The History of England - a Study in Political Evolution / Pollard, A. F. (Albert Pollard), 1869-1948

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Title: The History of England
       A Study in Political Evolution

Author: A. F. Pollard

Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6358]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on December 1, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND ***




Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND
A STUDY IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION

BY A. F. POLLARD, M.A., LITT.D.




CONTENTS

CHAP.
   I THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND, 55 B.C.-A.D. 1066
  II THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND, 1066-1272
 III EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 1272-1485
  IV THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM, 1485-1603
   V THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT, 1603-1815
  VI THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND, 1603-1815
 VII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
VIII A CENTURY OF EMPIRE, 1815-1911
  IX ENGLISH DEMOCRACY

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX




CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND

55 B.C.--A.D. 1066


"Ah, well," an American visitor is said to have soliloquized on the
site of the battle of Hastings, "it is but a little island, and it has
often been conquered." We have in these few pages to trace the
evolution of a great empire, which has often conquered others, out of
the little island which was often conquered itself. The mere incidents
of this growth, which satisfied the childlike curiosity of earlier
generations, hardly appeal to a public which is learning to look upon
historical narrative not as a simple story, but as an interpretation of
human development, and upon historical fact as the complex resultant of
character and conditions; and introspective readers will look less for
a list of facts and dates marking the milestones on this national march
than for suggestions to explain the formation of the army, the spirit
of its leaders and its men, the progress made, and the obstacles
overcome. No solution of the problems presented by history will be
complete until the knowledge of man is perfect; but we cannot approach
the threshold of understanding without realizing that our national
achievement has been the outcome of singular powers of assimilation, of
adaptation to changing circumstances, and of elasticity of system.
Change has been, and is, the breath of our existence and the condition
of our growth.

Change began with the Creation, and ages of momentous development are
shrouded from our eyes. The land and the people are the two foundations
of English history; but before history began, the land had received the
insular configuration which has largely determined its fortune; and the
various peoples, who were to mould and be moulded by the land, had
differentiated from the other races of the world. Several of these
peoples had occupied the land before its conquest by the Anglo-Saxons,
some before it was even Britain. Whether neolithic man superseded
palaeolithic man in these islands by invasion or by domestic evolution,
we do not know; but centuries before the Christian era the Britons
overran the country and superimposed themselves upon its swarthy, squat
inhabitants. They mounted comparatively high in the scale of
civilization; they tilled the soil, worked mines, cultivated various
forms of art, and even built towns. But their loose tribal organization
left them at the mercy of the Romans; and though Julius Caesar's two
raids in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C. left no permanent results, the conquest
was soon completed when the Romans came in earnest in A.D. 43.

The extent to which the Romans during the three and a half centuries of
their rule in Britain civilized its inhabitants is a matter of doubtful
inference. The remains of Roman roads, Roman walls, and Roman villas
still bear witness to their material activity; and an occupation of the
land by Roman troops and Roman officials, spread over three hundred and
fifty years, must have impressed upon the upper classes of the Britons
at least some acquaintance with the language, religion, administration,
and social and economic arrangements of the conquerors. But, on the
whole, the evidence points rather to military occupation than to
colonization; and the Roman province resembled more nearly a German
than a British colony of to-day. Rome had then no surplus population
with which to fill new territory; the only emigrants were the soldiers,
the officials, and a few traders or prospectors; and of these most were
partially Romanized provincials from other parts of the empire, for a
Roman soldier of the third century A.D. was not generally a Roman or
even an Italian. The imperial government, moreover, considered the
interests of Britain not in themselves but only as subordinate to the
empire, which any sort of distinctive national organization would have
threatened. This distinguishes Roman rule in Britain from British rule
in India; and if the army in Britain gradually grew more British, it
was due to the weakness and not to the policy of the imperial
government. There was no attempt to form a British constitution, or
weld British tribes into a nation; for Rome brought to birth no
daughter states, lest she should dismember her all-embracing unity. So
the nascent nations warred within and rent her; and when, enfeebled and
distracted by the struggle, she relaxed her hold on Britain, she left
it more cultivated, perhaps, but more enervated and hardly stronger or
more united than before.

Hardier peoples were already hovering over the prey. The Romans had
themselves established a "count of the Saxon shore" to defend the
eastern coasts of Britain against the pirates of the German Ocean; and
it was not long after its revolt from Rome in 410, that the Angles and
Saxons and Jutes discovered a chance to meddle in Britain, torn as it
was by domestic anarchy, and threatened with inroads by the Picts and
Scots in the north. Neither this temptation nor the alleged invitation
from the British chief Vortigern to come over and help, supplied the
original impulse which drove the Angles and Saxons across the sea.
Whatever its origin--whether pressure from other tribes behind,
internal dissensions, or the economic necessities of a population
growing too fast for the produce of primitive farming--the restlessness
was general; but while the Goths and the Franks poured south over the
Roman frontiers on land, the Angles and Saxons obeyed a prophetic call
to the sea and the setting sun.

This migration by sea is a strange phenomenon. That nations should
wander by land was no new thing; but how in those days whole tribes
transported themselves, their wives and their chattels, from the mouths
of the Elbe and the Weser to those of the Thames and the Humber, we are
at a loss to understand. Yet come they did, and the name of the Angles
at least, which clung to the land they reached, was blotted out from
the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as their
descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and
the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered
Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which
are said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the
landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea
deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as much
as these petrels of the storm could manage. The failure to dislodge
them, and the absence of centralized government and national
consciousness among the Britons encouraged further invaders; and Kent,
east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the next
morsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their easy
success led to imitation by their more numerous southern neighbours,
the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in volume and
rapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the rivers, and
all conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are the home
of lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress may be
traced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: in the south the
Saxons founded the kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, and Wessex; in
the east the Anglians founded East Anglia, though in the north they
retained the Celtic names, Bernicia and Deira. The districts in which
they met and mingled have less distinctive names; Surrey was perhaps
disputed between all the Saxon kingdoms, Hampshire between West Saxons,
South Saxons, and Jutes; while in the centre Mercia was a mixed march
or borderland of Angles and Saxons against the retiring Britons or
Welsh.

It used to be almost a point of honour with champions of the
superiority of Anglo-Saxon virtues to maintain that the invaders, like
the Israelites of old, massacred their enemies to a man, if not also to
a woman and child. Massacre there certainly was at Anderida and other
places taken by storm, and no doubt whole British villages fled at the
approach of their bloodthirsty foes; but as the wave of conquest rolled
from east to west, and the concentration of the Britons grew while that
of the invader relaxed, there was less and less extermination. The
English hordes cannot have been as numerous in women as in men; and in
that case some of the British women would be spared. It no more
required wholesale slaughter of the Britons to establish English
language and institutions in Britain than it required wholesale
slaughter of the Irish to produce the same results in Ireland; and a
large admixture of Celtic blood in the English race can hardly be
denied.

Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons began to fight one another before they
ceased to fight their common enemy, who must have profited by this
internecine strife. Of the process by which the migrating clans and
families were blended into tribal kingdoms, we learn nothing; but the
blending favoured expansion, and expansion brought the tribal kingdoms
into hostile contact with tougher rivals than the Britons. The
expansion of Sussex and Kent was checked by Saxons who had landed in
Essex or advanced up the Thames and the Itchen; East Anglia was hemmed
in by tribes who had sailed up the Wash, the Humber, and their
tributaries; and the three great kingdoms which emerged out of the
anarchy--Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex--seem to have owed the
supremacy, which they wielded in turn, to the circumstance that each
possessed a British hinterland into which it could expand. For
Northumbria there was Strathclyde on the west and Scotland on the
north; for Mercia there was Wales; and for Wessex there were the
British remnants in Devon and in Cornwall.

But a kingdom may have too much hinterland. Scotland taxed for
centuries the assimilative capacity of united England; it was too much
for Northumbria to digest. Northumbria's supremacy was distinguished by
the religious labours of Aidan and Cuthbert and Wilfrid in England, by
the missions of Willibrord on the Continent, and by the revival of
literature and learning under Caedmon and Bede; but it spent its
substance in efforts to conquer Scotland, and then fell a victim to the
barbaric strength of Mercia and to civil strife between its component
parts, Bernicia and Deira. Mercia was even less homogeneous than
Northumbria; it had no frontiers worth mention; and in spite of its
military prowess it could not absorb a hinterland treble the size of
the Wales which troubled Edward I. Wessex, with serviceable frontiers
consisting of the Thames, the Cotswolds, the Severn, and the sea, and
with a hinterland narrowing down to the Cornish peninsula, developed a
slower but more lasting strength. Political organization seems to have
been its forte, and it had set its own house in some sort of order
before it was summoned by Ecgberht to assume the lead in English
politics. From that day to this the sceptre has remained in his house
without a permanent break.

Some slight semblance of political unity was thus achieved, but it was
already threatened by the Northmen and Danes, who were harrying England
in much the same way as the English, three centuries earlier, had
harried Britain. The invaders were invaded because they had forsaken
the sea to fight one another on land; and then Christianity had come to
tame their turbulent vigour. A wave of missionary zeal from Rome and a
backwash from unconquered Ireland had met at the synod of Whitby in
664, and Roman priests recovered what Roman soldiers had lost. But the
church had not yet armed itself with the weapons of the world, and
Christian England was no more a match than Christian Britain had been
for a heathen foe. Ecgberht's feeble successors in Wessex, and their
feebler rivals in the subordinate kingdoms, gave way step by step
before the Danes, until in 879 Ecgberht's grandson Alfred the Great
was, like a second King Arthur, a fugitive lurking in the recesses of
his disappearing realm.

Wessex, however, was more closely knit than any Celtic realm had been;
the Danes were fewer than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors; and Alfred
was made of sterner stuff than early British princes. He was typical of
Wessex; moral strength and all-round capacity rather than supreme
ability in any one direction are his title-deeds to greatness. After
hard fighting he imposed terms of peace upon the Danish leader Guthrum.
England south-west of Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester,
was to be Alfred's, the rest to be Danish; and Guthrum succumbed to the
pacifying influence of Christianity. Not the least of Alfred's gains
was the destruction of Mercia's unity; its royal house had disappeared
in the struggle, and the kingdom was now divided; while Alfred lost his
nominal suzerainty over north-east England, he gained a real
sovereignty over south-west Mercia. His children, Edward the Elder and
Ethelfleda, the Lady of the Mercians, and his grandson Athelstan,
pushed on the expansion of Wessex thus begun, dividing the land as they
won it into shires, each with a burh (borough) or fortified centre for
its military organization; and Anglo-Saxon monarchy reached its zenith
under Edgar, who ruled over the whole of England and asserted a
suzerainty over most of Britain.

It was transitory glory and superficial unity; for there was no real
possibility of a national state in Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Danish England,
and the whole meaning of English history is missed in antedating that
achievement by several hundred years. Edgar could do no more than evade
difficulties and temporize with problems which imperceptible growth
alone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are not
drawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and an
unconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory in
political controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, had
satirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a description
of the primitive virtues of a Utopian Germany; and modern theorists
have found in his _Germania_ an armoury of democratic weapons
against aristocracy and despotism. From this golden age the Angles and
Saxons are supposed to have derived a political system in which most
men were free and equal, owning their land in common, debating and
deciding in folkmoots the issues of peace and war, electing their kings
(if any), and obeying them only so far as they inspired respect. These
idyllic arrangements, if they ever existed, did not survive the stress
of the migration and the struggle with the Celts. War begat the king,
and soon the church baptized him and confirmed his power with unction
and biblical precedents. The moot of the folk became the moot of the
Wise (Witan), and only those were wise whose wisdom was apparent to the
king. Community of goods and equality of property broke down in the
vast appropriation involved in the conquest of Britain; and when, after
their conversion to Christianity, the barbarians learnt to write and
left authentic records, they reveal a state of society which bears some
resemblance to that of medieval England but little to that of the
mythical golden age.

