THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

FROM THE ACCESSION OF HENRY III.

TO THE DEATH OF EDWARD III.

(1216-1377)

BY

T.F. TOUT, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN HISTORY IN THE

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND

IN TWELVE VOLUMES

Seventy-six years have passed since Lingard completed his
HISTORY OF ENGLAND, which ends with the Revolution of 1688. During
that period historical study has made a great advance. Year after
year the mass of materials for a new History of England has
increased; new lights have been thrown on events and characters,
and old errors have been corrected. Many notable works have been
written on various periods of our history; some of them at such
length as to appeal almost exclusively to professed historical
students. It is believed that the time has come when the advance
which has been made in the knowledge of English history as a whole
should be laid before the public in a single work of fairly
adequate size. Such a book should be founded on independent thought
and research, but should at the same time be written with a full
knowledge of the works of the best modern historians and with a
desire to take advantage of their teaching wherever it appears
sound.

The vast number of authorities, printed and in manuscript, on
which a History of England should be based, if it is to represent
the existing state of knowledge, renders co-operation almost
necessary and certainly advisable. The History, of which this
volume is an instalment, is an attempt to set forth in a readable
form the results at present attained by research. It will consist
of twelve volumes by twelve different writers, each of them chosen
as being specialty capable of dealing with the period which he
undertakes, and the editors, while leaving to each author as free a
hand as possible, hope to insure a general similarity in method of
treatment, so that the twelve volumes may in their contents, as
well as in their outward appearance, form one History.

As its title imports, this History will primarily deal with
politics, with the History of England and, after the date of the
union with Scotland, Great Britain, as a state or body politic; but
as the life of a nation is complex, and its condition at any given
time cannot be understood without taking into account the various
forces acting upon it, notices of religious matters and of
intellectual, social, and economic progress will also find place in
these volumes. The footnotes will, so far as is possible, be
confined to references to authorities, and references will not be
appended to statements which appear to be matters of common
knowledge and do not call for support. Each volume will have an
Appendix giving some account of the chief authorities, original and
secondary, which the author has used. This account will be compiled
with a view of helping students rather than of making long lists of
books without any notes as to their contents or value. That the
History will have faults both of its own and such as will always in
some measure attend co-operative work, must be expected, but no
pains have been spared to make it, so far as may be, not wholly
unworthy of the greatness of its subject.

Each volume, while forming part of a complete History, will also
in itself be a separate and complete book, will be sold separately,
and will have its own index, and two or more maps.

Vol. I. to 1066. By Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., Litt.D.,
Fellow of University College, London; Fellow of the British
Academy.

Vol. II. 1066 to 1216. By George Burton Adams, M.A.,
Professor of History in Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut.

Vol. III. 1216 to 1377. By T.F. Tout, M.A.,
Professor of Medieval and Modern History in the Victoria University
of Manchester; formerly Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Vol. IV. 1377 to 1485. By C. Oman, M.A., Fellow of
All Souls’ College, and Deputy Professor of Modern History in the
University of Oxford.

Vol. V. 1485 to 1547. By H.A.L. Fisher, M.A., Fellow
and Tutor of New College, Oxford.

Vol. VI. 1547 to 1603. By A.F. Pollard, M.A.,
Professor of Constitutional History in University College,
London.

Vol. VII. 1603 to 1660. By F.C. Montague, M.A.,
Professor of History in University College, London; formerly Fellow
of Oriel College, Oxford.

Vol. VIII. 1660 to 1702. By Richard Lodge, M.A.,
Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh; formerly
Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

Vol. IX. 1702 to 1760. By I.S. Leadam, M.A.,
formerly Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

Vol. X. 1760 to 1801. By the Rev. William Hunt,
M.A., D. Litt, Trinity College, Oxford.

Vol. XI. 1801 to 1837. By the Hon. George C.
Brodrick, D.C.L., late Warden of Merton College, Oxford, and J K.
Fotheringham, M.A., Magdalen College, Oxford, Lecturer in Classics
at King’s College, London.

Vol. XII. 1837 to 1901. By Sidney J Low, M.A.,
Balliol College, Oxford, formerly Lecturer on History at King’s
College, London.

The Political History of England

IN TWELVE VOLUMES

EDITED BY WILLIAM HUNT, D. LITT., AND

REGINALD L. POOLE, M.A.

III.

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

FROM THE ACCESSION OF HENRY III. TO THE

DEATH OF EDWARD III.

1216-1377

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

THE REGENCY OF WILLIAM MARSHAL.

CHAPTER II.

THE RULE OF HUBERT DE BURGH.

CHAPTER III.

THE ALIEN INVASION.

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL RETROGRESSION and NATIONAL PROGRESS.

CHAPTER V.

THE BARONS’ WAR.

CHAPTER VI.

THE RULE OF MONTFORT AND THE ROYALIST RESTORATION.

CHAPTER VII.

THE EARLY FOREIGN POLICY AND LEGISLATION OF EDWARD I.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CONQUEST OF NORTH WALES.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SICILIAN AND THE SCOTTISH ARBITRATIONS.

CHAPTER X.

THE FRENCH AND SCOTTISH WARS AND THE CONFIRMATION OF THE
CHARTERS.

CHAPTER XI.

THE SCOTTISH FAILURE.

CHAPTER XII.

GAVESTON, THE ORDAINERS, AND BANNOCKBURN.

CHAPTER XIII.

LANCASTER, PEMBROKE, AND THE DESPENSERS.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE FALL OF EDWARD II. AND THE RULE OF ISABELLA AND
MORTIMER.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE EARLY CAMPAIGNS OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR.

CHAPTER XVII.

FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO THE TREATY OF CALAIS.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR FROM THE TREATY OF CALAIS TO THE TRUCE
OF BRUGES.

CHAPTER XIX.

ENGLAND DURING THE LATTER YEARS OF EDWARD III.

APPENDIX.

ON AUTHORITIES.

(1216-1377.)

MAPS.

1. Map of Wales and the March at the end of the
XIIIth century.

2. Map of Southern Scotland and Northern England
in the XIIIth and XIVth centuries.

3. Map of France in the XIIIth and XIVth
centuries.

CHAPTER I.

THE REGENCY OF WILLIAM MARSHAL.

001When John died, on October 19, 1216, the
issue of the war between him and the barons was still doubtful. The
arrival of Louis of France, eldest son of King Philip Augustus, had
enabled the barons to win back much of the ground lost after John’s
early triumphs had forced them to call in the foreigner. Beyond the
Humber the sturdy north-country barons, who had wrested the Great
Charter from John, remained true to their principles, and had also
the support of Alexander II., King of Scots. The magnates of the
eastern counties were as staunch as the northerners, and the rich
and populous southern shires were for the most part in agreement
with them. In the west, the barons had the aid of Llewelyn ap
Iorwerth, the great Prince of North Wales. While ten earls fought
for Louis, the royal cause was only upheld by six. The towns were
mainly with the rebels, notably London and the Cinque Ports, and
cities so distant as Winchester and Lincoln, Worcester and
Carlisle. Yet the baronial cause excited little general sympathy.
The mass of the population stood aloof, and was impartially
maltreated by the rival armies.

John’s son Henry had at his back the chief military resources of
the country; the two strongest of the earls, William Marshal, Earl
of Pembroke, and Randolph of Blundeville, Earl of Chester; the
fierce lords of the Welsh March, the Mortimers, the Cantilupes, the
Cliffords, the Braoses, and the Lacys; and the barons of the West
Midlands, headed by Henry of Neufbourg, Earl of Warwick, and
William of Ferrars, Earl of Derby. This powerful phalanx gave to
the royalists a stronger hold in the west than their opponents had
in any one part of the much wider territory within their sphere of
influence. There was 002 no baronial counterpart to the successful
raiding of the north and east, which John had carried through in
the last months of his life. A baronial centre, like Worcester,
could not hold its own long in the west. Moreover, John had not
entirely forfeited his hereditary advantages. The administrative
families, whose chief representative was the justiciar Hubert de
Burgh, held to their tradition of unswerving loyalty, and joined
with the followers of the old king, of whom William Marshal was the
chief survivor. All over England the royal castles were in safe
hands, and so long as they remained unsubdued, no part of Louis’
dominions was secure. The crown had used to the full its rights
over minors and vacant fiefs. The subjection of the south-west was
assured by the marriage of the mercenary leader, Falkes de
Bréauté, to the mother of the infant Earl of Devon,
and by the grant of Cornwall to the bastard of the last of the
Dunstanville earls. Though Isabella, Countess of Gloucester, John’s
repudiated wife, was as zealous as her new husband, the Earl of
Essex, against John’s son, Falkes kept a tight hand over Glamorgan,
on which the military power of the house of Gloucester largely
depended. Randolph of Chester was custodian of the earldoms of
Leicester and Richmond, of which the nominal earls, Simon de
Montfort and Peter Mauclerc, were far away, the one ruling
Toulouse, and the other Brittany. The band of foreign adventurers,
the mainstay of John’s power, was still unbroken. Ruffians though
these hirelings were, they had experience, skill, and courage, and
were the only professional soldiers in the country.

The vital fact of the situation was that the immense moral and
spiritual forces of the Church remained on the side of the king.
Innocent III. had died some months before John, but his successor,
Honorius III., continued to uphold his policy. The papal legate,
the Cardinal Gualo, was the soul of the royalist cause. Louis and
his adherents had been excommunicated, and not a single English
bishop dared to join openly the foes of Holy Church. The most that
the clerical partisans of the barons could do was to disregard the
interdict and continue their ministrations to the excommunicated
host. The strongest English prelate, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of
Canterbury, was at Rome in disgrace. Walter Grey, Archbishop of
York, and Hugh of Wells, Bishop003 of Lincoln, were also abroad,
while the Bishop of London, William of Sainte-Mère-Eglise,
was incapacitated by illness. Several important sees, including
Durham and Ely, were vacant. The ablest resident bishop, Peter des
Roches of Winchester, was an accomplice in John’s
misgovernment.

The chief obstacle in the way of the royalists had been the
character of John, and the little Henry of Winchester could have
had no share in the crimes of his father. But the dead king had
lately shown such rare energy that there was a danger lest the
accession of a boy of nine might not weaken the cause of monarchy.
The barons were largely out of hand. The war was assuming the
character of the civil war of Stephen’s days, and John’s
mercenaries were aspiring to play the part of feudal potentates. It
was significant that so many of John’s principal supporters were
possessors of extensive franchises, like the lords of the Welsh
March, who might well desire to extend these feudal immunities to
their English estates. The triumph of the crown through such help
might easily have resolved the united England of Henry II. into a
series of lordships under a nominal king.

The situation was saved by the wisdom and moderation of the
papal legate, and the loyalty of William Marshal, who forgot his
interests as Earl of Pembroke in his devotion to the house of
Anjou. From the moment of John’s death at Newark, the cardinal and
the marshal took the lead. They met at Worcester, where the tyrant
was buried, and at once made preparations for the coronation of
Henry of Winchester. The ceremony took place at St. Peter’s Abbey,
Gloucester, on October 28, from which day the new reign was
reckoned as beginning. The marshal, who had forty-three years
before dubbed the “young king” Henry a knight, then for a second
time admitted a young king Henry to the order of chivalry. When the
king had recited the coronation oath and performed homage to the
pope, Gualo anointed him and placed on his head the plain gold
circlet that perforce did duly for a crown.[1]004 Next day
Henry’s supporters performed homage, and before November 1 the
marshal was made justiciar.

[1] There is some conflict of evidence on this
point, and Dr. Stubbs, following Wendover, iv., 2, makes Peter of
Winchester crown Henry. But the official account in Fædera,
i., 145, is confirmed by Ann. Tewkesbury, p. 62;
Histoire de G. le Maréchal, lines 15329-32; Hist.
des ducs de Normandie, et des rois d’Angleterre, p. 181, and
Ann. Winchester, p. 83. Wykes, p. 60, and Ann.
Dunstable, p. 48, which confirm Wendover, are suspect by reason
of other errors.

On November 2 a great council met at Bristol. Only four earls
appeared, and one of these, William of Fors, Earl of Albemarle, was
a recent convert. But the presence of eleven bishops showed that
the Church had espoused the cause of the little king, and a throng
of western and marcher magnates made a sufficient representation of
the lay baronage. The chief business was to provide for the
government during the minority. Gualo withstood the temptation to
adopt the method by which Innocent III. had ruled Sicily in the
name of Frederick II. The king’s mother was too unpopular and
incompetent to anticipate the part played by Blanche of Castile
during the minority of St. Louis. After the precedents set by the
Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the barons took the matter into their
own hands. Their work of selection was not an easy one. Randolph of
Chester was by far the most powerful of the royalist lords, but his
turbulence and purely personal policy, not less than his excessive
possessions and inordinate palatine jurisdictions, made him
unsuitable for the regency. Yet had he raised any sort of claim, it
would have been hardly possible to resist his pretensions.[1]
Luckily, Randolph stood aside, and his withdrawal gave the aged
earl marshal the position for which his nomination as justiciar at
Gloucester had already marked him out. The title of regent was as
yet unknown, either in England or France, but the style, “ruler of
king and kingdom,” which the barons gave to the marshal, meant
something more than the ordinary position of a justiciar. William’s
friends had some difficulty in persuading him to accept the office.
He was over seventy years of age, and felt it would be too great a
burden. Induced at last by the legate to undertake the charge, from
that moment he shrank from none of its responsibilities. The
personal care of the king was comprised within the marshal’s
duties, but he delegated that branch of his work to Peter des
Roches.[2] These two, with Gualo, controlled the whole policy of
the new reign.005 Next to them came Hubert de Burgh, John’s
justiciar, whomthe marshal very soon restored to that office. But
Hubert at once went back to the defence of Dover, and for some time
took little part in general politics.

[1] The fears and hopes of the marshal’s friends
are well depicted in Histoire de Guillaume le
Maréchal, lines 15500-15708.

[2] The panegyrist of the marshal emphasises
strongly the fact that Peter’s charge was a delegation,
ibid., lines 17993-18018.

On November 12, the legate and the regent issued at Bristol a
confirmation of the Great Charter. Some of the most important
articles accepted by John in 1215 were omitted, including the
“constitutional clauses” requiring the consent of the council of
barons for extraordinary taxation. Other provisions, which tied the
hands of the government, were postponed for further consideration
in more settled times. But with all its mutilations the Bristol
charter of 1216 marked a more important moment than even the
charter of Runnymede. The condemnation of Innocent III. would in
all probability have prevented the temporary concession of John
from becoming permanent. Love of country and love of liberty were
doubtless growing forces, but they were still in their infancy,
while the papal authority was something ultimate against which few
Christians dared appeal. Thus the adoption by the free will of the
papal legate, and the deliberate choice of the marshal of the
policy of the Great Charter, converted, as has well been said, “a
treaty won at the point of the sword into a manifesto of peace and
sound government”.[1] This wise change of policy cut away the ground
from under the feet of the English supporters of Louis. The friends
of the young Henry could appeal to his innocence, to his sacred
unction, and to his recognition by Holy Church. They offered a
programme of limited monarchy, of the redress of grievances, of
vested rights preserved, and of adhesion to the good old traditions
that all Englishmen respected. From that moment the Charter became
a new starting-point in our history.

[1] Stubbs, Const. Hist., ii., 21.

In strange contrast to this programme of reform, the aliens, who
had opposed the charter of Runnymede, were among the lords by whose
counsel and consent the charter of Bristol was issued. In its
weakness the new government sought to stimulate the zeal both of
the foreign mercenaries and of the loyal barons by grants and
privileges which seriously entrenched upon the royal authority.
Falkes de Bréauté was confirmed in the custody of a
compact group of six midland shires,006 besides the earldom of Devon, and
the “county of the Isle of Wight,”[1] which he guarded in the
interests of his wife and stepson. Savary de Mauléon, who in
despair of his old master’s success had crossed over to Poitou
before John’s death, was made warden of the castle of Bristol.
Randolph of Chester was consoled for the loss of the regency by the
renewal of John’s recent grant of the Honour of Lancaster which was
by this time definitely recognised as a shire.[2]

[1] Histoire des ducs de Normandie, etc.,
p. 181.

[2] Tait, Medieval Manchester and the
Beginnings of Lancashire, p. 180.

