bishop of Lincoln. the daily pay of three shillings each.1 This great and unprecedented demand led to fierce opposition and high debate. There were some in the assembly who dared to maintain the principle that taxes were not to be imposed simply by the royal will, that the right to consent to a grant necessarily The patriot implied the right to refuse it. In the person of Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln, the opposition found a spokesman and a leader who was as ready to resist the demands of Richard as Thomas had been in the preceding reign to resist the demands of Henry of Anjou. To the demand of the king for English money to pay a military force in a foreign war, the patriot bishop of Lincoln answered that his church and its pastor were bound to render military service to their lord the king within the realm, but that they owed him neither men nor money for wars in foreign lands.2 Hugh, supported by the bishop of Salisbury, held his ground, and the demand was withdrawn by the justiciar Hubert, who shortly afterwards resigned.3 Clerical opposition to taxation. In This unsuccessful attempt to tax the baronage was followed in the same year by the imposition of a carucage upon the lands of the freeholders at the heavy rate of five shillings on each carucate or hide. The imposition of this tax is important in view of the method employed for its assessment. the latter part of the preceding reign, when personal property became subject to taxation, Henry II. invoked the aid of his favorite institution of inquest by the oaths of local jurors in Assessment order to ascertain how much each one should give.5 With the imposition of the carucage of 1198 the same embryonic system of representation was for the first time extended to of real property. Hoveden, p. lxxxi.; Norm. Conq., vol. v. p. 465; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 509, 510. 4 Hoveden, vol. iv. p. 46. "In some cases the carucate seems to be identical with the normal hide of 120 acres, but other instances show that the carucate varied in area. It is the land cultivated by a plough-team; varying in acreage, therefore, according to the lightness or heaviness of the soil, and according to the strength of the team." - Seebohm, Eng. Village Community, p. 40. See above, p. 298. the assessment of real property. The officers who were sent out to collect it were commanded, with the aid of the sheriff in each county, to call before them the members of the county court, lords and bailiffs, the stewards of barons, the reeve and four men of each township, and two knights from each hundred, who were to be sworn to declare how many carucates, or what wainage for ploughs, there were in each township. Whether the assessment or survey was fully carried out is not known,2 but it is quite clear that the collection of the tax itself, which was excessive in amount, met with resistance. The religious houses opposed it in such a spirit as to bring upon the clergy a royal proclamation which put Clergy them practically outside of the law. The effect of this meas- outlawed. practically ure was to force the monks to purchase a reconciliation.3 Thus, by the steady and persistent pressure of taxation upon every class during the reign of Richard I., the clergy, the baronage, and the commons were each in turn aroused to more or less positive resistance. The poorer part of the commons of London break into open revolt under the leadership of William Fitz-Osbert; the barons refuse a grant under the lead of Hugh of Avalon; while a part of the clergy go far enough to bring upon themselves a denunciation which amounts practically to outlawry. By this severe preliminary discipline, under which every class and condition of men were made to feel the nature of the wrongs that were to be righted, the nation was trained for action in the darker days that were yet to come. accession the loss of in 1204. Normandy 4. The sudden death of the childless Richard, which oc- From the curred in April, 1199, brought face to face two hostile of John to claimants to his continental provinces and to his island kingdom, at a time when the principles regulating the right of succession to the royal office were still in a state of transition from the ancient rule of elective kingship to the new feudal rule of hereditary right. If the growing feudal doctrines of primogeniture and representation had been universally recognized, the right of Arthur, the son of Richard's deceased 1 "Quot carucarum wanagia fuerint in singulis villis; quot scilicet in dominico, quot in vilenagia, quot in eleemosynis viris religiosis collatis." Hoveden, vol. iv. p. 46. 2 As to the resemblance of this in- of succession. elder brother, would have been clearly superior to that of The right John. Upon the Continent, where the new feudal notions had taken the deepest root, Arthur's right was admitted in Anjou, while Philip received his homage as duke and count of all the provinces which Richard had held of the French crown. In Normandy and England, however, John, to whom Richard had bequeathed, as far as he had the right to bequeath, his island realm, with all his other lands,2 entered into quiet possession of dukedom and kingdom without opposition in favor of Arthur's title. To the kingship of England John was elected according to the ancient custom, and, if the Coronation story told by Matthew Paris can be accepted, Archbishop Archbishop Hubert, before he poured the consecrating oil upon the head Hubert. of the king-elect, reminded him that no man had by virtue speech of Arthur's murder in 1203. of his birth a right to the kingship of England; that that right was conferred through the election of the nation after invoking the aid of the Holy Ghost; that the only limit upon the elective right thus vested in the nation was the right of the royal house to have the choice made of some one of its own members, provided one could be found eminently fit for the kingly office. Richard having died without an heir, and John being of the royal house, and possessing the other necessary qualifications, was declared elected; and the cry of "Vivat Rex" was the response of the assembled multitude.3 Thus secure in the possession of his English kingdom, John set himself to work to wrest from his nephew such of his continental lands as Arthur, by the aid of the king of the French, had been able to withhold from him. After two years and more of war and diplomacy between Philip and John, the latter in a sudden fit of energy surprised Arthur while he was besieging his grandmother in the castle of Mirabel, and took him prisoner to Rouen, where he was murdered in the spring of 1203, as all the world believed, by his uncle's 1 Hoveden, vol. iv. pp. 86-94. See, also, Freeman, Norm. Cong., vol. v. p. 466. 