Upon a nation of freemen in arms had been superimposed a class of
military specialists, of whom the king was head. Specialization had
broken down the system by which all men did an equal amount of
everything. The few, who were called thegns, served the king, generally
by fighting his enemies, while the many worked for themselves and for
those who served the king. All holders of land, however, had to serve
in the national levy and to help in maintaining the bridges and
primitive fortifications. But there were endless degrees of inequality
in wealth; some now owned but a fraction of what had been the normal
share of a household in the land; others held many shares, and the
possession of five shares became the dividing line between the class
from which the servants of the king were chosen and the rest of the
community. While this inequality increased, the tenure of land grew
more and more important as the basis of social position and political
influence. Land has little value for nomads, but so soon as they settle
its worth begins to grow; and the more labour they put into the land,
the higher rises its value and the less they want to leave it; in a
purely agricultural community land is the great source of everything
worth having, and therefore the main object of desire.

But it became increasingly difficult for the small man to retain his
holding. He needed protection, especially during the civil wars of the
Heptarchy and the Danish inroads which followed. There was, however, no
government strong enough to afford protection, and he had to seek it
from the nearest magnate, who might possess armed servants to defend
him, and perhaps a rudimentary stronghold within which he might shelter
himself and his belongings till the storm was past. The magnate
naturally wanted his price for these commodities, and the only price
that would satisfy him was the poor man's land. So many poor men
surrendered the ownership of their land, receiving it back to be held
by them as tenants on condition of rendering various services to the
landlord, such as ploughing his land, reaping his crops, and other
work. Generally, too, the tenant became the landlord's "man," and did
him homage; and, thirdly, he would be bound to attend the court in
which the lord or his steward exercised jurisdiction.

This growth of private jurisdiction was another sign of the times.
Justice had once been administered in the popular moots, though from
very early times there had been social distinctions. Each village had
its "best" men, generally four in number, who attended the moots of the
larger districts called the Hundreds; and the "best" were probably
those who had inherited or acquired the best homesteads. This
aristocracy sometimes shrank to one, and the magnate, to whom the poor
surrendered their land in return for protection, often acquired also
rights of jurisdiction, receiving the fines and forfeits imposed for
breaches of the law. He was made responsible, too, for the conduct of
his poorer neighbours. Originally the family had been made to answer
for the offences of its members; but the tie of blood-relationship
weakened as the bond of neighbourhood grew stronger with attachment to
the soil; and instead of the natural unit of the family, an artificial
unit was created for the purpose of responsibility to the law by
associating neighbours together in groups of ten, called peace-pledges
or frith-borhs. It is at least possible that the "Hundred" was a
further association of ten frith-borhs as a higher and more responsible
unit for the administration of justice. But the landless man was
worthless as a member of a frith-borh, for the law had little hold over
a man who had no land to forfeit and no fixed habitation. So the
landless man was compelled by law to submit to a lord, who was held
responsible for the behaviour of all his "men"; his estate became, so
to speak, a private frith-borh, consisting of dependents instead of the
freemen of the public frith-borhs. These two systems, with many
variations, existed side by side; but there was a general tendency for
the freemen to get fewer and for the lords to grow more powerful.

This growth of over-mighty subjects was due to the fact that a
government which could not protect the poorest could not restrain the
local magnates to whom the poor were forced to turn; and the weakness
of the government was due ultimately to the lack of political education
and of material resources. The mass of Englishmen were locally minded;
there was nothing to suggest national unity to their imagination. They
could not read, they had no maps, nor pictures of crowned sovereigns,
not even a flag to wave; none, indeed, of those symbols which bring
home to the peasant or artisan a consciousness that he belongs to a
national entity. Their interests centred round the village green; the
"best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and shire-moot, but
anything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the affair of an
outside world with which they had no concern. Anglo-Saxon patriotism
never transcended provincial boundaries.

The government, on the other hand, possessed no proper roads, no
regular means of communication, none of those nerves which enable it to
feel what goes on in distant parts. The king, indeed, was beginning to
supply the deficiencies of local and popular organization: a special
royal peace or protection, which meant specially severe penalties to
the offender, was being thrown over special places like highways,
markets, boroughs, and churches; over special times like Sundays, holy
days, and the meeting-days of moots; and over special persons like
priests and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an example
of centralized administration; but its organization was still monastic
rather than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanse
it of sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, little
government machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, it
was impossible to enforce royal protection adequately, or to check the
centrifugal tendency of England to break up into its component parts.
The monarchy was a man rather than a machine; a vigorous ruler could
make some impression, but whenever the crown passed to a feeble king,
the reign of anarchy recommenced.

Alfred's successors annexed the Danelaw which Alfred had left to
Guthrum, but their efforts to assimilate the Danes provoked in the
first place a reaction against West Saxon influence which threatened
more than once to separate England north of the Thames from Wessex,
and, secondly, a determination on the part of Danes across the sea to
save their fellow-countrymen in England from absorption. Other causes
no doubt assisted to bring about a renewal of Danish invasion; but the
Danes who came at the end of the tenth century, if they began as
haphazard bands of rovers, greedy of spoil and ransom, developed into
the emissaries of an organized government bent on political conquest.
Ethelred, who had to suffer from evils that were incurable as well as
for his predecessors' neglect, bought off the raiders with ever-
increasing bribes which tempted them to return; and by levying Danegeld
to stop invasion, set a precedent for direct taxation which the
invaders eventually used as the financial basis of efficient
government. At length a foolish massacre of the Danish "uitlanders" in
England precipitated the ruin of Anglo-Saxon monarchy; and after heroic
resistance by Edmund Ironside, England was absorbed in the empire of
Canute.

Canute tried to put himself into the position, while avoiding the
mistakes, of his English predecessors. He adopted the Christian
religion and set up a force of hus-earls to terrify local magnates and
enforce obedience to the English laws which he re-enacted. His division
of England into four great earldoms seems to have been merely a casual
arrangement, but he does not appear to have checked the dangerous
practice by which under Edgar and Ethelred the ealdormen had begun to
concentrate in their hands the control of various shires. The greater
the sphere of a subject's jurisdiction, the more it menaced the
monarchy and national unity; and after Canute's empire had fallen to
pieces under his worthless sons, the restoration of Ecgberht's line in
the person of Edward the Confessor merely provided a figurehead under
whose nominal rule the great earls of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and
East Anglia fought at first for control of the monarchy and at length
for the crown itself. The strife resolved itself into a faction fight
between the Mercian house of Leofric and the West Saxon house of
Godwine, whose dynastic policy has been magnified into patriotism by a
great West Saxon historian. The prize fell for the moment on Edward's
death to Godwine's son, Harold, whose ambition to sit on a throne cost
him his life and the glory, which otherwise might have been his, of
saving his country from William the Norman. As regent for one of the
scions of Ecgberht's house, he might have relied on the co-operation of
his rivals; as an upstart on the throne he could only count on the
veiled or open enmity of Mercians and Northumbrians, who regarded him,
and were regarded by him, as hardly less foreign than the invader from
France.

The battle of Hastings sums up a series and clinches an argument.
Anglo-Saxondom had only been saved from Danish marauders by the
personal greatness of Alfred; it had utterly failed to respond to
Edmund's call to arms against Canute, and the respite under Edward the
Confessor had been frittered away. Angles and Saxons invited foreign
conquest by a civil war; and when Harold beat back Tostig and his
Norwegian ally, the sullen north left him alone to do the same by
William. William's was the third and decisive Danish conquest of a
house divided against itself; for his Normans were Northmen with a
French polish, and they conquered a country in which the soundest
elements were already Danish. The stoutest resistance, not only in the
military but in the constitutional and social sense, to the Norman
Conquest was offered not by Wessex but by the Danelaw, where personal
freedom had outlived its hey-day elsewhere; and the reflection that,
had the English re-conquest of the Danelaw been more complete, so, too,
would have been the Norman Conquest of England, may modify the view
that everything great and good in England is Anglo-Saxon in origin.
England, indeed, was still in the crudest stages of its making; it had
as yet no law worth the name, no trial by jury, no parliament, no real
constitution, no effective army or navy, no universities, few schools,
hardly any literature, and little art. The disjointed and unruly
members of which it consisted in 1066 had to undergo a severe
discipline before they could form an organic national state.




CHAPTER II

THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND

1066-1272


For nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest there is no history
of the English people. There is history enough of England, but it is
the history of a foreign government. We may now feel pride in the
strength of our conqueror or pretend claims to descent from William's
companions. We may boast of the empire of Henry II and the prowess of
Richard I, and we may celebrate the organized law and justice, the
scholarship and the architecture, of the early Plantagenet period; but
these things were no more English than the government of India to-day
is Hindu. With Waltheof and Hereward English names disappear from
English history, from the roll of sovereigns, ministers, bishops,
earls, and sheriffs; and their place is taken by names beginning with
"fitz" and distinguished by "de." No William, Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey,
Gilbert, John, Stephen, Richard, or Robert had played any part in
Anglo-Saxon affairs, but they fill the pages of England's history from
the days of Harold to those of Edward I. The English language went
underground, and became the patois of peasants; the thin trickle of
Anglo-Saxon literature dried up, for there was no demand for Anglo-
Saxon among an upper class which wrote Latin and spoke French.
Foreigners ruled and owned the land, and "native" became synonymous
with "serf."

Their common lot, however, gave birth to a common feeling. The Norman
was more alien to the Mercian than had been Northumbrian or West-Saxon,
and rival tribes at last discovered a bond of unity in the impartial
rigour of their masters. The Norman, coming from outside and exempt
from local prejudice, applied the same methods of government and
exploitation to all parts of England, just as Englishmen bring the same
ideas to bear upon all parts of India; and in both cases the steady
pressure of a superimposed civilization tended to obliterate local and
class divisions. Unwittingly Norman and Angevin despotism made an
English nation out of Anglo-Saxon tribes, as English despotism has made
a nation out of Irish septs, and will make another out of the hundred
races and religions of our Indian empire. The more efficient a
despotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the greater the
problems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself of
its despotic attributes and make common cause with the nation it has
created.

The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution of
the Normans to the making of England. They had no written law of their
own, but to secure themselves they had to enforce order upon their
schismatic subjects; and they were able to enforce it because, as
military experts, they had no equals in that age. They could not have
stood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipment
and the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons had
transferred the military business of the nation into the hands of large
landowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match for
his Norman rival, either individually or collectively. His burh was
inferior to the Norman castle, his shield and battle-axe to the weapons
of the mailed and mounted knight; and he had none of the coherence that
was forced upon the conquerors by the iron hand of William and by their
situation amid a hostile people.

The problem for William and his companions was how to organize this
military superiority as a means of orderly government, and this problem
wore a twofold aspect. William had to control his barons, and his
barons had to control their vassals. Their methods have been summed up
in the phrase, the "feudal system," which William is still popularly
supposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand, it has
been humourously suggested that the feudal system was really introduced
into England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar.
Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being introduced
from Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that feudalism was
introduced from England into Normandy, and thence spread throughout
France. These speculations serve, at any rate, to show that feudalism
was a very vague and elusive system, consisting of generalizations from
a vast number of conflicting data. Spelman was the first to attempt to
reduce these data to a system, and his successors tended to forget more
and more the exceptions to his rules. It is now clear that much that we
call feudal existed in England before the Norman Conquest; that much of
it was not developed until after the Norman period; and that at no time
did feudalism exist as a completely rounded and logical system outside
historical and legal text-books.