The war assumed the character of a crusade. The royalist troops
wore white crosses on their garments, and were assured by the
clergy of certain salvation. The cruel and purposeless ravaging of
the enemy’s country, which had occupied John’s last months of life,
became rare, though partisans, such as Falkes de
Bréauté, still outvied the French in plundering
monasteries and churches. The real struggle became a war of
castles. Louis endeavoured to complete his conquest of the
south-east by the capture of the royal strongholds, which still
limited his power to the open country. At first the French prince
had some successes. In November he increased his hold on the Home
counties by capturing the Tower of London, by forcing Hertford to
surrender, and by pressing the siege of Berkhampsted. As Christmas
approached the royalists proposed a truce. Louis agreed on the
condition that Berkhampsted should be surrendered, and early in
1217 both parties held councils, the royalists at Oxford and the
barons at Cambridge. There was vague talk of peace, but the war was
renewed, and Louis captured Hedingham and Orford in Essex, and
besieged the castles of Colchester and Norwich. Then another truce
until April 26 was concluded, on the condition that the royalists
should surrender these two strongholds.

Both sides had need to pause. Louis, at the limit of his
resources, was anxious to obtain men and money from France. He was
not getting on well with his new subjects. The eastern counties
grumbled at his taxes. Dissensions arose between the English and
French elements in his host. The English lords resented the grants
and appointments he gave to his countrymen. The French nobles
professed to despise the English as traitors. When Hertford was
taken, Robert007 FitzWalter demanded that its custody should
be restored to him. Louis roughly told him that Englishmen, who had
betrayed their natural lord, were not to be entrusted with such
charges. It was to little purpose that he promised Robert that
every man should have his rights when the war was over. The
prospects of ending the war grew more remote every day. The
royalists took advantage of the discouragement of their opponents.
The regent was lavish in promises. There should be no inquiry into
bygones, and all who submitted to the young king should be
guaranteed all their existing rights. The result was that a steady
stream of converts began to flow from the camp of Louis to the camp
of the marshal. For the first time signs of a national movement
against Louis began to be manifest. It became clear that his rule
meant foreign conquest.

Louis wished to return to France, but despite the truce he could
only win his way to the coast by fighting. The Cinque Ports were
changing their allegiance. A popular revolt had broken out in the
Weald, where a warlike squire, William of Cassingham,[1] soon
became a terror to the French under his nickname of Wilkin of the
Weald. As Louis traversed the disaffected districts, Wilkin fell
upon him near Lewes, and took prisoners two nephews of the Count of
Nevers. On his further march to Winchelsea, the men of the Weald
broke down the bridges behind him, while on his approach the men of
Winchelsea destroyed their mills, and took to their ships as avowed
partisans of King Henry. The French prince entered the empty town,
and had great difficulty in keeping his army alive. “Wheat found
they there,” says a chronicler; “in great plenty, but they knew not
how to grind it. Long time were they in such a plight that they had
to crush by hand the corn of which they made their bread. They
could catch no fish. Great store of nuts found they in the town;
these were their finest food.”[2] Louis was in fact besieged by the
insurgents, and was only released by a force of knights riding down
from London to help him. These troops dared not travel by the
direct road through the Weald, and made their way to Romney through
Canterbury. Rye was strongly008 held against them and the ships of the
Cinque Ports dominated the sea, so that Louis was still cut off
from his friends at Romney. A relieving fleet was despatched from
Boulogne, but stress of weather kept it for a fortnight at Dover,
while Louis was starving at Winchelsea. At last the French ships
appeared off Winchelsea. Thereupon the English withdrew, and Louis
finding the way open to France returned home.

[1] Mr. G.J. Turner has identified Cassingham with
the modern Kensham, between Rolvenden and Sandhurst, in Kent.

[2] Histoire des ducs de Normandie, etc.,
p. 183.

A crowd of waverers changed sides. At their head were William
Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, the bastard great-uncle of the little
king, and William, the young marshal, the eldest son of the Earl of
Pembroke. The regent wandered from town to town in Sussex,
receiving the submission of the peasantry, and venturing to
approach as near London as Dorking. The victorious Wilkin was made
Warden of the Seven Hundreds of the Weald. The greatest of the
magnates of Sussex and Surrey, William, Earl Warenne, followed the
example of his tenantry, and made his peace with the king. The
royalists fell upon the few castles held by the barons. While one
corps captured Odiham, Farnham, Chichester, and other southern
strongholds, Falkes de Bréauté overran the Isle of
Ely, and Randolph of Chester besieged the Leicestershire fortress
of Mount Sorrel. Enguerrand de Coucy, whom Louis had left in
command, remained helpless in London. His boldest act was to send a
force to Lincoln, which occupied the town, but failed to take the
castle. This stronghold, under its hereditary warden, the valiant
old lady, Nichola de Camville,[1] had already twice withstood a
siege.

[1] On Nichola de Camville or de la Hay see M.
Petit-Dutaillis in Mélanges Julien Havet, pp.
369-80.

Louis found no great encouragement in France, for Philip
Augustus, too prudent to offend the Church, gave but grudging
support to his excommunicated son. When, on the eve of the
expiration of the truce, Louis returned to England, his
reinforcements comprised only 120 knights. Among them, however,
were the Count of Brittany, Peter Mauclerc, anxious to press in
person his rights to the earldom of Richmond, the Counts of Perche
and Guînes, and many lords of Picardy, Artois and Ponthieu.
Conscious that everything depended on the speedy capture of the
royal castles, Louis introduced for the first time into England the
trébuchet, a recently invented009 machine that
cast great missiles by means of heavy counterpoises. “Great was the
talk about this, for at that time few of them had been seen in
France.”[1] On April 22, Louis reached Dover, where the castle was
still feebly beset by the French. On his nearing the shore, Wilkin
of the Weald and Oliver, a bastard of King John’s, burnt the huts
of the French engaged in watching the castle. Afraid to land in
their presence, Louis disembarked at Sandwich. Next day he went by
land to Dover, but discouraged by tidings of his losses, he gladly
concluded a short truce with Hubert de Burgh. He abandoned the
siege of Dover, and hurried off towards Winchester, where the two
castles were being severely pressed by the royalists. But his
progress was impeded by his siege train, and Farnham castle blocked
his way.

[1] Histoire des ducs de Normandie, etc.,
p. 188; cf. English Hist. Review, xviii. (1903), 263-64.

Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, joined Louis outside the
walls of Farnham. Saer’s motive was to persuade Louis to hasten to
the relief of his castle of Mount Sorrel. The French prince was not
in a position to resist pressure from a powerful supporter. He
divided his army, and while the Earl of Winchester, along with the
Count of Perche and Robert FitzWalter, made their way to
Leicestershire, he completed his journey to Winchester, threw a
fresh force into the castles, and, leaving the Count of Nevers in
charge, hurried to London. There he learnt that Hubert de Burgh at
Dover had broken the truce, and he at once set off to renew the
siege of the stronghold which had so continually baulked his plans.
But little good came of his efforts, and the much-talked-of
trébuchet proving powerless to effect a breach, Louis
had to resign himself to a weary blockade. While he was besieging
Dover, Saer de Quincy had relieved Mount Sorrel, whence he marched
to the help of Gilbert of Ghent, the only English baron whom Louis
ventured to raise to comital rank as Earl of Lincoln. Gilbert was
still striving to capture Lincoln Castle, but Nichola de Camville
had resisted him from February to May. With the help of the army
from Mount Sorrel, the castle and its châtelaine were
soon reduced to great straits.

The marshal saw that the time was come to take the offensive,
and resolved to raise the siege. Having no field010 army, he
stripped his castles of their garrisons, and gave rendezvous to his
barons at Newark. There the royalists rested three days, and
received the blessing of Gualo and the bishops. They then set out
towards Lincoln, commanded by the regent in person, the Earl of
Chester, and the Bishop of Winchester, whom the legate appointed as
his representative. The strong water defences of the rebel city on
the south made it unadvisable for them to take the direct route
towards it. Their army descended the Trent to Torksey, where it
rested the night of May 19. Early next day, the eve of Trinity
Sunday, it marched in four “battles” to relieve Lincoln Castle.

There were more than 600 knights besieging the castle and
holding the town, and the relieving army only numbered 400 knights
and 300 cross-bowmen. But the barons dared not risk a combat that
might have involved them in the fate of Stephen in 1141. They
retreated within the city and allowed the marshal to open up
communications with the castle. The marshal’s plan of battle was
arranged by Peter des Roches, who was more at home in the field
than in the church. The cross-bowmen under Falkes de
Bréauté were thrown into the castle, and joined with
the garrison in making a sally from its east gate into the streets
of the town. While the barons were thus distracted, the marshal
burst through the badly defended north gate. The barons taken in
front and flank fought desperately, but with no success. Falkes’
cross-bowmen shot down their horses, and the dismounted knights
soon failed to hold their own in the open ground about the
cathedral. The Count of Perche was slain by a sword-thrust through
the eyehole of his helmet. The royalists chased the barons down the
steep lanes which connect the upper with the lower town. When they
reached level ground the baronial troops rallied, and once more
strove to reascend the hill. But the town was assailed on every
side, and its land defences yielded with little difficulty. The
Earl of Chester poured his vassals through one of the eastern
gates, and took the barons in flank. Once more they broke, and this
time they rallied not again, but fled through the Wigford suburb
seeking any means of escape. Some obstruction in the Bar-gate, the
southern exit from the city, retarded their flight, and many of the
leaders were captured. The remnant fled to London,011 thinking that
“every bush was full of marshals,” and suffering severely from the
hostility of the peasantry. Only three persons were slain in the
battle, but there was a cruel massacre of the defenceless citizens
after its close. So vast was the booty won by the victors that in
scorn they called the fight the Fair of Lincoln![1]

[1] For a discussion of the battle, see English
Hist. Review, xviii. (1903), 240-65.

Louis’ prospects were still not desperate. The victorious army
scattered, each man to his own house, so that the marshal was in no
position to press matters to extremities. But there was a great
rush to make terms with the victor, and Louis thought it prudent to
abandon the hopeless siege of Dover, and take refuge with his
partisans, the Londoners. Meanwhile the marshal hovered round
London, hoping eventually to shut up the enemy in the capital. On
June 12, the Archbishop of Tyre and three Cistercian abbots, who
had come to England to preach the Crusade, persuaded both parties
to accept provisional articles of peace. Louis stipulated for a
complete amnesty to all his partisans; but the legate declined to
grant pardon to the rebellious clerks who had refused to obey the
interdict, conspicuous among whom was the firebrand Simon Langton,
brother of the archbishop. Finding no compromise possible, Louis
broke off the negotiations rather than abandon his friends. Gualo
urged a siege of London, but the marshal saw that his resources
were not adequate for such a step. Again many of his followers went
home, and the court abode first at Oxford and afterwards at
Gloucester. It seemed as if the war might go on for ever.

Blanche of Castile, Louis’ wife, redoubled her efforts on his
behalf. In response to her entreaties a hundred knights and several
hundred men-at-arms took ship for England. Among the knights was
the famous William des Barres, one of the heroes of Bouvines, and
Theobald, Count of Blois. Eustace the Monk, a renegade clerk turned
pirate, and a hero of later romance, took command of the fleet. On
the eve of St. Bartholomew, August 23, Eustace sailed from Calais
towards the mouth of the Thames. Kent had become royalist; the
marshal and Hubert de Burgh held Sandwich, so that the long voyage
up the Thames was the only way of taking succour to Louis. Next day
the old earl remained on shore, but sent out Hubert012 with the fleet.
The English let the French pass by, and then, manoeuvring for the
weather gage, tacked and assailed them from behind.[1] The fight
raged round the great ship of Eustace, on which the chief French
knights were embarked. Laden with stores, horses, and a ponderous
trébuchet, it was too low in the water to manoeuvre
or escape. Hubert easily laid his own vessel alongside it. The
English, who were better used to fighting at sea than the French,
threw powdered lime into the faces of the enemy, swept the decks
with their crossbow bolts and then boarded the ship, which was
taken after a fierce fight. The crowd of cargo boats could offer
little resistance as they beat up against the wind in their retreat
to Calais; the ships containing the soldiers were more fortunate in
escaping. Eustace was beheaded, and his head paraded on a pole
through the streets of Canterbury.

[1] This successful attempt of the English fleet
to manoeuvre for the weather gage, that is to secure a position to
the windward of their opponents, is the first recorded instance of
what became the favourite tactics of British admirals. For the
legend of Eustace see Witasse le Moine, ed. Förster
(1891).

The battle of St. Bartholomew’s Day, like that of Lincoln a
triumph of skill over numbers, proved decisive for the fortunes of
Louis. The English won absolute control of the narrow seas, and cut
off from Louis all hope of fighting his way back to France. As soon
as he heard of the defeat of Eustace, he reopened negotiations with
the marshal. On the 29th there was a meeting between Louis and the
Earl at the gates of London. The regent had to check the ardour of
his own partisans, and it was only after anxious days of
deliberation that the party of moderation prevailed. On September 5
a formal conference was held on an island of the Thames near
Kingston. On the 11th a definitive treaty was signed at the
archbishop’s house at Lambeth.

The Treaty of Lambeth repeated with little alteration the terms
rejected by Louis three months before. The French prince
surrendered his castles, released his partisans from their oaths to
him, and exhorted all his allies, including the King of Scots and
the Prince of Gwynedd, to lay down their arms. In return Henry
promised that no layman should lose his inheritance by reason of
his adherence to Louis, and that the baronial prisoners should be
released without further payment013 of ransom. London, despite its
pertinacity in rebellion, was to retain its ancient franchises. The
marshal bound himself personally to pay Louis 10,000 marks,
nominally as expenses, really as a bribe to accept these terms. A
few days later Louis and his French barons appeared before the
legate, barefoot and in the white garb of penitents, and were
reconciled to the Church. They were then escorted to Dover, whence
they took ship for France. Only on the rebellious clergy did
Gualo’s wrath fall. The canons of St. Paul’s were turned out in a
body; ringleaders like Simon Langton were driven into exile, and
agents of the legate traversed the country punishing clerks who had
disregarded the interdict. But Honorius was more merciful than
Gualo, and within a year even Simon received his pardon. The laymen
of both camps forgot their differences, when Randolph of Chester
and William of Ferrars fought in the crusade of Damietta, side by
side with Saer of Winchester and Robert FitzWalter. The
reconciliation of parties was further shown in the marriage of
Hubert de Burgh to John’s divorced wife, Isabella of Gloucester, a
widow by the death of the Earl of Essex, and still the foremost
English heiress. On November 6 the pacification was completed by
the reissue of the Great Charter in what was substantially its
final form. The forest clauses of the earlier issues were published
in a much enlarged shape as a separate Forest Charter, which laid
down the great principle that no man was to lose life or limb for
hindering the king’s hunting.

It is tempting to regard the defeat of Louis as a triumph of
English patriotism. But it is an anachronism to read the ideals of
later ages into the doings of the men of the early thirteenth
century. So far as there was national feeling in England, it was
arrayed against Henry. To the last the most fervently English of
the barons were steadfast on the French prince’s side, and the
triumph of the little king had largely been procured by John’s
foreigners. To contemporary eyes the rebels were factious assertors
of class privileges and feudal immunities. Their revolt against
their natural lord brought them into conflict with the sentiment of
feudal duty which was still so strong in faithful minds. And
against them was a stronger force than feudal loyally. From this
religious standpoint the Canon of Barnwell best sums up the014
situation: “It was a miracle that the heir of France, who had won
so large a part of the kingdom, was constrained to abandon the
realm without hope of recovering it. It was because the hand of God
was not with him. He came to England in spite of the prohibition of
the Holy Roman Church, and he remained there regardless of its
anathema.”

The young king never forgot that he owed his throne to the pope
and his legate. “When we were bereft of our father in tender
years,” he declared long afterwards, “when our subjects were turned
against us, it was our mother, the Holy Roman Church, that brought
back our realm under our power, anointed us king, crowned us, and
placed us on the throne.”[1] The papacy, which had secured a new
hold over England by its alliance with John, made its position
permanent by its zeal for the rights of his son. By identifying the
monarchy with the charters, it skilfully retraced the false step
which it had taken. Under the ægis of the Roman see the national
spirit grew, and the next generation was to see the temper fostered
by Gualo in its turn grow impatient of the papal supremacy. It was
Gualo, then, who secured the confirmation of the charters. Even
Louis unconsciously worked in that direction, for, had he not
gained so strong a hold on the country, there would have been no
reason to adopt a policy of conciliation. We must not read the
history of this generation in the light of modern times, or even
with the eyes of Matthew Paris.

[1] Grosseteste, Epistolæ, p. 339.

