English History

From LoveToKnow 1911

ENGLISH HISTORY.The general account of English history which follows should be supplemented for the earlier period oy the article BRITAIN. See also SCOTLAND, IRELAND, WALES.

I. FROM TItE LANDING OF AUGUSTINE To THE NORMAN

CONQUEST (6001066)

With the coming of Augustine to Kent the darkness which for nearly two centuries had enwrapped the history of Britain begins to clear away. From the days of Honorius to those of Gregory the Great the line of vision of the annalists of the continent was bounded by the Channel. As to what was going on beyond it, we have but a few casual gleams of light, just enough to make the darkness visible, from writers such as the author of the life of St Germanus, Prosper Tiro, Procopius, and Gregory of Tours. These notices do not, for the most part, square particularly well with the fragmentary British narrative that can be patched together from Gildass lamentable book, or the confused story of Nennius. Nor again do these British sources - ~ ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN

1;. 597-825

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I of Wight fit in happily with the English annals constructed long centuries after by King Alfreds scribes in the first edition of the AngloSaxon Chronicle. But from the date when the long-lost cornmunication between Britain and Rome was once more resumed, the history of the island becomes clear and fairly continuous. The gaps are neither broader nor more obscure than those which may be found in the contemporary annals of the other kingdoms of Europe. The stream of history in this period is narrow and turbid throughout the West. Quite as much is known of the doings of the English as of those of the Visigoths of Spain, the Lombards, or the later Merovingians. The 7th century was the darkest of all the dark ages, and England is particularly fortunate in possessing the Ecclcsiastica historia of Bede, which, though its author was primarily interested in things religious, yet contains a copious chronicle of things secular. No WTestern author, since the death of Gregory of Tours, wrote on such a scale, or with such vigour and insight.

The conversion of England to Christianity took, from first to last, some ninety years (AD. 597 to 686), though during the last thirty the ancestral heathenism was only lingering on in remote corners of the land. The original missionary England. impulse came from Rome, and Augustine is rightly regarded as the evangelist of the English; yet only a comparatively small part of the nation owed its Christianity directly to the mission sent out by Pope Gregory. Wessex was won over by an independent adventurer, the Frank Birinus, who had no connection with the earlier arrivals in Kent. The great kingdom of Northumbria, though its first Christian monarch Edwin was converted by Paulinus, a disciple of Augustine, relapsed into heathenism after his death. It was finally evangelized from quite another quarter, by Irish missionaries brought by King Oswald from Columbas monastery of lona. The church that they founded struck root, as that of Paulinus and Edwin had failed to do, and was not wrecked even by Oswalds deatn in battle at the hands of Penda the Mercian, the one strong champion of heathenism that England produced. Moreover, Penda was no sooner dead, smitten down by Oswalds brother Oswio at the battle of the Winwaed (A.D. 655), than his whole kingdom eagerly accepted Christianity, and received missionaries, Irish and Northumbrian, from the victorious Oswio. It is clear that, unlike their king, the Mercians had no profound enthusiasm for the old gods. Essex, which had received its first bishop from Augustines hands but had relapsed into heathenism after a few years, also owed its ultimate conversion to a Northumbrian preacher, Cedd, whom Oswio lent to King Sigeberht after the latter had visited his court and been baptized, hard by the Roman wall, in 653.

Yet even in those English regions where the missionaries from lona were the founders of the Church, the representatives of Rome were to be its organizers. In 664 the Northumbrian. king Oswio, at the synod of Whitby, declared his adhesion to the Roman connection, whether it was that he saw political advantage therein, or whether he realized the failings and weaknesses of the Celtic church, and preferred the more orderly methods of her rival. Five years later there arrived from Rome the great organizer, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, who bound the hitherto isolated churches of the English kingdoms into a well-compacted whole, wherein the tribal bishops paid obedience to the metropolitan at Canterbury, and met him frequently in national councils and synods. England gained a spiritual unity long crc she attained a political unity, for in these meetings, which were often attended by kings as well as by prelates, Northumbrian, West Saxon. and Mercian first learnt to work together as brothers.

In a few years the English church became the pride of Western Christendom. Not merely did it produce the great band of missionaries who converted heathen GermanyWilliEli h brord, Suidbert, Boniface and the restbut it excelled church, the other national churches in learning and culture.

It is but necessary to mention Bede and Alcuin. The first, as has been already said, was the one true historian who wrote during the dark time of the 7th8th centuries; the second became the pride of the court of Charles the Great for his unrivalled scholarship. At the coming of Augustine England had been a barbarous country; a century and a half later she was more than abreast of the civilization of the rest of Europe.

But the progress toward national unity was still a slow one. The period when the English kingdoms began to enter into the commonwealth of Christendom, by receiving the Formation missionaries sent out from Rome or from lona, practikingdoms. cally coincides with the period in which the occupation of central Britain was completed, and the kingdoms of the conquerors assumed their final size and shape. ~thelfrith, the last heathen among the Northumbrian kings, cut off the Britons of the North from those of the West, by winning the battle of Chester (AD. 613), and occupying the land about the mouths of the Mersey and the Dee. Cenwalh, the last monarch who ascended the throne of Wessex unbaptized, carried the boundaries of that kingdom into Mid-Somersetshire, where they halted for a long space. Penda, the last heathen king of Mercia, determined the size and strength of that state, by absorbing into it the territories of the other Anglian kingdoms of the Midlands, and probably also by carrying forward its western border beyond the Severn. By the time when the smallest and most barbarous of the Saxon statesSussexaccepted Christianity in the year 686, the political geography of England had reached a stage from which it was not to vary in any marked degree for some 200 years. Indeed, there was nothing accomplished in the way of further encroachment on the Cdt after 686, save Incs and Cuthreds extension of Wessex into the valleys of the Tone and the Exe, and Offas slight expansion of the Mercian frontier beyond the Severn, marked by his famous dyke. The conquests of the Northumbrian kings in Cumbria were ephemeral; what Oswio won was lost after the death of Ecgfrith.

That the conversion of the English to Christianity had anything to do with their slackening from the work of conquest it would be wrong to assert. Though their wars with the Welsh were not conducted with such ferocious cruelty as of old, and though (as the laws of Inc show) the Celtic inhabitants of newlywon districts were no longer exterminated, but received as the kings subjects, yet the hatred between Welsh and English did not cease because both were now Christians. The westward advance of the invaders would have continued, if only there had remained to attract them lands as desirable as those they had already won. But the mountains of Wales and the moors of Cornwall and Cumbria did not greatly tempt the settler. Moreover, the English states, which had seldom turned their swords against each other in the 5th or the 6th centuries, were engaged during the 7thand the 8th in those endless struggles for supremacy which seem so purposeless, because the hegemony which a king of energy and genius won for his kingdom always disappeared with his death. The Bretwaldaship, as Th ~

the English seem to have called it, was the most wa~edas~ ephemeral of dignities. This was but natural: conquest can only be enforced by the extermination of the conquered, or by their consent to amalgamate with the conquerors, or by the garrison.ing of the land that has been subdued by settlers or by military posts. None of these courses were possible to a king of the 7th or 8th centuries: even. in their heathen days the English were not wont to massacre their beaten kinsmen as they massacred the unfortunate Cdt. After their conversion to Christianity the idea of exterminating other English tribes grew even. more impossible. On the other hand, local particularism was so strong that the conquered would not, at first, consent to give up their natural indepen.dence and merge themselves in the victors. Such amalgamations became possible after a time, when many of the local royal lines died out, and unifying influences, of which a common Christianity was the most powerful, sapped the strength of tribal pride. But it is not till the 9th century that we find this phenomenon growing general. A kingdom like Kent or East Anglia, even. after long subjection to a powerful overlord, rose and reasserted its independence immedi~tely on hearing of his death. His successor had to attempt a new conquest, if he felt~himself strong enough. To garrison a district that had been overrun was impossible: the military force of an English king consisted of his military household of gesiths, backed by the general levy of the tribe. The strength of Mercia or Northumbria might be mustered for, a single battle, but could not supply a standing army to hold down the vanquished. The victorious king had to be content with tribute and obedience, which would cease when he died, or was beaten by a competitor for the position of Bretwalda.

In the ceaseless strife between the old English kingdoms, therefore, it was the personality of the king which was the main factor in determining the hegemony of one state over another. If in the 7th century the successive great ~ NorthumbriansEdwin, Oswald, Oswio and Ecgfrith thumbiia.

were reckoned the chief monarchs of England, and exercised a widespread influence over the southern realms, yet each had to win his supremacy by his own sword; and when Edwin and Oswald fell before the savage heathen Penda, and Ecgfrith was cut off by the Picts, there was a gap of anarchy before another king asserted hh superior power. The same phenomenon was seen with regard to the Mercian kings of the 8th century; the long reigns of the two conquerors SuPrefi11~ ~lthelbald and Off a covered eighty years (716796), Merda. and it might have been supposed that after such a term of supremacy Mercia - would have remained permanently at the head of the English kingdoms. It was not so, ~lthelbald in his old age lost his hegemony at the battle of Burford (752), and was murdered a few years after by his own people. Off a had to win back by long wars what his kinsman had lost; he became so powerful that we find the pope calling him Rex Anglorum, as if he were the only king in the island. He annexed Kent and East Anglia,overawed Northumbria and Wessex, both hopelessly faction-ridden at the time, was treated almost as an equal by the emperor Charles the Great, and died still at the height of his power. Yet the moment that he was dead all his vassals revolted; his successors could never recover all that was lost. Kent once more became a kingdom, and two successive Mercian sovereigns, Beornwulf and Ludica, fell in battle while vainly trying to recover Offas supremacy over East Anglia and Wessex.

The ablest king in England in the generation that followed Off a was Ecgbert of Wessex, who had long been an exile abroad, and served for thirteen years as one of the captains of Suprem- Charles the Great. He beat Beornwulf of Mercia at ~ssex. Ellandune (A.D. 823), permanently annexed Kent, to whose crown he had a claim by descent, in 829 received the homage of all the other English kings, and was for the remainder of his life reckoned as Bretwalda. But it is wrong to call him, as some have done, the first monarch of all England. His power was no greater than that of Oswio or Off a had been, and the supremacy might perhaps have tarried with Wessex no longer than it had tarried with Northumbria or Mercia if it had not chanced that the Danish raids were now beginning. For these invasions, paradoxical ~s it may seem, were the greatest efficient cause in the welding together of England. They seemed about to rend the land in twain, but they really cured the English of their desperate particularism, and drove all the tribes to take as their common rulers the one great line of native kings which survived the Danish storm, and maintained itself for four generations cf desperate fighting against the invaders. On the continentthe main effect of the viking invasions was to dash the empire of Charles the Great into fragments, and to aid in producing the numberless petty states of feudal Europe. In this island they did much to help the transformation of. the mere Bretwaldaship of Ecgbert into the monarchy of all England.