The political and social arrangements summed up in the phrase related
primarily to the land and the conditions of service upon which it was
held. Commerce and manufactures, and the organization of towns which
grew out of them, were always exceptions to the feudal system; the
monarchy saved itself, its sheriffs, and the shires to some extent from
feudal influence; and soon it set to work to redeem the administration
of justice from its clutches. In all parts of the country, moreover,
there was land, the tenure of which was never feudalized. Generally,
however, the theory was applied that all land was held directly or
indirectly from the king, who was the sole owner of it, that there was
no land without a lord, and that from every acre of land some sort of
service was due to some one or other. A great deal of it was held by
military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either
a layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to the
king, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the tenants-in-chief.
When the tenant died his land reverted to the lord, who only granted it
to the heir after the payment of a year's revenue, and on condition of
the same service being rendered. If the heir were a minor, and thus
incapable of rendering military service, the land was retained by the
lord until the heir came of age; heiresses could only marry with the
lord's leave some one who could perform his services. The tenant had
further to attend the lord's court--whether the lord was his king or
not--submit to his jurisdiction, and pay aids to the lord whenever he
was captured and needed ransom, when his eldest son was made a knight,
and when his eldest daughter married.

Other land was held by churchmen on condition of praying or singing for
the soul of the lord, and the importance of this tenure was that it was
subject to the church courts and not to those of the king. Some was
held in what was called free socage, the terms of which varied; but its
distinguishing feature seems to have been that the service, which was
not military, was fixed, and that when it was performed the lord had no
further hold on the tenant. The great mass of the population were,
however, villeins, who were always at the beck and call of their lords,
and had to do as much ploughing, sowing, and reaping of his land as he
could make them. Theoretically they were his goods and chattels, who
could obtain no redress against any one except in the lord's court, and
none at all against him. They could not leave their land, nor marry,
nor enter the church, nor go to school without his leave. All these
forms of tenure and kinds of service, however, shaded off into one
another, so that it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines between
them. Any one, moreover, might hold different lands on different terms
of service, so that there was little of caste in the English system; it
was upon the land and not the person that the service was imposed; and
William's Domesday Book was not a record of the ranks and classes of
the people, but a survey of the land, detailing the rents and service
due from every part.

The local agency by which the Normans enforced these arrangements was
the manor. The Anglo-Saxons had organized shires and hundreds, but the
lowest unit, township or vill seems to have had no organization except,
perhaps, for agricultural purposes. The Danegeld, which William imposed
after the Domesday survey, was assessed on the hundreds, as though
there were no smaller units from which it could be levied. But the
hundred was found too cumbrous for the efficient control of local
details; it was divided into manors, the Normans using for this purpose
the germs of dependent townships which had long been growing up in
England; and the agricultural organization of the township was
dovetailed into the jurisdictional organization of the manor. The lord
became the lord of all the land on the manor, the owner of a court
which tried local disputes; but he rarely possessed that criminal
jurisdiction in matters of life and death which was common in
continental feudalism; and if he did, it was only by special royal
grant, and he was gradually deprived of it by the development of royal
courts of justice, which drew to themselves large parts of manorial
jurisdiction.

These and other matters were reserved for the old courts of the shire
and hundred, which the Norman kings found it advisable to encourage as
a check upon their barons; for the more completely the natives and
villagers were subjected to their lords, the more necessary was it for
the king to maintain his hold upon their masters. For this reason
William imposed the famous Salisbury oath. In France the sub-tenant was
bound to follow and obey his immediate lord rather than the king.
William was determined that every man's duty to the king should come
first. Similarly, he separated church courts from the secular courts,
in order that the former might be saved from the feudal influence of
the latter; and he enforced the ecclesiastical reforms of Hildebrand,
especially the prohibition of the marriage of the clergy, lest they
should convert their benefices into hereditary fiefs for the benefit of
their children.

For the principles of heredity and primogeniture were among the
strongest of feudal tendencies. Primogeniture had proved politically
advantageous; and one of the best things in the Anglo-Saxon monarchy
had been its avoidance of the practice, prevalent on the Continent, of
kings dividing their dominions among their sons, instead of leaving all
united to the eldest. But the principle of heredity, sound enough in
national monarchy, was to prove very dangerous in the other spheres of
politics. Office tended to become hereditary, and to be regarded as the
private property of the family rather than a position of national
trust, thus escaping national control and being prostituted for
personal ends. The earldoms in England were so perverted; originally
they were offices like the modern lords-lieutenancies of the shires;
gradually they became hereditary titles. The only remedy the king had
was to deprive the earls of their power, and entrust it to a nominal
deputy, the sheriff. In France, the sheriff  (_vice-comes_, _vicomte_)
became hereditary in his turn, and a prolonged struggle over the same
tendency was fought in England. Fortunately, the crown and country
triumphed over the hereditary principle in this respect; the sheriff
remained an official, and when viscounts were created later, in
imitation of the French nobility, they received only a meaningless and
comparatively innocuous title.

Some slight check, too, was retained upon the crown owing to a series
of disputed successions to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy had
always been in theory elective, and William had been careful to observe
the form. His son, William II, had to obtain election in order to
secure the throne against the claims of his elder brother Robert, and
Henry I followed his example for similar reasons. Each had to make
election promises in the form of a charter; and election promises,
although they were seldom kept, had some value as reminders to kings of
their duties and theoretical dependence upon the electors. Gradually,
too, the kings began to look for support outside their Norman baronage,
and to realize that even the submerged English might serve as a
makeweight in a balance of opposing forces. Henry I bid for London's
support by the grant of a notable charter; for, assisted by the order
and communications with the Continent fostered by Norman rule, commerce
was beginning to flourish and towns to grow. London was already
distancing Winchester in their common ambition to be the capital of the
kingdom, and the support of it and of other towns began to be worth
buying by grants of local government, more especially as their
encouragement provided another check on feudal magnates. Henry, too,
made a great appeal to English sentiment by marrying Matilda, the
granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, and by revenging the battle of
Hastings through a conquest of Normandy from his brother Robert,
effected partly by English troops.

But the order, which the three Norman sovereigns evolved out of chaos,
was still due more to their personal vigour than to the strength of the
administrative machinery which they sought to develop; and though that
machinery continued to work during the anarchy which followed, it could
not restrain the feudal barons, when the crown was disputed between
Henry's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen. The barons, indeed,
had been more successful in riveting their baronial yoke on the people
than the kings had been in riveting a monarchical yoke on the barons;
and nothing more vividly illustrates the utter subjection of Anglo-
Saxons than the fact that the conquerors could afford to tear each
other to pieces for nineteen years (1135-1154) without the least
attempt on the part of their subjects to throw off their tyranny. There
was no English nation yet; each feudal magnate did what he pleased with
his own without fear of royal or popular vengeance, and for once in
English history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence.
The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within
its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and
refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to
broaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and
assert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to depose
sovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization,
had it been able to assert a power of putting down the barons from
their castles and raising the peasantry from their bondage.

Deliverance could only come by royal power, and in Henry II, Matilda's
son, Anjou gave England a greater king than Normandy had done in
William the Bastard. Although a foreigner, who ruled a vast continental
empire and spent but a fraction of his days on this side of the
Channel, he stands second to none of England's makers. He fashioned the
government which hammered together the framework of a national state.
First, he gathered up such fragments of royal authority as survived the
anarchy; then, with the conservative instincts and pretences of a
radical, he looked about for precedents in the customs of his
grandfather, proclaiming his intention of restoring good old laws. This
reaction brought him up against the encroachments of the church, and
the untoward incident of Becket's murder impaired the success of
Henry's efforts to establish royal supremacy. But this supremacy must
not be exaggerated. Henry did not usurp ecclesiastical jurisdiction; he
wanted to see that the clerical courts did their duty; he claimed the
power of moving them in this direction; and he hoped to make the crown
the arbiter of disputes between the rival spiritual and temporal
jurisdictions, realizing that the only alternative to this supreme
authority was the arbitrament of war. He also contended that clergy who
had been unfrocked in the clerical courts for murder or other crimes
should be handed over as laymen to be further punished according to the
law of the land, while Becket maintained that unfrocking was a
sufficient penalty for the first offence, and that it required a second
murder to hang a former priest.

Next, he sought to curb the barons. He instituted scutage, by which the
great feudatories granted a money payment instead of bringing with them
to the army hordes of their sub-tenants who might obey them rather than
the king; this enabled the king to hire mercenaries who respected him
but not the feudatories. He cashiered all the sheriffs at once, to
explode their pretensions to hereditary tenure of their office. By the
assize of arms he called the mass of Englishmen to redress the military
balance between the barons and the crown. By other assizes he enabled
the owners and possessors of property to appeal to the protection of
the royal court of justice: instead of trial by battle they could
submit their case to a jury of neighbours; and the weapons of the
military expert were thus superseded by the verdicts of peaceful
citizens.

This method, which was extended to criminal as well as civil cases, of
ascertaining the truth and deciding disputes by means of juratores, men
sworn to tell the truth impartially, involved a vast educational
process. Hitherto men had regarded the ascertainment of truth as a
supernatural task, and they had abandoned it to Providence or the
priests. Each party to a dispute had been required to produce oath-
helpers or compurgators and each compurgator's oath was valued
according to his property, just as the number of a man's votes is still
proportioned to some extent to his possessions. But if, as commonly
happened, both parties produced the requisite oath-helpers, there was
nothing for it but the ordeal by fire or water; the man who sank was
innocent, he who floated guilty; and the only rational element in the
ritual was its supervision by the priests, who knew something of their
parishioners' character. Military tenants, however, preferred their
privilege of trial by battle. Now Henry began to teach men to rely upon
their judgment; and by degrees a distinction was even made between
murder and homicide, which had hitherto been confounded because "the
thought of man shall not be tried, for the devil himself knoweth not
the thought of man."

In order to carry out his judicial reforms, Henry developed the
_curia regis_, or royal court of justice. That court had simply
been the court of the king's barons corresponding to the court of his
tenants which every feudal lord possessed. Its financial aspect had
already been specialized as the exchequer by the Norman kings, who had
realized that finance is the first essential of efficient government.
From finance Henry I had gone on to the administration of justice,
because _justitia magnum emolumentum_, the administration of
justice is a great source of profit. Henry II's zeal for justice sprang
from similar motives: the more justice he could draw from the feudal
courts to his own, the greater the revenue he would divert from his
unruly barons into the royal exchequer. From the central stores of the
_curia regis_ he dispensed a justice that was cheaper, more
expeditious, and more expert, than that provided by the local courts.
He threw open its doors to all except villeins, he transformed it from
an occasional assembly of warlike barons into a regular court of
trained lawyers--mere servants of the royal household, the barons
called them; and by means of justices in eyre he brought it into touch
with all localities in the kingdom, and convinced his people that there
was a king who meant to govern with their help.