The marshal had before him a task essentially similar to that
which Henry II had undertaken after the anarchy of Stephen’s reign.
It was with the utmost difficulty that the sum promised to Louis
could be extracted from the war-stricken and famished tillers of
the soil. The exchequer was so empty that the Christmas court of
the young king was celebrated at the expense of Falkes de
Bréauté. Those who had fought for the king clamoured
for grants and rewards, and it was necessary to humour them. For
example, Randolph of Blundeville, with the earldom of Lincoln added
to his Cheshire palatinate and his Lancashire Honour, had acquired
a position nearly as strong as that of the Randolph of the reign of
Stephen. “Adulterine castles” had grown up in such numbers that the
new issue of the Charter insisted upon their destruction.015 Even the
lawful castles were held by unauthorised custodians, who refused to
yield them up to the king’s officers. Though Alexander, King of
Scots, purchased his reconciliation with Rome by abandoning
Carlisle and performing homage to Henry, the Welsh remained
recalcitrant. One chieftain, Morgan of Caerleon, waged war against
the marshal in Gwent, and was dislodged with difficulty. During the
war Llewelyn ap Iorwerth conquered Cardigan and Carmarthen from the
marchers, and it was only after receiving assurances that he might
retain these districts so long as the king’s minority lasted that
he condescended to do homage at Worcester in March, 1218.

In the following May Stephen Langton came back from exile and
threw the weight of his judgment on the regent’s side. Gradually
the worst difficulties were surmounted. The administrative
machinery once more became effective. A new seal was cast for the
king, whose documents had hitherto been stamped with the seal of
the regent. Order was so far restored that Gualo returned to Italy.
He was a man of high character and noble aims, caring little for
personal advancement, and curbing his hot zeal against
“schismatics” in his desire to restore peace to England. His memory
is still commemorated in his great church of St. Andrew, at
Vercelli, erected, it may be, with the proceeds of his English
benefices, and still preserving the manuscript of legends of its
patron saint, which its founder had sent thither from his
exile.

At Candlemas, 1219, the aged regent was smitten with a mortal
illness. His followers bore him up the Thames from London to his
manor of Caversham, where his last hours were disturbed by the
intrigues of Peter of Winchester for his succession, and the
importunity of selfish clerks, clamouring for grants to their
churches. He died on May 14, clad in the habit of the Knights of
the Temple, in whose new church in London his body was buried, and
where his effigy may still be seen. The landless younger son of a
poor baron, he had supported himself in his youth by the spoils of
the knights he had vanquished in the tournaments, where his
successes gained him fame as the model of chivalry. The favour of
Henry, the “young king,” gave him political importance, and his
marriage with Strongbow’s daughter made him a mighty 016man in England,
Ireland, Wales, and Normandy. Strenuous and upright, simple and
dignified, the young soldier of fortune bore easily the weight of
office and honour which accrued to him before the death of his
first patron. Limited as was his outlook, he gave himself entirely
to his master-principle of loyally to the feudal lord whom he had
sworn to obey. This simple conception enabled him to subordinate
his interests as a marcher potentate to his duty to the English
monarchy. It guided him in his difficult work of serving with
unbending constancy a tyrant like John. It shone most clearly when
in his old age he saved John’s son from the consequences of his
father’s misdeeds. A happy accident has led to the discovery in our
own days of the long poem, drawn up in commemoration of his
career[1] at the instigation of his son. This important work has
enabled us to enter into the marshal’s character and spirit in much
the same way as Joinville’s History of St. Louis has made us
familiar with the motives and attributes of the great French king.
They are the two men of the thirteenth century whom we know most
intimately. It is well that the two characters thus portrayed at
length represent to us so much of what is best in the chivalry,
loyalty, statecraft, and piety of the Middle Ages.

[1] Histoire de Guillaume le
Maréchal, published by P. Meyer for the Soc. de
l’histoire de France. Petit-Dutaillis, Étude sur Louis
VIII. (1894), and G.J. Turner, Minority of Henry III.,
part i, in Transactions of the Royal Hist. Soc., new ser.,
viii. (1904), 245-95, are the best modern commentaries on the
history of the marshal’s regency.

CHAPTER II.

THE RULE OF HUBERT DE BURGH.

017William Marshal had recognized that the
regency must end with him. “There is no land,” he declared, “where
the people are so divided as they are in England. Were I to hand
over the king to one noble, the others would be jealous. For this
reason I have determined to entrust him to God and the pope. No one
can blame me for this, for, if the land is not defended by the
pope, I know no one who can protect it.” The fortunate absence of
Randolph of Chester on crusade made it easy to carry out this plan.
Accordingly the king of twelve years was supposed to be capable of
acting for himself. But the ultimate authority resided with the new
legate Pandulf, who, without any formal designation, was the real
successor of the marshal. This arrangement naturally left great
power to Peter des Roches, who continued to have the custody of the
king’s person, and to Hubert the justiciar, who henceforth acted as
Pandulf’s deputy. Next to them came the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Langton’s share in the struggle for the charters was so
conspicuous, that we do not always remember that it was as a
scholar and a theologian that he acquired his chief reputation
among his contemporaries. On his return from exile he found such
engrossing occupation in the business of his see, that he took
little part in politics for several years. His self-effacement
strengthened the position of the legate.

Pandulf was no stranger to England. As subdeacon of the Roman
Church he received John’s submission in 1213, and stood by his side
during nearly all his later troubles. He had been rewarded by his
election to the bishopric of Norwich, but was recalled to Rome
before his consecration, and only came 018 back to England in the
higher capacity of legate on December 3, 1218, after the recall of
Gualo. He had been the cause of Langton’s suspension, and there was
probably no love lost between him and the archbishop. It was in
order to avoid troublesome questions of jurisdiction that Pandulf,
at the pope’s suggestion, continued to postpone his consecration as
bishop, since that act would have subordinated him to the
Archbishop of Canterbury. But neither he nor Langton was disposed
to push matters to extremities. Just as Peter des Roches balanced
Hubert de Burgh, so the archbishop acted as a makeweight to the
legate. When power was thus nicely equipoised, there was a natural
tendency to avoid conflicting issues. In these circumstances the
truce between parties, which had marked the regency, continued for
the first years after Earl William’s death. In all doubtful points
the will of the legate seems to have prevailed. Pandulf’s
correspondence shows him interfering in every matter of state. He
associated himself with the justiciar in the appointment of royal
officials; he invoked the papal authority to put down “adulterine
castles,” and to prevent any baron having more than one royal
stronghold in his custody; he prolonged the truce with France, and
strove to pacify the Prince of North Wales; he procured the
resumption of the royal domain, and rebuked Bishop Peter and the
justiciar for remissness in dealing with Jewish usurers; he filled
up bishoprics at his own discretion. Nor did he neglect his own
interests; his kinsfolk found preferment in his English diocese,
and he appropriated certain livings for the payment of his debts,
“so far as could be done without offence”. But in higher matters he
pursued a wise policy. In recognising that the great interest of
the Church was peace, he truly expressed the policy of the mild
Honorius. For more than two years he kept Englishmen from flying at
each other’s throats. If they paid for peace by the continuance of
foreign rule, it was better to be governed by Pandulf than pillaged
by Falkes. The principal events of these years were due to papal
initiative.[1] Honorius looked askance on the maimed rites of019 the
Gloucester coronation, and ordered a new hallowing to take place at
the accustomed place and with the accustomed ceremonies. This
supplementary rite was celebrated at Westminster on Whitsunday, May
17, 1220. Though Pandulf was present, he discreetly permitted the
Archbishop of Canterbury to crown Henry with the diadem of St.
Edward. “This coronation,” says the Canon of Barnwell, “was
celebrated with such good order and such splendour that the oldest
magnates who were present declared that they had seen none of the
king’s predecessors crowned with so much goodwill and
tranquillity.” Nor was this the only great ecclesiastical function
of the year. On July 7 Langton celebrated at Canterbury the
translation of the relics of St. Thomas to a magnificent shrine at
the back of the high altar. Again the legate gave precedence to the
archbishop, and the presence of the young king, of the Archbishop
of Reims, and the Primate of Hungary, gave distinction to the
solemnity. It was a grand time for English saints. When Damietta
was taken from the Mohammedans, the crusaders dedicated two of its
churches to St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. Edmund the King. A new
saint was added to the calendar, who, if not an Englishman, had
done good work for the country of his adoption. In 1220 Honorius
III. canonised Hugh of Avalon, the Carthusian Bishop of Lincoln, on
the report of a commission presided over by Langton himself.

[1] H.R. Luard, On the Relations between
England and Rome during the Earlier Portion of the Reign of Henry
III. (1877), illustrates papal influence at this period.

No real unity of principle underlay the external tranquillity.
As time went on Peter des Roches bitterly resented the growing
preponderance of Hubert de Burgh. Not all the self-restraint of the
legate could commend him to Langton, whose obstinate insistence
upon his metropolitical authority forced Pandulf to procure bulls
from Rome specifically releasing him from the jurisdiction of the
primate. In these circumstances it was natural for Bishop Peter and
the legate to join together against the justiciar and the
archbishop. Finding that the legate was too strong for him, Langton
betook himself to Rome, and remained there nearly a year. Before he
went home he persuaded Honorius to promise not to confer the same
benefice twice by papal provision, and to send no further legate to
England during his lifetime. Pandulf was at once recalled, and left
England in July, 1221, a month before his020 rival’s return. He was
compensated for the slight put upon him by receiving his
long-deferred consecration to Norwich at the hands of the pope.
There is small reason for believing that he was exceptionally
greedy or unpopular. But his withdrawal removed an influence which
had done its work for good, and was becoming a national danger.
Langton henceforth could act as the real head of the English
Church. In 1222, he held an important provincial council at Oseney
abbey, near Oxford, where he issued constitutions, famous as the
first provincial canons still recognised as binding in our
ecclesiastical courts. He began once more to concern himself with
affairs of state, and Hubert found him a sure ally. Bishop Peter,
disgusted with his declining influence, welcomed his appointment as
archbishop of the crusading Church at Damietta. He took the cross,
and left England with Falkes de Bréauté as his
companion. Learning that the crescent had driven the cross out of
his new see, he contented himself with making the pilgrimage to
Compostella, and soon found his way back to England, where he
sought for opportunities to regain power.

Relieved of the opposition of Bishop Peter, Hubert insisted on
depriving barons of doubtful loyalty of the custody of royal
castles, and found his chief opponent in William Earl of Albemarle.
In dignity and possessions, Albemarle was not ill-qualified to be a
feudal leader. The son of William de Fors, of Oléron, a
Poitevin adventurer of the type of Falkes de Bréauté,
he represented, through his mother, the line of the counts of
Aumâle, who had since the Conquest ruled over Holderness from
their castle at Skipsea. The family acquired the status of English
earls under Stephen, retaining their foreign title, expressed in
English in the form of Albemarle, being the first house of comital
rank abroad to hold an earldom with a French name unassociated with
any English shire. During the civil war Albemarle’s
tergiversations, which rivalled those of the Geoffrey de Mandeville
of Stephen’s time, had been rewarded by large grants from the
victorious party. Since 1219 he suffered slight upon slight, and in
1220 was stripped of the custody of Rockingham Castle. Late in that
year Hubert resolved to enforce an order, promulgated in 1217,
which directed Albemarle to restore to his former subtenant Bytham
Castle, in South Kesteven, of which he was021 overlord, and of which he
had resumed possession on account of the treason of his vassal. The
earl hurried away in indignation from the king’s Christmas court,
and in January, 1221, threw himself into Bytham, eager to hold it
by force against the king. For a brief space he ruled over the
country-side after the fashion of a baron of Stephen’s time. He
plundered the neighbouring towns and churches, and filled the
dungeons of Castle Bytham with captives. On the pretext of
attending a council at Westminster he marched southwards, but his
real motive was disclosed when he suddenly attacked the castle of
Fotheringhay. His men crossed the moat on the ice, and, burning
down the great gate, easily overpowered the scanty garrison. “As if
he were the only ruler of the kingdom,” says the Canon of Barnwell,
“he sent letters signed with his seal to the mayors of the cities
of England, granting his peace to all merchants engaged in plying
their trades, and allowing them free licence of going and coming
through his castles.” Nothing in the annals of the time puts more
clearly this revival of the old feudal custom that each baron
should lord it as king over his own estates.

Albemarle’s power did not last long. He incurred the wrath of
the Church, and both in Kesteven and in Northamptonshire set
himself against the interests of Randolph of Chester. Before
January was over Pandulf excommunicated him, and a great council
granted a special scutage, “the scutage of Bytham,” to equip an
army to crush the rebel. Early in February a considerable force
marched northwards against him. The Earl of Chester took part in
the campaign, and both the legate and the king accompanied the
army. Before the combined efforts of Church and State, Albemarle
dared not hold his ground, and fled to Fountains, where he took
sanctuary. His followers abandoned Fotheringhay, but stood a siege
at Bytham. After six days this castle was captured on February 8.
Even then secret sympathisers with Albemarle were able to exercise
influence on his behalf, and Pandulf himself was willing to show
mercy. The earl came out of sanctuary, and was pardoned on
condition of taking the crusader’s vow. No effort was made to
insist on his going on crusade, and within a few months he was
again in favour. “Thus,” says Roger of Wendover, “the king set the
worst of022 examples, and encouraged future rebellions.”
Randolph of Chester came out with the spoils of victory. He secured
as the price of his ostentatious fidelity the custody of the Honour
of Huntingdon, during the nonage of the earl, his nephew, John the
Scot.

A tumult in the capital soon taught Hubert that he had other
foes to fight against besides the feudal party. At a wrestling
match, held on July 25, 1222, between the city and the suburbs, the
citizens won an easy victory. The tenants of the Abbot of
Westminster challenged the conquerors to a fresh contest on August
1 at Westminster. But the abbot’s men were more anxious for revenge
than good sport, and seeing that the Londoners were likely to win,
they violently broke up the match. Suspecting no evil, the citizens
had come without arms, and were very severely handled by their
rivals. Driven back behind their walls, the Londoners clamoured for
vengeance. Serlo the mercer, their mayor, a prudent and
peace-loving man, urged them to seek compensation of the abbot. But
the citizens preferred the advice of Constantine FitzAthulf, who
insisted upon an immediate attack on the men of Westminster. Next
day the abbey precincts were invaded, and much mischief was done.
The alarm was the greater because Constantine was a man of high
position, who had recently been a sheriff of London, and had once
been a strenuous supporter of Louis of France. It was rumoured that
his followers had raised the cry, “Montjoie! Saint Denis!” The
quarrels of neighbouring cities were as dangerous to sound rule as
the feuds of rival barons, and Hubert took instant measures to put
down the sedition. With the aid of Falkes de
Bréauté’s mercenaries, order was restored, and
Constantine was led before the justiciar. Early next day Falkes
assembled his forces, and crossed the river to Southwark. He took
with him Constantine and two of his supporters, and hanged all
three, without form of trial, before the city knew anything about
it. Then Falkes and his soldiers rushed through the streets,
capturing, mutilating, and frightening away the citizens.
Constantine’s houses and property were seized by the king. The weak
Serlo was deposed from the mayoralty, and the city taken into the
king’s hands. It was the last time that Hubert and Falkes worked
together, and something of the violence of023 the condottiere
captain sullied the justiciar’s reputation. As the murderer of
Constantine, Hubert was henceforth pursued with the undying hatred
of the Londoners.

During the next two years parties became clearly defined. Hubert
more and more controlled the royal policy, and strove to strengthen
both his master and himself by marriage alliances. Powerful
husbands were sought for the king’s three sisters. On June 19,
1221, Joan, Henry’s second sister, was married to the young
Alexander of Scotland, at York. At the same time Hubert, a widower
by Isabella of Gloucester’s death, wedded Alexander’s elder sister,
Margaret, a match which compensated the justiciar for his loss of
Isabella’s lands. Four years later, Isabella, the King of Scot’s
younger sister, was united with Roger Bigod, the young Earl of
Norfolk, a grandson of the great William Marshal, whose eldest son
and successor, William Marshal the younger, was in 1224 married to
the king’s third sister, Eleanor. The policy of intermarriage
between the royal family and the baronage was defended by the
example of Philip Augustus in France, and on the ground of the
danger to the royal interests if so strong a magnate as the earl
marshal were enticed away from his allegiance by an alliance with a
house unfriendly to Henry.[1]

[1] Royal Letters, i., 244-46.