Already ere Ecgbert ascended the throne of Kent the new enemy had made his first tentative appearance on the British shore. It was in the reign of Beorhtric, Ecgberts ~ predecessor, that the pirates of the famous three ships from Heretheland had appeared on the coast of Dorset, and slain the sheriff who would fain have known what manner of Inen they might be. A few years later another band appeared, rising unexpectedly from the sea to sack the famous Northumbriars monastery of Lindisfarne (793). After that their visits came fast and furious on the shore-line of every English kingdom, and by the end of Ecgberts reign it was they, and not his former Welsh and Mercian enemies, who were the old monarchs main source of trouble. But he brought his Bretwaldaship to a good end by inflicting a crushing defeat on them at Hingston Down, hard by the Tamar, probably in 836, and died ere the year was out, leaving the ever-growing problem to his son A~lthelwu1f The cause of the sudden outpouring of the Scandinavian deluge upon the lands of Christendom at this particular date is one of the puzzles of history. So far as memory ran, ll~fl7jlce the peoples beyond the North Sea had been seafaring sea-~power. races addicted to piracy. Even Tacitus mentions their fleets. Yet since the 5th century they had been restricting their operations to their own shores, and are barely heard of in the chronicles of their southern. neighbors. It seems must probable that the actual cause of their sudden activity was the conquest of the Saxons by Charles the Great, and his subsequent advahce into the peninsula of Denmark. The emperor seemed to be threatening the independence of the North, and in terror and resentment the Scandinavian peoples turned first to strike at the encroaching Frank, and soon after to assail the other Christian kingdoms which lay behind, or on the flank of, the Empire. But their offensive action proved so successful and so profitable that, after a short time, the whole manhood of Denmark and Norway took to the pirate life. Never since history first began to be recorded was there such a supreme example of the potentialities of sea-power. Civilized Europe had been caught at a moment when it was completely destitute of a war-navy; the Franks had never been maritime in their tastes, the English seemed to have forgotten their ancient seafaring habits. Though their ancestors had been pirates as fierce as the vikings of the 9th century, and though some of their later kings had led naval armamentsEdwin had annexed for a moment Man and Anglesea, and Ecgfrith had cruelly ravaged part of Irelandyet by the year 800 they appear to have ceased to be a seafaring race. Perhaps the long predominance of Mercia, an essentially inland state, had something to do with the fact. At any rate England was as helpless as the Empire when first the Danish and Norwegian galleys began to cross the North Sea, and to beat down both sides of Britain seeking for prey. The number of the invaders was not at first very great; their fleets were not national armaments gathered by great kings, but squadrons of a few vessels collected by some active and enterprising adventurer. Their original tactics were merely to land suddenly near some thriving seaport, or rich monastery, to sack it, and to take to the water again before the local militia could turn out in force against them. But such raids proved so profitable that the vikings soon began to take greater things in hand; they began to ally themselves in confederacies: two, six or a dozen sea-kings would join their forces for something more than a desultory raid. With fifty or a hundred ships they would fall upon some unhappy region, harry it for many miles inland, and offer battle to the landsfolk unless the latter came out in overpowering force. And as their crews were trained warriors chosen for their high spirit, contending with a raw militia fresh from the plough, they were generally successful. If the odds were too great they could always retire to their ships, put to sea, and resume their predatory operations on some other coast three hundred miles away. As long as their enemies were unprovided with a navy they were safe from pursuit and annihilation. The only chance against them was that, if caught too far from the base-fort where they had run their galleys ashore, they might find their communication with the sea cut off, and be forced to fight for their lives surrounded by an infuriated countryside. But in the earlier years of their struggles with Christendom the vikings seldom suffered a complete disaster; they were often beaten but seldom annihilated. Ere long they grew so bold that they would stay ashore for months, braving the forces of a whole kingdom, and sheltering themselves in great palisaded camps on peninsulas or islands when the enemy pressed ,them too hard. On well-guarded strongholds like Thanet or Sheppey in England, Noirmoutier at the Loire mouth, or the Isle of Walcheren, they defied the local magnates to evict them. Finally they took to wintering on the coast of England or the Empire, a preliminary to actual settlement and conquest. (See VIKING.)

King Ecgbert died long ere the invaders had reached this stage of insolence. thelwulf, his weak and kindly son, would undoubtedly have lost the titular supremacy of Wessex over the other English kingdoms if there had been in Mercia or Northumbria a strong king with leisure to conquest. concentrate his thoughts on domestic wars. But the vikings were now showering such blows on the northern states that their unhappy monarchs could think of nothing but selfdefence. They slew Redulfking of Northumbriain 844, took London in 851, despite all the efforts of Burgred of Mercia, and forced that sovereign to make repeated appeals for help to A~lthe1wulf as his overlord. For though Wessex had its full share of Danish attacks it met them with a vigour that was not seen in the other realms. The defence was often, if not always, successful; and once at least (at Aclea in 851) -~lthelwu1f exterminated a whole Danish army with the greatest slaughter among the heathen host that had been heard of down to that day, as the Anglo-Saxon chronicler is careful to record. But though he might ward off blows from his own realm, he was helpless to aid Mercia or East Anglia, and still more the distant Northumbria.

It was not, however, till after Æthelwulfs death that the attack of the vikings developed its full strength. The fifteen years (85687 1) that were covered by the reigns of his three shortlived sons, ~thelbald, Æthelbert and iEthelred, were the most miserable that England was to see. Assembling in greater and ever greater confederacies, the Danes fell upon the northern kingdoms, no longer merely to harry but to conquer and occupy them. A league of many sea-kings which called itself the great army slew the last two sovereigns of Northumbria and stormed York ~fl 867. Some of the victors settled down there to lord it over the half-exterminated English population. The rest continued their advance southward. East Anglia was conquered in 870; its last king, Edmund, having been defeated and taken prisoner, the vikings shot him to death with arrows because he would not worship their gods. His realm was annexed and partly settled by the conquerors. The fate of Mercia was hardly better: its king, Burgred, by constant payment of tribute, bought off the invaders for a space, but the eastern half of his realm was reduced to a wilderness.

Practically masters of all that lay north of Thames, the great army ~next moved against Wessex, the only quarter where a vigorous resistance was still maintained against them, though its capital, Winchester, had been sacked in 864. Under two kings named Halfdan and Bacsceg, and six earls, they seized Reading and began to harry Berkshire, Surrey and Hampshire. King JEthelred, the third son of ~thelwulf, came out against them, with his young brother Alfred and all the levies of Wessex. In the year 871 these two gallant kinsmen fought no less than six pitched battles against the invaders. Some were victories notably the fight of Ashdown, where Alfred first won his name as a soldierbut the English failed to capture the fortified camps of the vikings at Reading, and were finally beaten at Marten (Maeretun) near Bedwyn, where ~thelred was mortally wounded.

He left young sons, but the men of Wessex crowned Alfred king, because they needed a grown man to lead them in their Alfred th desperate campaigning. Yet his reign opened inOteat. e auspiciously: defeated near Wilton, he offered in despair to pay the vikings to depart. He must have known, from the experience of Mercian, Northumbrian and Frankish kings, that such blackmail only bought a short respite, but the condition of his realm was such that even a moderate time for reorganization might prove valuable. The enemy had suffered so much in the year of the six battles that they held off for some space from Wessex, seeking easier prey on the continent and in northern England. In 874 they harried Mercia so cruelly that King Burgred fled in despair to Rome; the victors divided up his realm, taking the eastern half for themselves, and establishing in it a confederacy, whose jarls occupied the five boroughs of Stamford, Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham and Leicester. But the western half they handed over to an unwise thegn named Ceolwulf, who bought for a short space the precarious title of king by paying great tribute.

Alfred employed the four years of peace, which he had bought in 871, in the endeavour to strengthen his realm against the inevitable return of the raiders. His wisdom was shown by the fact that he concentrated his attention on the one device which must evidently prove effective for defence, if only he were given time to perfect itthe building of a national navy. He began to lay down galleys and long ships, and hired pirates renegade vikings no doubtto train crews for him and to teach his men seamanship. The scheme, however, was only partly completed when in 876 three Danish kings entered Wessex and resumed the war. But Alfred blockaded them first in Wareham and then in Exeter. The fleet which was coming to carry them off, or to bring them reinforcements, fought an indecisive erigagem~nt with the English ships, and was wrecked immediately after on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck, where more than. 100 galleys and all their crews perished. On hearing of this disaster the vikings in Exeter surrendered the place on being granted a free departure.

Yet within a few months of this successful campaign Alfred was attacked at midwinter by the main Danish army under King Guthrum. He was apparently taken by surprise by an assault at such an unusual time of the year, and was forced to escape with his military household to the isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parrett. The invaders harried Wiltshire and Hampshire at their leisure, and vainly thought that Wessex was at last subdued. But with the spring the English rallied:

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Devonshire. A few weeks later Alfred had issued from Athelney, had collected a large army in Seiwood, and went out to meet the enemy in the open field. He beat them at Edington in~Wiltshire, blockaded them in their great camp at Chippenham, and in fourteen days starved them into surrender. The terms were that they should give hostages, that they should depart for ever from Wessex, and that their king Guthrum should do homage to Alfred as overlord, and submit to be baptized, with thirty of his chiefs, Not only were all these conditions punctually fulfilled, but (what is more astonishing) the Danes had been so thoroughly cured of any desire to try their luck against the great king that hey left him practically unmolested for fourteen years (878892). King Guthrum settled down as a Christian sovereign in East Anglia, with the bulk of the host that had capitulated at Chippenham. Of the rest of the invaders one section established I petty kingdom in Yorkshire, but those in the Midlands were fubject to no common sovereign but lived in a loose confederacy inder the jarls of the Five Boroughs already named above. rhe boundary between English and Danes established by the eace of 8~8 is not perfectly ascertainable, but a document of a few years later, called 0 Alfred and Guthrums frith, gives the border as lying from Thames northward up the Lea to its source, then across to Bedford, and then along the Ouse to Watling Street, the old Roman road from London to Chester. This gave King Alfred London and Middlesex, most of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, and the larger half of Mercialands that had never before been an integral part of Wessex, though they had some time been tributary to her kings. They were now taken inside the realm and governed by the ealdorman }Ethelred, the kings son-in-law. The Mercians gladly mingled with the West Saxons, and abandoned all memories of ancient independence. Twenty years of schooling under the hand of the Dane had taught them to forget old particularism.

Alfreds enlarged kingdom was far more powerful than any one of the three new Danish states which lay beyond the Lea and Watling Street: it was to be seen, ere another generation was out, that it was stronger than all three together. But Alfred was not to see the happy day when York and Lincoln, Colchester and Leicester, were to become mere shire-capitals in the realm of United England. -

The fourteen years of comparative peace which he now enjoyed were devoted to perfecting the military organization of his enlarged kingdom. His fleet was reconstructed:

in 882 he went out with it in person and destroyed a small piratical squadron: in 885 we hear of it coasting all along Danish East Anglia. But his navy was not yet strong enough to hold off all raids: it was not till the very end of his reign that he perfected it by building long ships that were nigh twice as large as those of the heathen; some had 60 oars, some more; and they were both steadier and swifter and lighter than the others, and were shaped neither after the Frisian nor after the Danish fashion, but as it seemed to himself that they would be most handy. This great war fleet he left as a legacy to his son, but he himself in his later campaigns had only its first beginnings at his disposal.

His military reforms were no less important. Warned by the failures of the English against Danish entrenched camps, he introduced the long-neglected art of fortification, and built many burhs stockaded fortresses on mounds by the waterside wherein dwelt permanent garrisons of military settlers. It would seem that the system by which he maintained them was that he assigned to each a region of which the inhabitants were responsible for its manning and its sustentation. The landowners had either to build a house within it for their own inhabiting, or to provide that a competent substitute dwelt there to represent them. These burh-ware, or garrison-men, are repeatedly mentioned in Alfreds later years. The old national levy of the fyrd was made somewhat more serviceable by an ordinance which divided it into two halves, one of which must take the field when the other was dismissed. But it would seem that the king paid even more attention to another military reformthe increase of the number of the professional fighting class, the thegnhood as it was now called. All the wealthier men, both in the countryside and in the towns, were required to take up the duties as well as the privileges of membership of the military household of the king. They became of thegnright worthy by receiving, really or nominally, a place in the royal hail, with the obligation to take the field whenever their master raised his banner. The document which defines their duties and privileges sets forth that every ceorl who throve so that he had fully five hides of land, and a helm, and a mail-shirt, and a sword ornamented with gold, was to be reckoned gesithcund. A second draft allowed the man who had the military equipment complete, but not fully the five hides of land, to slip into the list, and also the merchant who has fared thrice over the high seas at his own expense. How far the details of the scheme are Alfreds own, how far they were developed by his son Edward the Elder, it is unfortunately impossible to say. But there is small doubt that the system was working to some extent in the later wars of the great king, and that his successes were largely due to the fact that his army contained a larger nucleus of fully armed warriors than those of his predecessors.

Military reforms were only one section of the work of King Alfred during the central years of his reign. It was then that he set afoot his numerous schemes for the restoration of the learning and culture of England which had sunk so low during the long years of disaster which had preceded his accession. How he gathered, scholars from the continent, Wales and Ireland; how he collected the old heroic poems of the nation, how he himself translated books from the Latin tongue, started schools, and set his scribes to write up the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is told elsewhere, as are his mechanical inventions, his buildings, and his dealings with missionaries and explorers (see ALFRED).

The test of the efficiency of his work was that it held firm when, in his later years, the Danish storm once more began to beat against the shores of Wessex. In the years 892896 Alfred was assailed from many sides at once by viking fleets, of which the most important was that led by the great freebooter Hasting. Moreover, the settled Danes of eastern England broke their oaths and gave the invaders assistance. Yet the king held his own, with perfect success if not with ease. The enemy was checked, beaten off, followed up rapidly whenever he changed his base of operation, and hunted repeatedly all across England. The campaigning ranged from Appledore in Kent to Exeter, from Chester to Shoeburyness; but wherever the invaders transferred themselves, either the king, or his son Edward, or his son-in-law Ethelred, the ealdorman of Mercia, was promptly at hand with a competent army. The camps of the Danes were stormed, their fleet was destroyed in the river Lea in 895, and at last the remnant broke up and dispersed, some to seek easier plunder in France, others to settle down among their kinsmen in Northumbria or East Anglia.