These experts had a free hand as regards the law they administered. The
old Anglo-Saxon customs which had done duty for law had degenerated
into antiquated formalities, varying in almost every shire and hundred,
which were perforce ignored by Henry's judges because they were
incomprehensible. So much as they understood and approved they blended
with principles drawn from the revived study of Roman law and with
Frankish and Norman customs. The legal rules thus elaborated by the
king's court were applied by the justices in eyre where-ever their
circuits took them, and became in time the common law of England,
common because it admitted no local bars and no provincial prejudices.
One great stride had been taken in the making of the English nation,
when the king's court, trespassing upon local popular and feudal
jurisdiction, dumped upon the Anglo-Saxon market the following among
other foreign legal concepts--assize, circuit, suit, plaintiff,
defendant, maintenance, livery, possession, property, probate,
recovery, trespass, treason, felony, fine, coroner, court, inquest,
judge, jury, justice, verdict, taxation, charter, liberty,
representation, parliament, and constitution. It is difficult to over-
estimate the debt the English people owe to their powers of absorbing
imports. The very watchwords of progress and catchwords of liberty,
from the trial by jury which was ascribed to Alfred the Great to the
charter extorted from John, were alien immigrants. We call them alien
because they were alien to the Anglo-Saxons; but they are the warp and
woof of English institutions, which are too great and too complex to
have sprung from purely insular sources.

In spite of the fierce opposition of the barons, who rebelled in 1173,
and of disputes with his fractious children which embittered his
closing years, Henry II had laid the foundations of national monarchy.
But in completing one part of the Norman Conquest, namely, the
establishment of royal supremacy over disorderly feudatories, he had
modified the other, the arbitrary rule of the barons over the subject
people. William had only conquered the people by the help of his
barons; Henry II only crushed the barons with the help of lower orders
and of ministers raised from the ranks. It was left for his sons to
alienate the support which he had enlisted, and to show that, if the
first condition of progress was the restraint of the barons, the second
was the curbing of the crown. Their reigns illustrate the ineradicable
defect of arbitrary rule: a monarch of genius creates an efficient
despotism, and is allowed to create it, to deal with evils that yield
to no milder treatment. His successors proceed to use that machinery
for personal ends. Richard I gilded his abuse of his father's power
with the glory of his crusade, and the end afforded a plausible
justification for the means he adopted. But John cloaked his tyranny
with no specious pretences; his greed and violence spared no section of
the community, and forced all into a coalition which extorted from him
the Great Charter.

This famous document betrays its composite authorship; no section of
the community entered the coalition without something to gain, and none
went entirely unrewarded from Runnymede. But if Sir Henry Spelman
introduced feudalism into England, his contemporary, Chief-justice
Coke, invented Magna Carta: and in view of the profound misconceptions
which prevail with regard to its character, it is necessary to insist
rather upon its reactionary than upon its reforming elements. The great
source of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, but
sometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally the
change has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in their
earlier stages of education men find it very difficult to grasp
anything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a good
illustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession by a definite
person or group of persons of very definite and tangible privileges,
such as having a court of your own with its perquisites, or exemption
from the duties of attending the public courts of the shire or hundred,
of rendering the services or of paying the dues to which the majority
were liable. The value of a "liberty" was that through its enjoyment
you were not as other men; the barons would have eared little for
liberties which they had to share with the common herd. To them liberty
meant privilege and monopoly; it was not a general right to be enjoyed
in common. Now Magna Carta is a charter not of "liberty," but of
"liberties"; it guaranteed to each section of the coalition those
special privileges which Henry II and his sons had threatened or taken
away. Some of these liberties were dangerous obstacles to the common
welfare--for instance the "liberty" of every lord of the manor to try
all suits relating to property and possession in his own manorial
court, or to be punished by his fellow-barons instead of by the judges
of the king's court. This was what the barons meant by their famous
demand in Magna Carta that every man should be judged by his peers;
they insisted that the royal judges were not their peers, but only
servants of the crown, and their demands in these respects were
reactionary proposals which might have been fatal to liberty as we
conceive it.

Nor is there anything about trial by jury or "no taxation without
representation" in Magna Carta. What we mean by "trial by jury" was not
developed till long after 1215; there was still no national, but only
class taxation; and the great council, which was to give its assent to
royal demands for money, represented nobody but the tenants-in-chief of
whom it was composed. All that the barons meant by this clause was that
they, as feudal tenants-in-chief, were not to pay more than the
ordinary feudal dues. But they left to the king, and they reserved to
themselves, the right to tallage their villeins as arbitrarily as they
pleased; and even where they seem to be protecting the villeins, they
are only preventing the king from levying such judicial fines from
their villeins as would make it impossible for those villeins to render
their services to the lords. It was to be no affair of the king or
nation if a lord exacted the uttermost farthing from his own chattels;
legally, the villeins, who were the bulk of the nation, remained after
Magna Carta, as before, in the position of a man's ox or horse to-day,
except that there was no law for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
Finally, the provision that no one was to be arrested until he had been
convicted would, if carried out, have made impossible the
administration of justice.

On the other hand, the provisions for the fixing of the court of common
pleas at Westminster, for standard weights and measures, for the
administration of law by men acquainted with English customs, and some
others were wholesome reforms. The first clause, guaranteeing that the
church should be free from royal (not papal) encroachments, was sound
enough when John was king, and the general restraint of his authority,
even in the interests of the barons, was not an unmixed evil. But it is
as absurd to think that John conceded modern liberty when he granted
the charter of medieval liberties, as to think that he permitted some
one to found a new religion when he licensed him to endow a new
religious house (_novam religionem_); and to regard Magna Carta as
a great popular achievement, when no vernacular version of it is known
to have existed before the sixteenth century, and when it contains
hardly a word or an idea of popular English origin, involves complete
misunderstanding of its meaning and a serious antedating of English
nationality.

At no time, indeed, did foreign influence appear more dominant in
English politics than during the generation which saw Richard I
surrender his kingdom to be held as a fief of the empire, and John
surrender it to be held as a temporal fief of the papacy; or when, in
the reign of Henry III, a papal legate, Gualo, administered England as
a province of the Papal States; when a foreign freebooter was sheriff
of six English shires; and when aliens held in their hands the castles
and keys of the kingdom. It was a dark hour which preceded the dawn of
English nationality, and so far there was no sign of English
indignation at the bartering of England's independence. Resistance
there was, but it came from men who were only a degree less alien than
those whose domination they resented.

Yet a governing class, planted by Henry II, was striking root in
English soil and drawing nourishment and inspiration from English
feelings. It was reinforced by John's loss of Normandy, which compelled
bi-national barons who held lands in both countries to choose between
their French and English sovereigns; and those who preferred England
became more English than they had been before. The French invasion of
England, which followed John's repudiation of the charter, widened the
cleavage; and there was something national, if little that was English,
in the government of Hubert de Burgh, and still more in the naval
victory which Hubert and the men of the Cinque Ports won over the
French in the Straits of Dover in 1217. But not a vestige of national
feeling animated Henry III; and for twenty-five wearisome years after
he had attained his majority he strove to govern England by means of
alien relatives and dependents.

The opposition offered by the great council was baronial rather than
national; the revolt in which it ended was a revolt of the half-breeds
rather than a revolt of the English; and the government they
established in 1258 was merely a legalized form of baronial anarchy.
But there was this difference between the anarchy of Stephen's reign
and that of Henry III's: now, when the foreigners fell out, the English
began to come by their own. A sort of "young England" party fell foul
of both the barons and the king; Simon de Montfort detached himself
from the baronial brethren with whom he had acted, and boldly placed
himself at the head of a movement for securing England for the English.
He summoned representatives from cities and boroughs to sit side by
side with greater and lesser barons in the great council of the realm,
which now became an English parliament; and for the first time since
the Norman Conquest men of the subject race were called up to
deliberate on national affairs. It does not matter whether this was the
stroke of a statesman's genius or the lucky improvisation of a party-
leader. Simon fell, but his work remained; Prince Edward, who copied
his tactics at Evesham, copied his politics in 1275 and afterwards at
Westminster; and under the first sovereign since the Norman Conquest
who bore an English name, the English people received their national
livery and the seisin of their inheritance.




CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

1272-1485


In 1265, simultaneously with the appearance of English townsfolk in
parliament, an official document couched in the English tongue appeared
like a first peak above the subsiding flood of foreign language. When,
three generations back, Abbot Samson had preached English sermons, they
were noted as exceptions; but now the vernacular language of the
subject race was forcing its way into higher circles, and even into
literary use. The upper classes were learning English, and those whose
normal tongue was English were thrusting themselves into, or at any
rate upon the notice of, the higher strata of society.

The two normal ranks of feudal society had in England naturally been
French lords and English tillers of the soil; but commerce had never
accommodated itself to this agricultural system, and the growth of
trade, of towns, of other forms of wealth than land, tended
concurrently to break down French and feudal domination. A large number
of towns had been granted, or rather sold, charters by Richard I and
John, not because those monarchs were interested in municipal
development, but because they wanted money, and in their rights of
jurisdiction over towns on the royal domain they possessed a ready
marketable commodity. The body which had the means to pay the king's
price was generally the local merchant guild; and while these
transactions developed local government, they did not necessarily
promote popular self-government, because the merchant guild was a
wealthy oligarchical body, and it might exercise the jurisdiction it
had bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit as he
had done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town
democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there
had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to
oligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies were
English, and legally their members had been villeins; and their
experience in local government prepared them for admittance to that
share in national government which the development of taxation made
almost necessary.

Henry II's scheme of active and comprehensive administration, indeed,
led by a natural sequence to the parliament of Edward I and further.
The more a government tries to do, the more taxation it must impose;
and the broadening of the basis of taxation led gradually to the
broadening of the basis of representation, for taxation is the mother
of representation. So long as real property only--that is to say, the
ownership of land--was taxed, the great council contained only the
great landowners. But Henry II had found it necessary to tax personalty
as well, both clerical and lay, and so by slow steps his successors in
the thirteenth century were driven to admit payers of taxes on
personalty to the great council. This representative system must not be
regarded as a concession to a popular demand for national self-
government. When in 1791 a beneficent British parliament granted a
popular assembly to the French Canadians, they looked askance and
muttered, "_C'est une machine anglaise pour nous taxer_"; and
Edward I's people would have been justified in entertaining the
suspicion that it was their money he wanted, not their advice, and
still less their control. He wished taxes to be voted in the royal
palace at Westminster, just as Henry I had insisted upon bishops being
elected in the royal chapel. In the royal presence burgesses and
knights of the shire would be more liberal with their constituents'
money than those constituents would be with their own when there were
neighbours to encourage resistance to a merely distant terror.

The representation people had enjoyed in the shire and hundred moots
had been a boon, not because it enabled a few privileged persons to
attend, but because by their attendance the mass were enabled to stay
away. If the lord or his steward would go in person, his attendance
exempted all his tenants; if he would not, the reeve and four "best"
men from each township had to go. The "best," moreover, were not chosen
by election; the duty and burden was attached to the "best" holdings in
the township, and in the thirteenth century the sheriff was hard put to
it to secure an adequate representation. This "suit of court" was, in
fact, an obligatory service, and membership of parliament was long
regarded in a similar light. Parliament did not clamour to be created;
it was forced by an enlightened monarchy on a less enlightened people.
A parliamentary "summons" had the imperative, minatory sound which now
only attaches to its police court use; and centuries later members were
occasionally "bound over" to attend at Westminster, and prosecuted if
they failed. On one occasion the two knights for Oxfordshire fled the
country on hearing of their election, and were proclaimed outlaws.
Members of parliament were, in fact, the scapegoats for the people, who
were all "intended" or understood to be present in parliament, but
enjoyed the privilege of absence through representation. The greater
barons never secured this privilege; they had to come in person when
summoned, just as they had to serve in person when the king went to the
wars. Gradually, of course, this attitude towards representation
changed as parliament grasped control of the public purse, and with it
the power of taxing its foes and sparing its friends. In other than
financial matters it began to pay to be a member; and then it suited
magnates not only to come in person but to represent the people in the
Lower House, the social quality of which developed with the growth of
its power. Only in very recent times has the House of Commons again
included such representatives as these whose names are taken from the
official returns for the parliaments of Edward I: John the Baker,
William the Tailor, Thomas the Summoner, Andrew the Piper, Walter the
Spicer, Roger the Draper, Richard the Dyer, Henry the Butcher, Durant
the Cordwainer, John the Taverner, William the Red of Bideford, Citizen
Richard (Ricardus Civis), and William the priest's son.