The futility of marriage alliances in modifying policy was
already made clear by the attitude of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, the
husband of Henry’s bastard sister Joan. This resourceful prince had
already raised himself to a high position by a statecraft which
lacked neither strength nor duplicity. Though fully conscious of
his position as the champion of a proud nation, and, posing as the
peer of the King of Scots, Llewelyn saw that it was his interest to
continue the friendship with the baronial opposition which had
profited him so greatly in the days of the French invasion. The
pacification arranged in 1218 sat rightly upon him, and he plunged
into a war with William Marshal the younger that desolated South
Wales for several years. In 1219 Llewelyn devastated Pembrokeshire
so cruelly that the marshal’s losses were currently, though
absurdly, reported to have exceeded the amount of the ransom of
King Richard. There was much more fighting, but Llewelyn’s progress
was impeded by difficulties with his own son Griffith, 024and with the
princes of South Wales, who bore impatiently the growing hold of
the lord of Gwynedd upon the affections of southern Welshmen. There
was war also in the middle march, where in 1220 a royal army was
assembled against Llewelyn; but Pandulf negotiated a truce, and the
only permanent result of this effort was the fortification of the
castle and town at Montgomery, which had become royal demesne on
the extinction of the ancient house of Bollers a few years earlier.
But peace never lasted long west of the Severn, and in 1222 William
Marshal drove Llewelyn out of Cardigan and Carmarthen. Again there
were threats of war. Llewelyn was excommunicated, and his lands put
under interdict. The marshal complained bitterly of the poor
support which Henry gave him against the Welsh, but Hubert restored
cordiality between him and the king. In these circumstances the
policy of marrying Eleanor to the indignant marcher was a wise one.
Llewelyn however could still look to the active friendship of
Randolph of Chester. While the storm of war raged in South Wales,
the march between Cheshire and Gwynedd enjoyed unwonted peace, and
in 1223 a truce was patched up through Randolph’s mediation.

Earl Randolph needed the Welsh alliance the more because he
definitely threw in his lot with the enemies of Hubert de Burgh. In
April, 1223, a bull of Honorius III. declared Henry competent to
govern in his own name, a change which resulted in a further
strengthening of Hubert’s power. Towards the end of the year
Randolph joined with William of Albemarle, the Bishop of Winchester
and Falkes de Bréauté, in an attempt to overthrow the
justiciar. The discontented barons took arms and laid their
grievances before the king. They wished, they said, no ill to king
or kingdom, but simply desired to remove the justiciar from his
counsels. Hot words passed between the indignant Hubert and Peter
des Roches, and the conference broke up in confusion. The barons
still remained mutinous, and, while the king held his Christmas
court at Northampton, they celebrated the feast at Leicester. At
last Langton persuaded both parties to come to an agreement on the
basis of king’s friends and barons alike surrendering their castles
and wardships. This was a substantial victory for the party of
order, and during the next few months much was 025done to transfer
the castles to loyal hands. Randolph himself surrendered Shrewsbury
and Bridgnorth.

Comparative peace having been restored, and the judicial bench
purged of feudal partisans, private persons ventured to complain of
outrageous acts of “novel disseisin”, or unlawful appropriation of
men’s lands. In the spring of 1224 the king’s justices went
throughout the country, hearing and deciding pleas of this sort.
Sixteen acts of novel disseisin were proved against Falkes de
Bréauté. Despite all the efforts of Langton and
Hubert, that able adventurer, though stripped of some of his
castles, fully maintained the position which he first acquired in
the service of John. He was not the man to put up tamely with the
piecemeal destruction of his power by legal process, and, backed up
secretly by the feudal leaders, resolved to take the law into his
own hands. One of the most active of the judges in hearing
complaints against him was Henry of Braybrook. Falkes bade his
brother, William de Bréauté fall upon the justice,
who had been hearing suits at Dunstable, and take him prisoner.
William faithfully fulfilled his brother’s orders, and on June 17
the unlucky judge was safely shut up in a dungeon of Bedford
Castle, of which William had the custody, as his brother’s agent.
So daring an outrage on the royal authority was worse than the
action of William of Albemarle four years before. Hubert and the
archbishop immediately took strong measures to enforce the sanctity
of the law. While Langton excommunicated Falkes and his abettors,
Hubert hastily turned against the traitor the forces which were
assembling at Northampton with the object of reconquering Poitou.
Braybrook was captured on Monday. On Thursday the royal troops
besieged Bedford.

The siege lasted from June 20 to August 14. The “noble castle of
Bedford” was new, large, and fortified with an inner and outer
baily, and two strong towers. Falkes trusted that it would hold out
for a year, and had amply provided it with provisions and munitions
of war. In effect, though William de Bréauté and his
followers showed a gallant spirit, it resisted the justiciar for
barely two months. When called upon to surrender the garrison
answered that they would only yield at their lord’s orders, and
that the more as they were not bound to the king by homage or
fealty. Nothing was left 026but a fight to the death. The royalists made
strenuous efforts. A new scutage, the “scutage of Bedford,” was
imposed on the realm. Meanwhile Falkes fled to his accomplice, the
Earl of Chester, and afterwards took refuge with Llewelyn. But the
adventurer found such cold comfort from the great men who had lured
him to his ruin that he perforce made his way back to England,
along with a motley band of followers, English and French, Scottish
and Welsh.[1] A hue and cry was raised after him, and, like William
of Albemarle, he was forced to throw himself into sanctuary, while
Randolph of Chester openly joined the besiegers of Bedford. In his
refuge in a church at Coventry, Falkes was persuaded to surrender
to the bishop of the diocese, who handed him over to Langton.

[1] The names of his familia taken with him
are in Patent Rolls of Henry III., 1216-1227, pp.
461-62.

During Falkes’s wanderings his brother had been struggling
valiantly against overwhelming odds. Petrariae and mangonels
threw huge stones into the castle, and effected breaches in keep
and curtain. Miners undermined the walls, while over-against the
stronghold two lofty structures of wood were raised, from which the
crossbowmen, who manned them, were able to command the whole of the
interior. At last the castle was captured in four successive
assaults. In the first the barbican was taken; in the next the
outer baily was stormed; in the third the interior baily was won;
and in the last the keep was split asunder. The garrison then
allowed the women and captives, including the wife of Falkes and
the unlucky Braybrook, to make their way to the enemies’ lines.
Next day the defenders themselves surrendered. The only mercy shown
to these gallant men was that they were allowed to make their peace
with the Church before their execution. Of the eighty prisoners,
three Templars alone were spared.

Falkes threw himself upon the king’s mercy, appealing to his
former services to Henry and his father. He surrendered to the King
the large sums of money which he had deposited with his bankers,
the Templars of London, and ordered his castellans in Plympton and
the other west-country castles of his wife to open their gates to
the royal officers. In return for these concessions he was released
from excommunication. His life was spared, but his property was
confiscated, and he027 was ordered to abjure the realm. Even his
wife deserted him, protesting that she had been forced to marry him
against her will. On October 26 he received letters of safe conduct
to go beyond sea. As he left England, he protested that he had been
instigated by the English magnates in all that he had done. On
landing at Fécamp he was detained by his old enemy Louis,
then, by his father’s death, King of France. But Louis VIII. was
the last man to bear old grudges against the Norman adventurer,
especially as Falkes’s rising had enabled him to capture the chief
towns of Poitou.

Even in his exile Falkes was still able to do mischief. He
obtained his release from Louis’ prison about Easter, 1225, on the
pretence of going on crusade. He then made his way to Rome where he
strove to excite the sympathy of Honorius III., by presenting an
artful memorial, which throws a flood of light upon his character,
motives, and hopes. Honorius earnestly pleaded for his restitution,
but Hubert and Langton stood firm against him. They urged that the
pope had been misinformed, and declined to recall the exile.
Honorius sent his chaplain Otto to England, but the nuncio found it
impossible to modify the policy of the advisers of the king. Falkes
went back from Italy to Troyes, where he waited for a year in the
hope that his sentence would be reversed. At last Otto gave up his
cause in despair, and devoted himself to the more profitable work
of exacting money from the English clergy. Falkes died in 1226.
With him disappears from our history the lawless spirit which had
troubled the land since the war between John and his barons. The
foreign adventurers, of whom he was the chief, either went back in
disgust to their native lands, or, like Peter de Mauley, became
loyal subjects and the progenitors of a harmless stock of English
barons. The ten years of storm and stress were over. The
administration was once more in English hands, and Hubert enjoyed a
few years of well-earned power.

New difficulties at once arose. The defeat of the feudalists and
their Welsh allies involved heavy special taxation, and the king’s
honour required that an effort should be made both to wrest Poitou
from Louis VIII., and to strengthen the English hold over Gascony.
Besides national obligations, clergy and laity alike were still
called upon to contribute towards the028 cost of crusading enterprises,
and in 1226 the papal nuncio, Otto, demanded that a large
proportion of the revenues of the English clergy should be
contributed to the papal coffers. To the Englishman of that age all
extraordinary taxation was a grievance quite irrespective of its
necessity. The double incidence of the royal and papal demands was
met by protests which showed some tendency towards the splitting up
of the victorious side into parties. It was still easy for all to
unite against Otto, and the papal agent was forced to go home empty
handed, for councils both of clergy and barons agreed to reject his
demands. Whatever other nations might offer to the pope, argued the
magnates, the realms of England and Ireland at least had a right to
be freed from such impositions by reason of the tribute which John
had agreed to pay to Innocent III. The demand of the king’s
ministers for a fifteenth to prosecute the war with France was
reluctantly conceded, but only on the condition of a fresh
confirmation of the charters in a form intended to bring home to
the king his personal obligation to observe them. Hubert de Burgh,
however, was no enthusiast for the charters. His standpoint was
that of the officials of the age of Henry II. To him the
re-establishment of order meant the restoration of the prerogative.
There he parted company with the archbishop, who was an eager
upholder of the charters, for which he was so largely responsible.
The struggle against the foreigner was to be succeeded by a
struggle for the charters.

In January, 1227, a council met at Oxford. The king, then nearly
twenty years old, declared that he would govern the country
himself, and renounced the tutelage of the Bishop of Winchester.
Henry gave himself over completely to the justiciar, whom he
rewarded for his faithful service by making him Earl of Kent. In
deep disgust Bishop Peter left the court to carry out his
long-deferred crusading vows. For four years he was absent in
Palestine, where his military talents had ample scope as one of the
leaders of Frederick II.’s army, while his diplomatic skill sought,
with less result, to preserve some sort of relations between the
excommunicated emperor and the new pope, Gregory IX., who in this
same year succeeded Honorius. In April Gregory renewed the bull of
1223 in which his predecessor recognised Henry’s competence to
govern.

Thus ended the first minority since the Conquest. The029
successful restoration of law and order when the king was a child,
showed that a strong king was not absolutely necessary for good
government. From the exercise of royal authority by ministers
without the personal intervention of the monarch arose the ideas of
limited monarchy, the responsibility of the official, and the
constitutional rights of the baronial council to appoint ministers
and control the administration. We also discern, almost for the
first time, the action of an inner ministerial council which was
ultimately to develop into the consilium ordinarium of a
later age.

No sudden changes attended the royal majority. Those who had
persuaded Henry to dismiss Bishop Peter had no policy beyond
getting rid of a hated rival. The new Earl of Kent continued to
hold office as justiciar for five years, and his ascendency is even
more marked in the years 1227 to 1232 than it had been between 1224
and 1227. Hubert still found the task of ruling England by no means
easy. With the mitigation of home troubles foreign affairs assumed
greater importance, and England’s difficulties with France, the
efforts to establish cordial relations with the empire, the
ever-increasing aggressions of Llewelyn of Wales, and the chronic
troubles of Ireland, involved the country in large expenses with
little compensating advantage. Not less uneasy were the results of
the growing encroachments of the papacy and the increasing
inability of the English clergy to face them. Papal taxation, added
to the burden of national taxation, induced discontent that found a
ready scapegoat in the justiciar. The old and the new baronial
opposition combined to denounce Hubert as the true cause of all
evils. The increasing personal influence of the young king
complicated the situation. In his efforts to deal with all these
problems Hubert became involved in the storm of obloquy which
finally brought about his fall.

At the accession of Henry III., the truce for five years
concluded between his father and Philip Augustus on September 18,
1214, had still three years to run. The expedition of Louis to
England might well seem to have broken it, but the prudent
disavowal by Philip II. of his son’s sacrilegious enterprise made
it a point of policy for the French King to regard it as still in
force, and neither John nor the earl marshal 030had a mind to
face the enmity of the father as well as the invasion of the son.
Accordingly the truce ran out its full time, and in 1220 Honorius
III., ever zealous for peace between Christian sovereigns, procured
its prolongation for four years. Before this had expired, the
accession of Louis VIII. in 1223 raised the old enemy of King Henry
to the throne of France. Louis still coveted the English throne,
and desired to complete the conquest of Henry’s French dominions in
France. His accession soon involved England in a new struggle,
luckily delayed until the worst of the disorders at home had been
overcome.

Peace was impossible because Louis, like Philip, regarded the
forfeiture of John as absolute, and as involving the right to deny
to Henry III. a legitimate title to any of his lands beyond sea.
Henry, on the other hand, was still styled Duke of Normandy, Count
of Anjou, Count of Poitou, and Duke of Aquitaine. Claiming all that
his father had held, he refused homage to Philip or Louis for such
French lands as he actually possessed. For the first time since the
Conquest, an English king ruled over extensive French territories
without any feudal subjection to the King of France. However,
Henry’s French lands, though still considerable, were but a shadow
of those once ruled by his father. Philip had conquered all
Normandy, save the Channel Islands, and also the whole of Anjou and
Touraine. For a time he also gained possession of Poitou, but
before his death nearly the whole of that region had slipped from
his grasp. Poitiers, alone of its great towns, remained in French
hands. For the rest, both the barons and cities of Poitou
acknowledged the over-lordship of their English count. Too much
importance must not be ascribed to this revival of the English
power. Henry claimed very little domain in Poitou, which
practically was divided between the feudal nobles and the great
communes. So long as they maintained a virtual freedom, they were
indifferent as to their overlord. If they easily transferred their
allegiance from Philip to Henry, it was because the weakness of
absentee counts was less to be dreaded than the strength of a
monarch near at hand. Meanwhile the barons carried on their feuds
one against the other, and all alike joined in oppressing the
townsmen.

During Henry’s minority the crown was not strong enough 031to deal
with the unruly Foitevins. Seneschals quickly succeeded each other;
the barons expected the office to be filled by one of their own
order, and the towns, jealous of hostile neighbours, demanded the
appointment of an Englishman. At last, in 1221, Savary de
Mauléon, one of King John’s mercenaries, a poet, and a
crusader against infidels and Albigenses, was made seneschal. His
English estates ensured some measure of fidelity, and his energy
and experience were guarantees of his competence, though, as a
younger member of the great house of Thouars, he belonged by birth
to the inner circle of the Poitevin nobility, whose treachery,
levity, and self-seeking were proverbial. The powerful Viscounts of
Thouars were constantly kept in check by their traditional enemies
the Counts of La Marche, whose representative, Hugh of Lusignan,
was by far the strongest of the local barons. His cousin, and
sometime betrothed, Isabella, Countess of Angoulême, the
widow of King John, had left England to resume the administration
of her dominions. Early in 1220 she married Hugh, justifying
herself to her son on the ground that it would be dangerous to his
interests if the Count of La Marche should contract an alliance
with the French party. But this was mere excuse. The union of La
Marche and Angoulême largely increased Count Hugh’s power,
and he showed perfect impartiality in pursuing his own interests by
holding a balance between his stepson and the King of France.
Against him neither Savary nor the Poitevin communes could contend
with success. The anarchy of Poitou was an irresistible temptation
to Louis VII. “Know you,” he wrote to the men of Limoges, “that
John, king of England, was deprived by the unanimous judgment of
his peers of all the lands which he held of our father Philip. We
have now received in inheritance all our father’s rights, and
require you to perform the service that you owe us.” While the
English government weakly negotiated for the prolongation of the
truce, and for the pope’s intervention, Louis concluded treaties
with the Poitevin barons, and made ready an army to conquer his
inheritance. Foremost among his local partisans appeared Henry’s
stepfather.

