СНАР.
III.

$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

CHAP.

III.

СНАР.

III.

§ 6. Institutions of

the first

Norman

Kings.

87. Their Imperfec

tion.

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.

CHAP.

III.

Cluniac

The more perfect the institutions of a state are, the more possible it is to leave ideas to influence men simply with their own inherent weight. In the time of a king $8. The like William Rufus, they needed a special organisation to Reforms. give them a chance of being listened to. The system of entrusting the direction of Church affairs to the king and his Witan had not worked well. The Church might be regarded as identical with the nation, but it did not rise above the nation, did not, except in rare instances, produce men who could teach the nation to be better than it was. The performance of the duties of the clergy threatened to sink into mere routine, and their morals threatened to become no better than those of the laity around them. There was a danger lest clerical offices should sink into hereditary positions bringing no help to the souls of those for whose sake those offices had been erected. It was precisely against these evils that the great spiritual movement of the age was directed. Springing from the monastery of Cluny, it gained a hearing from emperors and popes. The remedies which it proposed were the abolition of simony, that is to say, of the purchase of Church offices, and the abolition of clerical marriage. With all allowance for the evil caused by the stringent enforcement of the latter demand, so far as it could be enforced at all, it is impossible not to see that in some form or other these ideas were indispensable to the progress of the world. It is hardly possible for us, even in imagination, to conceive a danger to modern civilisation similar in kind to that which threatened the men of the eleventh century from feudal brutality, with its contempt for mental thought and its hatred of the bonds of morality. Yet it is only by steadily keeping before us the existence of this danger, that it is possible to pass a fair judgment on the drastic remedies proposed by the medieval churchmen. Nor must it be forgotten that, in

СНАР.
III.

$9. The Hildebrandine Papacy and the

men.

the eleventh century marriage was likely to interfere with the work of the clergy in a way in which it would not interfere with it at a later time. It was not merely that the married priest would be entangled in worldly affairs, but that it would be almost impossible to escape from a lowering influence in his own home. Medieval education was a male education. According to the ideal of the reformers of the eleventh century the priest was to be mentally as well as spiritually far above his fellow For women, save in exceptional cases, there was no education, no cultivation of the higher powers. The ideal of modern marriage, that mutual helpfulness in the higher aims of life, was impossible when the wife must of necessity be rude, untaught, familiar only with the lower and material side of the world. She would be a drag on the upward course, not a consoler and a helper. The true remedy no doubt lay not in clerical celibacy but in female education. The choice of the former is only one of the many instances which history affords of the application of a partial and unsatisfactory relief as an escape from acknowledged evils, because the complete and satisfactory relief has not entered as yet within the sphere of vision.

The abolition of simony and of clerical marriage did not make up the whole of the papal programme. By degrees a third idea was added to the other two. At first Conqueror. even Hildebrand would have been content to see the remedies which he valued worked out by kings and emperors. It was only when, as Pope Gregory VII., he found that this could not be, that he gradually added the third demand for the erection of a universal clerical state of which the pope should be the absolute head, and of which the clergy in all parts of Christendom should be the willing and subservient instruments, bound by the closest ties to Rome, and by no ties at all to the society in the midst of which they lived.

E