2 Hoveden, vol. iv. p. 83. "Divisit Johanni fratri suo regnum Angliæ, et omnes alias terras suas." 3 Matthew Paris, vol. ii. p. 8o, R. S.; and in a shorter form in Chr. Maj., p. 197. "This speech has been much criticised, and its authenticity ques tioned, but it is directly referred to by Prince Louis of France in 1216, in a public document printed in Rymer's Fœdera." Preface to M. Paris, vol. iii. p. xli., R. S. For Mr. Freeman's view of the speech, see Norm. Conq., vol. i p. 404, vol. v. p. 466. -- hand. In the midst of the indignation aroused by this dark and bloody deed, Philip, after having first cited John to appear before his court to be tried by his peers upon an accusation of murder made by the barons of Brittany,1 declared that his guilty and contumacious vassal had forfeited all the fiefs which he held of the crown of France. In the execution of his own Loss of sentence Philip at once marched on Normandy. Castle after Castle after Normandy. castle fell before him, city after city surrendered at his mere summons, until the whole land, without any show of serious resistance, passed into his hands, to be united at last to his dominions as one of the most faithful provinces of France. By midsummer of 1204 Philip was master not only of Normandy, but of Maine, Anjou, and Touraine, and of nearly all of Aquitaine north of the Garonne.2 As a punishment for his great crime, John was thus stripped at a blow of all of his continental dominions, with the exception of the fragment which he retained of his mother's inheritance. results of By the breaking up of the vast empire of which England Political was only a part, although the greater part, John was brought the loss of into more dependent relations with the English nation than Normandy. had ever been imposed upon any of his Norman or Angevin predecessors. But the change which was thus brought about in the attitude of the king was no more marked than the change which the loss of Normandy brought about in the attitude of the baronage. By this time the great baronial houses of the Conquest had to a very great extent either died. out or had been humbled by the overshadowing power of the crown which had raised up in their places a new ministerial The new nobility which had waxed strong in the sunshine of royal nobility. favor. The new nobility which had thus grown to greatness on English soil, although in the main no doubt of Norman descent, were in feelings and interests far more English than Norman, and far less closely connected with the Norman duchy than had been the older nobility. With the conquest 1 On this subject, see Sismondi, Histoire des Français, vol. iii. p. 489; Le Baud, Hist. Bret., p. 210; R. Wendover, iii. p. 273; Fœdera, i. p. 140. Mr. Freeman says: "The French king cunningly devised for himself a jurisprudence out of the romances of Charlemagne; and by its help he professed to deprive his guilty vassal of all his Green, Hist. Eng. People, vol. i. pp. 189, 190 See Select Charters, 2d ed. p. 269. ministerial of Normandy by Philip, the last direct connection of the baronage of England with the land of their fathers passed forever away. An election had now to be made between Philip and John, and under the pressure of this necessity those families that still retained estates on both sides of the Channel either split into two branches, each of which made terms for itself, or, renouncing their interests in one kingdom, cast their fortunes with the other. This complete severance of all connection with the Continent, whereby the barons of Norman descent who had grown up on English ground were finally transformed into Englishmen, was the completion of the great work which had been steadily going on since the Conquest, the work of building up a united English nation.2 At the head and front of the united nation, which thus arose out of the assimilation of the smaller mass of the conquerors leadership by the greater mass of the conquered, the baronage-Norman in descent, but English in interest and in feeling - held its place throughout the prolonged struggle in which the Great Charter was won. The baronage assumes the of the na tion. From the mandy to of the Great Charter at Runnymede. acter of 5. After John had been reduced by the loss of his contiloss of Nor- nental dominions to the kingship of England, he set himself the signing to work to illustrate to his English subjects, with whom he was now brought face to face, how far, in the absence of positive guarantees, the royal authority might be applied to the wanton oppression of all classes and conditions of men, when that authority happened to be wielded by the vilest, the The char craftiest, the ablest of despots. "His worst enemies owned that he toiled steadily and closely at the work of administration. . . . His plan for the relief of Château Gaillard, the rapid march by which he shattered Authur's hopes at Mirabel, showed an inborn genius for war. In the rapidity and breadth of his political combinations he far surpassed the statesmen of his time. . . . The closer study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost John. 1 Hallam, M. A., vol. iii. p. 154; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 518. 2 "The loss of Normandy thus once more called into being an united English nation. It was well at such a mo ment that England had a king whose reign was one long series of wrongs and insults done to the English nation." -Norm. Cong., vol. v. p. 470. |