The French army met at Tours on June 24, 1224, and marched
through Thouars to La Rochelle, the strongest of the Poitevin
towns, and the most devoted to England. On 032the way Louis forced Savary
de Mauléon to yield up Niort, and to promise to defend no
other place than La Rochelle, before which city he sat down on July
15. At first Savary resisted vigorously. The siege of Bedford,
however, prevented the despatch of effective help from England, and
Savary was perhaps already secretly won over by Louis. Be this as
it may, the town surrendered on August 3, and with it went all
Aquitaine north of the Dordogne. Savary took service with the
conqueror, and was made warden of La Rochelle and of the adjacent
coasts, while Lusignan received the reward of his treachery in a
grant of the Isle of Oléron. When Louis returned to the
north, the Count of La Marche undertook the conquest of Gascony. He
soon made himself master of St. Emilion, and of the whole of
Périgord. The surrender of La Réole opened up the
passage of the Garonne, and the capture of Bazas gave the French a
foothold to the south of that river. Only the people of Bordeaux
showed any spirit in resisting Hugh. But their resistance proved
sufficient, and he withdrew baffled before their walls.

The easiness of Louis’ conquests showed their instability. “I am
sure,” wrote one of Henry’s officers, “that you can easily recover
all that you have lost, if you send speedy succour to these
regions.” After the capture of Bedford, Hubert undertook the
recovery of Poitou and the defence of Gascony. Henry’s younger
brother Richard, a youth of sixteen, was appointed Earl of Cornwall
and Count of Poitou, dubbed knight by his brother, and put in
nominal command of the expedition despatched to Gascony in March,
1225. His experienced uncle, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury,
and Philip of Aubigny, were sent with him as his chief counsellors.
Received with open arms by Bordeaux, he boasted on May 2 that he
had conquered all Gascony, save La Réole, and had received
the allegiance of every Gascon noble, except Elie Rudel, the lord
of Bergerac. The siege of La Réole, the only serious
military operation of the campaign, occupied Richard all the summer
and autumn, and it was not until November 13 that the burgesses
opened their gates. As soon as the French had retired, the lord of
Bergerac, “after the fashion of the Poitevins,” renounced Louis and
professed himself the liegeman of Earl Richard. Then the worst
trouble was that Savary de 033Mauléon’s ships commanded the Bay
of Biscay, and rendered communication between Bordeaux and England
very difficult.[1] Once more the men of the Cinque Ports came to
the king’s aid, and there was severe fighting at sea, involving
much plunder of merchant vessels and dislocation of trade.

[1] The names of his familia taken with him
are in Patent Rolls of Henry III., 1216-1227, pp.
461-62.

The English sought to supplement their military successes by
diplomacy. Richard of Cornwall made an alliance with the counts of
Auvergne, and the home administration negotiated with all possible
enemies of the French King. A proposal to affiance Henry’s sister,
Isabella, to Henry, King of the Romans, the infant son of Frederick
II., led to no results, for the Archbishop of Cologne, the chief
upholder of the scheme in Germany, was murdered, and the young king
found a bride in Austria. Yet the project counteracted the
negotiations set on foot by Louis to secure Frederick II. for his
own side, and induced the Emperor to take up a position of
neutrality. An impostor appeared in Flanders who gave out that he
was the old Count Baldwin, sometime Latin Emperor of the East, who
had died in prison in Bulgaria twenty years before. Baldwin’s
daughter, Joan, appealed to Louis for support against the false
Baldwin, whereupon Henry recognised his claims and sought his
alliance. Nothing but the capture and execution of the impostor
prevented Henry from effecting a powerful diversion in Flanders.
Peter Mauclerc, Count of Brittany, was won over by an offer of
restitution to his earldom of Richmond, and by a promise that Henry
would marry his daughter Iolande. Intrigues were entered into with
the discontented Norman nobles, and the pope was importuned to save
Henry from French assaults at the same moment that the king made a
treaty of alliance with his first cousin, the heretical Raymond
VII. of Toulouse. Honorius gave his ward little save sympathy and
good advice. His special wish was to induce Louis to lead a French
expedition into Languedoc against the Albigensian heretics. As soon
as Louis resolved on this, the pope sought to prevent Henry from
entering into unholy alliance with Raymond. It was the crusade of
1226, not the good-will of the Pope or the fine-drawn English
negotiations, which gave Gascony a short respite. Louis VIII. died
on November 8 in the course of his expedition, and the Capetian
034monarchy became less dangerous during the
troubles of a minority, in which his widow, Blanche, strove as
regent to uphold the throne of their little son, Louis IX.

The first months of Louis IX.’s reign showed how unstable was
any edifice built upon the support of the treacherous lords of
Poitou. Within six weeks of Louis VIII.’s death, Hugh of Lusignan,
the viscount of Thouars, Savary de Mauléon, and many other
Poitevin barons, concluded treaties with Richard of Cornwall, by
which in return for lavish concessions they went back to the
English obedience. In the spring of 1227, however, the appearance
of a French army south of the Loire caused these same lords to make
fresh treaties with Blanche. Peter of Brittany also became friendly
with the French regent, and gave up his daughter’s English
marriage. With allies so shifty, further dealings seemed hopeless.
Before Easter, Richard patched up a truce and went home in disgust.
The Capetians lost Poitou, but Henry failed to take advantage of
his rival’s weakness, and the real masters of the situation were
the local barons. Fifteen more years were to elapse before the
definitive French conquest of Poitou.

During the next three years the good understanding between the
Bretons, the Poitevins, and the regent Blanche came to an end, and
the progress of the feudal reaction against the rule of the young
King of France once more excited hopes of improving Henry’s
position in south-western France. Henry III. was eager to win back
his inheritance, though Hubert de Burgh had little faith in
Poitevin promises, and, conscious of his king’s weakness, managed
to prolong the truce, until July 22, 1229. Three months before
that, Blanche succeeded in forcing the unfortunate Raymond VII. to
accept the humiliating treaty of Meaux, which assured the
succession to his dominions to her second son Alfonse, who was to
marry his daughter and heiress, Joan. The barons of the north and
west were not yet defeated, and once more appealed to Henry to come
to their aid. Accordingly, the English king summoned his vassals to
Portsmouth on October 15 for a French campaign. When Henry went
down to Portsmouth he found that there were not enough ships to
convey his troops over sea. Thereupon he passionately denounced the
justiciar as an “old traitor,” and accused him of being bribed by
the French queen. 035Nothing but the intervention of Randolph of
Chester, Hubert’s persistent enemy, put an end to the undignified
scene.

Count Peter of Brittany, who arrived at Portsmouth on the 9th,
did homage to Henry as King of France, and received the earldom of
Richmond and the title of Duke of Brittany which he had long
coveted, but which the French government refused to recognise. He
persuaded Henry to postpone the expedition until the following
spring. When that time came Henry appointed Ralph Neville, the
chancellor, and Stephen Segrave, a rising judge, as wardens of
England, and on May 1, 1230, set sail from Portsmouth. It was the
first time since 1213 that an English king had crossed the seas at
the head of an army, and every effort was made to equip a
sufficient force. Hubert the justiciar, Randolph of Chester,
William the marshal, and most of the great barons personally shared
in the expedition, and the ports of the Channel, the North Sea, and
the Bay of Biscay were ransacked to provide adequate shipping. Many
Norman vessels served as transports, apparently of their owners’
free-will.

On May 3 Henry landed at St. Malo, and thence proceeded to
Dinan, the meeting-place assigned for his army, the greater part of
which landed at Port Blanc, a little north of Tréguier.
Peter Mauclerc joined him, and a plan of operations was discussed.
The moment was favourable, for a great number of the French
magnates were engaged in war against Theobald, the poet-count of
Champagne, and the French army, which was assembled at Angers,
represented but a fraction of the military strength of the land.
Fulk Paynel, a Norman baron who wished to revive the independence
of the duchy, urged Henry to invade Normandy. Hubert successfully
withstood this rash proposal, and also Fulk’s fatal suggestion that
Henry should divide his army and send two hundred knights for the
invasion of Normandy. Before long the English marched through
Brittany to Nantes, where they wasted six weeks. At last, on the
advice of Hubert, they journeyed south into Poitou. The innate
Poitevin instability had again brought round the Lusignans, the
house of Thouars, and their kind to the French side, and Henry
found that his own mother did her best to obstruct his progress. He
was too strong to make open resistance safe, and his long progress
from Nantes 036to Bordeaux was only once checked by the need
to fight his way. This opposition came from the little town and
castle of Mirambeau, situated in Upper Saintonge, rather more than
half-way between Saintes and Blaye.[1] From July 21 to 30 Mirambeau
stoutly held out, but Henry’s army was reinforced by the chivalry
of Gascony, and by a siege-train borrowed from Bordeaux and the
loyal lords of the Garonne. Against such appliances of warfare
Mirambeau could not long resist. On its capitulation Henry pushed
on to Bordeaux.

[1] E. Berger, Bibl. Ecole des Chartes,
1893, pp. 35-36, shows that Mirambeau, not Mirebeau, was
besieged by Henry; see also his Blanche de Castille
(1895).

Useless as the march through Poitou had been, it was then
repeated in the reverse way. With scarcely a week’s rest, Henry
left the Gascon capital on August 10, and on September 15 ended his
inglorious campaign at Nantes. Although he was unable to assert
himself against the faithless Poitevins, the barons of the province
were equally impotent to make head against him. On reaching
Brittany, Hubert once more stopped further military efforts. After
a few days’ rest at Nantes, Henry made his way by slow stages
through the heart of Brittany. It was said that his army had no
better occupation than teaching the local nobles to drink deep
after the English fashion. The King had wasted all his treasure,
and the poorer knights were compelled to sell or pawn their horses
and arms to support themselves. The farce ended when the King
sailed from St. Pol de Leon, and late in October landed at
Portsmouth. He left a portion of his followers in Brittany, under
the Earls of Chester and Pembroke. Randolph himself, as a former
husband of Constance of Brittany, had claims to certain dower lands
which appertained to Count Peter’s mother-in-law. He was put in
possession of St. James de Beuvron, and thence he raided Normandy
and Anjou. By this time the coalition against the count of
Champagne had broken down, and Blanche was again triumphant. It was
useless to continue a struggle so expensive and disastrous, and on
July 4, 1231, a truce for three years was concluded between France,
Brittany, and England. Peter des Roches, then returning through
France from his crusade, took an active part in negotiating the
treaty. Just as the king was disposed to make the justiciar the
scapegoat of his failure, 037Hubert’s old enemy appeared once more upon
the scene. The responsibility for blundering must be divided among
the English magnates, and not ascribed solely to their monarch. If
Hubert saved Henry from reckless adventures, he certainly deserves
a large share of the blame for the Poitevin fiasco.

The grave situation at home showed the folly of this untimely
revival of an active foreign policy. The same years that saw the
collapse of Henry’s hopes in Normandy and Poitou, witnessed
troubles both in Ireland and in Wales. In both these regions the
house of the Marshals was a menace to the neighbouring chieftains,
and Hugh de Lacy, Earl of Ulster, and Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, made
common cause against it and vigorously attacked their rivals both
in Leinster and in South Wales. Nor was this the only disturbance.
The summons of the Norman chieftains of Ireland to Poitou gave the
king of Connaught a chance of attacking the justiciar of Ireland,
Geoffrey Marsh, who ultimately drove the Irish back with severe
loss. Llewelyn was again as active and hostile as ever. Irritated
by the growing strength of the new royal castle of Montgomery, he
laid siege to it in 1228. Hubert de Burgh, then castellan of
Montgomery, could only save his castle by summoning the levies of
the kingdom. At their head Hubert went in person to hold the field
against Llewelyn, taking the king with him. The Welsh withdrew as
usual before a regular army, and Hubert and the king, late in
September, marched a few miles westwards of Montgomery to the vale
of Kerry, where they erected a castle. But Llewelyn soon made the
English position in Kerry untenable. Many of the English lords were
secretly in league with him, and the army suffered severely from
lack of food. In the fighting that ensued the Welsh got the better
of the English, taking prisoner William de Braose, the heir of
Builth, and one of the greatest of the marcher lords. At last king
and justiciar were glad to agree to demolish the new castle on
receiving from Llewelyn the expenses involved in the task. The
dismantled ruin was called “Hubert’s folly”. “And then,” boasts the
Welsh chronicler, “the king returned to England with shame.”

In 1230 Llewelyn inflicted another slight upon his overlord.
William de Braose long remained the Welsh prince’s captive, and
only purchased his liberty by agreeing to wed his 038daughter to
Llewelyn’s son, and surrendering Builth as her marriage portion.
The captive had employed his leisure in winning the love of
Llewelyn’s wife, Joan, Henry’s half-sister. At Easter, Llewelyn
took a drastic revenge on the adulterer. He seized William in his
own castle at Builth, and on May 2 hanged him on a tree in open day
in the presence of 900 witnesses. Finding that neither the king nor
the marchers moved a finger to avenge the outrage done to sister
and comrade, Llewelyn took the aggressive in regions which had
hitherto been comparatively exempt from his assaults. In 1231 he
laid his heavy hand on all South Wales, burning down churches full
of women, as the English believed, and signalling out for special
attack the marshal’s lands in Gwent and Pembroke. Once more the
king penetrated with his barons into Mid Wales, while the pope and
archbishop excommunicated Llewelyn and put his lands under
interdict. Yet neither temporal nor spiritual arms were of avail
against the Welshman. Henry’s only exploit in this, his second
Welsh campaign, was to rebuild Maud’s Castle in stone. He withdrew,
and in December agreed to conclude a three years’ truce, and
procure Llewelyn’s absolution. Hubert once more bore the blame of
his master’s failure.

On July 9, 1228, Stephen Langton died. Despite their differences
as to the execution of the charters, his removal lost the justiciar
a much-needed friend. Affairs were made worse by the unteachable
folly of the monks of Christ Church. Regardless of the severe
warning which they had received in the storms that preceded the
establishment of Langton’s authority, the chapter forthwith
proceeded to the election of their brother monk, Walter of Eynsham.
The archbishop-elect was an ignorant old monk of weak health and
doubtful antecedents, and Gregory IX. wisely refused to confirm the
election. On the recommendation of the king and the bishops,
Gregory himself appointed as archbishop Richard, chancellor of
Lincoln, an eloquent and learned secular priest of handsome person,
whose nickname of “le Grand” was due to his tall stature. The first
Archbishop of Canterbury since the Conquest directly nominated by
the pope—for even in Langton’s case there was a form of
election—Richard le Grand at once began to quarrel with the
justiciar, demanding that he 039should surrender the custody of Tunbridge
castle on the ground of some ancient claim of the see of
Canterbury. Failing to obtain redress in England, Richard betook
himself to Rome in the spring of 1231. There he regaled the pope’s
ears with the offences of Hubert, and of the worldly bishops who
were his tools. In August, Richard’s death in Italy left the Church
of Canterbury for three years without a pastor.

While Gregory IX. did more to help Henry against Louis than
Honorius III., the inflexible character and lofty hierarchical
ideals of this nephew of Innocent III. made his hand heavier on the
English Church than that of his predecessor. Above all, Gregory’s
expenses in pursuing his quarrel with Frederick II. made the wealth
of the English Church a sore temptation to him. With his imposition
of a tax of one-tenth on all clerical property to defray the
expenses of the crusade against the emperor, papal taxation in
England takes a newer and severer phase. The rigour with which
Master Stephen, the pope’s collector, extorted the tax was bitterly
resented. Not less loud was the complaint against the increasing
numbers of foreign ecclesiastics forced into English benefices by
papal authority, and without regard for the rights of the lawful
patrons and electors. A league of aggrieved tax-payers and patrons
was formed against the Roman agents. At Eastertide, 1232, bands of
men, headed by a knight named Robert Twenge, who took the nickname
of William Wither, despoiled the Romans of their gains, and
distributed the proceeds to the poor. These doings were the more
formidable from their excellent organisation, and the strong
sympathy everywhere extended to them. Hubert, who hated foreign
interference, did nothing to stop Twenge and his followers. His
inaction further precipitated his ruin. Archbishop Richard had
already poisoned the pope’s mind against him, and his suspected
connivance with the anti-Roman movement completed his disfavour.
Bitter letters of complaint arrived in England denouncing the
outrages inflicted on the friends of the apostolic see. It is hard
to dissociate the pope’s feeling in this matter from his rejection
of the nomination of the king’s chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop
of Chichester, to the see of Canterbury, as an illiterate
politician.

