СНАР. §2. New Ideas in Italy and France. $3. Nor man Adapt ability. land the national kingship was struck down by a Norman host, many of whom, indeed, were of kindred blood-if the kinship was but distant-with the Englishmen whom they attacked, but which was nevertheless imbued with southern thought, which spoke a southern tongue, and which waged war with all the art and weapons of the South. The coincidence is too striking to have been altogether accidental. It was not without a reason that Harold fell at Senlac in 1066, and that in 1076, but ten years later, Henry IV. was standing a shivering penitent on the snows before the barred gate of Canossa. Ideas which change the face of the world spring from nations in a state of suffering, not from nations in comfortable circumstances. The political arrangements of Germany were not satisfactory when she gave birth to the Reformation, nor were the social arrangements of France satisfactory when she gave birth to the Revolution. In the eleventh century, the German and the Englishman were too content with their own lot to strive eagerly for something new, whilst the idea of higher order and government easily found room in the brains of Italian priests who had no national government to look up to, and who saw a stranger lording it in the glorious cities whose very stones proclaimed them to be the work of Italian hands in days when Italians were the foremost men of the world. So too, it was in the midst of France, distracted and torn by feuds and rivalries as it was, that Norman William grasped the full power of the arrow and the horseman as agencies of war, and filled his mind with notions of organised government, which he strove to realise in his new country beyond the sea. The Normans themselves were not originators. But their power of adapting the ideas of others was wonderful. No race wandered into so many parts of Europe. No race was so willing to welcome merit from whatever quarter it came. Whilst the Englishman stayed at home and hated foreigners, the Norman willingly emigrated in search of adventure or gain, and displayed no grudging at the sight of the Italian Lanfranc and the Italian Anselm seated on the metropolitan throne of Canterbury. of СНАР. III. §4. Nor man Organisation land. Such a character, in spite of a predisposition to violence ordinarily hidden under external forms courtesy, was a promising element in the building up of in Enga state. But it was to the position of the Norman conquerors far more than to their mental habits that the organisation of William's government was due. The body of warriors who carved out estates for themselves under the forms of technical law, could not, in the face of the English people, resolve itself with safety into its separate units. It must be ready at any moment for self-defence, and must therefore see without reluctance the very strictest powers needed for the maintenance of military discipline placed in the hands of its chief. For many a long year the conquerors would still be a garrison in a conquered country, and they could not, therefore, free themselves from the obligations of discipline which such a position entailed. No doubt the new landed arrangements were modelled upon those which were familiar to the conquerors in France. The theory was adopted that all the land in England was the king's land, held by others directly or indirectly from him. If at first nothing more was recognised than the old English obligation of finding soldiers in proportion to the extent of land held, this was at least before the death of Henry I. converted into a distinct feudal tenure. The English system had required that so many men should be furnished by so much land, but it provided no steady means of enforcing the obligation. The Norman system proclaimed that if the men did not come, they CHAP. $5. The national Kingship. had forfeited their land, and the Norman king was strong enough to enforce the penalty. To some extent, doubtless, the Norman king derived this strength from his position at the head of the conquerors. But if it had no other basis, it would hardly have been long maintained. If the native English population had remained as divided, and consequently as weak, as they were during the years of the Conquest, the Norman nobles, relieved from fear of danger from below, would sooner or later have cast off obedience to a king who would be no longer needed to sustain them in their estates. Some difficulty would, indeed, have been thrown in their way by the prudent prevision of the Conqueror and his sons. The first William at once abolished the great earldoms of Cnut, granted the title but rarely, and confined its advantages, as a rule, to the enjoyment of pecuniary revenues in single counties, whilst he transferred the official duties of the earls to the sheriffs who were more completely under his own control. With the same object, he took care, in heaping landed property on his principal followers, to scatter their estates over many counties—as Cleisthenes had once scattered the demes of his new Athenian tribes-in order that they might be unable to combine against the crown the forces which they thus acquired. These expedients however would but have postponed the evil day, if William had not had something more than mere shiftful contrivance in reserve. Such a resource was near at hand. William knew well that the English people had been subdued not from want of strength, but from want of coherence. That coherence he was himself prepared to give. If Englishmen did not love William, they loved the local Norman intruders less. Northumbrian, and Mercian, and West Saxon at last found a common cause in their common hatred of a local aristocracy ignorant of their speech and habits, greedy of gain, and careless of the restraints of law in the arrogance of their might. An English nation was rapidly forming itself by means of this common hatred, and of this English nation William offered himself, so far as suited his own purposes, to be the leader. He knew how to establish his power by old theories as well as by new ones. If he claimed to be the universal landlord, as Edgar or Cnut had never been, he claimed also to be the national king far more truly than Edgar or Cnut had ever been. He knew how to use technical law to cover the most startling innovations. He gave himself out to be the true and lawful successor of Edward, as a king whose title had been acknowledged by the English Witan. If he was able to reward his Norman followers, it was because the English patriots who struggled against him had been guilty of an act of technical treason against their king. If too he was able to defy the insubordination of those very followers, it was because he really offered himself to the English as their national king. When the great Domesday survey was finished, it looked like a mere recognition of old rights of the old English kingship, according to the old English law. When at the great assembly of Salisbury, William received the oath of allegiance from every landowner in England, whether he were his own immediate vassal or not, and so reminded his subjects that as long as he had the power there would be no excuse for any man who followed his feudal superior in arms against his king, he did but carry out the old English principle of due military obligation on the part of all landowners, irrespective of the special conditions of their tenure of land. Practically, however, the old conditions. were reinvigorated with a new force. When the Conqueror summoned his subjects round him against the rebels of 1074, and still more decisively when the English СНАР. III. population rallied round the Red King when his succession was questioned by Norman barons on either side of the Channel, a force was behind the king more united and compact than any on which the earlier rulers of native race had been able to fall back. Hence, though the Witenagemot continued to exist in a changed form, its action was far less constant than it had been in the time of Edgar or Edward. The Great Council of the Norman kings was the assembly of men holding land immediately from the crown, which few were likely to attend who were not wealthy or influential enough to make it probable that their voice would count for something in the deliberations of the body. The real change however was not in the alteration from personal dependence to feudal dependence. It lay in quite another direction. The old English Witan had, if they chose to exert it, the chief force of the realm behind them. The new Norman Great Council was by no means weak, but there was a power in the realm stronger still. The first place was held by the king resting on the English people. Such an arrangement could never suffice for a permanent settlement. Some day both king and council would have to come more closely into connection with the people. For the present it was but a choice between the tyranny of one and the tyranny of many. The mass of the nation only supported the king from fear of something worse. They had no means of reaching his ear, of impressing upon him their wants and wishes. Not they, but their enemies were represented by the Great Council. It was well when kings like William I. and Henry I. were wise enough to regularise their administration for their own ends. It was an evil day when a king like William II. threw himself into sheer oppression from the knowledge that he was indispensable. |