The appearance of emancipated villeins side by side with earls and
prelates in the great council of the realm is the most significant fact
of thirteenth-century English history. The people of England were
beginning to have a history which was not merely that of an alien
government; and their emergence is traceable not only in language,
literature, and local and national politics, but also in the art of
war. Edward I discovered in his Welsh wars that the long-bow was more
efficient than the weapons of the knight; and his grandson won English
victories at Crecy and Poitiers with a weapon which was within the
reach of the simple yeoman. The discovery of gunpowder and development
of artillery soon proved as fatal to the feudal castle as the long-bow
had to the mailed knight; and when the feudal classes had lost their
predominance in the art of war, and with it their monopoly of the power
of protection, both the reasons for their existence and their capacity
to maintain it were undermined. They took to trade, or, at least, to
money-making out of land, like ordinary citizens, and thus entered into
a competition in which they had not the same assurance of success.

Edward I's greatness consists mainly in his practical appreciation of
these tendencies. He was less original, but more fortunate in his
opportunity, than Henry II. The time had come to set limits to the
encroachments of feudalism and of the church, and Edward was able to
impose them because, unlike Henry II, he had the elements of a nation
at his back. He was not able to sweep back these inroads, but he placed
high-water marks along the frontiers of the state, and saw that they
were not transgressed. He inquired into the titles by which the great
lords held those portions of sovereign authority which they called
their liberties; but he could take no further action when Earl Warenne
produced a rusty sword as his effective title-deeds. He prohibited
further subinfeudation by enacting that when an estate was sold, the
purchaser should become the vassal of the vendor's lord and not of the
vendor himself; and the social pyramid was thus rendered more stable,
because its base was broadened instead of its height being increased.
He expelled the Jews as aliens, in spite of their usefulness to the
crown; he encouraged commerce by making profits from land liable to
seizure for debt; and he defined the jurisdiction of the church, though
he had to leave it authority over all matters relating to marriage,
wills, perjury, tithes, offences against the clergy, and ecclesiastical
buildings. He succeeded, however, in defiance of its opposition, in
making church property liable to temporal taxation, and in passing a
Mortmain Act which prohibited the giving of land to monasteries or
other corporations without the royal licence.

By thus increasing the national control over the church in England, he
made the church itself more national. It is sometimes implied that the
church was equally national throughout the Middle Ages; but it is
difficult to speak of a national church before there was a nation, or
to see that there was anything really English in a church ruled by
Lanfranc or Anselm, when there was not an Englishman on the bishops'
bench, when the vast majority of Englishmen were legally incapable as
villeins of even taking orders in the church, and when the vernacular
language had been ousted from its services. But with the English nation
grew an English church; Grosseteste denounced the dominance of aliens
in the church, while Simon de Montfort denounced it in the state. It
was, however, by secular authority that the English church was
differentiated from the church abroad. It was the barons and not the
bishops who had resisted the assimilation of English to Roman canon
law, and it was Edward I, and not Archbishops Peckham and Winchilsey,
who defied Pope Boniface VIII. Archbishops, indeed, still placed their
allegiance to the pope above that to their king.

The same sense of national and insular solidarity which led Edward to
defy the papacy also inspired his efforts to conquer Wales and
Scotland. Indeed, it was the refusal of the church to pay taxes in the
crisis of the Scottish war that provoked the quarrel with Boniface.
But, while Edward was successful in Wales, he encountered in Scotland a
growing national spirit not altogether unlike that upon which Edward
himself relied in England. Nor was English patriotism sufficiently
developed to counteract the sectional feelings which took advantage of
the king's embarrassments. The king's necessity was his subjects'
opportunity, and the Confirmation of Charters extorted from him in 1297
stands, it is said, to the Great Charter of 1215 in the relation of
substance to shadow, of achievement to promise. Edward, however, gave
away much less than has often been imagined; he certainly did not
abandon his right to tallage the towns, and the lustre of his motto,
"Keep troth," is tarnished by his application to the pope for
absolution from his promises. Still, he was a great king who served
England well by his efforts to eliminate feudalism from the sphere of
government, and by his insistence on the doctrine that what touches all
should be approved by all. If to some catholic medievalists his reign
seems a climax in the ascent of the English people, a climax to be
followed by a prolonged recessional, it is because the national forces
which he fostered were soon to make irreparable breaches in the
superficial unity of Christendom.

The miserable reign of his worthless successor, Edward II, illustrated
the importance of the personal factor in the monarchy, and also showed
how incapable the barons were of supplying the place of the feeblest
king. Both parties failed because they took no account of the commons
of England or of national interests. The leading baron, Thomas of
Lancaster, was executed; Edward II was murdered; and his assassin,
Mortimer, was put to death by Edward III, who grasped some of the
significance of his grandfather's success and his father's failure. He
felt the national impulse, but he twisted it to serve a selfish and
dynastic end. It must not, however, be supposed that the Hundred Years'
War originated in Edward's claim to the French throne; that claim was
invented to provide a colourable pretext for French feudatories to
fight their sovereign in a war which was due to other causes. There was
Scotland, for instance, which France wished to save from Edward's
clutches; there were the English possessions in Gascony and Guienne,
from which the French king hoped to oust his rival; there were
bickerings about the lordship of the Narrow Seas which England claimed
under Edward II; and there was the wool-market in the Netherlands which
England wanted to control. The French nation, in fact, was feeling its
feet as well as the English; and a collision was only natural,
especially in Guienne and Gascony. Henry II had been as natural a
sovereign in France as in England, because he was quite as much a
Frenchman as an Englishman. But since then the kings of England had
grown English, and their dominion over soil which was growing French
became more and more unnatural. The claim to the throne, however, gave
the struggle a bitter and fruitless character; and the national means,
which Edward employed to maintain the war, only delayed its inevitably
futile end. It was supported by wealth derived from national commerce
with Flanders and Gascony; national armies were raised by enlistment to
replace the feudal levy; the national long-bow and not the feudal war-
horse won the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; and command of the sea
secured by a national navy enabled Edward to win the victory of Sluys
and complete the reduction of Calais. War, moreover, required extra
supplies in unprecedented amounts, and they took the form of national
taxes, voted by the House of Commons, which supplemented and then
supplanted the feudal aids as the mainstay of royal finance.

Control of these supplies brought the House of Commons into
constitutional prominence. It was no mere Third Estate after the
continental model, for knights of the shire sat side by side with
burgesses and citizens; and knights of the shire were the lesser
barons, who, receiving no special writ of summons, cast in their lot
with the Lower and not with the Upper House. Parliament had separated
into two Houses in the reign of Edward II--for Edward I's Model
Parliament had been a Single Chamber, though doubtless it voted by
classes--but the House of Commons represented the _communities_ of
the realm, and not its lower orders; or rather, it concentrated all
these communities--shires, cities, and boroughs--and welded them into a
single community of the realm. It thus created a nucleus for national
feeling, which gradually cured the localism of early England and the
sectionalism of feudal society; and it developed an _esprit de
corps_ which counteracted the influence of the court. The advantages
which the crown may have hoped to secure by bringing representatives up
to Westminster, and thus detaching them from their basis of local
resistance, were frustrated by the solidarity and consistency which
grew up among members of parliament; and this growing national
consciousness supplanted local consciousness as the safeguard of
constitutional liberty.

Most of the principles and expedients of representative government were
adumbrated during this first flush of English nationalism, which has
been called "the age of the Commons." The petitions, by which alone
parliament had been able to express its grievances, were turned into
bills which the crown had to answer, not evasively, but by a thinly
veiled "yes" or "no." The granting of taxes was made conditional upon
the redress of grievances; the crown finally lost its right to tallage;
and its powers of independent taxation were restricted to the levying
of the "ancient customs" upon dry goods and wines. If it required more
than these and than the proceeds from the royal domains, royal
jurisdiction, and diminishing feudal aids, it had to apply to
parliament. The expense of the Hundred Years' War rendered such
applications frequent; and they were used by the Commons to increase
their constitutional power. Attempts were made with varying success to
assert that the ministers of the crown, both local and national, were
responsible to parliament, and that money-grants could only originate
in the House of Commons, which might appropriate taxes to specific
objects and audit accounts so as to see that the appropriation was
carried out.

The growth of national feeling led also to limitations of papal power.
Early in Edward III's reign a claim was made that the king, in virtue
of his anointing at coronation, could exercise spiritual jurisdiction,
and the statutes of _Praemunire_ and _Provisors_ prohibited the
exercise in England of the pope's powers of judicature and appointment
to benefices without the royal licence, though royal connivance and
popular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges for
nearly two centuries longer. National feeling was particularly inflamed
against the papacy because the "Babylonish captivity" of the pope at
Avignon made him appear an instrument in the hands of England's enemy,
the king of France; and that captivity was followed by the "Great
Schism," during which the quarrels of two, and then three, popes,
simultaneously claiming to be the only head of the church on earth,
undermined respect for their office. These circumstances combined with
the wealth and corruption of the church to provoke the Lollard
movement, which was the ecclesiastical aspect of the democratic
tendencies of the age.

One of the most striking illustrations of popular development was the
demand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures, which Wycliffe met by
his translation of the Bible. At the same time Langland made literature
for the common people out of their common lot, a fact that can hardly
be understood unless we remember that villeins, although they might be
fined by their lords for so doing, were sending their sons in
increasing numbers to schools, which were eventually thrown open to
them by the Statute of Labourers in 1406. The fact that Chaucer wrote
in English shows how the popular tongue was becoming the language of
the court and educated classes. Town chronicles and the records of
guilds and companies began to be written in English; legal proceedings
are taken in the same tongue, though the law-reports continued to be
written in French; and after a struggle between French and Latin, even
the laws are drawn up in English. That the church persisted, naturally
enough, in its usage of catholic Latin, tended to increase its
alienation from popular sympathies. Wycliffe represented this national
feeling when he appealed to national authority to reform a corrupt
Catholic church, and when he finally denied that power of miraculous
transubstantiation, upon which ultimately was based the claim of the
priesthood to special privileges and estimation. But his association
with the extreme forms of social agitation, which accompanied the
Lollard movement, is less clear.

Before the end of Edward III's reign the French war had produced a crop
of disgrace, disorder, and discontent. Heavy taxation had not availed
to retain the provinces ceded to England at the Treaty of Bretigny in
1360, and hordes of disbanded soldiery exploited the social
disorganization produced by the Black Death; a third of the population
was swept away, and many villeins deserted their land to take up the
more attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts and
manufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the services
from villeins which there were not enough villeins to perform; and the
imposition of a poll-tax was the signal for a comprehensive revolt of
town artisans and agricultural labourers in 1381. Its failure did not
long impede their emancipation, and the process of commuting services
for rent seems to have gone on more rapidly in the first half of the
fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. But the passionate preaching
of social equality which inflamed the minds of the insurgents produced
no further results; in their existing condition of political education,
the peasant and artisan had perforce to be content with watching the
struggles of higher classes for power.

Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather in 1377, reaped the
whirlwind of Edward's sowing, not so much in the consequences of the
war as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth century
which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage
shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor
has it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal"
does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But
the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises,
earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of
parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor
electors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another;
and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. The
use of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in the
fourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could not
have in England. A peer in France claimed equality with the crown; that
is to say, he was the ruler of one of the great fiefs which had been
equal to the county of Paris when the count of Paris had been elected
by his equals king of France. If the king of Wessex had been elected
king of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those other
kings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to be
peers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they were
simply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king.

The barons, however, of William I or Henry II had been a large class of
comparatively small men, while the peers of Richard II were a small
class of big men. The mass of lesser barons had been separated from the
greater barons, and had been merged in the landed gentry who were
represented by the knights of the shire in the House of Commons. The
greater barons were summoned by special and individual writs to the
House of Lords; but there was nothing to fetter the crown in its issue
of these writs. The fact that a great baron was summoned once, did not
mean that he need be summoned again, and the summons of the father did
not involve the summons of his eldest son and successor. But gradually
the greater barons made this summons hereditary and robbed the crown of
all discretion in the matter, though it was not till the reign of
Charles I that the House of Lords decided in its own favour the
question whether the crown had the power to refuse a writ of summons to
a peer who had once received one.

With this narrowing of the baronage, the barons lost the position they
had held in the thirteenth century as leaders of constitutional reform,
and this part was played in the fourteenth century by the knights of
the shire. The greater barons devoted themselves rather to family than
to national politics; and a system of breeding-in amalgamated many
small houses into a few great ones. Thomas of Lancaster held five
earldoms; he was the rival of Edward II, and might well be called a
peer of the crown. Edward III, perceiving the menace of these great
houses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means of
marriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Prince
married the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulster
in the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress of
Lancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married the
heiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendants
of Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer;
and other great houses were brought within the royal family circle. New
titles were imported from abroad to emphasize the new dignity of the
greater barons. Hitherto there had been barons only, and a few earls
whose dignity was an office; now by Edward III and Richard II there
were added dukes, marquises, and viscounts, and England might boast of
a peerage nearly, if not quite, as dangerous to the crown as that of
France. For Edward's policy failed: instead of securing the great
houses in the interests of the crown, it degraded the crown to the
arena of peerage rivalries, and ultimately made it the prize of noble
factions.

Richard II was not the man to deal with these over-mighty subjects. He
may perhaps be described as a "New" monarch born before his time. He
had some of the notions which the Tudors subsequently developed with
success; but he had none of their power and self-control, and he was
faced from his accession by a band of insubordinate uncles. Moreover,
it needed the Wars of the Roses finally to convince the country of the
meaning of the independence of the peerage. Richard fell a victim to
his own impatience and their turbulence. Henry IV came to the throne as
the king of the peers, and hardly maintained his uneasy crown against
their rival ambitions. The Commons, by constitutional reform, reduced
almost to insignificance a sovereignty which the Lords could not
overthrow by rebellion; and by insisting that the king should "live of
his own," without taxing the country, deprived him of the means of
orderly government. Their ideal constitution approached so nearly to
anarchy that it is impossible not to suspect collusion between them and
the Lords. The church alone could Henry placate by passing his statute
for burning heretics.

Henry V took refuge from this domestic imbroglio in a spirited foreign
policy, and put forward a claim more hollow than Edward III's to the
throne of France. There were temptations in the hopeless condition of
French affairs which no one but a statesman could have resisted; Henry,
a brilliant soldier and a bigoted churchman, was anything but a
statesman; and the value of his churchmanship may be gauged from the
fact that he assumed the insolence of a crusader against a nation more
catholic than his own. He won a deplorably splendid victory at
Agincourt, married the French king's daughter, and was crowned king of
France. Then he died in 1422, leaving a son nine months old, with
nothing but success in the impossible task of subduing France to save
the Lancastrian dynasty from the nemesis of vaulting ambition abroad
and problems shelved at home.

Step by step the curse of war came home to roost. Henry V's abler but
less brilliant brother, Bedford, stemmed till his death the rising tide
of English faction and French patriotism. Then the expulsion of the
English from France began, and a long tale of failure discredited the
government. The nation had spirit enough to resent defeat, but not the
means to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war party
in the government resolved itself into a faction fight between
Lancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the government
provoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hirelings instead of
liegemen. Local factions fought with no respect for the law, which was
administered, if at all, in the interests of one or other of the great
factions at court; and these two great factions fostered and organized
local parties till the strife between them grew into the Wars of the
Roses.

Those wars are perhaps the most puzzling episode in English history.
The action of an organized government is comparatively easy to follow,
but it is impossible to analyze the politics of anarchy. The Yorkist
claim to the throne was not the cause of the war; it was, like Edward
III's claim to the throne of France, merely a matter of tactics, and
was only played as a trump card. No political, constitutional, or
religious principle was at stake; and the more peaceable, organized
parts of the community took little share in the struggle. No great
battle was fought south of the Thames, and no town stood a siege. It
looks as though the great military and feudal specialists, whose power
lay principally on the Borders, were engaged in a final internecine
struggle for the control of England, in somewhat the same way as the
Ostmark or East Border of the Empire became Austria, and the Nordmark
or North Border became Prussia, and in turn dominated Germany.
Certainly the defeat of these forces was a victory for southern and
eastern England, and for the commercial and maritime interests on which
its growing wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point in
the wars was not the triumph of Edward IV over the Lancastrians in
1461, but his triumph over Warwick, the kingmaker, ten years later. The
New Monarchy has been plausibly dated from 1471; but Edward IV had not
the political genius to work out in detailed administration the results
of the victory which he owed to his military skill, and Richard III,
who possessed the ability, made himself impossible as a king by the
crimes he had to commit in order to reach the throne. The
reconstruction of English government on a broader and firmer national
basis was therefore left to Henry VII and the House of Tudor.




CHAPTER IV

THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM

1485-1603


England had passed through the Middle Ages without giving any sign of
the greatness which awaited its future development. Edward III and
Henry V had won temporary renown in France, but English sovereigns had
failed to subjugate the smaller countries of Scotland and Ireland,
which were more immediately their concern. Wycliffe and Chaucer, with
perhaps Roger Bacon, are the only English names of first importance in
the realms of medieval thought and literature, unless we put Bede (673-
735) in the Middle Ages; for insular genius does not seem to have
flourished under ecumenical inspiration; and even Wycliffe and Chaucer
may be claimed as products of the national rather than of the catholic
spirit. But with the transition from medieval to modern history, the
conditions were altered in England's favour. The geographical expansion
of Europe made the outposts of the Old World the _entrepôts_ for
the New; the development of navigation and sea-power changed the ocean
from the limit into the link of empires; and the growth of industry and
commerce revolutionized the social and financial foundations of power.
National states were forming; the state which could best adapt itself
to these changed and changing conditions would outdistance its rivals;
and its capacity to adapt itself to them would largely depend on the
strength and flexibility of its national organization. It was the
achievement of the New Monarchy to fashion this organization, and to
rescue the country from an anarchy which had already given other powers
the start in the race and promised little success for England.

Henry VII had to begin in a quiet, unostentatious way with very scanty
materials. With a bad title and many pretenders, with an evil heritage
of social disorder, he must have been sorely tempted to indulge in the
heroics of Henry V. He followed a sounder business policy, and his
reign is dull, because he gave peace and prosperity at home without
fighting a battle abroad. His foreign policy was dictated by insular
interests regardless of personal glory; and the security of his kingdom
and the trade of his people were the aims of all his treaties with
other powers. At home he carefully depressed the over-mighty subjects
who had made the Wars of the Roses; he kept down their number with such
success that he left behind him only one English duke and one English
marquis; he limited their retainers, and restrained by means of the
Star Chamber their habits of maintaining lawbreakers, packing juries,
and intimidating judges. By a careful distribution of fines and
benevolences he filled his exchequer without taxing the mass of his
people; and by giving office to ecclesiastics and men of humble origin
he both secured cheaper and more efficient administration, and
established a check upon feudal influence. He was determined that no
Englishman should build any castle walls over which the English king
could not look, and that, as far as possible, no private person should
possess a franchise in which the king's writ did not run. He left to
his son, Henry VIII, a stable throne and a united kingdom.

The first half of Henry VIII's reign left little mark on English
history. Wolsey played a brilliant but essentially futile part on the
diplomatic stage, where the rivalry and balance of forces between the
Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France helped him to pose as the
arbiter of Christendom. But he obtained no permanent national gains;
and the final result of his foreign policy was to make the emperor
master of the papacy at the moment when Henry wanted the pope to annul
his marriage with the emperor's aunt, Catherine of Aragon. Henry
desired a son to succeed him and to prevent the recurrence of dynastic
wars; he had only a daughter, Mary, and no woman had yet ruled or
reigned in England. The death of all his male children by Catherine
convinced him that his marriage with his deceased brother Arthur's
widow was invalid; and his passion for Anne Boleyn added zest to his
suit for a divorce. The pope could not afford to quarrel with Charles
V, who cared little, indeed, for the cause of his aunt, but much for
his cousin Mary's claim to the English throne; and in 1529 Henry began
the process, completed in the acts of Annates, Appeals, and Supremacy,
by which England severed its connexion with Rome, and the king became
head of an English church.

It is irrational to pretend that so durable an achievement was due to
so transient a cause as Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn or desire for a
son; vaster, older, and more deeply seated forces were at work. In one
sense the breach was simply the ecclesiastical consummation of the
forces which had long been making for national independence, and the
religious complement of the changes which had emancipated the English
state, language, and literature from foreign control.

The Catholic church naturally resisted its disintegration, and the
severance was effected by the secular arms of parliament and the crown.
The nationalism of the English church was the result rather than the
cause of the breach with Rome, and its national characteristics--
supreme governance by the king, the disappearance of cosmopolitan
religious orders, the parliamentary authorization of services in the
vernacular, of English books of Common Prayer, of English versions of
the Bible, and of the Thirty-nine Articles--were all imposed by
parliament after, and not adopted by the church before, the separation.
There were, indeed, no legal means by which the church in England could
have accomplished these things for itself; there were the convocations
of Canterbury and York, but these were two subordinate provinces of the
Catholic church; and, whatever may be said for provincial autonomy in
the medieval church, the only marks of national autonomy were stamped
upon it by the state. York was more independent of Canterbury than
Canterbury was of Rome; and the unity as well as the independence of
the national church depends upon the common subjection of both its
provinces to the crown.  This predominance of state over church was a
consequence of its nationalization; for where the boundaries of the two
coincide, the state generally has the upper hand. The papacy was only
made possible by the fall of the Western Empire; in the Eastern Empire
the state, so long as it survived, controlled the church; and the
independence of the medieval church was due to its catholicity, while
the state at best was only national. It was in defence of the
catholicity, as opposed to the nationalism, of the church that More and
Fisher went to the scaffold in 1535, and nearly the whole bench of
bishops was deprived in 1559. Henry VIII and Elizabeth were bent on
destroying the medieval discord between the Catholic church and the
national state. Catholicity had broken down in the state with the
decline of the empire, and was fast breaking down in the church;
nationalism had triumphed in the state, and was now to triumph in the
church.

In this respect the Reformation was the greatest achievement of the
national state, which emerged from the struggle with no rival for its
omnicompetent authority. Its despotism was the predominant
characteristic of the century, for the national state successfully rid
itself of the checks imposed, on the one hand by the Catholic church,
and on the other by the feudal franchises. But the supremacy was not
exclusively royal; parliament was the partner and accomplice of the
crown. It was the weapon which the Tudors employed to pass Acts of
Attainder against feudal magnates and Acts of Supremacy against the
church; and men complained that despotic authority had merely been
transferred from the pope to the king, and infallibility from the
church to parliament. "Parliament," wrote an Elizabethan statesman,
"establisheth forms of religion...."