Alfred survived for four years after his final triumph in 896, to complete the organization of his fleet and to repair the damages done by the last four years of constant fighting. He died on the 26th of October 900, leaving Wessex well armed for the continuance of the struggle, and the inhabitants of the Danelagh much broken in spirit. They saw that it would never be in their power to subdue all England. Within a few years they were to realize that it was more probable that the English kings would subdue them.

The house of Wessex continued to supply a race of hardfighting and capable monarchs, who went on with Alfreds work, His son, Edward the Elder, and his three grandsons, ~thelstan, Edmund and Edred, devoted themselves for fifty-five years (A.D. 900955) to the task of conquering the Danelagh, and ended by making England into a single unified kingdom, not by admitting the conquered to homage and tribute, in the old style of the 7th century, but by their complete absorption. The process was not so hard as might be thought; when once the Danes had settled down, had brought over wives from their native land or taken them from among their English vassals, had built themselves farmsteads and accumulated flocks and herds, they lost their old advantage in contending with the English. Their strength had been their mobility and their undisputed command of the sea. But now they had possessions of their own to defend, and could not raid at large in Wessex or Mercia without exposing their homes to similar molestation. Moreover, the fleet which Alfred had built, and which his successors kept up, disputed their mastery of the sea, and ended by achieving a clear superiority over them. Unity of plan and unity of command was also on the side of the English. The inhabitants of the three sections of the Danelagh were at best leagued in a many-headed confederacy. Their opponents were led by kings whose orders were punctually obeyed from Shrewsbury to Dover and from London to Exeter. It must also be remembered that in the greater part of the land which they possessed the Danes were but a small minority of the population. After their first fury was spent they no longer exterminated the conquered, but had been content to make the Mercians and Deirans their subjects, to take the best of the land, and exact tribute for the rest. Only in Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire and parts of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire do they seem to have settled thickly and formed a preponderating element in the countryside. In the rest of the Midlands and in East Anglia they were only a governing oligarchy of scanty numbers. Everywhere there was an English lower class which welcomed the advent of the conquering kings of Wessex and the fall of the Danish jarls.

Edward the Elder spent twenty-five laborious years first in repelling and repaying Danish raids, then in setting to work to subdue the raiders. He worked forward into the Danelagh, building burhs as he advanced, to hold down each district that he won. He was helped by his brother-in-law, the Mercian ealdorman ~thelred, and, after the death of that magnate, by his warlike sister i~lthelflfed, the ealdormans widow, who was continued in her husbands place. While Edward, with London as his base, pushed forward into the eastern counties, his sister, starting from Warwick and Stafford, encroached on the Danelagh along the line of the Trent. The last Danish king of East Anglia was slain in. battle in 918, and his realm annexed. thelfind won Derby and Leicester, while her brother reduced Stamford and Nottingham. Finally, in 921, not only was the whole land south of. the Humber subdued, but the Yorkshire Danes, the Welsh, and evenit is saidthe remote Scots of the North, did homage to Edward and became his men.

In 925 Edward was succeeded by his eldest, son ~thelstan, who completed the reduction of the Danelagh by driving out h Guthfrith, the Danish king of York, and annexing his realm. But this first conquest of the region beyond Humber had to be repeated over and over again; time after time the Danes rebelled and proclaimed a new king, aided sometimes by bands of their kinsmen from Ireland or Norway, sometimes by the Scots and Strathclyde Welsh. ~Ethelstans greatest and best-remembered achievement was his, decisive victory in 937 at Brunanburhan unknown spot, probably by the Solway Firth or the Ribbleover a great confederacy of rebel Danes of Yorkshire, Irish Danes from Dublin, the Scottish king, Constantine, and Eugenius, king of Strathclyde. Yet even after such a triumph ~thelstan had to set up a Danish under-king in Yorkshire, apparently despairing of holding it down as a shire governed by a mere ealdorman. But its overlordship he never lost, and since he also maintained the supremacy which his father had won over the Welsh and Scots, it was not without reason that he called himself on his coins and in his charters Rex totius Britanniae. Occasionally he even used the title Basileus, as if he claimed a quasi-imperial position.

The trampling out of the last embers of Danish particularism in the North was reserved for thelstans brothers and successors, Edmund and Edred (940955), who put down ~rn~nd. several risings 01 the Yorkshiremen, one of which was aided by a rebellion of the Midland Danes of the Five Boroughs. But the untiring perseverance of the house of Alfred was at last rewarded by success. After the expulsion of the last rebel king of York, Eric Haraldson, by Edred in 948, we cease to hear of trouble in the North. When next there was rebellion in that quarter it was in favor of a Wessex prince, not of a Danish adventurer, and had no sinister national significance. The descendants of the vikings were easily incorporated in the English race, all the more so because of the wise policy of the conquering kings, who readily employed and often promoted to high station men of Danish descent who showed themselves loyaland this not only in the secular but in spiritual offices. In 942 Oda, a full-blooded Dane, was made archbishop of Canterbury. The Danelagh became a group of earldoms, ruled by officials who were as often of Danish as of English descent.

It is notable that when, after Edreds death, there was civil strife, owing to the quarrel of his nephew Edwy with some of his kinsmen, ministers and bishops, the rebels, who included the majority of the Mercians and Northumbrians, set up as their pretender to the throne not a Dane but Edwys younger brother Edgar, who ruled for a short time north of Thames, and became sole monarch on the death of his unfortunate kinsman.

The reign of Edgar (959975) saw the culmination of the power of the house of Alfred. It was untroubled by rebellion or by foreign invasions, so that the king won the honorable title of Rex Pacificus. The minor sovereigns of Britain owned him as overlord, as they had owned his grandfather Edgar. Edward and his uncle ~thelstan. It was long remembered how all the kings of this island, both the Welsh and the Scots, eight kings, came to him once upon a time on one day and all bowed to his governance. The eight were Kenneth of Scotland, Malcolm of Strathclyde, Maccus of Man, and five Welsh kings. There is fair authority for the well-known legend that, after this meeting at Chester, he was rowed in his barge down the Dee by these potentates, such a crew as never was seen before or after, and afterwards exclaimed that those who followed him might now truly boast that they were kings of all Britain.

Edgars chief counsellor was the famous archbishop Dunstan, to whom no small part of the glory of his reign has been ascribed. This great prelate was an ecclesiastical reformera leader in a movement for the general purification of morals, and especially for the repressing of simony and evil-living among the clergy a great builder of churches, and a stringent enforcer of the rules of the monastic life. But he was also a busy statesman; he probably had a share in the considerable body of legislation which was enacted in Edgars reign, and is said to have encouraged him in his policy of treating Dane and Englishman with exact equality, and Of investing the one no less than the other with the highest offices in church and state.

Edgars life was too short for the welfare of his peoplehe was only in his thirty-third year when he died in 975, and his sons were young boys. The hand of a strong man was still needed to keep the peace in the newly-constituted realm of all England, and the evils of a minority were not long in showing themselves. One section of the magnates had possession of the thirteen-yearold king Edward, and used his name to cover their ambitions. The other was led by his step-mother iElfthryth, who was set on pushing the claims of her son, the child ~thelred. After much factious strife, and many stormy meetings of the Witan, Edward was murdered at Corfe in 978 by some thegns of the party of the queen-dowager. The crime provoked universal indignation, but since there was no other prince of the house of Alfred available, the magnates were forced to place ~thelred on the throne:

he was only in his eleventh year, and was at least personally innocent of complicity in his brothers death.

With the accession of)Ethelred, the Redeless, as he was afterwards called from his inability to discern good counsel from evil, and the consistent incapacity of his policy, an evil time began. The retirement from public life of Edgars old minister Dunstan was the first event of Unready. the new reign, and no man of capacity came forward to take his place. The factions which had prevailed during the reign of Edward the Martyr seem to have continued to rage during his brothers minority, yet iEthelreds earliest years were his least disastrous. It was hoped that when he came to roans estate things would improve, but the reverse was the case. The first personal action recorded of him is an unjust harryirg of the goods of his own subjects, when he besieged Roch*~,ster because he had quarrelled with its bishop over certain lands, and was bribed to depart with 100 pounds of silver. Yet lom 978 to 991 no irreparable harm came to England; the machinery for government and defence which his ancestors had establshed seemed fairly competent to defend the realm even under a wayward and incapable king. Two or three small descents o~ vikings are recorded, but the ravaging was purely local, and the invader soon departed. No trouble occurred in the Dane. lagh, where the old tendency of the inhabitants to take sides with their pagan kinsmen from over the sea appears to have completely vanished. But the vikings had apparently learnt by small experiments that England was no longer, ~

guarded as she had been in the days of Alfred or ~thelstan, and in 991 the first serious invasion of .Æthelreds reign took place. A large fleet came ashore in Essex, and, after a hard fight with the ealdorman Brihtnoth at Maldon, slew him and began to ravage the district north of the Thames.

Instead of making a desperate attempt to drive them off, the king bribed them to depart with io,ooo pounds of silver, accepting it is said this cowardly advice from archbishop Sigeric. The fatal precedent soon bore fruit: the invaders came back in larger numbers, headed by Olaf Tryggveson, the celebrated adventurer who afterwards made himself king of Norway, and who was already a pretender to its throne. He was helped by Sweyn, king of Denmark, and the two together laid siege to London in 994, but were beaten off by the citizens. Nevertheless ~lthelred for a second time stooped to pay tribute, and bought the departure of Dane and Norwegian with 16,ooo pounds of silver. There was a precarious interval of peace for three years after, but in 997 began a series of invasions led by Sweyn which lasted for seventeen years, and at last ended in the complete subjection of England and the flight of Aithelred to Normandy. It should be noted that the invader during this period was no mere adventurer, but king of all Denmark, and, after Olaf Tryggvesons death in 1000, king of Norway also. His power was something far greater than that of the Guthrums and Anlafs of an. earlier generation, andin the end of his life at leasthe was aiming at political conquest, and not either at mere plunder or at finding new settlements for his followers. But if the strength of the invader was greater than that of his predecessors, ~thelred also was far better equipped for war than his ancestors of the 9th century. He owned, and he sometimes usedbut always to little profita large fleet, while all England instead of the mere realm of Wessex was at his back. Any one of the great princes of the house of Egbert who had reigned from 871 to 975, would have fought a winning fight with such resources, and it took nearly twenty years of ,~thelreds tried incapacity to lose the game. He did, however, succeed in undoing all the work of his ancestors5 partly by his own slackness and sloth, partly by his choice of corrupt and treacherous ministers. For the two ealdormen whom he delighted to honor and placed at the head of his armies, ~lfric and Eadric Streona, are accused, the one of persistent cowardice, the other of underhand intrigue with the Danes. Some of the local magnates made a desperate defence of their own regions, especially Ulfkytel of East Anglia, a Dane by descent; but the central government was at fault. ~thelreds army was always at the wrong place if the enemy were east then was thefyrd held west, and if they were north then was our force held south, When ~thelred did appear it was more often to pay a bribe to the invaders than to fight. Indeed the Dane geld, the tax which he raised to furnish tribute to the invaders, became a regular institution: on six occasions at least ~thelred bought a few months of peace by sums ranging from 10,000 to 48,000 pounds of silver.

At last in the winter of 1013-1014, more as it would seem from sheer disgust at their kings cowardice and incompetence than Canute because further resistance was impossible, the English gave up the struggle and acknowledged Sweyn as king. First Northumbria, then Wessex, then London yielded, and 1~thelred was forced to fly over seas to Richard, duke of Nor. mandy, whose sister he had married as his second wife. But Sweyn survived his triumph little over a month; he died suddenly at Gainsborough on the 3rd of February 1014. The Danes hailed his son Canute, a lad of eighteen, as king, but many of the English, though they had submitted to a hard-handed conqueror like Sweyn, were not prepared to be handed over like slaves to his untried successor. There was a general rising, the old king was brought over from Normandy, and Canute was driven out for a moment by force of arms. He returned next year witha greater army to hear soon after of IEthelreds death (1016). The witan chose Edmund Ironside, the late kings eldest son, to succeed him, and as he was a hard-fighting prince of that normal type of his house to which his father had been such a disgraceful exception, it seemed probable that the Danes might be beaten off. But ~thelreds favorite Eadric Streonaadheredto Canute,. fearing to lose the office and power that he had enjoyed for so long under ~thelred, and prevailed on the tn~gnates of part of Wessex and Mercia to follow his example. For a moment the curious phenomenon was seen of Canute reigning in Wessex, while Edmund was making head against him with the aid of the Anglo-Danes of the Five Boroughs and Northumbria. There followed a year of desperate struggle: the two young kings fought five pitched battles, fortune seemed to favor Edmund, and the traitor Eadric submitted to him with all Wessex. But thelast engagement, at Assandun (Ashingdon) in Essex went against the English, mainly because Eadric again betrayed the national catise and deserted to the enemy.