The dislike of the taxes made necessary by the Welsh 040and French
wars, such as the “scutage of Poitou” and the “scutage of Kerry,”
swelled the outcry against the justiciar. So far back as 1227
advantage had been taken of Henry’s majority to exact large sums of
money for the confirmation of all charters sealed during his
nonage. The barons made it a grievance that his brother Richard was
ill-provided for, and a rising in 1227 extorted a further provision
for him from what was regarded as the niggardliness of the
justiciar. Nor did Hubert, with all his rugged honesty, neglect his
own interests. He secured for himself lucrative wardships, such as
the custody for the second time of the great Gloucester earldom,
and of several castles, including the not very profitable charge of
Montgomery, and the important governorship of Dover. On the very
eve of his downfall he was made justice of Ireland. His brother was
bishop of Ely, and other kinsmen were promoted to high posts. He
was satisfied that he spent all that he got in the King’s service,
in promoting the interests of the kingdom, but his enemies regarded
him as unduly tenacious of wealth and office. All classes alike
grew disgusted with the justiciar. The restoration of the malign
influence of Peter of Winchester completed his ruin. The king
greedily listened to the complaints of his old guardian against the
minister who overshadowed the royal power. At last, on July 29,
1232, Henry plucked up courage to dismiss him.

With Hubert’s fall ends the second period of Henry’s reign.
William Marshal expelled the armed foreigner. Hubert restored the
administration to English hands. Matthew Paris puts into the mouth
of a poor smith who refused to fasten fetters on the fallen
minister words which, though probably never spoken, describe with
sufficient accuracy Hubert’s place in history: “Is he not that most
faithful Hubert who so often saved England from the devastation of
the foreigners and restored England to England?” Hubert was, as has
been well said, perhaps the first minister since the Conquest who
made patriotism a principle of policy, though it is easy in the
light of later developments to read into his doings more than he
really intended. But whatever his motives, the results of his
action were clear. He drove away the mercenaries, humbled the
feudal lords, and set limits to the pope’s interference. He renewed
respect for law and obedience to the law courts. 041Even in the
worst days of anarchy the administrative system did not break down,
and the records of royal orders and judicial judgments remain
almost as full in the midst of the civil war as in the more
peaceful days of Hubert’s rule. But it was easy enough to issue
proclamations and writs. The difficulty was to get them obeyed, and
the work of Hubert was to ensure that the orders of king and
ministers should really be respected by his subjects. He made many
mistakes. He must share the blame of the failure of the Kerry
campaign, and he was largely responsible for the sorry collapse of
the invasion of Poitou. He neither understood nor sympathised with
Stephen Langton’s zeal for the charters. A straightforward,
limited, honourable man, he strove to carry out his rather
old-fashioned conception of duty in the teeth of a thousand
obstacles. He never had a free hand, and he never enjoyed the
hearty support of any one section of his countrymen. Hated by the
barons whom he kept away from power, he alienated the Londoners by
his high-handed violence, and the tax-payers by his heavy
exactions. The pope disliked him, the aliens plotted against him,
and the king, for whom he sacrificed so much, gave him but grudging
support. But the reaction which followed his retirement made many,
who had rejoiced in his humiliation, bitterly regret it.

Three notable enemies of Hubert went off the stage of history
within a few months of his fall. The death of Richard le Grand has
already been recorded. William Marshal, the brother-in-law of the
king, the gallant and successful soldier, the worthy successor of
his great father, came home from Brittany early in 1231. His last
act was to marry his sister, Isabella, to Richard of Cornwall.
Within ten days of the wedding his body was laid beside his father
in the Temple Church at London. In October, 1232, died Randolph of
Blundeville, the last representative of the male stock of the old
line of the Earls of Chester, and long the foremost champion of the
feudal aristocracy against Hubert. The contest between them had
been fought with such chivalry that the last public act of the old
earl was to protect the fallen justiciar from the violence of his
foes. For more than fifty years Randolph had ruled like a king over
his palatine earldom; had, like his master, his struggles with his
own vassals, 042and had perforce to grant to his own barons
and boroughs liberties which he strove to wrest from his overlord
for himself and his fellow nobles. He was not a great statesman,
and hardly even a successful warrior. Yet his popular personal
qualities, his energy, his long duration of power, and his enormous
possessions, give him a place in history. His memory, living on
long in the minds of the people, inspired a series of ballads which
vied in popularity with the cycle of Robin Hood,[1] though,
unfortunately, they have not come down to us. His estates were
divided among his four sisters. His nephew, John the Scot, Earl of
Huntingdon, received a re-grant of the Chester earldom; his
Lancashire lands had already gone to his brother-in-law, William of
Ferrars, Earl of Derby; other portions of his territories went to
his sister, the Countess of Arundel, and the Lincoln earldom,
passing through another sister, Hawise of Quincy, to her
son-in-law, John of Lacy, constable of Chester, raised the chief
vassal of the palatinate to comital rank. None of these heirs of a
divided inheritance were true successors to Randolph. With him died
the last of the great Norman houses, tenacious beyond its fellows,
and surpassing in its two centuries of unbroken male descent the
usual duration of the medieval baronial family. Its collapse made
easier the alien invasion which threatened to undo Hubert’s
work.

[1] “Ich can rymes of Robyn Hode, and of Randolf
erl of Chestre,” Vision of Piers Plowman, i., 167; ii.,
94.

CHAPTER III.

THE ALIEN INVASION.

043With the dismissal of Hubert on July 29,
1232, Peter des Roches resumed his authority over Henry III.
Mindful of past failures, the bishop’s aim was to rule through
dependants, so that he could pull the wires without making himself
too prominent. His chief agents in pursuing this policy were Peter
of Rivaux, Stephen Segrave, and Robert Passelewe. Of these, Peter
of Rivaux was a Poitevin clerk, officially described as the
bishop’s nephew, but generally supposed to have been his son.
Stephen Segrave, the son of a small Leicestershire landholder, was
a lawyer who had held many judicial and administrative posts,
including the regency during the king’s absence abroad in 1230. He
abandoned his original clerical profession, received knighthood,
married nobly, and was the founder of a baronial house in the
midlands. His only political principle was obedience to the powers
that were in the ascendant. Passelewe, a clerk who had acted as the
agent of Randolph of Chester and Falkes of Bréauté at
the Roman court, was, like Segrave, a mere tool.

The Bishop of Winchester began to show his hand. Between June 26
and July 11, nineteen of the thirty-five sheriffdoms were bestowed
on Peter of Rivaux for life. As Segrave was sheriff of five shires,
and the bishop himself had acquired the shrievalty of Hampshire,
this involved the transference of the administration of over
two-thirds of the counties to the bishop’s dependants. On the
downfall of Hubert, Segrave became justiciar. He was not the equal
of his predecessors either in personal weight or in social
position, and did not aspire to act as chief minister. The
appointment of a mere lawyer to the great Norman office of state
marks 044the first stage in the decline, which before
long degraded the justiciarship into a simple position of headship
over the judges, the chief justiceship of the next generation.
Hubert’s offices and lands were divided among his supplanters.
Peter of Rivaux became keeper of wards and escheats, castellan of
many castles on the Welsh march, and the recipient of even more
offices and wardships in Ireland than in England. The custody of
the Gloucester earldom went to the Bishop of Winchester. The last
steps of the ministerial revolution were completed at the king’s
Christmas court at Worcester. There Rivaux, who had yielded up
before Michaelmas most of his shrievalties, was made treasurer,
with Passelewe as his deputy. Of the old ministers only the
chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester, was suffered to
remain in office. Finally the king’s new advisers imported a large
company of Poitevin and Breton mercenaries, hoping with their help
to maintain their newly won position. The worst days of John seemed
renewed.

The Poitevin gang called upon Hubert to render complete accounts
for the whole period of his justiciarship. When he pleaded that
King John had given him a charter of quittance, he was told that
its force had ended with the death of the grantor. He was further
required to answer for the wrongs which Twenge’s bands had
inflicted on the servants of the pope. He was accused of poisoning
William Earl of Salisbury, William Marshal, Falkes de
Bréauté, and Archbishop Richard. He had prevented the
king from contracting a marriage with a daughter of the Duke of
Austria; he had dissuaded the king from attempting to recover
Normandy; he had first seduced and then married the daughter of the
King of Scots; he had stolen from the treasury a talisman which
made its possessor invincible in war and had traitorously given it
to Llewelyn of Wales; he had induced Llewelyn to slay William de
Braose; he had won the royal favour by magic and witchcraft, and
finally he had murdered Constantine FitzAthulf.

Many of these accusations were so monstrous that they carried
with them their own refutation. It was too often the custom in the
middle ages to overwhelm an enemy with incredible charges for it to
be fair to accuse the enemies of Hubert of any excessive malignity.
The substantial innocence of Hubert is clear, for the only charges
brought against him 045were either errors of judgment and policy, or
incredible crimes. Nevertheless he was in such imminent danger that
he took sanctuary with the canons of Merton in Surrey. Thereupon
the king called upon the Londoners to march to Merton and bring
their ancient foe, dead or alive, to the city. Randolph of Chester
interposed between his fallen enemy and the royal vengeance. He
persuaded Henry to countermand the march to Merton and to suffer
the fallen justiciar to leave his refuge with some sort of safe
conduct. But the king was irritated to hear that Hubert had
journeyed into Essex. Again he was pursued, and once more he was
forced to take sanctuary, this time in a chapel near Brentwood.
From this he was dragged by some of the king’s household and
brought to London, where he was imprisoned in the Tower. The Bishop
of London complained to the king of this violation of the rights of
the Church, and Hubert was allowed to return to his chapel.
However, the levies of Essex surrounded the precincts, and he was
soon forced by hunger to surrender. He offered to submit himself to
the king’s will, and was for a second time confined in the Tower.
On November 10, he was brought before a not unfriendly tribunal, in
which the malice of the new justiciar was tempered by the baronial
instincts of the Earls of Cornwall, Warenne, Pembroke, and Lincoln.
He made no effort to defend himself, and submitted absolutely to
the judgment of the king. It was finally agreed that he should be
allowed to retain the lands which he had inherited from his father,
and that all his chattels and the lands that he had acquired
himself should be forfeited to the crown. Further, he was to be
kept in prison in the castle of Devizes under the charge of the
four earls who had tried him.

Peter des Roches was soon in difficulties. The earls who had
saved Hubert began to oppose the whole administration. Their leader
was Richard, Earl of Pembroke, the second son of the great regent,
and since his brother’s death head of the house of Marshal. Richard
was bitterly prejudiced against the king and his courtiers by an
attempt to refuse him his brother’s earldom. A gallant warrior,
handsome and eloquent, pious, upright, and well educated, Richard,
the best of the marshal’s sons, stood for the rest of his short
life at the head of the opposition. He incited his friends to
refuse to attend a 046council summoned to meet at Oxford, on June
24, 1233. The king would have sought to compel their presence, had
not a Dominican friar, Robert Bacon, when preaching before the
court, warned him that there would be no peace in England until
Bishop Peter and his son were removed from his counsels. The
friar’s boldness convinced him that disaffection was widespread,
and he promised the magnates at a later council at London that he
would, with their advice, correct whatever he found there was need
to reform. Meanwhile the Poitevins brought into England fresh
swarms of hirelings from their own land, and Peter des Roches urged
Henry to crush rebellion in the bud. As a warning to greater
offenders, Gilbert Basset was deprived of a manor which he had held
since the reign of King John, and an attempt was made to lay
violent hands upon his brother-in-law, Richard Siward. The two
barons resisted, whereupon all their estates were transferred to
Peter of Rivaux. Yet Richard Marshal still continued to hope for
peace, and, after the failure of earlier councils, set off to
attend another assembly fixed for August 1, at Westminster. On his
way he learnt from his sister Isabella, the wife of Richard of
Cornwall, that Peter des Roches was laying a trap for him. In high
indignation he took horse for his Welsh estates, and prepared for
rebellion.

The king summoned the military tenants to appear with horses and
arms at Gloucester on the 14th. There Richard Marshal was declared
a traitor and an invasion of his estates was ordered. But the king
had not sufficient resources to carry out his threats, and October
saw the barons once more wrangling with Henry at Westminster, and
claiming that the marshal should be tried by his peers. Peter of
Winchester declared that there were no peers in England as there
were in France, and that in consequence the king had power to
condemn any disloyal subject through his justices. This daringly
unconstitutional doctrine provoked a renewed outcry. The bishops
joined the secular magnates, and threatened their colleague with
excommunication. A formidable civil war broke out. Siward and
Basset harried the lands of the Poitevins, while the marshal made a
close alliance with Llewelyn of Wales. The king still had
formidable forces on his side. Richard of Cornwall was persuaded by
Bishop Peter to take up arms for his brother, and 047the two new
earls, John the Scot of Chester, and John de Lacy of Lincoln,
joined the royal forces. Hubert de Burgh took advantage of the
increasing confusion to escape from Devizes castle to a church in
the town. Dragged back with violence to his prison, he was again,
as at Brentwood, restored to sanctuary through the exertions of the
bishop of the diocese. There he remained, closely watched by his
foes, until October 30, when Siward and Basset drove away the
guard, and took him off with them to the marshal’s castle of
Chepstow.

The tide of war flowed to the southern march of Wales. Llewelyn
and Richard Marshal devastated Glamorgan, which, as a part of the
Gloucester inheritance, was under the custody of the Bishop of
Winchester. They took nearly all its castles, including that of
Cardiff. Thence they subdued Usk, Abergavenny, and other
neighbouring strongholds, while an independent army, including the
marshal’s Pembrokeshire vassals and the men of the princes of South
Wales, wasted months in a vain attack on Carmarthen. The king’s
vassals were again summoned to Gloucester, whence Henry led them
early in November towards Chepstow, the centre of the marshal’s
estates in Gwent. Earl Richard devastated his lands so effectively
that the king could not support his army on them, and was compelled
to move up the Wye valley towards the castles of Monmouth,
Skenfrith, Whitecastle, and Grosmont, the strong quadrilateral of
Upper Gwent which still remained in the hands of the king’s
friends. Marching to the most remote of these, Grosmont, on the
upper Monnow, Henry spent several days in the castle, while his
army lay around under canvas. On the night of November 11, the
sleeping soldiers were suddenly set upon by the barons and their
Welsh allies; they fled unarmed to the castle, or scattered in
confusion. The assailants seized their horses, harness, arms and
provisions, but refrained from slaying or capturing them. The royal
forces never rallied. Many gladly went home, giving as their excuse
that they were unable to fight since they had lost their equipment.
Henry and his ministers withdrew to Gloucester. More convinced than
ever of the treachery of Englishmen, the king entrusted the defence
of the border castles to mercenaries from Poitou.

The fighting centred round Monmouth, which Richard approached on
the 25th with a small company. A sudden 048sortie almost overwhelmed the
little band. The marshal held his own heroically against twelve,
until at last Baldwin of Guînes, the warden of the castle,
took him prisoner. Thereupon Baldwin fell to the ground, his armour
pierced by a lucky bolt from a crossbow. His followers, smitten
with panic, abandoned the marshal, and bore their leader home. By
that time, however, the bulk of the marshal’s forces had come upon
the scene. A general engagement followed, in which the Anglo-Welsh
army drove the enemy back into Monmouth and took possession of the
castle. This set the marshal free to march northwards and join
Llewelyn in a vigorous attack upon Shrewsbury. In January, 1234,
they burnt that town and retired to their own lands loaded with
booty. Meanwhile Siward devastated the estates of the Poitevins and
of Richard of Cornwall. Afraid to be cut off from his retreat to
England the king abandoned Gloucester, where he had kept his
melancholy Christmas court, and found a surer refuge in Bishop
Peter’s cathedral city. Thereupon Gloucestershire suffered the fate
of Shropshire. “It was a wretched sight for travellers in that
region to see on the highways innumerable dead bodies lying naked
and unburied, to be devoured by birds of prey, and so polluting the
air that they infected healthy men with mortal sickness.”[1]

[1] Wendover, iv., 291.

The king swore that he would never make peace with the marshal,
unless he threw himself on the royal mercy as a confessed traitor
with a rope round his neck. Having, however, exhausted all his
military resources, he cunningly strove to entice Richard from
Wales to Ireland. The two Peters wrote to Maurice Fitzgerald, then
justiciar of Ireland, and to the chief foes of the marshal, urging
them to fall upon his Irish estates and capture the traitor, dead
or alive. Many of the most powerful nobles of Ireland lent
themselves to the conspiracy. The Lacys of Meath, his old enemies,
joined with Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Marsh, and Richard de Burgh, the
greatest of the Norman lords of Connaught, and the nephew of
Hubert, in carrying out the plot. The confederates fell suddenly
upon the marshal’s estates and devastated them with fire and sword.
On hearing of this attack Richard immediately left Wales, and,
accompanied by only fifteen knights, took ship for Ireland. On his
arrival Geoffrey Marsh, the meanest of the conspirators, 049received
him with every profession of cordiality, and urged him to attack
his enemies without delay. Geoffrey was an old man; he had long
held the great post of justiciar of Ireland; and he was himself the
liegeman of the marshal. Richard therefore implicitly trusted him,
and forthwith took the field.

