CHAPTER VIII

RICHARD I (1189-1199) AND THE TRANSITION FROM ABSOLUTE TOWARD LIMITED MONARCHY. CONDITIONS AT THE CLOSE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

Twofold Nature of Richard's Reign. — In September, 1189, Richard, surnamed Cœur de Lion, or the Lion-Hearted, the eldest surviving son of Henry II, was crowned King of England. "A knight errant " had "succeeded a statesman," but the change was not at first very marked, because, with the exception of a few months in 1189 and 1194, the new King was absent from England throughout his reign of nearly ten years, and the Government was carried on by Ministers who sought, in the main, to continue the policy of Henry II. The reign then has to be considered from two points of view: one deals with personal exploit and adventures; the other with points of constitutional advance, notably the growth of the representative principle in the system of administration employed by the central government in the local

centers.

His Personal Character. Richard had many faults: he was an undutiful son, he was unscrupulous in extortion, and had little interest or capacity in problems of statesmanship. Yet he had his redeeming features: he was a "splendid savage splendid savage" with the virtues and vices of the medieval hero; he was warm-hearted, generous, and magnanimous toward his enemies; moreover, much of the money which he squeezed from subjects he devoted to a cause that was regarded as the highest in which men could engage, the winning of the Holy City from the enemies of Christ. As a general he was the genius of his age. His romantic nature, his fondness for poetry and music mark him as a Frenchman rather than an Englishman.

Departure for the Third Crusade. - Directly after his coronation Richard, having pledged himself to join Philip II of France in driving Saladin from the Holy Land, began to raise money for the Crusade and to provide for the government during his absence. William Longchamp, Chancellor and Justiciar, stood almost alone in representing the interests of the King; on the other hand, he took with him some

of his most trustworthy servants, leaving behind many disaffected, some of them naturally embittered, because he had confiscated their estates for alleged disloyalty for adhering to him against the late King, his father. He excused men from accompanying him on the Crusade in return for money payments, and besides sold everything he could, offices, lands, privileges, and favors; some men paid to resign offices, others to acquire them. Richard left England in December, 1189; but, owing to delays, did not until June of 1191 reach the scene of the fighting, where the French King had arrived before him. Shortly after the capture of Acre in July, Philip returned home on the plea of illness, though his real reason was to take advantage of Richard's absence to improve his own affairs. With his remaining allies the English King marched on Jerusalem, and though they managed twice to get within striking distance, they failed to capture the city, after which, much against Richard's will, they turned back. Meantime, very disquieting news arrived from England. Richard's younger brother John, crossing over from Normandy, had become involved in a war with Longchamp and had succeeded in getting the Great Council to depose the Justiciar and to declare him heir to the throne in the event of his brother's death without issue.

Treachery of John. Capture and Imprisonment of Richard. In October, 1192, Richard left Palestine never to return. On his voyage home he was captured and handed over to the Emperor, Henry VI, who, besides itching for ransom, nursed a number of grievances against the English King. Philip and John were overjoyed at the capture; but the prospect of 150,000 marks and Richard's promise to do homage for England and his other lands induced the Emperor to agree to his release. Richard in England, March to May (1194). John and Philip were baffled in their efforts to prolong Richard's captivity and seize his kingdom. Though he was received with greatest enthusiasm by his subjects, he only remained in the country from March to May, 1194, and employed most of his time in selling again the offices and honors already sold to provide for the third Crusade. Disloyalty furnished him a good pretext, though he spared the lands of John and rather contemptuously forgave him for his treachery. In addition to sales. and confiscations, Richard levied heavy taxes to carry on a war of revenge against Philip, and departed, as it turned out, forever.

The Administration of Hubert Walter (1194-1198). -For the next four years the government was in the hands of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury and Justiciar, a man trained in the methods of Henry II. Intrusted with the task of keeping order and supplying Richard's constant demands for money, the credit for the constitu

tional and administrative progress of the period is due to him. Though charged with avarice and extortion he did much to conciliate the middle classes, to confer self-government on important towns, and to extend the jury system and make it more representative.

His instructions to the itinerant justices in 1194 and in 1198 introduced important reforms. The justices in 1194 were ordered to provide for the election by the suitors, or those entitled to attend the court in each county, of four crowners or coroners to decide what were crown pleas and to reserve them for the royal judges. Both the instructions for 1194 and 1198 required that the presentment juries, hitherto appointed by the sheriff, should be selected by four knights chosen in the county court. Moreover, these juries, who formerly confined their activities to criminal accusations, were instructed to report on all sorts of royal business. Certain of Hubert's measures miscarried. In 1197, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, refused in the Great Council to contribute to a sum for equipping three hundred knights to serve abroad for a year, thus establishing a precedent for resistance to an unpopular tax. Then in 1198, a new land tax, designed to replace the old Danegeld, yielded very disappointing returns. Meantime, in 1196, William "Longbeard," a London alderman, when accused of stirring up the poor to sack the houses of the wealthy, took sanctuary in the Bow Church. Hubert smoked him out by setting the edifice on fire, whereupon the monks of Canterbury, who owned the Church, denounced the act to the Pope as sacrilege. The Pope demanded his removal from the Justiciarship, and Richard, disappointed at his two recent failures to raise money, agreed. Hubert, however, retained his office of Archbishop and became Chancellor early in the next reign.