Edmund was so hard hit by this last disaster that he offered to divide the realm with Canute;they met on the isle of Alney near Gloucester, and agreed that the son of ~lthelred should keep Wessex and all the South, London and East Anglia, while the Dane should have Northumbria, the five boroughs and Eadrics Mercian earldom. But ere the year was out Edmund died: secretly murdered, according to some authorities, by the infamous Eadric. The witan of Wessex made no attempt to set on the throne either one of the younger Sons of)Ethelred by his Norman wife, or the infant heir of Edmund, but chose Canute as king, preferring to reunite England by submission to the stranger rather than to continue the disastrous war, They were wise in. so doing, though their motive may have been despair rather than long-sighted policy. Canute became more of an Englishman than a Dane: he spent more of his time in his island realm than in his native Denmark. He paid off and sent home the great army with whose aid he had won the English crown, retaining only a small bodyguard of house-cans and trusting to the loyalty of his new subjects. There was no confiscation of lands for the benefit of intrusive Danish settlers. On the contrary Canute had more English than Danish courtiers and ministers about his person, and sent many Englishmen as bishops and some even as royal officers to Denmark. It is strange to find thatwhether from policy or from affectionhe married King ~thelreds young widow Emma of Normandy, though she was somewhat older than himselfso that his son King Harthacnut and that sons successor Edward the Confessor, the heir of the line of Wessex, were half-brothers. It might have been thought likely that the son of the pagan Sweyn would have turned out a mere hard-fighting viking. But Canute developed into a great adniinistrator and a friend of learning and culture. Occasionally he committed a harsh and tyrannical act. Though he neednot be blamed for making a prompt end of the traitor Eadric Streona and of Tjhtred, the turbulent earl of Northumbria, at the commencement of his reign, there are other and less justifiable deeds of blood to be laid to his account. But they were but few; for the most part his administration was just and wise as well as strong and intelligent.

Aslong as he lived England was the centre of a great Northern empire, for Canute reconquered Norway, which had lapsed into independence after his fathers death, and extended his power into the Baltic. Moreover, all the so-called Scandinavian colonists in the Northern Isles and Ireland owned him as overlord. So did the Scottish king Malcolm, and the princes of Wales and Strathclyde. The one weak point in his policy that can be detected is that he left in the hands of Malcolm the Bernician district of Lothian, which the Scot had conquered during the anarchy that followed the death of ~thelred. The battle of Carham (1018) had given this land to the Scots, and Canute consented to draw the border line of England at the Tweed instead of at the Firth of Forth, when Malcolm did him homage. Strangely enough it was this cession of a Northumbrian earldom to the Northern king that ultimately made Scotland an Englishspeaking country. For the Scottish kings, deserting their native Highlands, took to dwelling at Edinburgh among their new subjects, and first the court and afterwards the whole of their Lowland subjects were gradually assimilated to the Northumbnian nucleus which formed both the most fertile and the most civilized portion of their enlarged realm.

The fact - that England recovered with marvellous rapidity from the evil effects of ,~thelreds disastrous reign, and achieved great wealth and prosperity under Canute, would seem to show that the ravages of Sw~yn, widespread and ruthless though they had been, had yet fallen short of the devastating completeness of those of the earlier vikings. He had been more set on exacting tribute than on perpetrating wanton massacres. A few years of peace and wise administration seem to have restored the realm to a ,satisfactory condition. A considerable mass of his legis. lation has survived to show Canutes care for law and order.

Canute died in 1035, aged not more than forty or forty-one. The crown was disputed between his two sons, the half-brothers Harold and Harthacnut; it was doubtful whether the birth of the elder prince was legitimate, and Queen Emma strove to get her own son Harthacnut preferred to him. In Denmark the younger claimant was acknowledged by the whole people, but in England the Mercian and Northumbrian earls chose Harold as king, and Wessex only fell to Harthacnut. Both the young kings were cruel, dissolute and wayward, most unworthy sons of a wise father. It was to the great profit of England that they died within two years of each other, the elder in 1040, the younger in 1042.

On Harthacnuts death he was succeeded not by any Danish prince but by his half-brother Edward, the elder son of ~thelred and Emma, whom he had entertained at his court, and Edward had apparently designated as his heir, for he had no Cnfessor. offspring. There was an end of the empire of Canute, for Denmark fell to the great kings nephew, Sweyn Estrfthson, and Norway had thrown off the Danish yoke. Engaged in wars with each other, Dane and Norseman had no leisure to think of reconquering England. Hence Edwards accession took place without any friction. He reigned, but did not rule, for twenty-four years, though he was well on in middle age before he was crowned. Of all the descendants of Alfred he was the 0nly one who lived to see his sixtieth birthdaythe house of Wessex were a short-lived race. In character he differed from all his ancestorshe had Alfreds piety without his capacity, and A~thelreds weakness without his vices. The mildest of men, a crowned monk, who let slip the reins of government from his hands while he busied himself in prayer and church building, he lowered the kingly power to a depth to which it had never sunk before in England. His sole positive quality, over and above his piety, was a love for his mothers kin, the Normans. He had spent his whole life from 1013 to 1040 as an exile at the court of Rouen, and was far more of a Norman than an Englishman. It was but natural, therefore, that he should invite his continental relatives and the friends of his youth to share in his late-coming prosperity. But when he filled his court with them, made them earls and bishops, and appointed one of them, Robert of Jumiges, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, his undisguised preference for strangers gave no small offence to his English subjects. In the main, however, the kings personal likes and dislikes mattered little to the realm, since he had a comparatively small share in its governance. He was habitually overruled and dominated by his earls, of whom three, Leofric, Godwine and Siwardall old servants of Canutehad far moIe power than their master. Holding respectively the great earidoms of West Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, they reigned almost like petty sovereigns in their domains, and there seemed some chance that England might fall apart into semi-independent feudal states, just as France had done in the preceding century. The rivalries and intrigues of these three magnates constitute the main part of the domestic politics of Edwards reign. Godwine, whose flamid, daughter had wedded the king, was the most forcible and ambitious of the three, but his pre-eminence provoked a general league against him and in 1o51 he was cast out of the kingdom with his sons. In the next year he returned in arms, raised Wessex in revolt, and compelled the king to in-law him again, to restore his earldom, and to dismiss with ignominy the Norman favorites who were hunted over seas. The old earl died in 1053, but was succeeded in power by his son Harold, who for thirteen years maintained an unbroken mastery over the king, and ruled England almost with the power of a regent. There seems little doubt that he aspired to be Edwards successor:

there was no direct heir to the crown, and the nearest of kin was an infant, Edgar, the great-nephew of the reigning sovereign and grandson of Edmund Ironside. Englands experience of minors on the thtone had been unhappyEdwy and ~thelred the Redeless were warnings rather than examples. Moreover, Harold had before his eye as a precedent the displacement of the effete Carolingian line in France, by the new house of Robert the Strong and Hugh Capet, seventy years before, He prepared for the crisis that must come at the death of Edward the Confessor by bestowing the governance of several earldoms upon his brothers. Unfortunately for him, however, the eldest of them, Tostig, proi~ed the greatest hindrance to his plans, provoking wrath and opposition wherever he went by his highhandedness and cruelty.

Hsrolds governance of the realm seems to have been on the whole successful. He put down the Scottish usurper Macbeth with the swords of a Northumbrian army, and restored Malcolm III. to the throne of that kingdom (1o55fo5S). He led an army into the heart of Wales to punish the raids of King Griffith ap Llewelyn, and harried the Welsh so bitterly that they put their leader to death, and renewed their homage to the English crown (1063). He won enthusiastic devotion from the men of Wessex and the South, but in Northumbria and Mercia lie was less liked. His experiment in taking the rule of these earldoms out of the hands of the descendants of Siward and Leofrie proved so unsuccessful that he had to resign himself to undoing it. Ultimately one of Leofrics grandsons, Edwin, was left as earl of Mercia, and the other, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria instead of Harolds unpopular brother Tostig. It was on this fact that the fortune of England was to turn, for in the hour of crisis Harold was to be betrayed by the lords of the Midlands and the North.

Somewhere about the end of his period of ascendancy, perhaps in. 1064, Harold was sailing in the Channel when his ship was driven ashore by a tempest near the mouth of the OrigJn Somme. He fell into the hands of William the Bastard, of the duke of Normandy, King Edwards cousin and best- Norman loved relative. The duke brought him to Rouen, and Conquest. kept him in a kind of honorable captivity till he had extorted a strange pledge from him. William alleged that his cousin had promised to make him his heir, and to recommend him to the witan as king of England. He demanded that Harold should swear to aid him in the project. Fearing for his personal safety, the earl gave the required oath, and sailed home a perjured man, for he had assuredly no intention of keeping the promise that had been extorted from him. Within two years King Edward expired (Jan. 5, 1066) after having recommended Harold as his successor to the thegns and bishops who stood about his deathbed. The witan cbose the earl as king without any show of doubt, though the assent of the Mercian and Northumbrian earls must have been half-hearted: Not a word was said in favor of the claim of the child Edgar, the heir of the house of Alfred, nothing (of course) for the preposterous claim of William of Normandy. Harold accepted the crown without a moments hesitation, and at once prepared to defend it, for he was aware that the Norman would fight to gain iiis purpose. He endeavoured to conciliate Edwin and Morcar by marrying their sister Ealdgyth, and trusted that he had bought their loyal support. When the spring came round it was known that William had begun to collect a great fleet and army. Aware that the resources of his own duchy were inadequate to the conquest of England, he sent all over Europe to hire mercenaries, promising every knight who would join him broad lands beyond the Channel in the event of victory. He gathered beneath his banner thousands of adventurers not only from France, Brittany and Flanders, but even from distant regions such as Aragon, Apulia and Germany. The native Normans were but a third part of his host, and he himself commanded rather as director of a great joint-stock venture than as the feudal chief of his own duchy. He also obtained the blessing of Pope Alexander II. for his enterprise, partly on the plea that Harold was a perjurer, partly because Stigand, the archbishop of Canterbury, had acknowledged the late anti-pope Benedict.

All through the summcr Harold held a fleet concentrated under the lee of the Isle of Wight, waiting to intercept Williams armament, while the fyrd of Wessex was ready to support him if the enemy should succeed in making a landing. By September the provisions were spent, and the ships were growing ~unseaworthy. Very reluctantly the king bade them go round to London to refit and revictual themselves. William meanwhile had been unable to sail, because for many weeks the wind had been unfavourable. If it had set from the south the fortune of England would have been settled by a sea-fight. At this moment came a sudden and incalculable diversion; Harolds turbulent brother Tostig, banished for his crimes in 1065, was seeking revenge. He had persuaded Harold Hardrada, king of Norway, almost the last of the great viking adventurers, to take him as guide for a raid on England. They ran into the Humber with a great fleet, beat the earls Edvin and Morcar in battle, and captured York. Abandoning his watch on the south coast Harold of England flew northward to meet the invaders;, he surprised them at Stamford Bridge, slew both the Norse king and the rebel earl, and almost exterminated their army (Sept. 25? 1066). But while he was absent from the Channel the wind turned, and William of Normandy put to sea. The English fleet :and the English army were both absent, and the Normans came safely to shore on the 28th of September. Harold had to turn hastily southward to meet them. On the I3th of October his host was arrayed on the hill of Senlac, ~ miles from the dukes camp at Hastings. The ranks of his thegnhood and house-carles had ,been thinned by the slaughter of Stamford Bridge, and their place was but indifferently supplied by the hasty levies of London, \Vessex and the Home Counties. Edwin and Morcar, who should have been at his side with their Mercians and Northumbrians, were still far awayprobably from treachery, slackness and jealousy.