The first warlike operations of Earl Richard were successful.
After a short siege he obtained possession of Limerick, and his
enemies were fain to demand a truce. Richard proposed a conference
to be held on April 1, 1234, on the Curragh of Kildare. The
conference proved abortive, for Geoffrey Marsh cunningly persuaded
the marshal to refuse any offer of terms which the magnates would
accept, and Richard found that he had been duped into taking up a
position that he was not strong enough to maintain. Marsh withdrew
from his side, on the ground that he could not fight against Lacy,
whose sister he had married. The marshal foresaw the worst. “I
know,” he declared, “that this day I am delivered over to death,
but it is better to die honourably for the cause of justice than to
flee from the field and become a reproach to knighthood.”

The forsworn Irish knights slunk away to neighbouring places of
sanctuary or went over to the enemy. When the final struggle came,
later on the same April 1, Richard had few followers save the
faithful fifteen knights who had crossed over with him from Wales.
The little band, outnumbered by more than nine to one, struggled
desperately to the end. At last the marshal, unhorsed and severely
wounded, fell into the hands of his enemies. They bore him, more
dead than alive, to his own castle of Kilkenny, which had just been
seized by the justiciar. After a few days Richard’s tough
constitution began to get the better of his wounds. Then his
enemies, showing him the royal warranty for their acts, induced him
to admit them into his castles. An ignorant or treacherous surgeon,
called in by the justiciar, cauterised his wounds so severely that
his sufferings became intense. He died of fever on the 16th, and
was buried, as he himself had willed, in the Franciscan church at
Kilkenny. No one rejoiced at the death of the hero save the
traitors who had lured him to his doom and the Poitevins who had
suborned them. Their victim, the weak king, mourned for his friend
as David had lamented Saul and 050Jonathan.[1] The treachery of his
enemies brought them little profit. While Richard Marshal lay on
his deathbed, a new Archbishop of Canterbury drove the Poitevins
from office.

[1] Dunstable Ann., p. 137.

In the heyday of the Poitevins’ power the Church sounded a
feeble but clear note of alarm. The pope expostulated with Henry
for his treatment of Hubert de Burgh, and Agnellus of Pisa, the
first English provincial of the newly arrived Franciscan order,
strove to reconcile Richard Marshal with his sovereign in the
course of the South-Welsh campaign. More drastic action was
necessary if vague remonstrance was to be translated into fruitful
action. The three years’ vacancy of the see of Canterbury, after
the death of Richard le Grand, paralysed the action of the Church.
After the pope’s rejection of the first choice of the convent of
Christ Church, the chancellor, Ralph Neville, the monks elected
their own prior, and him also Gregory refused as too old and
incompetent. Their third election fell upon John Blunt, a
theologian high in the favour of Peter des Roches, who sent him to
Rome, well provided with ready money, to secure his confirmation.
Simon Langton, again restored to England, and archdeacon of
Canterbury, persuaded the pope to veto Blunt’s appointment on the
ground of his having held two benefices without a dispensation. His
rejection was the first check received by the Poitevin faction. It
was promptly followed by a more crushing blow. Weary of the long
delay, Gregory persuaded the Christ Church monks then present at
Rome to elect Edmund Rich, treasurer of Salisbury. Edmund, a
scholar who had taught theology and arts with great distinction at
Paris and Oxford, was still more famous for his mystical devotion,
for his asceticism and holiness of life. He was however an old man,
inexperienced in affairs, and, with all his gracious gifts,
somewhat wanting in the tenacity and vigour which leadership
involved. Yet in sending so eminent a saint to Canterbury, Rome
conferred on England a service second only to that which she had
rendered when she secured the archbishopric for Stephen
Langton.

Before his consecration as archbishop on April 2, 1234, Edmund
had already joined with his suffragans on February 2 in upholding
the good fame of the marshal and in warning the king 051of the
disastrous results of preferring the counsels of the Poitevins to
those of his natural-born subjects. A week after his consecration
Edmund succeeded in carrying out a radical change in the
administration. On April 9 he declared that unless Henry drove away
the Poitevins, he would forthwith pronounce him excommunicate.
Yielding at once, Henry sent the Bishop of Winchester back to his
diocese, and deprived Peter of Rivaux of all his offices. The
followers of the two Peters shared their fate, and Henry,
despatching Edmund to Wales to make peace with Llewelyn and the
marshal, hurried to Gloucester in order to meet the archbishop on
his return. His good resolutions were further strengthened by the
news of Earl Richard’s death. On arriving at Gloucester he held a
council in which the ruin of the Poitevins was completed. A truce,
negotiated by the archbishop with Llewelyn, was ratified. The
partisans of the marshal were pardoned, even Richard Siward being
forgiven his long career of plunder. Gilbert Marshal, the next
brother of the childless Earl Richard, was invested with his
earldom and office, and Henry himself dubbed him a knight. Hubert
de Burgh was included in the comprehensive pardon. Indignant that
his name and seal should have been used to cover his ex-ministers’
treachery to Earl Richard, Henry overwhelmed them with reproaches,
and strove by his violence against them to purge himself from
complicity in their acts. The Poitevins lurked in sanctuary,
fearing for the worst. Segrave forgot his knighthood, resumed the
tonsure, and took refuge in a church in Leicester. The king’s worst
indignation was reserved for Peter of Rivaux. Peter protested that
his orders entitled him to immunity from arrest, but it was found
that he wore a mail shirt under his clerical garments, and, without
a word of reproach from the archbishop, he was immured in a lay
prison on the pretext that no true clerk wore armour. Of the old
ministers Ralph Neville alone remained in office.

With Bishop Peter’s fall disappeared the last of the influences
that had prevailed during the minority. The king, who felt his
dignity impaired by the Poitevin domination, resolved that
henceforward he would submit to no master. He soon framed a plan of
government that thoroughly satisfied his jealous and exacting
nature. Henceforth no magnates, either of Church or State, should
stand between him and his subjects. 052He would be his own chief
minister, holding in his own hands all the strings of policy, and
acting through subordinates whose sole duly was to carry out their
master’s orders. Under such a system the justiciarship practically
ceased to exist. The treasurership was held for short periods by
royal clerks of no personal distinction. Even the chancellorship
became overshadowed. Henry quarrelled with Ralph Neville in 1238,
and withdrew from him the custody of the great seal, though he
allowed him to retain the name and emoluments of chancellor. On
Neville’s death the office fell into abeyance for nearly twenty
years, during which time the great seal was entrusted to seven
successive keepers. Like his grandfather, Henry wished to rule in
person with the help of faithful but unobtrusive subordinates. This
system, which was essentially that of the French monarchy,
presupposed for success the constant personal supervision of an
industrious and strong-willed king. Henry III was never a strenuous
worker, and his character failed in the robustness and
self-reliance necessary for personal rule. The magnates, who
regarded themselves as the king’s natural-born counsellors, were
bitterly incensed, and hated the royal clerks as fiercely as they
had disliked the ministers of his minority. Opposed by the barons,
distrusted by the people, liable to be thrown over by their master
at each fresh change of his caprice, the royal subordinates showed
more eagerness in prosecuting their own private fortunes than in
consulting the interests of the State. Thus the nominal government
of Henry proved extremely ineffective. Huge taxes were raised, but
little good came from them. The magnates held sullenly aloof; the
people grumbled; the Church lamented the evil days. Yet for five
and twenty years the wretched system went on, not so much by reason
of its own strength as because there was no one vigorous enough to
overthrow it.

The author of all this mischief was a man of some noble and many
attractive qualities. Save when an occasional outburst of temper
showed him a true son of John, Henry was the kindest, mildest, most
amiable of men. He was the first king since William the Conqueror
in whose private life the austerest critics could find nothing
blameworthy. His piety stands high, even when estimated by the
standards of the thirteenth century. He was well educated and had a
touch of the artist’s temperament, 053loving fair churches, beautiful
sculpture, delicate goldsmith’s work, and richly illuminated books.
He had a horror of violence, and never wept more bitter tears than
when he learned how treacherously his name had been used to lure
Richard Marshal to his doom. But he was extraordinarily deficient
in stability of purpose. For the moment it was easy to influence
him either for good or evil, but even the ablest of his counsellors
found it impossible to retain any hold over him for long. One day
he lavished all his affection on Hubert de Burgh; the next he
played into the hands of his enemies. In the same way he got rid of
Peter des Roches, the preceptor of his infancy, the guide of his
early manhood. Jealous, self-assertive, restless, and timid, he
failed in just those qualities that his subjects expected to find
in a king. Born and brought up in England, and never leaving it
save for short and infrequent visits to the continent, he was proud
of his English ancestors and devoted to English saints, more
especially to royal saints such as Edward the Confessor and Edmund
of East Anglia. Yet he showed less sympathy with English ways than
many of his foreign-born predecessors. Educated under alien
influences, delighting in the art, the refinement, the devotion,
and the absolutist principles of foreigners, he seldom trusted a
man of English birth. Too weak to act for himself, too suspicious
to trust his natural counsellors, he found the friendship and
advice for which he yearned in foreign favourites and kinsmen. Thus
it was that the hopes excited by the fall of the Poitevins were
disappointed. The alien invasion, checked for a few years, was
renewed in a more dangerous shape.

During the ten years after the collapse of Peter des Roches,
swarms of foreigners came to England, and spoiled the land with the
king’s entire good-will. Henry’s marriage brought many
Provençals and Savoyards to England. The renewed troubles
between pope and emperor led to a renewal of Roman interference in
a more exacting form. The continued intercourse with foreign states
resulted in fresh opportunities of alien influence. A new attempt
on Poitou brought as its only result the importation of the king’s
Poitevin kinsmen. The continued close relationship between the
English and the French baronage involved the frequent claim of
English estates and titles by men of alien birth. Even such
beneficial movements as the establishment of the mendicant orders
in England, and the cosmopolitan outlook 054of the increasingly important
academic class contributed to the spread of outlandish ideas. As
wave after wave of foreigners swept over England, Englishmen
involved them in a common condemnation. And all saw in the weakness
of the king the very source of their power.

The first great influx of foreigners followed directly from
Henry’s marriage. For several years active negotiations had been
going on to secure him a suitable bride. There had also at various
times been talk of his selecting a wife from Brittany, Austria,
Bohemia, or Scotland, and in the spring of 1235 a serious
negotiation for his marriage with Joan, daughter and heiress of the
Count of Ponthieu, only broke down through the opposition of the
French court. Henry then sought the hand of Eleanor, a girl twelve
years old, and the second of the four daughters of Raymond Berengar
IV., Count of Provence, and his wife Beatrice, sister of Amadeus
III., Count of Savoy. The marriage contract was signed in October.
Before that time Eleanor had left Provence under the escort of her
mother’s brother, William, bishop-elect of Valence. On her way she
spent a long period with her elder sister Margaret, who had been
married to Louis IX. of France in 1234. On January 14, 1236, she
was married to Henry at Canterbury by Archbishop Edmund, and
crowned at Westminster on the following Sunday.

The new queen’s kinsfolk quickly acquired an almost unbounded
ascendency over her weak husband. With the exception of the
reigning Count Amadeus of Savoy, her eight maternal uncles were
somewhat scantily provided for. The prudence of the French
government prevented them from obtaining any advantage for
themselves at the court of their niece the Queen of France, and
they gladly welcomed the opportunity of establishing themselves at
the expense of their English nephew. Self-seeking and not
over-scrupulous, able, energetic, and with the vigour and resource
of high-born soldiers of fortune, several of them play honourable
parts in the history of their own land, and are by no means
deserving of the complete condemnation meted out to them by the
English annalists.[1] The 055bishop-elect of Valence was an able and
accomplished warrior. He stayed on in England after accomplishing
his mission, and with him remained his clerk, the younger son of a
house of Alpine barons, Peter of Aigueblanche, whose cunning and
dexterity were as attractive to Henry as the more martial qualities
of his master. Weary of standing alone, the king eagerly welcomed a
trustworthy adviser who was outside the entanglements of English
parties, and made Bishop William his chief counsellor. It was
believed that he was associated with eleven others in a secret
inner circle of royal advisers, whose advice Henry pledged himself
by oath to follow. Honours and estates soon began to fall thickly
on William and his friends. He made himself the mouthpiece of
Henry’s foreign policy. When he temporarily left England, he led a
force sent by the king to help Frederick II. in his war against the
cities of northern Italy. His influence with Henry did much to
secure for his brother, Thomas of Savoy, the hand of the elderly
countess Joan of Flanders. With Thomas as the successor of
Ferdinand of Portugal, the rich Flemish county, bound to England by
so many political and economic ties, seemed in safe hands, and
preserved from French influence. In 1238 Thomas visited England,
and received a warm welcome and rich presents from the king.

[1] For Eleanor’s countrymen see Mugnier, Les
Savoyards en Angleterre au XIIIe siècle, et Pierre
d’Aigueblanche, évêque d’Héreford
(1890).

Despite the establishment of the Savoyards, the Poitevin
influence began to revive. Peter des Roches, who had occupied
himself after his fall by fighting for Gregory IX. against the
revolted Romans, returned to England in broken health in 1236, and
was reconciled to the king. Peter of Rivaux was restored to favour,
and made keeper of the royal wardrobe. Segrave and Passelewe again
became justices and ministers. England was now the hunting-ground
of any well-born Frenchmen anxious for a wider career than they
could obtain at home.[1] Among the foreigners attracted to England
to prosecute legal claims or to seek the royal bounty came Simon of
Montfort, the second son of the famous conqueror of the Albigenses.
Amice, the mother of the elder Simon, was the sister and heiress of
Robert of Beaumont, the last of his line to hold the earldom of
056Leicester. After Amice’s death her son used
the title and claimed the estates of that earldom. But these
pretensions were but nominal, and since 1215 Randolph of Chester
had administered the Leicester lands as if his complete property.
However, Amaury of Montfort, the Count of Toulouse’s eldest son,
ceded to his portionless younger brother his claims to the Beaumont
inheritance, and in 1230 Simon went to England to push his
fortunes. Young, brilliant, ambitious and attractive, he not only
easily won the favour of the king, but commended himself so well to
Earl Randolph that in 1231 the aged earl was induced to relax his
grasp on the Leicester estates. In 1239 the last formalities of
investiture were accomplished. Amaury renounced his claims, and
after that Simon became Earl of Leicester and steward of England. A
year before that he had secured the great marriage that he had long
been seeking. In January, 1238, he was wedded to the king’s own
sister, Eleanor, the childless widow of the younger William
Marshal. Simon was for the moment high in the affection of his
brother-in-law. To the English he was simply another of the foreign
favourites who turned the king’s heart against his born
subjects.

[1] This is well illustrated by Philip de
Beaumanoir’s well-known romance, Jean de Dammartin et Blonde
d’Oxford (ed. by Suchier, Soc. des anciens Textes
français, and by Le Roux de Lincy, Camden Soc.).

In 1238 Peter des Roches died. With all his faults the Poitevin
was an excellent administrator at Winchester,[1] and left his
estates in such a prosperous condition that Henry coveted the
succession for the bishop-elect of Valence, though William already
had the prospect of the prince-bishopric of liege. But the monks of
St. Swithun’s refused to obey the royal order, and Henry sought to
obtain his object from the pope. Gregory gave William both Liege
and Winchester, but in 1239 death ended his restless plans.
William’s death left more room for his kinsfolk and followers. His
clerk, Peter of Aigueblanche, returned to the land of promise, and
in 1240 secured his consecration as Bishop of Hereford. William’s
brother, Peter of Savoy, lord of Romont and Faucigny, was invited
to England in the same year. In 1241 he was invested with the
earldom of Richmond, which a final breach with Peter of Brittany
had left in the king’s hands. Peter, the ablest member of his
house, thus became its chief representative in England.[2]

[1] See H. Hall, Pipe Roll of the Bishop of
Winchester, 1207-8.

[2] For Peter see Wurstemberger, Peter II.,
Graf von Savoyen (1856).

