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baronial strongholds became dens of highway robbers. New castles, built at first for safety, were in turn applied to purposes of violence; and England in the reign of Stephen was one scene of turbulence and bloodshed. Charters and laws in such a reign were of but little value. When Stephen thought his crown safe on his head, he spurned the solemn obligations he had sworn before the altar to fulfil; and the historian tells us that not laws nor charters, but his power, was the sole measure of his conduct." Such a monarch could not be otherwise than hateful to his subjects of all classes; and the anarchy which overspread the realm must have impressed them with the absolute necessity of fixed laws founded, not in the caprice or the necessities of vicious princes, but on the eternal principles of right. Hence, when MATILDA, the true heir to the succession came with her son Henry to assert her right, she found the people of all classes ready to support her claims, and Stephen was before long beaten and made prisoner. But England had by this time learned that her prosperity depended, not upon the person of their king, but on the equitable administration of just laws. When the queen was in the pride of her triumph, it was firmly but respectfully demanded by the people that she should promise to govern them by the laws of Edward. Their prayer was haughtily refused; and the result was the desertion of her standard by the people, her defeat by Stephen's partisans, and, ere long, the restoration of a king who, faithless as he was, at least was willing to confess his obligation to obey the fundamental constitutions of the kingdom over which he ruled.

HENRY II. was a monarch of another stamp. Firm and determined, he applied himself to the correction of the multiform abuses which had grown up in the previous reign. His first act was to dismiss the mercenaries who had been collected by his predecessor at a ruinous expense to overawe the barons. Then he demolished the baronial castles which had been productive of such monstrous evils; but required that every man throughout the country should be armed and practised in the use of weapons suited to his rank in life; thus aiming to establish peace within the country and security against invasions from without. Still more to repress the violence of the barons, he commissioned four justiciaries, whose duty was to

travel through the country, holding courts in the king's name; and being armed with full power to decide the causes brought before them, they were able to curb the barons in their very strongholds.

Henry's disposition was unquestionably to do right; yet one important act of this reign shows how loose were all ideas both of parliaments and legislation. A law was made that if a feudal lord contracted debts, his vassal's goods should not be seized to satisfy the creditor; but that, until the debt were paid, the creditor should be entitled to receive the rents paid by the vassal to his lord. This equitable law was not enacted by an English parliament, but was made at Verneuil, in a council of prelates and barons of Normandy, Poictou, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Brittany; yet it was readily accepted as a valid law in England-so completely had the royal power at this time overshadowed, and indeed extinguished the remembrance of the national legislature.

In the next reign, favorable circumstances tended to the reëstablishment of the authority of Parliament. During the protracted absence of King Richard in the Crusades, William Longchamp, who had been left joint regent and judiciary with the bishop of Durham, wielded his power with so high a hand, that Parliament, on its own responsibility, removed him from his office. There is reason to believe that Richard was not displeased with this act of his barons, but, at all events, the act stood; and for the first time since the days of Saxon witena-gemotes, another voice than that of the sovereign was heard in the administration of the national affairs. The first blow had been struck at the unlimited autocracy established by the Norman conqueror in England. The first step toward the building up of a free government with a well-balanced constitution had been taken. Centuries of conflict still had to be passed through ere the work could be accomplished; but in this act of the barons the great work had been begun. The Parliament of England was by this act reëstablished; and before that generation passed away, the abject baseness and the treacherous tyranny of John inspired the will, afforded the occasion, and called forth the power to set the liberties of England on a permanent foundation.*

NOTES.

1. Character of the Reign of the Conqueror.—“ The commencement of his (William the Conqueror's) administration was tolerably equitable. Though many confiscations took place in order to gratify the Norman army, yet the mass of the property was left in the hands of its former possessors. Offices of high trust were bestowed upon Englishmen, even upon those whose family renown might have raised the most aspiring thoughts. But partly through the insolence and injustice of William's Norman vassals, partly through the suspiciousness natural to a man conscious of having overturned the national government, his yoke soon be came more heavy. The English were oppressed; they rebelled, were subdued, and oppressed again. All their risings were without concert and desperate; they wanted men fit to head them, and fortresses to sustain their revolt. After a very few years they sank in despair, and yielded for a century to the indignities of a comparatively small body of strangers without a single tumult. So possible is it for a nation to be kept in permanent servitude, even without losing its reputation for individual courage, or its desire of freedom."--HALLAM's Middle Ages, vol. ii. p. 301.

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England passed under the yoke; she endured the annoyance of foreign conquerors; her children, even though their loss in revenue may have been exaggerated, and still it was enormous, became a lower race, not called to the councils of their sovereign, not sharing his trust or his bounty. They were in a far different condition from the provincial Romans after the conquest of Gaul, even if, which is hardly possible to determine, their actual deprivation of lands should have been less extensive; for, not only they did not for several reigns occupy the honorable stations which sometimes fell to the lot of the Roman subject of Clovis or Alaric, but they had a great deal more freedom and importance to lose. Nor had they a protecting church to mitigate barbarous superiority. Their bishops were degraded and in exile; the footstep of the invader was at their altars; their monasteries were plundered and the native monks insulted. Rome herself looked with little favor on a church which had preserved some measure of independence. Strange contrast to the triumphant episcopate of the Merovingian kings!"-Ibid. vol ii. p. 308.