Next morning (October 14) William marched out from Hastings and attacked the English host, which stood at bay in a solid mass of spear and axemen behind a slight breastwork on the hillside. After six hours of desperate fighting the victory fell to the duke, who skilfully alternated the use of ,archers and cavalry against the unwieldy English phalanx. (See HASTINGS:

Battle of.) The disaster was complete, Harold himself was slain, his two brothers had fallen with him, not even the wreck of an army escaped. There was no one to rally the English in the name of the house of Godwine. The witan met and hastily saluted the child Edgar A~theling as king. But the earls Edwin and Morcar refused to fight for him, and when William appeared in front of the gates of London. they were opened almost without resistance. He was elected king in the old English fashion by the surviving magnates, and crowned on Christmas Day 1066.

II. THE NORMAN AND ANGEVIN MONARCHY (1066-1199)

\Vhen William of Normandy was crowned at Westminster by Archbishop Aldred of York and acknowledged as king by the witan, it is certain that few Englishmen understood the full importance of the occasion. It is probable queror. that most men recalled the election of Canute, and supposed that the accession of the one alien sovereign would have no more permanent effect on the realm than that of the other. The rule of the Danish king and his two short-lived sons had caused no break in the social or constitutional history of England. Canute had become an Englishman, had accepted all the old institutions of the nation, had dismissed his host of vikings, and had ruled like a native king and for the most part with native ministers. Within twenty years of his accession the disasters and calamities which had preceded his triumph had been forgotten, and the national life was running quietly in its old channels. But the accession of William the Bastard meant something very different. Canute had been an impressionable lad of eighteen or nineteen when he was crowned; he was ready and eager to learn and to forget. He had found himself confronted in England with a higher civilization and a more advanced social organization than those which he had known in his boyhood, and he accepted them with alacrity, feeling that he was thereby getting advantage. With William the Norman all was different~ he was a man well on in middle age, too old to adapt himself easily to new surroundings, even if he had been willing to do so. He never even learnt the language of his English subjects, the first step to comprehending their needs and their views. Moreover, unlike his Danish predecessor, he looked down upon the English from the plane of a higher civiliza- tion; the Normans regarded the conquered nation as barbarous and boorish. Thediffereuce in customs and culture between the dwellers on the two sides of the Channel was sufficient to make this possible; though it is hard to discern any adequate justification for the Norman attitude. Probably the bar of language was the most prominent cause of estrangement. In five generations the viking settlers of Normandy had not only completely forgotten their old Scandinavian tongue, but had come to look upon those who spoke the kindred English idiom not only as aliens but as inferiors. For three centuries French remained the court speech, and the mark of civilization and gentility.

Despite all this the Conquest would not have had its actual results if William, like Canute, had been able to dismiss his conquering army, and to refrain from a general policy Progress tf confiscation. But he had won his crown. not as of Norn,an duke of Normandy, but as the head of a band of cosmo- settle.

politan adventurers, who had to be rewarded with land meat.

in England. Some few received their pay in hard cash, and went off to other wars; but the large majority, Breton. and Angevin, French and Fleming, no less than Norman, wanted land. William could only provide it by a wholesale confiscation of the estates of all the thegnhood who had followed the house of Godwine. Almost his first act was to seize on these lands, and to distribute them among his followers. In the regions of the South, which had supplied the army that fell at Hastings, at least four-fifths of the soil passed to new masters. The dispossessed heirs of the old owners had either to sink to the condition of peasants, or to throw themselves upon. the world and seek new homes. The friction and hatred thus caused were bitter and long enduring. And this same system of confiscation was gradually extended to the rest of England. At first the English landowners who had not actually served in Harolds host were permitted to buy back their lands, by paying a heavy fine to the new king and doing him homage. What would have happened supposing that England had made no further stir, and had not vexed William by rebellion, it is impossible to say. But, as a matter of fact, during the first few years of his reign one district after another took up arms and endeavoured to cast out the stranger. As it became gradually evident that Williams whole system of government was to be on new and distasteful lines, the English of the Midlands, the North and the West all went into rebellion. The risings were sporadic, illorganized, badly led, for each section of the realm fought for its own hand. In some parts the insurrections were in favor of the sons of Harold, in others Edgar ~ltheling was acclaimed as king: and while the unwise earls Edwin and Morcar fought for their own hand, the Anglo-Danes of the East sent for Sweyn, king of Denmark, who proved of small help, for he abode but a short space in England, and went off after sacking the great abbey of Peterborough and committing other outrages. The rebels cut up several Norman garrisons, and gave King William much trouble for some years, but they could never face him in battle. Their last stronghold, the marsh-fortress of Ely, surrenjered in 1071, and not long after their most stubborn chief,, Hereward the Wake, the leader of the fenmen, laid down hi~ arms and became King Williams man (see HERE WARD).

The only result of the long series of insurrections was to provoke the king to a cruelty which he had not at first shown, and to give him an excuse for confiscating and dividing among his foreign knights and barons the immense majority of the estates of the English theglihood. William could be pitiless when provoked; to punish the men of the North for persistent rebellion and the destruction of his garrison at York, he harried the whple countryside from the Aire to the Tees with such remorseless ferocity that it did not recover its ancient prosperity for centuries. The population was absolutely exterminated, and the great Domesday survey, made nearly twenty years later, shows the greater part of Yorkshire as waste. This act was exceptional only in its extent: the king was as cruel on a smaller scale elsewhere, and not contented with the liberal use of the axe and the rope was wont to inflict his favorite punishments of blinding and mutilation on a most reckless scale.

The net result of the kings revenge on. the rebellious English was that by 1075 the old governing class had almost entirely disappeared, and that their lands, from the Channel to the Tweed, had everywhere been distributed to new holders. To a great extent the same horde of continental adventurers who had obtained the first batch of grants in Wessex and Kent were also the recipients of the later confiscations, so that their newly acquired estates were scattered all over England. Many of them came to own land in ten or a dozen counties remote from each other, a fact which was of the greatest importance in determining the character of English feudalism. While abroad the great vassals of the crown generally held their property in compact blocks, in England their power was weakened by the dispersion of their lands. This tendency was assisted by the fact that even when the king, as was his custom, transferred to a Norman. the estates of an English landowner just as they stood, those estates were already for the most part not conterminous. Even before the Conquest the lands of the magnates were to a large extent held in scattered units, not in solid patches. Only in two cases did William establish lordships of compact strength, and these were created for the special purpose of guarding the turbulent Welsh March. The palatine earls of Chester and Shrewsbury were not only endowed with special powers and rights of jurisdiction, but were almost the only tenants-in-chief within their respective shires. These rare exceptions prove the general rule: William probably foresaw the dangers of such accumulation of territory in private hands. He made a complete end of the old English system by which great earls ruled many shires: there were to be no Godwines or Leofrics under the Norman rule. This particular feudal danger was avoided:

where earls were created, and they were but few, their authority was usually restricted to a single shire.

It remains to speak of the most important change which Williams rearrangements made in the polity of England. It Feudelism is of course untrue to sayas was so often done by early historiansthat he introduced the feudal system into England. In some aspects feudalism was already in the land before he arrived: in others it may be said that it was never introduced at all. He did not introduce the practice by which the small man commended himself to the great man, and in return for his protection divested himself~ of the full ownership of his own land, and became a customary tenant in what later ages called a manor. That system was already in full operation in England before the Conquest. In some districts the wholly free small landowner had already disappeared, though in the regions which had formed the Danelagh he was still to be found in large numbers. Nor did William introduce the system of great earldoms, passing from father to son, which gave over-great subjects a hereditary grip on the ~ountryside- On the contrary, as has been already said, he did much to check that tendency, which had already developed in England.

What he really did do was to reconstruct society on the essentially feudal theory that the land was a gift from the king, held on conditions of homage and military service. The duties which under the old system were national obligations resting on the individual as a citizen, he made into duties depending on the relation between the king as supreme landowner and the subject as tenant of the land. Military service and the paying of the feudal taxesaids, reliefs, &care incidents of the bargain between the crown and the grantee to whom land has been given. That grantee, the tenant-in-chief, has the right to demand from his sub-tenants, to whom he has given out fractions of his estate, the same dues that the king exacts from himself. As at least four-fifths of the land of England had fallen into the kings hands between 1066 and 1074, and had been actually regranted to new ownersforeigners to whom the feudal system was the only conceivable organization of political existencethe change was not only easy but natural. The few surviving English landholders had to fall into line with the newcomers. England, in short, was reorganized into a state of the continental type, but one differing from France or Germany in that the crown had not lost so many of its regalities as abroad, and that even the greater earls had less power than the ordinary continental tenant-in-chief.

The English people became aware of this transformation in the theory of the state mainly through the fact that the new tenants-in-chief, bringing with them the ideas in which they had been reared, failed to com,prehend the rather complicated status of the rural population on this side of the Channel. To the French or Norman knight all peasants on his manor seemed to be villeins, and he failed to understand the distinction between freemen who had personally commended themselves to his English predecessor but still owned their land, and the mass of ordinary servile tenants. There can be no doubt that the first effect of the Conquest was that the upper strata of the agricultural classes lost the comparative independence which they had hitherto enjoyed, and were in many cases depressed to the level of their inferiors. The number of freemen began to decrease, from the encroachments of the landowner, and continued to dwindle for many years: even in districts where Domesday Book shows them surviving in considerable numbers, it is clear that a generation or two lat.~r they had largely disappeared, and became merged in the vihein class.

In this sense, therefore, England was turned into a feudal state by the results of the work of William the Conqueror. But it would be wrong to assert that all traces of the - Domesday.

ancient social organization of the realm were swept away. The old Saxon customs were not forgotten, though they might in many cases be twisted to fit new surroundings. Indeed William and his successors not infrequently caused them to be collected and put on record. The famous Domesday Book (q.v.) of 1086 iS in its essential nature an inquiry into the state of England at the moment of the Conquest, compiled in order that the king may have a full knowledge of the rights that he possesses as the heir of King Edward. Being primarily intended to facilitate the levy of taxation, it dwells more on the details of the actual wealth and resources of the country in 1066 and 1086, and less on the laws and customs that governed the distribution of that wealth, than could have been wished. But it is nevertheless a monumen.t of the permanence of the old English institutions, even after the ownership of four-fifths of the soil has been changed. The king inquires into the state of things in 1066 because it is on that state of things that his rights of taxation depend. He does not claim to have rearranged the whole realm on a new basis, or to be levying his revenue on a new assessment made at his own pleasure. Nor is it in the sphere of taxation alone that Williams organization of the realm stands on the old English customs. In the military sphere, though his normal army is the feudal force composed of the tenants-in-chief and the knights whom they have enfeoffed, he retains the power to call out the fyrd, the old national levee en masse, without regard to whether its members are freemen or villeins of some lord. And in judicial matters the higher rights of royal justice remain intact, except in the few cases where special privileges have been granted to one or two palatine earls. The villein must sue in his lords manorial courts, but he is also subject to the royal courts of hundred and shire. The machinery of the local courts survives for the most part intact.

Williams dealings with the Church of England were no less important than his dealings with social organization. In the earlier years of his reign he set himself to get rid of ~

the whole of the upper hierarchy, in order to replace ofO7heOfl them by Normans. In 1070 Archbishop Stigand was Chumi,. deposed as having been uncanonically chosen, and six or seven other bishops after him. All the vacancies, as well as those which kept occurring during the next few years, were immediately filled up with foreigners. By the time that William had been ten years on the throne there were only three English bishops left. At his death there was only onethe saintly Wulfstan of Worcester. The same process was carried out with regard to abbacies, and indeed with all important places of ecclesiastical preferment. By 1080 the English Church was officered entirely by aliens. Just as with the lay landholders, the change of personnel made a vast difference, not so much in the legal position of the new-corners as in the way in which they regarded their office. Theoutlook of a Norman bishop was as unlike that of his English predecessor as that of a Norman baron. The English Church had got out of touch with the ideals and the spiritual movements of the other Western churches. In especial the great monastic revival which had started from the abbey of Cluny and spread all over France, Italy and Germany had hardly touched this island. The continental churchmen of the 11th century were brimming over with ascetic zeal and militant energy, while the majority of the English hierarchy were slack and easy-going. The typical faults of the dark ages, pluralism, simony, lax observation of the clerical rules, contented ignorance, worldliness in every aspect, were all too prevalent in England. There can be no doubt that the greater part of Williams nominees were better men than those who preceded them; his great archbishop, Lanfranc, though a busy statesman, was also an energetic reformer and a man of holy life. Osmund, Remigius and others of the first post-Conquest bishops have left a good name behind them. The condition of the church alike in the matter of spiritual zeal, of hard work and of learning was much improved. But there was a danger behind this revival; for the reformers of the 11th century, in their zeal for establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, were not content with raising the moral and intellectual standards prevailing in Christendom, but sought to bring the whole scheme of life under the church, by asserting the absolute supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, wherever the two came in contact or overlapped. The result, since the feudal and ecclesiastical systems had become closely interwoven, aiid the frontier between the religious and secular spheres must ever be vague and undefined, was the conflict between the spiritual and temporal powers which, for two centuries to come, was to tear Europe into warring factions (see the articles CHURCH HIsToRY; PAPACY; INVESTITURE).