Richard's Death (1199). Results of the Reign. — Richard, in 1199, was mortally wounded during one of his many wars in France. Although the Crusade and his conflicts with Philip of France were nearer to his heart than the welfare of his English subjects, they really contributed to English constitutional development, since the money they necessitated developed the machinery of representation, and at the same time awakened forces of opposition which later made use of this machinery against the Crown.

Secular Character of the Period. Learning at Henry's Court. Perhaps the most striking feature of the age of Henry II and his sons is its worldly or secular character. The death of Becket brought to an abrupt pause an intellectual and moral revival which, under the influence of higher clergy and monks, had shown its force as early as the reign of Henry I. On the other hand, science was mainly sub

ordinated to theology and, for that reason, made little progress. Partly owing to the number of quacks, notably in medicine and astrology, but most of all because of the superstition of the age, men of science were under suspicion and justified their pursuit of forbidden knowledge by curious apologies, generally to the effect that it aided in the comprehension of theological subjects. Although Paris and Chartres were centers of classical learning, and John of Salisbury, the foremost scholar of his time, was an enthusiast on the subject, even the classics had to yield the palm to law and logic. However, in spite of the material and bigoted character of the age, Henry II and many of his family were well educated, alert, and interested in learning. This is true even of King John, the blackest of the dark sheep; for the story that he got his reputation from having once borrowed a book of the Abbot of St. Albans is unjust. Many learned men, though more particularly historians and legal scholars, surrounded the King, and there was much intercourse with foreign countries, diplomatic, ecclesiastical, and scholarly.

Legal and Historical Writing. As one might expect, the writings of the period were mainly of a legal and historical character. In the reign of Henry II appeared a Treatise Concerning the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England, notable as the first systematic treatment of the subject ever produced in the country. It was formerly ascribed to Henry's great Justiciar, Ranulf de Glanville, though it is quite possible that the author was his nephew Hubert Walter. To Richard Fitzneal, Treasurer, and Bishop of London, we owe the Dialogue of the Exchequer, describing the organization and procedure of that celebrated financial body. The chronicles of the period differ greatly from the earlier ones; while they are annals, bare notes of events, they are written by men in the midst of affairs, busy statesmen and diplomats and not by solitary monks; moreover, they reach out beyond the boundaries of England and deal with what is going on in Europe and with the Orient which the Crusades had opened to western Christendom. One work that stands out as really historical, that tries to grasp events and to interpret their meaning, is William of Newburgh's History of English Things, the production of a canon of a remote priory in Yorkshire. Since too, he was the first to denounce the mass of fable which that unblushing romancer Geoffrey of Monmouth passed off as history, he has sometimes been called "the father of historical criticism."

Two writers throw vivid
One was Walter Map,

Walter Map and Giraldus Cambrensis. lights on the conditions in which they lived. a versatile, many-sided man of great learning. His only surviving

work, Courtiers' Triflings, is an interesting scrapbook on all sorts of subjects with the dominating aim of satirizing the Church and clergy and the follies and vices of the court. The other was Gerald the Welshman, or Giraldus Cambrensis as he is more commonly called, who wrote a valuable and lively account of the conquest of Ireland as well as topographical descriptions both of that country and of his native. Wales. Although his Irish works are manifestly hostile to the natives and full of wild and horrible tales, they are among the few sources for the period. Gerald produced many other works on various subjects; and has been characterized as "the father of English popular literature." These works were all in Latin. First in the reign of John, Layamon, a simple Worcestershire priest, in his Brut, or legendary history of Brutus and Britain, set himself "to tell the noble deeds of Englishmen " in the English tongue the earliest seed of a noble national literary revival.

The Rise of the Universities. In the last years of Henry II England's most ancient seat of learning, Oxford, came into prominence, although it was not formally known as a "University" till the reign of his grandson Henry III. One of the most notable features of the twelfth century is the rise of the universities. The earliest teachers in England as elsewhere were in schools attached to monasteries, cathedrals, parish churches, and occasionally to a royal court. Gradually, however, groups of students began to gather in this place or that to hear some man famous for learning or eloquence; then, as time went on, groups, sometimes of masters, sometimes of scholars, organized themselves into corporations or gilds called universities. Originally meaning any body of men in a collective capacity, the term universitas came at length to be restricted to those combined together for learning or teaching, with the aim of regulating conditions of membership and methods of instruction. Oxford traces its origin to an expulsion of English students from the University of Paris about 1167. There had been teachers at Oxford before this date, but they had taught merely in a private capacity. The university of Cambridge apparently owes its origin to one of the town and gown conflicts common in early times, which led to a migration from Oxford in 1209, though it was not till 1318 that the younger institution secured formal recognition.

Conditions at the Universities. Conditions were at first very primitive. The students lodged with the townsmen, and the masters lectured wherever they could, sometimes in the open air with their

1 There is a story that a famous canonist Vacarius, silenced by Stephen, lectured there, but it rests on no adequate evidence. He probably taught at Canterbury.