II. Norman Dukes, and he had himself spent the early СНАР. years of life in exile in Normandy. He passed amongst his contemporaries as one endowed with prophetic powers, and in truth he saw what none around him saw, the insufficiency of the moral and mental standard of English life. He shrunk from the jealousies of the great English families, from the rough animalism of English enjoyments, from its want of polish and culture, and from its low ideal of the religious life. But he shrunk from this with the petulance of a petty mind. He tried to do weakly what Dunstan had tried to do strongly. Dunstan had introduced foreign ideas and foreign teachers, with the purpose of weaving the golden threads of higher thought into the midst of the strong web of English life. Edward would have substituted that which he liked for that which he disliked, would have surrounded himself with foreign officers in church and state, would have spoken in the tongue of the foreigner and lived a foreigner's life, and he was not content till he had defied the laws and customs of his despised land by offering the succession to the throne to the foreign Duke of the Normans, without a thought of consulting his own Witan, in whom alone its disposal rested. House of Insulted in such a way, the English feeling turned, § 27. The if not upon the king, at least upon his foreign favourites. The revolt was headed by Godwin, and Harold, his nobler son. After Godwin's death, Harold ruled England in Edward's name. Strenuous and warlike, prompt in decision, and generous in thought, Harold was the ablest man of an unprogressive race. What he did he did well. But he brought no new ideas into the work of government, or into the existing system of military tactics. When on Edward's death, he was called to assume the crown, it was the natural choice of the wor CHAP. II. thiest man in England. But he could not bind Englishmen together into a national unity. Edwin and Morcar, the chiefs of central and northern England, looked coldly on him with family jealousy. They were glad of his aid against the Norsemen at Stamford Bridge. They would not come to his help at Senlac. His last fight was a combat, in which heroic bravery strove in vain to compensate for want of discipline and lack of intelligence. In fighting qualities both sides were equal. The power of grasping the new idea, and the readiness to subordinate individual thought to the skill of the commander, were on the side of the invader. The Norman troops attacking, or flying in simulated rout, at the word of Duke William, or exchanging the combat of the horseman for the combat of the archer at his word, deserved, at least in a military sense, to win. William put his mind into the battle, Harold could but give his example. 41 CHAPTER III. NORMAN AND ANGEVIN ORGANISATION. CHAP. and South. IN the first half of the eleventh century, the two most purely Teutonic states, Germany and England, were beyond comparison, the strongest and the best governed § 1. North states of Europe. Before the end of the century, England had been smitten to the ground, and Germany was in deadly combat with the foe before whose persistent attacks she was ultimately to fall. Up to that time it seemed to be the law of progress that in England, as on the Continent, the last comer who placed his Teutonic freshness of vigour under the restraints of Roman civilisation should rise to the mastery. As dominion passed here from the descendants of Alfred and Athelstan to Cnut, so had it passed there from the children of Clovis to the Carolingian border family from the lands east of the Meuse, and then again to the new border family of the Saxon line of Henry and the Ottos. The second half of the eleventh century witnessed a great revulsion. It was the time of the reaction of the south against the north. In the world of ideas a great spiritual power arose at Rome, clothing in ecclesiastical forms the claims of the old imperial city, and baffling and driving back the Teutonic sovereign who had decked himself in the imperial mantle which the great Otto and the greater Charles had donned, as the symbol of the heritage of Constantine and Augustus. In our own CHAP. §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. Norman Organisation of in Eng Such a character, in spite of a predisposition to violence ordinarily hidden under external forms courtesy, was a promising element in the building up a 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 land. |