The Norman Conquest of England was contemporaneous with the supreme influence of the greatest exponent of the theory of ecclesiastical supremacy, the archdeacon Hildebrand, who in 1073 mounted the papal throne as Gregory VII. (q.v.). William, despite all his personal faults, was a sincerely pious man, but it could not be expected that he would acquiesce in these new developments of the religious reformation which he had done his best to forward. Hence we find a divided purpose in the policy which he pursued with regard to church affairs. He endeavoured to keep on the best term~ with the papacy: he welcomed legates and frequently consulted the pope on purely spiritual matters. He even took the hazardous step of separating ecclesiastical courts and lay courts, giving the church leave to establish separate tribunals of her own, a right which she had never possessed in Saxon England. The spiritual jurisdiction of the bishop had hitherto been exercised in the ordinary national courts, with lay assessors frequently taking part in the proceedings, and mixing their dooms with the clergys canonical decisions. William in 1076 granted the church a completely independent set of courts, a step which his successors were to regret for many a generation.

At the same time, however, he was not blind to the possibilities of papal interference in domestic matters, and of the danger of conflict between the crown and the recently-strengthened clerical order. To guard against them he laid down three general rules: (1) that no one should be recognized as pope in England till he had himself taken cognizance of the papal election, and that no papal letters should be brought into the realm without his leave; (2) that no decisions of the English eccIe~iastical synods should be held valid till he had examined and sanctioned them; (3) that none of his barons or ministers should be~x. cotnmunicated unless he approved of such punishment being inflicted on them. These rules seem to argue a deeply rooted distrust of the possible encroachments of the papacy on the power of the state. The question of ecclesiastic patronage, which was tobe thesource of the first great quarrel between the crown and the church in the next generation, is not touched upon. William retained in his own hands the choice of bishops and abbots, and Alexander II. and Gregory VII. seem to have made no objection to his doing so, in spite of the claim that free election was the only canonical way of filling vacancies. The Conqueror was allowed for his lifetime to do as he pleased, since be was recognized as a true friend of the church. But the question was only deferred and not settled.

The political history of Williams later years is unimportant; his main energy was absorbed in the task of holding down and organizing his new kingdom. His rather precarious conquest of the county of Maine, his long quarrels 11Ihhhjams, with Philip I. of France, who suborned against him his undutiful and rebellious eldest son Robert, his negotiation with Flanders and Germany, deserve no more than a mention. It is more necessary to point out that he reasserted on at least one occasion (when King Malcolm Canmore did him homage) the old suzerainty of the English kings over Scotland. He also beganthat encroachment on the borders of Wales which was to continue with small interruptions for the neyt two centuries. The advance was begun by his great vassals, the earls of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, all of whom occupied new districts on the edge of the mountains of Powys and Gwynedd. William himself led an expedition as far as St. Davids in io81, and founded Cardiff Castle to mark the boundary of his realm north of the Bristol Channel.

Perhaps the most noteworthy event of the second portion of the Conquerors reign was a rebellion which, though it made no head and was easily suppressed, marks the commencement of that feudal danger which was to be the constant trouble of the English kings for the next three generations. Two of the greatest of his foreign magnates, Roger, earl of Hereford, and Ralph, earl of Norfolk, rose against him in I075, with no better cause than personal grievances and ambitions. He put them down with ease; the one was imprisoned for life, the other driven into exile, while Waltheof, the last of the English earls, who had dabbled in a hesitating way in this plot, was executed. There was never any serious danger, but the fact that under the new rgime baronial rebellion was possible, despite of all Williams advantages over other feudal kings, and despite of the fact that the rebels were hardly yet settled firmly into their new estates, had a sinister import for the future of England. With the new monarchy there had come into England the anarchic spirit of continental feudalism. If such a man as the Conqueror did not overawe it, what was to be expected in the reigns of his successors? William had introduced into his new realm alike the barons, with their personal ambition, and the clerics of the school of Hildebrand, with their intense jealousy for the rights of the church. The tale of the dealings of his descendants with these two classes of opponents constitutes the greater part of English history for a full century.

William died at Rouen on the 7th of September 1087; on his death-bed he expressed his wish that Normandy should pass to his elder son, Robert, in spite of all his rebellions, but gave his second son William (known by the nick- ~7 name of Rufus) the crown of England, and sent him thither with commendatory letters to archbishop Lanfranc and his other ministers. There was at first no sign of opposition to the will of the late king, and William Rufus was crowned within three weeks of his fathers decease. But the results of the Conquest had made it hard to tear England and Normandy apart. Almost every baron in the duchy was now the possessor of a smaller or a greater grant of lands in the kingdom, and the possibilityof serving two masters was as small in 1087 as at any other period of the worlds history. By dividing his two states between his sons the Con~queror undid his own work, and left to his subjects the certainty of civil war. For the brothers Robert and William were, and always had been, enemies, and every intriguing baron had before him the tempting prospect of aggrandizing himself, by making his allegiance to one of the brothers serve as an excuse for betraying the other. Robert was thriftless, volatile and easy-going, a good knight but a most incompetent sovereign. These very facts commended him to the more turbulent section of the baronage; if he succeeded to the whole of the Conquerors heritage they would have every opportunity of enjoying freedom from all governance. Williams private character was detestable: he was cruel, lascivious, greedy of gain, a habitual breaker of oaths and promises, ungrateful and irreligious. But he was cunning, strong-handed and energetic; clearly the Red King would be an undesirable master to those who loved feudal anarchy. Hence every turbulent baron in England soon came to the conclusion that Robert was the sovereign whom his heart desired.

The greater part of the reign of William II. was taken up with his fight against the feudal danger. Before he had been six months on the throne he was attacked by a league comprising more than half the baronage, and headed by his uncles, bishop Odo of Bayeux and, Robert of Mortain. They used the name of the duke of Normandy and had secured his promise to cross the Channel for their assistance. A less capable and unscrupulous king than Rufus might have been swept away, for the rising burst out simultaneously in nearly every corner of the realm. But he made head against it with the aid of mercenary bands, the loyal minority of the barons, and the shire-levies of his English subjects. When he summoned out the fyrd they came in great force to his aid, not so much because they trusted in the promises of good governance and reduced taxation which he made, but because they saw that a horde of greedy barons would be worse to serve than a single king, however hard and selfish he might be. With their assistance William fought down the rebels, expelled his uncle Odo and several other leaders from the realm, confiscated a certain amount of estates, and then pardoned the remainder of the rebels. Such mercy, as he was to discover, was misplaced. In 1095 the same body of barons made a second and a more formidable rising, headed by the earls of Shrewsbury, Eu and Northumberland. It was put down with the same decisive energy that William had shown in 1088, and this time he was merciless; he blinded and mutilated William of Ets, shut up Mowbray of Northumberland for life in a monastery, and hanged many men of lesser rank. Of the other rebels some were deprived of their English estates altogether, athers restored to part of them after paying crushing fines. This second feudal rebellion was only a distraction to William from his war with his brother Robert, which continued intermittently all through the earlier years of his reign. It was raging from 1088 to 1091, and again from 1093 to 1096, when Robert tired of the losing game, pawned his duchy to his brother and went off on the First Crusade. Down to this moment Williams position had been somewhat precarious; with the Norman war generally on hand, feudal rebellion always imminent, and Scottish invasions occasionally to be repelled, he had no easy life. But he fought through his troubles, conquered Cumberland from the Scots (1092), in dealing with his domestic enemies used cunning where force failed, and generally got his will in the end. His rule was expensive, and he made himself hated by every class of his subjects, baronage, clergy and people alike, by his ingenious and oppressive taxation. His chosen instrument, a clerical lawyer named Ranuif Flambard (q.v.), whom he presently made bishop of Durham, was shameless in his methods of twisting feudal or national law to the detriment of the taxpayer. William supported him in every device, however unjust, with a cynical frankness which was the distinguishing trait of his character; for he loved to display openly all the vices and meannesses which most men take care to disguise. In dealing with the baronage Ranulf and his master extorted excessive and arbitrary reliefs whenever land passed in succession to heirs. When the church was a landholder their conduct was even more unwarrantable; every clerk installed in a new preferment was forced to pay a large sum downwhich in that age was considered a clear case of simony by all conscientious men. But-in addition the king kept all wealthy posts, such as bishoprics and abbacies, vacant for years at a time and appropriated the revenue meanwhile.

This policy, when pursued with regard to the archbishopric of Canterbury, brought on Rufus the most troublesome of his 4uarrels. When the wise primate Lanfranc, his A 1

ftthers friend, died in 1089, he made no appointment In. till 1093, extracting meanwhile great plunder from the see. In a moment of sickness, when his conscience was for a space troub~ ling him or his will was weak, he nominated the saintly Anseim (q.v.) to the archbishopric. When enthroned the new primate refused to make the enormous gift which the king expected from every recipient of preferment. Soon after he began to press for leave to hold a national synod, and when it was denied him, spoke out boldly on the personal vices as well as the immoral policy of the king. From this time William and Anseim became open enemies. They fought first upon the question of acknowledging Urban II. as popefor the king, taking advantage of the fact that there was an antipope in existence, refused to allow that there was any certain and legitimate head of the Western church at the moment. Then, after William had reluctantly yielded on this point, the far more important question of lay investitures cropped up. The council of Clermont (Nov. 1095) had just issued its famous decree to the effect that bishops must be chosen by free election, and not invested with their spiritual insignia or enfeoffed with their estates by the hands of a secular prince. Anselm felt himself obliged to accept this decision, and refused to accept his own pallium from William when Urban sent it across the sea by the hands of a legate. The king replied by harrying him on charges of having failed in his feudal obligation to provide well-equipped knights for a Welsh expedition, and imposed ruinous fines on him. It was even said that his life was threatened, and he fled to Rome in 1097, not to return till his adversary was dead. There was much to be said for the theory of the king as to the relations between church and state; he was indeed only carrying on in. a harsh form his fathers old policy. But the fact that he was a tyrant and an evil-liver, while Anseim was a saint, so much influenced public opinion that William was universally regarded as in the wrong, and the sympathy of the laity no less than the clergy was with the archbishop. For the remaining three years of his life the Red King was considered to be in a state of reprobation and at open strife with righteousness.

Yet so far as secular affairs wen.t William seemed prosperous enough. Since his brother had pawned the duchy of Normandy to him, so that he reigned at Rouen no less than at London, the danger of rebellion was almost removed. His foreign policy was successful: he installed a nominee of his own, Edgar, the son of Malcolm Canmore, on the throne of Scotland (1097); he reconquered Maine, which his brother Robert had lost; he made successful war upon King Philip of France. His barons subdued much of South Wales, though his own expeditions into North Wales, which he had designed to conquer and annex, had a less fortunate ending. He dreamed, we are told, of attacking Ireland, even of crowning himself king at Paris. But on the 2nd of August i1oo he was suddenly cut off in the midst of his sins. While hunting with some of his godless companions in the New Forest, he was struck by an arrow, unskilfully shot by one of the party. The knight Walter Tyrrell, who was persistently accused of being the author of his masters death, as persistently denied his responsibility for it; and whether the arrow was his or no, it was not alleged that malice guided it. Williams favorites had all to lose by his death.

