bound the prelacy and people together, and its action, when at the end of Henry's reign it started into a power strong enough to save England from anarchy, has been felt in our history ever since.

From this revival of English feeling Henry himself stood jealously aloof; but the enthusiasm which his marriage had excited enabled him to defy the claims of his brother and the disaffection of his nobles. Robert landed at Portsmouth to find himself face to face with an English army which Anselm's summons had gathered round the King; and his retreat left Henry free to deal sternly with the rebel barons. Robert of Belesme, the son of Roger of Montgomery, was now their chief; but 60,000 English footmen followed the king through the rough passes which led to Shrewsbury, and an early surrender alone saved Robert's life. Master of his own realm and enriched by the confiscated lands of the revolted baronage, Henry crossed into Normandy, where the misgovernment of Robert had alienated the clergy and trades, and where the outrages of the Norman nobles forced the more peaceful classes to call the King to their aid. On the field of Tenchebray his forces met those of the Duke, and a decisive English victory on Norman soil avenged the shame of Hastings. The conquered duchy became a dependency of the English crown, and Henry's energies were frittered away through a quarter of a century in crushing its revolts, the hostility of the French, and the efforts of his nephew, William the son of Robert, to regain the crown which his father had lost at Tenchebray. In England, however, all was peace. The vigorous administration of Henry the First completed in fullest detail the system of government which the Conqueror had sketched. The vast estates which had fallen to the Crown through revolt and forfeiture were granted out to new men dependent on royal favor. On the ruins of the great feudatories whom he had crushed the King built up a class of lesser nobles, whom the older barons of the Conquest looked down on in scorn, but who formed a counterbalancing force and furnished a class of useful administrators whom Henry employed as his sheriffs and judges. A new organization of justice and finance bound the kingdom together under the royal administration. The clerks of the royal chapel were formed into a body of secretaries or royal ministers, whose head bore the title of Chan

cellor. Above them stood the Justiciar, or lieutenant-general of the kingdom, who in the frequent absence of the King acted as Regent, and whose staff, selected from the barons connected with the royal household, were formed into a Supreme Court of the realm. The King's Court, as this was called, permanently represented the whole court of royal vassals, which had hitherto been summoned thrice in the year. As the royal council, it revised and registered laws, and its "counsel and consent," though merely formal, preserved the principle of the older popular legislation. As a court of justice it formed the highest court of appeal: it could call up any suit from a lower tribunal on the application of a suitor, while the union of several sheriffdoms under some of its members connected it closely with the local courts. As a financial body, its chief work lay in the assessment and collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took the name of the Court of Exchequer from the chequered table, much like a chess-board, at which it sat, and on which accounts were rendered. In their financial capacity its justices became "barons of the Exchequer." Twice every year the sheriff of each county appeared before these barons and rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, the Danegeld or land tax, the fines of the local courts, the feudal aids from the baronial estates, which formed the chief part of the royal revenue. Local disputes respecting these payments or the assessment of the town-rents were settled by a detachment of barons from the court who made the circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal visitations led to the judicial visitations, the "judges' circuits," which still form so marked a feature in our legal system.

From this work of internal reform Henry's attention was called suddenly by one terrible loss to the question of the succession to the throne. His son William "the Ætheling," as the English fondly styled the child of their own Matilda, had with a crowd of nobles accompanied the King on his return from Normandy; but the White Ship in which he had embarked lingered behind the rest of the royal fleet while the young nobles, excited with wine, hung over the ship's side and chased away with taunts the priest who came to give the customary benediction. At last the guards of the King's treasure pressed the vessel's departure, and, driven by the arms of fifty rowers,, it swept swiftly out to sea. All at once

the ship's side struck on a rock at the mouth of the harbor, and in an instant it sank beneath the waves. One terrible cry, ringing through the stillness of the night, was heard by the royal fleet; but it was not till the morning that the fatal news reached the King. He fell unconscious to the ground, and rose never to smile again. Henry had no other son, and the whole circle of his foreign foes closed round him the more fiercely that the son of Robert was now his natural heir. The king hated William, while he loved Matilda, the daughter who still remained to him, who had been married to the Emperor Henry the Fifth, and whose husband's death now restored her to her father. He recognized her as his heir, though the succession of a woman seemed strange to the feudal baronage; nobles and priests were forced to swear allegiance to her as their future mistress, and Henry affianced her to the son of the one foe he really feared, Count Fulk of Anjou.

