duty of the travelling justices to inquire into the wardenship of castles.

Thus Henry disarmed the nobles by allowing scutage and by keeping hold of their castles, while at the same time he armed the English people. In this manner he based his system of government on sound guarantees.

Forest Laws.

The Forest Laws are the only part of Henry's legislation which is at all oppressive. Even before the Conquest the forests had been regarded as outside the scope of the common law of the realm, and Henry I. had claimed supreme jurisdiction over them, whether on his own lands or not. Henry II. put them under a law of their own, and appointed special justices for them. He forbade anyone dwelling in his forests to have bows, arrows, or dogs, without special warrant; none were to touch his wild beasts; no benefit of clergy was to save a priest who was found hunting in his forest; and the master forester had power to summon all the neighbouring nobles to a forest-court. But still he did not deny to the common people their ancient right of estovers, that is of cutting wood in his forests, provided it were done without damage, and under the oversight of the foresters; and he forbade his foresters to vex his knights or other honest men.

Henry II. is described to us as a man of middle height, strongly made, and corpulent. He was fair-haired, and his otherwise handsome face was too red. His eyes Personal

seemed to flash fire when he was angry, and his character of anger when roused was furious. He was a man Henry II. of powerful character, with naturally strong affections and passions, a character capable of much good, but which when thwarted turned to evil. His fatal marriage with Eleanor of Poitou, while it laid the foundations of his wealth and outward greatness, also prepared the way for the miseries of his later life. Eleanor was the divorced wife of Louis VII., king of France, and therefore the marriage was regarded even in that day as an iniquitous one, nor did men fail to trace its unhappy results to the wrong which it was in itself. It was a marriage of interest, and the king ceased to care for his wife, neglected her, and led an immoral life. Whilst passionately fond of his children, he spoilt them, and, as might be expected in such a union, they grew up without reverence

for him, and at last broke his heart by their unfilial conduct. Yet though during his long reign the evil side of his character seemed to develope, Henry remained to the last a man intellectually superior to most of his contemporaries. His ceaseless activity, when not employed on the affairs of his dominions or seeking recreation in hunting, found exercise in discussing knotty questions with learned clerks, or in reading history. Though generally very successful as a soldier, he disliked bloodshed, and always avoided war when he thought negotiations could serve his end. William of Newburgh says of him that he was a most earnest maintainer of the public peace; a faithful defender of ecclesiastic properties and liberties; a faithful guardian of widows and orphans; and that he never imposed any heavy burden on England or his transmarine dominions, except on the occasion of the Saladin tithe which he imposed for an intended crusade in 1188. Writing in the reign of his son Richard, he says that this man who when living was hated by almost all, is now called an excellent and useful sovereign; for the excessive exactions of the following reign have made his burthens seem small.

When we read Henry II.'s life, we cannot refrain from the judgment that he was a very bad man, selfish, violent, cunning, licentious, faithless, cruel at times. Yet when we look at the works which he left behind him, the system of justice organised, the guarantees of orderly government established, we are obliged to say that few English kings have done so much good. The contradiction is illustrated by what we see in other walks of life. We see sometimes a splendid poet or painter, whose private character is disgraced by the worst vices; yet these drunken and dissolute men have an irresistible instinct of art working within them, which enables them to bring forth enduring creations of loveliness in spite of the forces which are ever dragging them downwards. In like manner Henry Il. was an artist of justice and order. The power of governing, of arranging, worked in him like a persistent instinct, which even his violent passions could not quench. He had genius; and while as a mere man he lived for base personal ends, gratifying his passions ruthlessly, not ashamed of any means of extorting money, nor shrinking from any devices, base or viclent, to gain his ends, his

genius made him the watchful guardian of his people, the organiser of a systematised justice to supersede the feudal jurisdictions, the contriver of guarantees against the power of the nobles, the builder of dykes to hold back the noisome inundations of the Loire. In 1170, when he removed all the sheriffs from office, he consulted his people's interest as well as his own, for not only was it chiefly in consequence of their complaints that the matter was inquired into, but the outgoing sheriffs were obliged to make satisfaction to the parties aggrieved; a fact which shows that Henry did care for justice in itself.