But while Englishmen on the whole were pretty well agreed that foreign
jurisdiction was to be eliminated, and that Englishmen were to be
organized in one body, secular and spiritual, which might be called
indifferently a state-church or a church-state, there was much more
difference of opinion with regard to its theological complexion. It
might be Catholic or it might be Protestant in doctrine; and it was far
more difficult to solve this religious problem than to effect the
severance from Rome. There were, indeed, many currents in the stream,
some of them cross-currents, some political, some religious, but all
mingling imperceptibly with one another. The revolt of the nation
against a foreign authority is the most easily distinguished of these
tendencies; another is the revolt of the laity against the clerical
specialist. The church, it must be remembered, was often regarded as
consisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of the
clergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after they
had ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. The
Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of
clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write
and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles,
secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth
and intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done of
military specialists. The essential feature of the reformed services
was that they were compiled in the common tongue and not in the Latin
of ecclesiastical experts, that a Book of _Common_ Prayer was used,
that congregational psalm-singing replaced the sacerdotal solo,
and a communion was substituted for a priestly miracle. Religious
service was to be something rendered by the people themselves, and not
performed for their benefit by the priest.

Individual participation and private judgment in religion were indeed
the essence of Protestantism, which was largely the religious aspect of
the revolt of the individual against the collectivism of the Middle
Ages. The control exercised by the church had, however, been less the
expression of the general will than the discipline by authority of
masses too illiterate to think for themselves. Attendance at public
worship would necessarily be their only form of devotion. But the
general emancipation of servile classes and spread of intelligence by
the Renaissance had led to a demand for vernacular versions of the
Scriptures and to a great deal of private and family religious
exercise, without which there could have been no Protestant
Reformation. Lollardy, which was a violent outburst of this domestic
piety, was never completely suppressed; and it flamed out afresh when
once political reasons, which had led the Lancastrians to support the
church, induced the Tudors to attack it.

Most spiritual of all the factors in the Reformation was the slow and
partial emancipation of men's minds from the materialism of the Middle
Ages. It may seem bold, in face of the vast secularization of church
property and other things in the sixteenth century, to speak of
emancipation from materialism. Nevertheless, there was a distinct step
in the progress of men's minds from that primitive condition of
intelligence in which they can only grasp material symbols of the real
conception. Rudimentary jurisprudence had confessed its inability to
penetrate men's thoughts and differentiate their actions according to
their motives; there had been a time when possession had seemed more
real than property, and when the transference of a right was
incomprehensible without the transference of its concrete symbols.
There could be no gift without its manual conveyance, no marriage
without a ring, no king without a coronation. Many of these material
swaddling-clothes remain and have their value. A national flag
stimulates loyalty, gold lace helps the cause of discipline. Bishop
Gardiner, in the sixteenth century, defended images on the ground that
they were documents all could read, while few could read the
Scriptures. To unimaginative men there could be no priest without
vestments, no worship without ritual, no communion of the Spirit
without the presence of the Body, no temple not made with hands, no God
without an image. To break the image, to abolish the vestments and the
ritual, to deny the transubstantiation, was to destroy the religion and
reverence of the masses, who could only grasp matter and worship with
their senses.

Protestantism was, therefore, not a popular religion, and to thousands
of educated men it did not appeal. Few people are so immaterialistic
that they can dispense with symbols; many can idealize symbols in which
others see nothing but matter; and only those devoid of artistic
perception deny the religious value of sculpture, painting, and music.
Protestantism might be an ideal religion if men were compounded of pure
reason; being what they were, many adopted it because they were
impervious to artistic influence or impatient of spiritual discipline.
It will hardly do to divide the nation into intelligent Protestants and
illiterate Catholics: the point is that the somewhat crude symbolism
which had satisfied the cravings of the average man had ceased to be
sufficient for his newer intelligent needs; he demanded either a higher
symbolism or else as little as possible. Some felt the symbol a help,
others felt it a hindrance to the realization of the ideal; so some men
can see better with, others without, spectacles, but that fact would
hardly justify their abolition.

Henry VIII confined his sympathies to the revolt of the nation against
Rome and the revolt of the laity against the priests. The former he
used to make himself Supreme Head of the church, the latter to subdue
convocation and despoil the monasteries. All civilized countries have
found it expedient sooner or later to follow his example with regard to
monastic wealth; and there can be little doubt that the withholding of
so much land and so many men and women from productive purposes impeded
the material prosperity of the nation. But the devotion of the proceeds
to the foundation of private families, instead of to educational
endowment, can only be explained and not excused by the exigencies of
political tactics. His real services were political, not religious. He
taught England a good deal of her insular confidence; he proclaimed the
indivisible and indisputable sovereignty of the crown in parliament; he
not only incorporated Wales and the county palatine of Chester with
England, and began the English re-organization of Ireland, but he
united England north with England south of the Humber, and consolidated
the Borders, those frayed edges of the national state. He carried on
the work of Henry II and Edward I, and by subduing rival jurisdictions
stamped a final unity on the framework of the government.

The advisers of Edward VI embarked on the more difficult task of making
this organization Protestant; and the haste with which they, and
especially Northumberland, pressed on the change provoked first
rebellion in 1549 and then reaction under Mary. They were also
confronted with social discontent arising out of the general
substitution of competition for custom as the ruling economic
principle. Capital amassed in trade was applied to land, which began to
be treated as a source of money, not a source of men. Land held in
severalty was found more profitable than land held in common, large
estates than small holdings, and wool-growing than corn-growing. Small
tenants were evicted, small holdings consolidated, commons enclosed,
and arable land converted to pasture. The mass of the agricultural
population became mere labourers without rights of property on the soil
they tilled; thousands lost employment and swelled the ranks of sturdy
beggars; and sporadic disorder came to a head in Kett's rebellion in
Norfolk in 1549, which was with difficulty suppressed. But even this
highhanded expropriation of peasants by their landlords stimulated
national development. It created a vagrant mobile mass of labour, which
helped to meet the demands of new industrial markets and to feed
English oversea enterprise. A race that sticks like a limpet to the
soil may be happy but cannot be great; and the ejection of English
peasants from their homesteads saved them from the reproach of home-
keeping youths that they have ever homely wits.

Mary's reign, however, checked the national impulse towards expansion,
and thrust England for the moment back into the Middle Ages. First she
put herself and her kingdom under the aegis of Spain, to which in heart
and mind she belonged, by marrying Philip II. Then with his assistance
she restored the papal jurisdiction, and England surrendered its
national independence. Those who repudiated their foreign jurisdiction
were naturally treated as contumacious by the papal courts in England
and sent to the stake; and English adventurers were prohibited, in the
interests of Spain and Portugal, from trespassing in the New World.
Finally England was plunged into war with France in order to help
Philip, and lost Calais for its pains. Mary's reign showed that in a
sovereign good intentions and upright conversation exaggerate rather
than redeem the evil effects of bigotry and blindness. She had,
however, made it impossible for any successor to perpetuate in England
the Roman jurisdiction and the patronage of Spain.

Elizabeth was a sovereign more purely British in blood than any other
since the Norman Conquest; and to her appropriately fell the task of
completing her country's national independence. Henry VIII's Act of
Supremacy and Edward VI's of Uniformity were restored with some
modifications, in spite of the opposition of the Catholic bishops, who
contended that a nation had no right to deal independently with
ecclesiastical matters, and suffered deprivation and imprisonment
rather than recognize a schismatic national church. Elizabeth rejected
Philip's offers of marriage and paid no heed to his counsels of state.
She scandalized Catholic Europe by assisting the revolted Scots to
expel the French from North Britain; and revenged the contempt, in
which England had been held in Mary's reign, by supporting with
impunity the Dutch against Philip II and the Huguenots against the king
of France. She concealed her aggressions with diplomatic artifice and
caution; but at heart she was with her people, who lost no opportunity,
in their new-found confidence, of plundering and insulting the Catholic
powers in their way.

The astonishing success of England amid the novel conditions of
national rivalry requires some attempt at explanation. It seems to have
been due to the singular flexibility of the English character and
national system, and to the consequent ease with which they adapted
themselves to changing environment. Indeed, whatever may be the case at
present, a survey of English history suggests that the conventional
stolidity ascribed to John Bull was the least obvious of his
characteristics; and even to-day the only people who never change their
mind at general elections are the mercurial Celts. Certainly England
has never suffered from that rigidity of social system which has
hampered in the past the adaptability of its rivals. Even in feudal
times there was little law about status; and when the customary
arrangement of society in two agricultural classes of landlord and
tenant was modified by commerce, capitalism, and competition, nobles
adapted themselves to the change with some facility. They took to
sheep-farming and commercial speculations, just as later on they took
to keeping dairy-shops. It is the smallness rather than the source of
his profits that excites social prejudice against the shopkeeper in
England. On the Continent, however, class feeling prevented the
governing classes from participating in the expansion of commerce.
German barons, for instance, often with only a few florins a year
income, could not supplement it by trade; all they could do was to rob
the traders, robbery being a thoroughly genteel occupation. Hence
foreign governments were, as a rule, less alive and less responsive to
the commercial interests of their subjects. Philip II trampled on
commercial opinion in a way no English sovereign could have done.
Indeed, complaints were raised in England at the extent to which the
commercial classes had the ear of parliament and the crown; since the
accession of Henry VIII, it was said in 1559, they had succeeded by
their secret influence in procuring the rejection of every bill they
thought injurious to their interests.

There was no feeling of caste to obstruct the efficiency of English
administration. The nobility were separated from the nation by no fixed
line; there never was in England a nobility of blood, for all the sons
of a noble except the eldest were commoners. And while they were
constantly sinking into the mass of the nation, commoners frequently
rose to the rank of nobility. Before the end of the fourteenth century
wealth derived from trade had become an avenue to the House of Lords.
The justices of the peace, on whom the Tudors relied for local
administration, were largely descended from successful city men who
had, like the Walsinghams, planted themselves out in the country; and
Elizabeth herself was great-great-granddaughter of a London mayor. This
social elasticity enabled the government to avail itself of able men of
all classes, and the efficiency of Tudor administration was mainly due
to these recruits, whose genius would have been elsewhere neglected.
Further, it provided the government with agents peculiarly fitted by
training and knowledge to deal with the commercial problems which were
beginning to fill so large a sphere in politics; and finally, it
rendered the government singularly responsive to the public opinion of
the classes upon whose welfare depended the expansion of England.

Englishmen likewise took to the sea, when the sea became all-important,
as readily as they took to trade. English command of the Narrow Seas
had laid France open to the invasions of Edward III and Henry V, and
had checked the tide of French reconquest before the walls of Calais.
English piracy in the Channel was notorious in the fifteenth century,
and in the sixteenth it attained patriotic proportions. Henry VII had
encouraged Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland, but the papal partition of
new-found lands between Spain and Portugal barred to England the door
of legitimate, peaceful expansion; and there can be little doubt that
this prohibition made many converts to Protestantism among English
seafaring folk. Even Mary could not prevent her subjects from preying
on Spanish and Portuguese commerce and colonies; and with Elizabeth's
accession preying grew into a national pastime. Hawkins broke into
Spanish monopoly in the West Indies, Drake burst into their Pacific
preserves, and circumvented their defences; and a host of followers
plundered nearly every Spanish and Portuguese colony.