Section VII.-England and Anjou, 870-1154.*

To understand the history of England under its Angevin rulers, we must first know something of the Angevins themselves. The character and the policy of Henry the Second and his sons were as much a heritage of their race as the broad lands of Anjou. The fortunes of England were being slowly wrought out in every incident of the history of the Counts, as the descendants of a Breton woodman became masters not of Anjou only, but of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of Gascony

* Authorities.-The chief documents for Angevin history have been collected in the "Chroniques d'Anjou," published by the Historical Society of France (Paris, 1856–1871). The best known of these is the "Gesta Consulum," a compilation of the twelfth century (given also by D'Achery, "Spicilegium," 4to. vol. x. p. 534), in which the earlier romantic traditions are simply dressed up into historical shape by copious quotations from the French historians. Save for the reigns of Geoffry Martel, and Fulk of Jerusalem, it is nearly valueless. The short autobiography of Fulk Rechin is the most authentic memorial of the earlier Angevin history; and much can be gleaned from the verbose life of Geoffry the Handsome by John of Marmoutier. For England, Orderic and the Chronicle die out in the midst of Stephen's reign; here, too, end William of Malmesbury, Huntingdon, the Gesta Stephani," a record in great detail by one of Stephen's clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers, who are most valuable for its opening (published by Mr. Raine for the Surtees Society). The blank in our historical literature extends over the first years of Henry the Second. The lives and letters of Beket have been industriously collected and published by Canon Robertson in the Rolls Series.

and Auvergne, of Aquitaine and Normandy, and sovereigns at last of the great realm which Normandy had won. The legend of the father of their race carries us back to the times of our own Ælfred, when the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they ravaged along Thames. In the heart of the Breton border, in the debatable land between France and Britanny, dwelt Tortulf the Forester, half-brigand, half-hunter as the gloomy days went, living in free outlaw fashion in the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in his rough forest school "how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground, to bear hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter's frost, how to fear nothing save ill-fame." Following King Charles the Bald in his struggle with the Danes, the woodman won broad lands along Loire, and his son Ingelger, who had swept the northmen from Touraine and the land to the west, which they had burned and wasted into a vast solitude, became the first Count of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulf and Ingelger is a mere creation of some twelfth century jongleur, and the earliest Count whom history recognizes is Fulk the Red. Fulk attached himself to the Dukes of France who were now drawing nearer to the throne, and received from them in guerdon the county of Anjou. The story of his son is a story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-storms of his house. Alone of his race Fulk the Good waged no wars: his delight was to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called "Canon." One Martinmas eve Fulk was singing there in clerkly guise when the king, Louis d'Outremer, entered the church. "He sings like a priest," laughed the King, as his nobles pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon; but Fulk was ready with his reply. "Know, my lord," wrote the Count of Anjou, "that a king unlearned is a crowned ass." Fulk was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, governing, enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every corner of the wasted land. To him alone of his race men gave the title of "the Good."

Himself in character little more than a bold dashing soldier, Fulk's son, Geoffry Grey-gown, sank almost into a vassal of his powerful neighbors, the Counts of Blois and Champagne. The vassalage was roughly shaken off by his successor. Fulk Nerra, Fulk the Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in whom we can trace that marked type of character which their house was to preserve with a fatal constancy

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through two hundred years. He was without natural affection. In his youth he burnt a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led her to her doom decked out in his gayest attire. In his old age he waged his bitterest war against his son, and exacted from him when vanquished a humiliation which men reserved for the deadliest of their foes. "You are conquered, you are conquered!" shouted the old man in fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled and saddled like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his father's feet. In Fulk first appeared the low type of superstition which startled even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets. Robber as he was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, the fear of the judgment drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. Barefoot and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a halter through the streets of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of penitence. He rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from utter ruin, by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him of his land. He secured the terrified friendship of the French king by despatching twelve assassins to cut down before his eyes the minister who had troubled it. Familiar as the age was with treason and rapine and blood, it recoiled from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed the wrath of heaven to have been revealed against the union of the worst forms of evil in Fulk the Black. But neither the wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his success.

At his accession Anjou was the least important of the greater provinces of France. At his death in 1040 it stood, if not in extent, at least in real power, first among them all. Coolheaded, clear-sighted, quick to resolve, quicker to strike, Fulk's career was one long series of victories over all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and he had the gift of personal bravery, which was denied to some of his greatest descendants. There was a moment in the first of his battles when the day seemed lost for Anjou; a feigned retreat of the Bretons had drawn the Angevin horsemen into a line of hidden pitfalls, and the Count himself was flung heavily to the ground. Dragged from the medley of men and horses, he swept down almost singly on the foe "as a storm-wind" (so ran the pæan of the Angevins) "sweeps down on the thick corn-rows," and