Fusion of

As we see Henry II. playing off the English people against the nobles, we want to know whether English and Normans still form two distinct nations, as they did in the days of William I. We have some English and evidence that the higher nobility still gloried in Normans. their Norman descent, and nourished feelings of contempt towards the common people. They wished Battle Abbey to be maintained as a sign of their triumph over the English. On the other hand we are told on very good authority, toward the end of Henry's reign, that the English and Normans had now dwelt so long together, and intermarried so frequently, that it was almost impossible to say of the younger generation whether they were Norman or English. Thus the fusion of the two races as a whole was being accomplished; and so was the long delayed fusion between the different parts of England. After the accession of Henry II. we hear no more of the old threefold division of England into Wessex, Mercia, and Danelaw. But this fusion of England into one nation did not yet express itself by a fusion of language. Let us briefly glance at the history of the English language.

In the lips of our fathers, before the Norman Conquest, the Old-English language had been a noble instrument of poetry; in it had been sung the great The English events of English history, the glory of her kings language. and warriors, and the best wisdom of English common sense or English piety. For many centuries there was a standard literature, which fixed the grammar, so that the written language underwent no important changes. But even before the Conquest, signs of change began to show themselves.

The English language, thanks in great measure to the im pulse given by King Alfred, had become a cultivated booklanguage sooner than any other European tongue. But this premature blossom was doomed to wither before the overwhelming influence of the Latin language, then the language of European literature, science, and history, and of the Church. When English was banished from the Norman court, it was no longer able to make head against the tide. It fell back into obscurity and localism. English historians and men of science wrote in Latin for the learned; English poets who aspired to court favour rimed in Norman French. Nevertheless, for at least a century and a half after the Norman Conquest, the English language had an independent life of its own, almost unaffected by French influence. The old national legends were still sung in the streets and at the alehouses; and there were men who collected and wrote them down. The monks of Peterborough steadily carried on their chronicle in English up to the accession of Henry II. Priests went on preaching their sermons in English, and making English versions of the Gospels and English lives of the saints, that unlearned men might understand them. And about the end of the twelfth century, the English priest of Arley-on-Severn, Layamon, chaplain to the good knight of that place, must needs translate into English the fashionable poem of the day, the already twice-cooked romance in which the Norman poet Wace, translating from the Welshman Geoffry of Monmouth, had rimed a cock-and-bull history of Britain, in which Layamon's own ancestors were made to cut but a sorry figure, and to be always running away from the victorious Britons. But this book was in fashion, and even Arley-on-Severn must follow the fashion.

The English history, sermons, and poems of the twelfth century which have come down to us are all written in different dialects. There is no longer a standard English; each county is going its own way, developing its own dialect in its own fashion. But though differing in many things, these dialects are all alike in two. They are all still unmixed with French words; the well of English is as yet undefiled; and they are all more or less careless about the inflectional changes. This carelessness was already beginning to appear before the Norman Conquest. In the older and purer English,

which we now call Anglo-Saxon, the endings of words were all important to the grammar and to the sense. All nouns and verbs had their fixed changes, inflections as we call them. In the case of nouns we have kept only a remnant of an inflection, the plural in s, and a few survivals of plurals in en; and we have either dropped or in great part changed the old inflections of the verbs. This is a change which nearly always takes place in a language as it grows old. People get careless about the endings of words, and they drop them and use other words to make their meaning clear. The Norman Conquest, therefore, was not greatly to blame for the changed English of the twelfth century; the change would have come even without the Conquest, though it was doubtless hastened by the loss of an English court, a centre and standard of English.

It was not till the close of the thirteenth century that any real fusion began to take place between the language of the conquerors and that of the conquered. To trace the history of this fusion, and the rise of modern English, would therefore carry us beyond the limits of the period which now occupies us. The English writers of the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century, such as Layamon and Orm, are not heralds of the future as regards their language, but echoes of the past.' The old native English had to accept an immense infusion of foreign words, to its great gain in some respects, its great loss in others, before the language which we now speak could grow up.

In a literary point of view, the English writers of the twelfth century scarcely call for mention. Layamon's version of Wace is spirited, sometimes nervous and English literhythmical; he makes many additions of his rature. own, and shows a thoroughly English tendency to moralise and improve the occasion. But he is far below the standard of Anglo-Saxon poetry. A poem on the Grave, supposed to have been written in the twelfth century, has much more of the weird and solemn ring of Teutonic genius. We cannot say that no good English poetry existed in the twelfth century because so little has come down to us; for we know that the English originals of many romances, such as 'Horn,'

1 See Morris's Outlines of English Accidence, p. 338. for the very small infusion of words of Romance origin in Layamon.