The kings death was unexpected: he was only in his fortieth year, and mens minds had not even begun to ponder over, the question of who would succeed him. The crown of Succession England was left vacant for the boldest kinsman to of Henry I. snatch at, if he dared. William had two surviving brothers, beside several nephews. Roberts claim seemed the more likely to succeed, for not only was he the elder, but England was full of barons who desired his accession, and had already taken up arms for him in 1087 or 1095. But he was far awaybeing at the moment on his return journey from Jerusalemwhile on the spot was his brother Henry, an ambitious prince, whose previous efforts to secure himself a territorial endowment had failed more from ill-luck than from want of enterprise or ability. Seeing his opportunity, Henry left his brothers body unburied, rode straight off to Winchester with a handful of companions, and seized the royal treasure. This and his ready tongue were the main arguments by which he convinced (he few magnates present, and persuaded them to back him, despite the protests of some supporters of Robert. There was hardly the semblance of an election, and the earl of Warwick and the chancellor William Giffard were almost the only persons of importance on the spot. But Henry, once hailed as king, rode hard for London and persuaded bishop Maurice to crown him without delay at Westminster, since the primate Anseim was absent beyond seas. He certainly lost no time: Rufus was shot on Thursday, the 2nd of Augusthis successor was crowned on Sunday the 5th of August! The realm heard almost by the same messengers that it had lost one king and that it had gained another.

Henry at once issued a proclamation and charter promising the redress of all the grievances with which his brother had afflicted his feudal tenants, the clergy and the whole nation. He would keep the ancient laws of King Edward, as amended by his father the Conqueror, and give all men good justice. These promises he observed more faithfully than Norman kings were wont to do; if the pledge was not redeemed in every detail, he yet kept England free from anarchy, abandoned the arbitrary and unjust taxation of his brother, and set up a government that worked by rule and order, not by the fits and starts of tyrannical caprice. He was a man of a cold and hard disposition, but full of practical wisdom, and conscious that his precarious claim to the crown must be secured by winning the confidence of his subjects. Almost the first and quite the wisest of his inspirations was to wed a princess of the old English lineEdith,1 the niece of Edgar ~theling, the child of his sister Margaret of Scotland and Malcolm Canmore. The match, though his Norman barons sneered at it, gave him the hearts of all his English subjects, who supported him with enthusiasm, and not merely (as had been the case with Rufus) because they saw that a strong king would oppress them less than a factious and turbulent baronage. Henry won much applause at the same time by filling up all the bishoprics and abbacies which his brother had kept so long vacant, by inviting the exiled Anselm to return to England, and by imprisoning Williams odious minister Ranulf Flambard. He had just time to create a favorable impression by his first proceedings, when his brother Robert, who had returned from Palestine and resumed possession of Normandy, landed at Portsmouth to claim the crown and to rouse his partisans among the English baronage. Henry bought him off, before the would-be rebels had time to join him, by promising him an annual tribute of 3000 marks and surrendering to him all his estates in Normandy (1101). His policy seemed tame and cautious, but was entirely justifiable, for within a few months of Roberts departure the inevitable feudal rebellion broke out. If the duke and his army had been on the spot to support it, things might have gone hardly with the king. The rising was led by Robert of Belesme, earl of Shrewsbury, a petty tyrant of the most ruffianly type, the terror of the Welsh marches. He was backed by his kinsmen. and many other barons, but proved unable to stand before the king, who was loyally supported by the English shire levies. After taking the strong castles of Arundel, Tickhill, Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury, Henry forced the rebels to submit. He confiscated their estates and drove them out of the realm; they fled for the most part to Normandy, to spur on duke Robert to make another bid for the English crown. From the broad lands which they forfeited Henry made haste to reward his own. servants, new men who owed all to him and served him faithfully. From them he chose the sheriffs, castellans and councillors through whom he administered the realm during the rest of his long reign.

i As the name Edith (Eadgyth) sounded uncouth to Norman ears, she assumed the continental name Maheut or Mahelt (Eng. Mahald, later Mold and Maud), in Latin Matildis or Matilda. Sir J. H. Ramsay, Foundations of England, ii. 235. (Ed.)

This minor official nobility was the strength of the crown, and was sharply divided in spirit and ambition from the older feudal aristocracy which descended from the original adventurers who had followed William the Conqueror. Yet the latter still remained strong enough to constitute a danger to the crown whenever it should fall to a king less wary and resolute than Henry himself.

Henry was by nature more of an administrator and organizer than of a fighting man. He was a competent soldier, but his wish was rather to be a strong king at home than a great conqueror abroad. Nevertheless he was driven by the logic of events to attack Normandy, for as long as his brother reigned there, and as long as many English barons retained great holdings on both sides of the Channel and were subjects of the duke as well as of the king, intrigues and plots never ceased. The Norman war ended in the battle of Tenchebrai (Sept. 28, 1106), where Duke Robert was taken prisoner. His brother shut him up in honorable confinement for the rest of his life, though otherwise he was not ill-treated. For the rest of his reign Henry was ruler of all the old dominions of the Conqueror, and none of his subjects could cloak disloyalty by the pretence of owing a divided allegiance to two masters. With this he was content, and made no great effort to extend his dominions farther; his desirewastoreignas a true king in EnglandandNormandy, rather than to build up a loosely compacted empire around them.

Throughout the time of Henrys Norman war, he was engaged in a tiresome controversy with the primate on the question of lay investitures, the continuation of the struggle which Henrys had begun in his brothers reign. Every English king difficulties for five generations had to face the danger from the with the church, no less than the danger from the barons, church.

Anselm had come back from Rome confirmed in the theories for which he had contended with Rufusnay, taught to extend them to a further extreme. He now maintained not only that it was a sin that kings should invest prelates with their spiritual insignia, the pallium, the staff, the ring, but claimed that no clerk ought to do homage to the king for the lands of his benefice, though he himself seven years before had not scrupled to make his oath to his earlier master. He now refused to swear allegiance to the new monarch, though he had recalled him and had restoredhim to the possession of his see. He also refused to consecrate Henrys nominees to certain bishoprics and abbacies on the ground that they had not been chosen by free election by their chapters or their monks. The king was loath to take up the quarrel, for he highly respected the archbishop; yet he was still more loath to surrender the ancient claims and privileges of the crown. Anselm was equally reluctant to force matters to an open breach, yet would not shift from his position. There followed an interminable series of arguments, interrupted by truces, till at last Anselm, at the kings suggestion, went to Rome to see if the pope could arrange some modus vivendi. Paschal II. for some time refused to withdraw from his fixed theory of the relation of church and state, and Anselm, in despair, preferred to remain abroad rather than to press matters to the rupture that seemed the only logical issue of the controversy. But in 1107 the pope consented to a compromise, which satisfied the king, and yet was acceptable to the church. Bishops and abbots were for the future to be canonically elected by the clergy, and were no longer to receive the ring and staff from lay hands. But they were to do homage to the king for their lands, and since they thus acknowledged him as their temporal lord Henry was content. Moreover, he retained in practice, if not in theory, his power to nominate to the vacant offices; chapters and monasteries seldom dared to resist the pressure which the sovereign could bring to bear upon them in. favor of the candidate whom he had selected. The arrangement was satisfactory, and served as the model for the similar compromise arrived at between Pope Calixtus II. and the emperor Henry V. fifteen years later.

From 1107 onward Henry was freed from both the dangers which had threatened him in his earlier years, and was free to develop his policy as he pleased. He had yet twenty-eight years to reign, for he survived to the age of sixty-seven, an age unparalleled by any of his predecessors, and by all his successors till Edward I.

It is to Henry, aided by his great justiciar, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, that England owed the institution of the machinery of government by which it was to be ruled during the Constftu- earlier middle ages. This may be described as a primi-. mac~1nery. tive kind of bureaucracy, which gradually developed into a much more complicated system of courts and offices. Around the sovereign was his Curia Regis or body of councillors, of whom the most important were the justiciar, the chancellor and the treasurer, though the feudal officers, the constable and marshal, were also to be found there. The bulk of the council, however, was composed of knights and clerks selected by the king for their administrative or financial ability. The Curia, besides advising the king on ordinary matters of state, had two special functions. It sat, or certain members of it sat, under the presidency of the king or the justiciar, as the supreme court of justice of the realm. In this capacity it tried the suits of tenants-in-chief, and all appeals from the local courts. But Henry, not contente4 with this, adopted the custom of sending forth certain members of the Curia throughout the realm at intervals, to sit in the shire court, along with or in place of the sheriff, and to hear and judge all the cases of which the court had cognizance. From these itinerant commissioners (justices in eyre) descend the modern justices of assize. The sheriff, the original president of the shire court, was gradually extruded by them from all important business.

But there were other developments of the Curia. The justiciar, chancellor and treasurer sat with certain other members of the council as the court of exchequer, not only to receive and audit the accounts of the royal revenue, but to give legal decisions on all questions connected with finance. Twice in every year the sheriffs and other royal officials came up to the exchequer court, which originally sat at Winchester, with their bags of money and their sheaves of accounts. Their figures were subjected to a severe scrutiny, and the law was laid down on all points in which the interests of the sheriff and the king, or the sheriff and the taxpayer, came into conflict. In this way the exchequer grew into a law court of primary importance, instead of remaining merely a court of receipt. Though its members were originally the same men who sat in. the Curia Regis, the character of the question to be tried settled the capacity in which they should sit, and two separate courts were evolved. (See EXCHEQUER.)

Under the superintendence of the Curia Regis and the exchequer, the sheriff still remained the kings factotum in local affairs. He led the shire-levies, collected the royal revenues both feudal and non-feudal, and presided in the shire-court as judge, till in the course of years his functions in that sphere were gradually taken over by the itinerant justices. On his fidelity the king had to rely both for military aid in times of baronial revolt and for the collection of the money which formed the sinews of war. Hence the position was one of the highest importance, and Henrys new nobility, the men of ability whom he selected and promoted, found their special occupation in holding the office of sheriff. It was they who had to see that the shire court, and in minor affairs the hundred court, did not allow cases to slip away into the jurisdiction of the feudal courts of the baronage.

Henry I. must count not merely as the father of the English bureaucracy, but as a fosterer of the municipal independence of the towns. He gave charters of a very liberal character to many places, and in especial to London, where the citizens were allowed to choose their own sheriff, and to deal directly with the exchequer in matters of revenue. He even. farmed out to them the charge of the taxes of the whole shire of Middlesex, outside the city walls. Such a grant was exceptionalthough Lincoln also seems to have been granted the privilege of dealing directly with the exchequer. But in many other smaller towns the first grants the smaller beginnings of autonomymay be traced back to this period (see BOROUGH).

Though Henry was an autocrat, and governed through bureaucratic officials who were entirely under his hand, yet a reign of law and order such as his was indirectly favorable to the growth of constitutional liberty. It was equally favorable to the growth of national unity: it was in his time that Norman and English began to melt together: intermarriage in all classes became common, and only thirty years after his death a contemporary writer could remark that it was hard for any man. to call himself either Norman or English, so much had blood been intermingled.

It is unnecessary to go into the very uninteresting and unimportan.t history of Henrys later years. A long war with France, prosecuted without much energy, led to no results, for the French kings attempts to stir up rebellions in the name of William the Clito (q.v.), the son of Duke Robert, came to an end with that princes death in. 1129. But the extension of the English borders in South Wales by the conquests of the lords marcher as far as Pembroke and Cardigan. deserves a word of notice.

The question of the succession was the main thing which occupied the mind of the king and the whole nation in Henrys later years. It had a real interest for every man in an age when any doubt as to the heir meant the out- ~ S break of civil war such as had occurred at the death of the Conqueror and of Rufus. There was now a problem of some difficulty to be solved. Henrys only son William had been drowned at sea ~n. 1120. He had no other child born in wedlock save a daughter, Matilda, who married the emperor Henry V., but had no issue by him. On. the emperors decease she wedded as her second husband Geoffrey of Anjou (1127), to whom during her fathers last years she bore two sons. But the succession of a woman to the crown was as unfamiliar to English as to Norman ideas, nor did it seem natural to either to place a young child on the throne. Moreover, Matildas husband Geoffrey was unpopular among the Normans; the Angevins had been the chief enemies of the duchy for several generations, and the idea that one of them might become its practical ruler was deeply resented~ The old king, as was but natural, had determined that his daughter should be his successor; he made the great council do homage to her in 1126, and always kept her before the eyes of his people as his destined heir. But though he had forced or cajoled every leading man in England and Normandy to take his oath to serve her, he must have been conscious that there was a large chance that such pledges would be forgotten at his death.. The prejudice against a female heir was strong, and there were too many turbulent magnates to whom the anarchy that would follow a disputed succession presented temptations which could not be resisted.