"The tyranny of William displayed less of passion or insolence than of that indifference about human suffering which distinguishes a cold and far-sighted statesman. Impressed by the frequent risings of the English at the commencement of his reign, and by the recollection, as one historian observes, that the mild government of Canute had only ended in the expulsion of the Danish line, he formed the scheme of riveting such fetters upon the conquered nation that all resistance should become impracticable. Those who had obtained honorable offices were successively deprived of them; even the bishops and abbots of

English birth were deposed--a stretch of power very singular in that age. Morcar, one of the most illustrious English, suffered perpetual imprisonment. Waltheoff, a man of equally conspicuous birth, lost his head upon a scaffold by a very harsh if not iniquitous sentence. It was so rare in those times to inflict judicially any capital punishment upon persons of such ranks that his death seems to have produced more indignation and despair in England than any single circumstance. The name of Englishman was turned into a reproach. None of that race for a hundred years were raised to any dignity in the state or church. Their language and the characters in which it was written were rejected as barbarous; in all schools, if we trust an authority often quoted, children were taught French, and the laws were administered in no other tongue. It is well known that this use of French in all legal proceedings lasted till the reign of Edward III."-Ibid. vol. ii. p. 302, 303.

The condition of England under the Conqueror may be readily conceived from the account given with apparent impartiality by the Saxon chronicler :

"If any one wish to know what manner of man he was, or what worship he had, or of how many lands he were the lord, we will describe him as we have known him; for we looked on him, and some while lived in his herd. King William was a very wise man and very rich, more worshipful and strong than any his foregangers. He was mild to good men who loved God; and stark beyond all bounds to those who withsaid his will. Yet truly, in his time, men had mickle suffering, and yet very many hardships. Castles he caused to be wrought and poor men to be oppressed. He was so very stark. He took from his subjects many marks of gold, and many hundred pounds of silver; and that he took, some by right, and some by mickle might, for very light need. He had fallen into avarice, and greediness he loved withal. He let his lands to fine as dear as he could; then came some other and bade more than the first had given, and the king let it to him who bade more; then came a third and bade yet more; and the king let it into the hands of the man who bade the most. Nor did he reck how sinfully his reeves got money of poor men, or how many unlawful things they did. For the more men talked of right law, the more they did against the law. He also set many deer-friths; and he made laws there with that whosoever should slay hart or hind, him man should blind. As he forbade the slaying of harts, so also did he of boars; so much he loved the high deer, as if he had been their father. He also decreed about hares that they should go free. His rich men moaned, and the poor men murmured; but he was so hard that he recked not the hatred of them all. For it was need they should follow the king's will withal, if they wished to live, or to have lands, or goods, or his favour. Alas, that any man should be so moody, and should so puff up himself, and think himself above all other men! May Almighty God have mercy on his soul and grant him forgiveness of his sins."-Saxon Chronicle.

Assuredly the Norman king had good need of the devout prayer of his Saxon subject.

2. Rufus.-Rufus was as reckless in the use of arbitrary power, and as fond of a rude joke, as some more modern rulers. Witness the following:

"For a while, the new monarch, William Rufus, made himself popular by pledging himself to rule with justice, and to relieve the native English from several irksome restraints; and by giving away or spending freely the accumulated wealth which came into his possession. But his temper was too violent to let him observe his promises. And when Lanfranc remonstrated with him, the king was not ashamed to reply in words which amounted to a confession that he neither had kept nor intended to keep them. 'Who,' said he, can per form all he promises?'

"Instead of removing restraints, he probably added to those imposed by his father that severe one by which all families were compelled to extinguish their lights and fires at the sound of the evening bell, which was thence called curfew, that is, cover fire. As to the liberality of Rufus, it was but the extravagance of a thoroughly selfish man. The money he wasted had cost him no labor, and he therefore chose to set no bounds to his profusion; caring nothing for the burdens which he thereby forced an unprincipled minister to impose upon his subjects. It is related of him, that his chamberlain having bought him a new pair of hose, William asked what they cost. Three shillings,' was the reply; and this was at that time the price of a quarter of wheat. 'Away with them,' said he; 'a king should wear nothing so cheap; bring me a pair ten times as dear.' The shrewd attendant brought him an inferior pair, but said he had with difficulty prevailed with the tradesman to part with them at the price named by the king. On which William replied: 'You have now served me well; those I will have.'

"Such silly pride and wilful prodigality, when extended to all the occasions of expense to which a sovereign is necessarily subject, must as certainly consume the revenues of a kingdom as they would on a smaller scale destroy any private fortune. And a king, like any other spendthrift, will be too surely driven by his folly from pride to meanness. Though too haughty to wear clothes of ordinary goodness, William could lower himself to cheat a Jew. One of that unhappy race complained to him with tears, that his son had been converted; and besought the king to command the youth to deny Christ, and return to the faith of his fathers. William gave no answer, but at the same time showed no horror at the request; so that the Jew was encouraged to offer his sovereign sixty marks as a bribe for compliance. On this he sent for the young man, told him what his father required, and bade him acknowledge himself a Jew again. The youth expressed his hope that the king could not be in earnest. 'Son of a dunghill,' exclaimed William, 'do you think I would joke with you? Obey me instantly, or, by the cross of Lucca, you shall lose your eyes.' Though thus threatened by a tyrant, who was known to fear neither God nor man, and whose passionate tone and fierce look seemed to declare that his threats would be executed the next moment, the young man calmly replied that he must suffer whatever the king should choose to inflict; but that he had hoped a Christian sovereign would

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