At last Philip was provoked into a naval war for which the English were
and he was not prepared. Spanish rigidity embraced the Spanish marine
as well as Spanish theology. Clinging to Mediterranean and medieval
traditions, Spain had failed to realize the conditions of sea-power or
naval tactics. England, on the other hand, had, largely under the
inspiration of Henry VIII, adapted its navy to oceanic purposes. A type
of vessel had been evolved capable of crossing the ocean, of
manoeuvring and of fighting under sail; to Drake the ship had become
the fighting unit, to the Duke of Medina Sidonia a ship was simply a
vehicle for soldiers, and a sea-fight was simply a land-fight on sea.
The crowning illustration of Spain's incapacity to adapt itself to new
conditions is perhaps the fact that only a marquis or duke could be
made a Spanish admiral.

England had disposed of similar claims to political and military
authority in 1569, when medieval feudalism made its last bid for the
control of English policy. For ten years Elizabeth had been guided by
Sir William Cecil, a typical "new man" of Tudor making, who hoped to
wean the common people from dependence upon their lords, and to
complete the destruction of feudal privileges which still impeded the
action of national sovereignty. The flight of Mary Queen of Scots into
England in 1568 provided a focus for noble discontent with Cecil's
rule, and the northern earls rebelled in 1569. The rebellion was easily
suppressed, but its failure did not deter the Duke of Norfolk, the
earls' accomplice, from joining Ridolfi's plot with similar ends. He
was brought to the block in 1572, and in him perished the last
surviving English duke. For more than half a century England had to do
its best--defeat the Spanish Armada, conquer Ireland, circumnavigate
the globe, lay the foundations of empire, produce the literature of the
Elizabethan age--without any ducal assistance. It was left for James I,
who also created the rank of baronet in order to sell the title (1611),
to revive the glories of ducal dignity in the persons of Ludovic
Stuart, Duke of Richmond, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham
(1623).

Cecil's drastic methods of dealing with the opposition lords left the
door of government open to men like Walsingham, who were determined to
give full play to the new forces in English politics. Discontented
reactionaries were reduced to impotent silence, or driven abroad to
side openly with the enemy. Pius V's bull excommunicating and deposing
Elizabeth (1570) shattered in a similar way the old Catholic party. The
majority acquiesced in the national religion; the extremists fled to
become conspirators at foreign courts or Jesuit and missionary priests.
The antagonism between England and Spain in the New World did more,
perhaps, than Spanish Catholicism to make Philip the natural patron of
these exiles and of their plots against the English government; and as
Spain and England drew apart, England and France drew together. In 1572
a defensive alliance was formed between them, and there seemed a
prospect of their co-operation to drive the Spaniards out of the
Netherlands. But Catholic France resented this Huguenot policy, and the
massacre of St. Bartholomew put a violent end to the scheme, while
Elizabeth and Philip patched up a truce for some years. There could,
however, be no permanent compromise, on the one hand, between Spanish
exclusiveness and the determination of Englishmen to force open the
door of the New World and, on the other, between English nationalism
and the papal resolve to reconquer England for the Catholic church.
Philip made common cause with the papacy and with its British champion,
Mary Queen of Scots, while Englishmen made common cause with Philip's
revolted subjects in the Netherlands. The acquisition of Portugal, its
fleet, and its colonial empire by Philip in 1580, the assassination of
William of Orange in 1584, and the victories of Alexander of Parma in
the Netherlands forced Elizabeth into decisive action. The Dutch were
taken under her wing, a national expedition led by Drake paralyzed
Spanish dominion in the West Indies in 1585 and then destroyed Philip's
fleet at Cadiz in 1587, and the Queen of Scots was executed.

At last Philip attempted a tardy retaliation with the Spanish Armada.
Its naval inefficiency was matched by political miscalculations. Philip
never imagined that a united England could be conquered; but he
laboured under the delusion, spread by English Catholic exiles, that
the majority of the English people only awaited a signal to rise
against their queen. When this delusion was exploded and the naval
incompetence of Spain exposed, his dreams of conquest vanished, and he
continued the war merely in the hope of securing guarantees against
English interference in the New World, in the Netherlands, and in
France, where he was helping the Catholic League to keep Henry of
Navarre off the French throne. Ireland, however, was his most promising
sphere of operations. There religious and racial hostility to the
English was fusing discordant Irish septs into an Irish nation, and the
appearance of a Spanish expedition was the signal for something like a
national revolt. England had not been rich enough in men or money to
give Ireland a really efficient government, but the extent of the
danger in 1598-1602 stimulated an effort which resulted in the first
real conquest of Ireland; and Englishmen set themselves to do the same
work, with about the same amount of benevolence, for the Irish that the
Normans had done for the Anglo-Saxons.

So far Tudor monarchy had proved an adequate exponent of English
nationalism, because nationalism had been concerned mainly with the
external problems of defence against foreign powers and jurisdictions.
But with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the urgency of those
problems passed away; and during the last fifteen years of Elizabeth's
reign national feelings found increasing expression in parliament and
in popular literature. In all forms of literature, but especially in
the Shakespearean drama, the keynote of the age was the evolution of a
national spirit and technique, and their emancipation from the
influence of classical and foreign models. In domestic politics a rift
appeared between the monarchy and the nation. For one thing the
alliance, forged by Henry VIII between the crown and parliament,
against the church, was being changed into an alliance between the
crown and church against the parliament, because parliament was
beginning to give expression to democratic ideas of government in state
and church which threatened the principle of personal rule common to
monarchy and to episcopacy. "No Bishop, no King," was a shrewd aphorism
of James I, which was in the making before he reached the throne. In
other respects--such as monopolies, the power of the crown to levy
indirect taxation without consent of parliament, to imprison subjects
without cause shown, and to tamper with the privileges of the House of
Commons--the royal prerogative was called in question. Popular
acquiescence in strong personal monarchy was beginning to waver now
that the need for it was disappearing with the growing security of
national independence. People could afford the luxuries of liberty and
party strife when their national existence was placed beyond the reach
of danger; and a national demand for a greater share of self-
government, which was to wreck the House of Stuart, was making itself
heard before, on March 24, 1603, the last sovereign of the line which
had made England a really national state passed away.




CHAPTER V

THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT

1603-1815


National independence and popular self-government, although they were
intimately associated as the two cardinal dogmas of nineteenth-century
liberalism, are very different things; and the achievement of complete
national independence under the Tudors did not in the least involve any
solution of the question of popular self-government. Still, that
achievement had been largely the work of the nation itself, and a
nation which had braved the spiritual thunders of the papacy and the
temporal arms of Philip II would not be naturally submissive under
domestic tyranny. Perhaps the fact that James I was an alien hastened
the admonition, which parliament addressed to him in the first session
of the reign, to the effect that it was not prepared to tolerate in him
many things which, on account of her age and sex, it had overlooked in
Elizabeth.

Parliament began the constitutional conflict thus foreshadowed with no
clear constitutional theory; and its views only crystallized under
pressure of James I's pretensions. James possessed an aptitude for
political speculation, which was rendered all the more dangerous by the
facilities he enjoyed for putting his theories into practice. He tried
to reduce monarchy to a logical system, and to enforce that system as
practical politics. He had succeeded to the English throne in spite of
Henry VIII's will, which had been given the force of a parliamentary
statute, and in spite of the common law which disabled an alien from
inheriting English land. His only claim was by heredity, which had
never been legally recognized to the exclusion of other principles of
succession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to such
mundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and the
obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and
he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary
principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his theory
of divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divine
right which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which was not
necessarily hereditary, but might be varied by the God of battles, as
at Bosworth. It must also be distinguished from the Catholic theory,
which gave the church a voice in the election and deposition of kings.
According to James's view, Providence had not merely ordained the king
_de facto_, but had pre-ordained the kings that were to be, by
selecting heredity as the principle by which the succession was to be
determined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyond
the power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justice
or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliament
could no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his
authority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. From
this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was
absolute; the king could do no wrong for which his subjects could call
him to account; he was responsible to God but not to man--a doctrine
which the Reformation had encouraged by proclaiming the Royal Supremacy
over the church. He might, if he chose, make concessions to his people,
and a wise sovereign like himself would respect the concessions of his
predecessors. But parliamentary and popular privileges existed by royal
grace; they could not be claimed as rights.

This dogmatic assurance, to which the Tudors had never resorted,
embittered parliamentary opposition and obscured the historical
justification for many of James's claims. Historically, there was much
more to be said for the contention that parliament existed by grace of
the monarchy than for the counterclaim that the monarchy existed by
grace of parliament; and for the plea that parliament only possessed
such powers as the crown had granted, than for the counter-assertion
that the crown only enjoyed such rights as parliament had conceded. Few
of James's arbitrary acts could not be justified by precedent, and not
a little of his unpopularity was due to his efforts to exact from local
gentry the performance of duties which had been imposed upon them by
earlier parliaments. The main cause of dissatisfaction was the growing
popular conviction that constitutional weapons, used by the Tudors for
national purposes, were now being used by the Stuarts in the interests
of the monarchy against those of the nation; and as the breach widened,
the more the Stuarts were led to rely on these weapons and on their
theory of the divine right of kings, and the more parliament was driven
to insist upon its privileges and upon an alternative theory to that of
James I.

This alternative theory was difficult to elaborate. There was no idea
of democracy. Complete popular self-government is, indeed, impossible;
for the mass of men cannot rule, and the actual administration must
always be in the hands of a comparatively few experts. The problem was
and is how to control them and where to limit their authority; and this
is a question of degree. In 1603 no one claimed that ministers were
responsible to any one but the king; administration was his exclusive
function. It was, however, claimed that parliamentary sanction must be
obtained for the general principles upon which the people were to be
governed--that is to say, for legislation. The crown might appoint what
bishops it pleased, but it could not repeal the Act of Uniformity; it
might make war or peace, but could not impose direct and general
taxation; it selected judges, but they could only condemn men to death
or imprisonment for offences recognized by the law. The subject was not
at the mercy of the king except when he placed himself outside the law.

The disadvantage, however, of an unwritten constitution is that there
are always a number of cases for which the law does not provide; and
there were many more in the seventeenth century than there are to-day.
These cases constituted the debatable land between the crown and
parliament. Parliament assumed that the crown could neither diminish
parliamentary privilege nor develop its own prerogative without
parliamentary sanction; and it read this assumption back into history.
Nothing was legal unless it had been sanctioned by parliament; unless
the crown could vouch a parliamentary statute for its claims they were
denounced as void. This theory would have disposed of much of the
constitution, including the crown itself; even parliament had grown by
precedent rather than by statute. There were, as always, precedents on
both sides. The question was, which were the precedents of growth and
which were those of decay? That could only be decided by the force of
circumstances, and the control of parliament over the national purse
was the decisive factor in the situation.

The Stuarts, indeed, were held in a cleft stick. Their revenue was
steadily decreasing because the direct taxes, instead of growing with
the nation's income, had remained fixed amounts since the fourteenth
century, and the real value of those amounts declined rapidly with the
influx of precious metals from the New World. Yet the expense of
government automatically and inevitably increased, and disputes over
foreign policy, over the treatment of Roman Catholics, over episcopal
jurisdiction, over parliamentary privileges, and a host of minor
matters made the Commons more and more reluctant to fill the empty
Treasury. The blunt truth is that people will not pay for what they do
not consider their concern; and Stuart government grew less and less a
popular affair. The more the Stuarts demanded, the greater the
obstacles they encountered in securing compliance.

James I levied additional customs which were called impositions, and
the judges in 1606 properly decided that these were legal. But they
increased James's unpopularity; and, as a precaution, parliament would
only grant Charles I tonnage and poundage (the normal customs duties)
for one year after his accession instead of for life. Charles contended
that parliament had, owing to non-user, lost the right of refusing
these supplies to the crown; he proceeded t