Henry died suddenly on the 25th of November 1135, while he was on a visit to his duchy of Normandy. The moment that his death was reported the futility of oaths became apparent. A majority of the Norman barons ap- Milda, pealed to Theobald, count of Blois, son of the Con- S7ephen. querors daughter Adela, to be their duke, and to save them from the yoke of the hated Angevin. I-us supporters and those of Matilda were soon at blows all along the frontier of Normandy. Meanwhile in England another pretender had appeared. Stephen, count of floulogne, the younger brother of Theobald, had landed at Dover within a few days of Henrys death, determined to make a snatch at the crown, though he had been one of the first who had taken the oath to his cousin a few years before. The citizens of London welcomed him, but he was not secure of his success till by a swift swoop on Winchester he obtained possession of the royal treasurean all-important factor in a crisis, as Henry I. had shown in 1100. At Winchester he was acknowledged as king by the bishop, his own brother Henry of Blois, and by the great justiciar, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, and the archbishop, William of Corbeil. The allegiance of these prelates was bought by an unwise promise to grant all the demands of the church party, which his predecessor had denied, or conceded only in part. He would permit free election to all benefices, and free legislation by ecclesiastical synods, and would surrender any claims of the royal courts to have jurisdiction over clerks or the property of clerks. it then remained necessary to buy thebaronage, of which only a few members had as yet committed themselves to his side. it was done by grants of lands and privileges, the first instalment of a never-ending crop of ruinOus concessions which Stephen continued to make from the day of his accession down to the day of his death.

The pretender was crowned at Westminster on the 22nd of December 1135less than a month after his uncles death. N9 one yet openly withstood him, but he was well aware that his position was precarious, and that the claims of Matilda would he brought forward ere long by the section of the baronage which had not yet got from him all they desired. Meanwhile, however, he was encouraged to persevere by the fact that his brother Theobald had withdrawn his claim to the duchy of Normandy, and retired in his favor. For a space he was to be duke as well as king; but thi.s meant merely thathe would have two wars, not one, in hand ere long. Matildas adherents were already in the field in Normandy; in England their rising was only delayed for a few months.

Stephen, though he had shown some enterprise and capacity in his successful snatch at the crown, was a man far below his three predecessors on the throne in the matter of perseverance and foresight. He was a good fighter, a liberal giver, and a faithful friend, but he lacked wisdom, caution and the power to organize. Starting his career as a perjurer, it is curious that he was singularly slow to suspect perjury in others; he was the most systematically betrayed of all English kings, because he was the least suspicious, and the most ready to buy off and to forgive rebels. His troubles began in 1136, when. sporadic rebellions, raised in the name of Matilda, began to appear; they grew steadily worse, though Stephen showed no lack of energy, posting about his realm with a band of mercenary knights whenever trouble broke out. But in 1138 the crisis came; the baronage had tried the capacity of their new master and found him wanting. The outbreak was now widespread and systematic Civil war. caused not by the turbulence of a few wild spirits, but by the deliberate conspiracy of all who saw their advantage in anarchy. Matilda had a few genuine partisans, such as her half-brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, tile illegitimate son of Henry I., btit the large majority of those who took arms in her name were ready to sell their allegiance to either candidate in return for lands, or grants of rank or privilege. A long list of doubly and triply forsworn nobles, led by Geoffrey de Mandeville, Aubrey de Vere and Ralph of Chester, made the balance of war sway alternately from side to side, as they transferred themselves to the camp of the highest bidder. It is hard to trace any meaning in the civil warit was not a contest between the principle of hereditary succession and the principle of elective kingship, as might be supposed. It was rather, if some explanation must be found for it, a strife between the kingly power and feudal anarchy. Unfortunately for England the kingly power was in the hands of an incapable holder, and feudal anarchy found a plausible mask by adopting the disguise of loyalty to the rightful heiress.

The civil war was not Stephens only trouble; foreign invasion was added. David I., king of Scotland, was the uncle of Matilda, and used her wrongs as the plea for thrice invading northern England, which he ravaged with great cruelty. His most formidable raid was checked by the Yorkshire shire levies, at the battle of the Standard (Aug. 22, 1138). Yet in the following year he had to be bought off by the grant of all Northumberland (save Newcastle and Bamborough) to his son Earl Henry. Carlisle and Cumberland were already in his hands. Some years later the Scottish prince also got possession of the great Honor of Lancaster. It was not Stephens fault that the boundary of England did not permanently recede from the Tweed and the Soiway to the Tyne and the Ribble.

But the affairs of the North attracted little attention while th civil war was at its height in the South. In 1139 Stephen had wrought himself fatal damage by quarrelling with the ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the kinsmen and allies of Roger of Salisbury, who had been among his earliest adherents. Jealous of their. power and their arrogance, and doubting their loyalty, he imprisoned them and confiscated their lands. This threw the whole church party on to the side of Matilda; even Henry, bishop of Winchester, the kings own brother, disowned him and passed over to the other side. Moreover, the whole machinery of local government in the realm fell out of gear, when the experienced ministers who were wont to control it were removed from power.

Matilda had landed in England in the winter of 1139-1140; for a year her partisans made steady progress against the king, and on the 2nd of February 1141 Stephen was defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln. All England, save the county of Kent and a few isolated castles elsewhere, submitted to, Matilda. She was hailed as a sovereign by a great assembly at Winchester, over which Stephens own brother Bishop Henry presided (April 7, 1141) and entered London in triumph in June. It is doubtful whether she would have obtained complete possession of the realm if she had played her cards well, for there were too many powerful personages who were interested in the perpetuatio~L of the civil war. But she certainly did her best to ruin her own chances by showing an unwise arrogance, and a determination toresume at once all the powers that her father had possessed. When she annulled all the royal acts of the last six years, declared charters forfeited and lands confiscated, and began to raise heavy and arbitrary taxes, she made the partisans of Stephen desperate, and estranged many of her own supporters. A sudden rising of the citizens drove her out of London, while she was making preparations for her coronation. The party of the imprisoned king rallied under the wise guidance of his wife Matilda of Boulogne and his brother Henry, and many other of the late deserters adhered to it. Their army drove the lately triumphant party out of Winchester, and captured its military chief, Robert, earl of Gloucester. So much was his loss felt that his sister exchanged him a few months later for King Stephen.

After this the war went on interminably, without complete advantage to either side, Stephen for the most part dominating the eastern and Matilda the western shires. It was the zenith of the power of the baronial anarchists, who moved from camo to camp with shameless rapidity, wresting from one or other of the two rival sovereigns some royal castle, or some dangerous grant of financial or judicial rights, at each change of allegiance. The kingdom was in the desperate state described in the last melancholy pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, when life and property were nowhere safe from the objectless ferocity of feudal tyrants when every shire was full of castles and every castle filled with devils and evil men, and the people murmured that Christ and his saints slept.

Such was Englands ,fate till 1153, when Matilda had retired from the strife in favor of her son, Henry of Anjou, and Stephen was grown an old man, and had just lost his heir, Eustace, to whom he had desired to pass on the crown. Both parties were exhausted, both were sick of the incessant treachery of their more unscrupulous barons, and at last they came to the compromise of Wallingford (October 1153), by which it was agreed that Stephen should reign for the remainder of his life, but that on his death the crown should pass to Henry. Both sides promised to lay down their arms, to dismiss their mercenaries, and to acquiesce in the destruction of unlicensed castles, of which it is said, with no very great exaggeration, that there were at the moment over 1000 in the realm. Henry then returned to Normandy, of which his mother had been in possession since 1145, while Stephen turned his small remaining strength to the weary task of endeavouring to restore the foundations of law and order. But he had accomplished little when he died in October 54. The task of reconstruction was to be left to Henry of Anjou: his predecessor was only remembered as an example of the evil that may be done by a weak man who has been reckless enough to seize a throne which he is incapable of defending. England has bad many worse kings, but never one who wrought her more harm. If his successor had been like him, feudal anarchy might have become as permanent in England as in Poland.

Fortunately the young king to whom Stephens battered crown now fell was energetic and capable, if somewhat self~ willed and hasty. He was inferior in caution and enry self-control to his grandfather Henry I., though he resembled him in his love of strong and systematic governance. From the point of view of his English subjects his main achievement was that he restored iii almost every detail the well-organized bureaucracy which his ancestor had created, and with it the law and order that had disappeared during Stephens unhappy reign. But there was this essential difference between the position of the two Henries, that the elder aspired to be no more than. king of England and duke of Normandy, while the younger strove all his life for an imperial position in western Europe. Such an ambition was almost forced upon him by the consequences of his descent and his marriage. Besides his grandfathers Anglo-Norman inheritance, he had received from his father Geoffrey the counties of Anjou and Touraine, and the predominance in the valley of the Lower Loire. But it was his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, two years before his accession to the English throne, which gave him the right to dream of greatness such as his Norman forbears had never enjoyed. This lady, the divorced wife of Louis VII. of France, brought to her second husband the whole of the lands from Pojtou to the Pyrenees, the accumulated gains of many warlike ancestors: In wealth and fighting strength the duchy of Aquitaine was a full third of France. Added to Anjou and Normandy it made a realm far more important than England. Hence it came that Henrys ambitions and interests were continental more than English. Unlike his grandfather he dwelt for the greater part of his time beyond seas. It must be remembered, too, that his youth had been spent abroad, and that England only came to him when he was already a grown man. The concerns of his island realm were a matter of high importance to him, but only formed a part of his cares. Essentially he was an Angevin, neither a Norman nor an. Englishman, and his primary ambition was to make the house of Anjou supreme in France. Nor di,d this seem impossible; he owned a far broader and wealthier domain beyond the Channel than did his nominal suzerain King Louis VII., andwhat was of more importancehe far excelled that prince both in vigour and in capacity.

On succeeding to the English crown, however, he came over at once to take possession of the realm, and abode there for over a year, displaying the most restless energy in setting to rights the governance of the realm. He expelled all Stephens mercenaries, took back into his hands the royal lands and castles which his predecessor had granted away, and destroyed hundreds of the adulterine castles which the barons and knights had built without leave during the years of the anarchy. Hardly a single magnate dared to oppose himBridgnorth, now a castle of the Mortimers, was the only place which he had to take by force. His next care was to restore the bureaucracy by which Henry I. had been wont to govern. He handed over the exchequer to Nigel, bishop of Ely, the nephew of the old justiciar Roger of Salisbury, and the heir of his traditions. His chancellor was a young clerk, Thomas Becket, who was recommended to him by archbishop Theobald as the most capable official in the realm. A short experience of his work convinced the king that his merits had not been exaggerated. He proved a zealous and capable minister, and such a strong exponent of the claims of the crown that no one could have foreseen the later developments by which he was to become their greatest enemy.

The machine of government was beginning to work in a satis4actory fashion, and the realm was already settling down. into order, when Henry was called abroad by a rebellion raised in Anjou by his brother Geoffreythe first of the innumerable dynastic troubles abroad which continued throughout his reign to distract his attention from his duties as an English king. He did not return for fifteen months; but when he did reappear it was to complete the work which he had begun in 1155, to extort from the greater barons the last of the royal fortresses which still remained in their hands, and to restore the northern boundaries of the realm. Malcolm TV., the young king of Scotland.

was compelled to give up the earldoms of Northumberland and Cumberland, which his father Henry had receiv~d from Stephen. He received instead only the earldom of Huntingdon, too far from the border to be a dangerous possession, to which he had a hereditary right as descending from Earl Waltheof. He did homage to the Icing of England, and actually followed him with a great retinue on his next continental expedition. In the same year (1157) Henry made an expedition into North Wales, and forced its prince Owen to become his vassal, not without some fighting, in which the English army received several sharp checks at the commencement of the campaign.

Yet once,more Henrys stayon the English side of the Channel was but for a year. In 1158 he again departed to plunge into schemes of continental conquest. This time it was an attempt to~ annex the great, county of Toulouse, and so to carry the borders of Aquitaine~ to the Mediterranean, which distracted him. Naturally Louis of France was unwilling to see his great vassal striding all across his realm, and did what he could to hinder him. Into the endless skirmishes and negotiations which followed the raising of the question of Toulouse it would be fruitless to enter. Henry did not achieve his purpose, indeed he seems to have failed to, use his strength to its best advantage, and al1ow~d himself to be bought off by a futile marriage treaty by which his eldest son was to marry the French kings daughter (i16o). This was to be but the first of many disappointments in this direction; there was apparently some fatal scruple, both in Henrys own mind and in that of his continental subjects, as to pressing their suzer