057With the Provençals and Savoyards came
a fresh swarm of Romans. In 1237 the first papal legates a
latere since the recall of Pandulf landed in England. The
deputy of Gregory IX. was the cardinal-deacon Otto, who in 1226 had
already discharged the humbler office of nuncio in England. It was
believed that the legate was sent at the special request of Henry
III., and despite the remonstrances of the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Those most unfriendly to the legate were won over by
his irreproachable conduct. He rejected nearly all gifts. He was
unwearied in preaching peace; travelled to the north to settle
outstanding differences between Henry and the King of Scots, and
thence hurried to the west to prolong the truce with Llewelyn. His
zeal for the reformation of abuses made the canons of the national
council, held under his presidency at St. Paul’s on November 18,
1237, an epoch in the history of our ecclesiastical
jurisprudence.

Despite his efforts the legate remained unpopular. The
pluralists and nepotists, who feared his severity, joined with the
foes of all taxation and the enemies of all foreigners in
denouncing the legate. To avoid the danger of poison, he thought it
prudent to make his own brother his master cook. During the council
of London it was necessary to escort him from his lodgings and back
again with a military force. In the council itself the claim of
high-born clerks to receive benefices in plurality found a
spokesman in so respectable a prelate as Walter of Cantilupe, the
son of a marcher baron, whom Otto had just enthroned in his
cathedral at Worcester, and the legate, “fearing for his skin,” was
suspected of mitigating the severity of his principles to win over
the less greedy of the friends of vested interests. His Roman
followers knew and cared little about English susceptibilities, and
feeling was so strong against them that any mischance might excite
an explosion. Such an accident occurred on St. George’s day, April
23, 1238, when the legate was staying with the Austin Canons of
Oseney, near Oxford, while the king was six miles off at Abingdon.
Some of the masters of the university went to Oseney to pay their
respects to the cardinal, and were rudely repulsed by the Italian
porter. Irritated at this discourtesy, they returned with a host of
clerks, who forced their way into the abbey. Amongst them was a
poor Irish chaplain, 058who made his way to the kitchen to beg for
food. The chief cook, the legate’s brother, threw a pot of scalding
broth into the Irishman’s face. A clerk from the march of Wales
shot the cook dead with an arrow. A fierce struggle followed, in
the midst of which Otto, hastily donning the garb of his hosts,
took refuge in the tower of their church, where he was besieged by
the infuriated clerks, until the king sent soldiers from Abingdon
to release him. Otto thereupon laid Oxford under an interdict,
suspended all lectures, and put thirty masters into prison. English
opinion, voiced by the diocesan, Grosseteste, held that the
cardinal’s servants had provoked the riot, and found little to
blame in the violence of the clerks.

In 1239 Gregory IX. began his final conflict with Frederick II.,
and demanded the support of all Europe. As before, from 1227 to
1230, the pressure of the papal necessity was at once felt in
England. The legate had to raise supplies at all costs. Crusaders
were allowed to renounce their vows for ready money. Every
visitation or conference became an excuse for procurations and
fees. Presents were no longer rejected, but rather greedily
solicited. On the pretence that it was necessary to reform the
Scottish Church, “which does not recognise the Roman Church as its
sole mother and metropolitan,” Otto excited the indignation of
Alexander II. by attempts to extend his jurisdiction to Scotland,
hitherto unvisited by legates. In England his claims soon grew
beyond all bearing. At last he demanded a fifth of all clerical
goods to enable the pope to finance the anti-imperial crusade. Even
this was more endurable than the order received from Rome that 300
clerks of Roman families should be “provided” to benefices in
England in order that Gregory might obtain the support of their
relatives against Frederick. Both as feudal suzerain and as
spiritual despot, the pope lorded it over England as fully as his
uncle Innocent III.

Weakness, piety, and self-interest combined to make Henry III.
acquiesce in the legate’s exactions. “I neither wish nor dare,”
said he, “to oppose the lord pope in anything.” The union of king
and legate was irresistible. The lay opposition was slow and
feeble. Gilbert Marshal, though showing no lack of spirit, was not
the man to play the part which his brother Richard had filled so
effectively. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who constituted himself the
spokesman of the magnates, made 059a special grievance of the
marriage of Simon of Montfort with his sister Eleanor. England, he
said, was like a vineyard with a broken hedge, so that all that
went by could steal the grapes. He took arms, and subscribed the
first of the long series of plans of constitutional reform that the
reign was to witness, according to which the king was to be guided
by a chosen body of counsellors. But at the crisis of the movement
he held back, having accomplished nothing.

There was more vigour in the ecclesiastical opposition. Robert
Grosseteste,[1] a Suffolk man of humble birth, had already won for
himself a position of unique distinction at Oxford and Paris. A
teacher of rare force, a scholar of unexampled range, a thinker of
daring originality, and a writer who had touched upon almost every
known subject, he was at the height of his fame when, in 1235, his
appointment as Bishop of Lincoln gave the fullest opportunities for
the employment of his great gifts in the public service. He was
convinced that the preoccupation of the clergy in worldly
employment and the constant aggressions of the civil upon the
ecclesiastical courts lay at the root of the evils of the time. His
conviction brought him into conflict with the king rather than the
legate, though for the moment his absorption in the cares of his
diocese distracted his attention from general questions. The
bishops generally had become so hostile that Otto shrank from
meeting them in another council, and strove to get money by
negotiating individually with the leading churchmen. The old foe of
papal usurpations, Robert Twenge, renewed his agitation on behalf
of the rights of patrons, and the clergy of Berkshire drew up a
remonstrance against Otto’s extortions.

[1] For Grosseteste, see F.S. Stevenson, Robert
Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1899).

Archbishop Edmund saw the need of opposing both legate and king;
but he was hampered by his ecclesiastical and political principles,
and still more, perhaps, by the magnitude of the rude task thrown
upon him. He had set before himself the ideal of St. Thomas, not
only in the asceticism of his private life, but in his zeal for his
see and the Church. But few men were more unlike the strong-willed
and bellicose martyr of Canterbury than the gentle and yielding
saint of Abingdon. A plentiful crop 060of quarrels, however, soon showed
that Edmund had, in one respect, copied only too faithfully the
example of his predecessor. He was engaged in a controversy of some
acerbity with the Archbishop of York, and he was involved in a long
wrangle with the monks of his cathedral, which took him to Rome
soon after the legate’s arrival. He got little satisfaction there,
and found a whole sea of troubles to overwhelm him on his return.
At last came the demand of the fifth from Otto. Edmund joined in
the opposition of his brethren to this exaction, but his attitude
was complicated by his other difficulties. Leaning in his weakness
on the pope, he found that Gregory was a taskmaster rather than a
director. At last he paid his fifth, but, broken in health and
spirits, he was of no mind to withstand the demands of the Roman
clerks for benefices. If he could not be another St. Thomas
defending the liberties of the Church, he could at least withdraw
like his prototype from the strife, and find a refuge in a foreign
house of religion. Seeking out St. Thomas’s old haunt at Pontigny,
he threw himself with ardour into the austere Cistercian life. On
the advice of his physicians, he soon sought a healthier abode with
the canons of Soisy, in Brie, at whose house he died on November
16, 1240. His body was buried at Pontigny in the still abiding
minster which had witnessed the devotions of Becket and Langton,
and miracles were soon wrought at his tomb. Within eight years of
his death he was declared a saint; and Henry, who had thwarted him
in life, and even opposed his canonisation, was among the first of
the pilgrims who worshipped at his shrine. It needed a tougher
spirit and a stronger character than Edmund’s to grapple with the
thorny problems of his age.

The retirement of the archbishop enabled Otto to carry through
his business, and withdraw from England on January 7, 1241. On
August 21 Gregory IX. died, with his arch-enemy at the gates of
Rome and all his plans for the time frustrated. High-minded, able
and devout, he wagered the whole fortunes of the papacy on the
result of his secular struggle with the emperor. In Italy as in
England, the spiritual hegemony of the Roman see and the spiritual
influence of the western Church were compromised by his exaltation
of ecclesiastical politics over religion.

The monks of Christ Church won court favour by electing as
archbishop, Boniface of Savoy, Bishop-elect of Belley, one 061of the
queen’s uncles. There was no real resistance to the appointment,
though a prolonged vacancy in the papacy made it impossible for him
to receive formal confirmation until 1243, and it was not until
1244 that he condescended to visit his new province. Meanwhile his
kinsmen were carrying everything before them. Richard of Cornwall
lost his first wife, Isabella, daughter of William Marshal, in
1240, an event which broke almost the last link that bound him to
the baronial opposition. He withdrew himself from the troubles of
English politics by going on crusade, and with him went his former
enemy, Simon of Leicester. Richard was back in England early in
1242, and on November 23, 1243, his marriage with Sanchia of
Provence, the younger sister of the queens of France and England,
completed his conversion to the court party.

Henry III.’s cosmopolitan instincts led him to take as much part
in foreign politics as his resources allowed. In 1235 he married
his sister Isabella to Frederick II., and henceforth manifested a
strong interest in the affairs of his imperial brother-in-law. His
relations with France were still uneasy, and he hoped to find in
Frederick’s support a counterpoise to the steady pressure of French
hostility. All England watched with interest the progress of the
emperor’s arms. Peter of Savoy led an English contingent to fight
for Frederick against the Milanese, and Matthew Paris, the greatest
of the English chroniclers, narrates the campaign of Corte Nuova
with a detail exceeding that which he allows to the military
enterprises of his own king. Frederick constantly corresponded with
both the king and Richard of Cornwall, and it was nothing but
solicitude for the safely of the heir to the throne that led the
English magnates to reject the emperor’s request that Richard
should receive a high command under him. Even Frederick’s breach
with the pope in 1239 did not destroy his friendship with Henry.
The situation became extremely complicated, since Innocent IV.
derived large financial support for his crusade from the unwilling
English clergy, while Henry still professed to be Frederick’s
friend. The king allowed Otto to proclaim Frederick’s
excommunication in England, and then urged the legate to quit the
country because the emperor strongly protested against the presence
of an avowed enemy at his brother-in-law’s court. Neither pope nor
emperor could 062rely upon the support of so half-hearted a
prince. Renewed trouble with France explains in some measure the
anxiety of Henry to remain in good relations with the emperor
despite Frederick’s quarrel with the pope.

The position of the French monarchy was far stronger than it had
been when Henry first intervened in continental politics. Blanche
of Castile had broken the back of the feudal coalition, and even
Peter Mauclerc had made his peace with the monarchy at the price of
his English earldom. Louis IX. attained his majority in 1235, and
his first care was to strengthen his power in his newly won
dominions. If Poitou were still in the hands of the Count of La
Marche and the Viscount of Thouars, the royal seneschals of
Beaucaire and Carcassonne after 1229 ruled over a large part of the
old dominions of Raymond of Toulouse. In 1237 the treaty of Meaux
was further carried out by the marriage of Raymond’s daughter and
heiress, Joan, to Alfonse, the brother of the French king. In 1241
Alfonse came of age, and Louis at once invested him with Poitou and
Auvergne. The lords of Poitou saw that the same process which had
destroyed the feudal liberties of Normandy now endangered their
disorderly independence. Hugh of Lusignan and his wife had been
present at Alfonse’s investiture, and the widow of King John had
gone away highly indignant at the slights put upon her dignity.[1]
She bitterly reproached her husband with the ignominy involved in
his submission. Easily moved to new treasons, Hugh became the soul
of a league of Poitevin barons formed at Parthenay, which received
the adhesion of Henry’s seneschal of Gascony, Rostand de Sollers,
and even of Alfonse’s father-in-law, the depressed Raymond of
Toulouse. At Christmas Hugh openly showed his hand. He renounced
his homage to Alfonse, declared his adhesion to his step-son,
Richard of Cornwall, the titular count of Poitou, and
ostentatiously withdrew from the court with his wife. The rest of
the winter was taken up with preparations for the forthcoming
struggle.

[1] See the graphic letter of a citizen of La
Rochelle to Blanche, published by M. Delisle in
Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, série
ii., iv., 513-55 (1856).

Untaught by experience, Henry III. listened to the appeals of
his mother and her husband. Richard of Cornwall, who came back from
his crusade in January, 1242, was persuaded that he had another
chance of realising his vain title of Count 063of Poitou. But
the king had neither men nor money and the parliament of February 2
refused to grant him sums adequate for his need, so that,
despairing of dealing with his barons in a body, Henry followed the
legate’s example of winning men over individually. He made a strong
protest against the King of France’s breach of the existing truce,
and his step-father assured him that Poitou and Gascony would
provide him with sufficient soldiers if he brought over enough
money to pay them. Thereupon, leaving the Archbishop of York as
regent, Henry took ship on May 9 at Portsmouth and landed on May 13
at Royan at the mouth of the Gironde. He was accompanied by Richard
of Cornwall, seven earls, and 300 knights.

Meanwhile Louis IX. marshalled a vast host at Chinon, which from
April to July overran the patrimony of the house of Lusignan, and
forced many of the confederate barons to submit. Peter of Savoy and
John Mansel, Henry’s favourite clerk, then made seneschal of
Gascony, assembled the Aquitanian levies, while Peter of
Aigueblanche, the Savoyard Bishop of Hereford, went to Provence to
negotiate the union between Earl Richard and Sanchia, and, if
possible, to add Raymond Berengar to the coalition against the
husband of his eldest daughter. Henry hoped to win tactical
advantages by provoking Louis to break the truce, and mendaciously
protested his surprise at being forced into an unexpected conflict
with his brother-in-law. Towards the end of July, Louis, who had
conquered all Poitou, advanced to the Charente, and occupied
Taillebourg. If the Charente were once crossed, Saintonge would
assuredly follow the destinies of Poitou; and the Anglo-Gascon army
advanced from Saintes to dispute the passage of the river. On July
21 the two armies were in presence of each other, separated only by
the Charente. Besides the stone bridge at Taillebourg, the French
had erected a temporary wooden structure higher up the stream, and
had collected a large number of boats to facilitate their passage.
Seeing with dismay the oriflamme waving over the sea of tents
which, “like a great and populous city,” covered the right bank,
the soldiers of Henry retreated precipitately to Saintes. There was
imminent danger of their retreat being cut off, but Richard of
Cornwall went to the French camp, and obtained an armistice of a
few hours, which gave his brother time to reach the town.

064Next day Louis advanced at his ease to the
capital of Saintonge. The Anglo-Gascons went out to meet him, and,
despite their inferior numbers, fought bravely amidst the vineyards
and hollow lanes to the west of the city. But the English king was
the first to flee, and victory soon attended the arms of the
French. Immediately after the battle, the lords of Poitou abandoned
Richard for Alfonse. Henry fled from Saintes to Pons, from Pons to
Barbezieux, and thence sought a more secure refuge at Blaye,
leaving his tent, the ornaments of his chapel, and the beer
provided for his English soldiers as booty for the enemy. The
outbreak of an epidemic in the French army alone prevented a siege
of Bordeaux, by necessitating the return of St. Louis to the
healthier north. Henry lingered at Bordeaux until September, when
he returned to England.[1] Meanwhile the French dictated peace to
the remaining allies of Henry. On the death of Raymond of Toulouse,
in 1249, Alfonse quietly succeeded to his dominions. The next
twenty years saw the gradual extension of the French administrative
system to Poitou, Auvergne, and the Toulousain. English Gascony was
reduced to little more than the districts round Bordeaux and
Bayonne. Even a show of hostility was no longer useful, and on
April 7, 1243, a five years’ truce between Henry and Louis was
signed at Bordeaux. The marriage of Beatrice of Provence, the
youngest of the daughters of Raymond Berengar, to Charles of Anjou,
Louis’ younger brother, removed Provence from the sphere of English
influence. On his father-in-law’s death in 1245, Charles of Anjou
succeeded to his dominions to the prejudice of his two English
brothers-in-law, and became the founder of a Capetian line of
counts of Provence, which brought the great fief of the empire
under the same northern French influences which Alfonse of Poitiers
was diffusing over the lost inheritances of Eleanor of Aquitaine
and the house of Saint-Gilles.

[1] The only good modern account of this
expedition is that by M. Charles Bémont, La campagne de
Poitou, 1242-3, in Annales du Midi, v., 389-314 (1893).
For the Lusignans see Boissonade, Quomodo comites Engolismenses
erga reges Angliæ et Franciæ se gesserint, 1152-1328
(1893).

A minor result of Louis’ triumph was the well-deserved ruin of
Hugh of Lusignan and Isabella of Angoulême. The proud spirit
of Isabella did not long tolerate her humiliation. She 065retired to
Fontevraud and died there in 1246. Hugh X. followed her to the tomb
in 1248. Their eldest son, Hugh XI., succeeded him, but the rest of
their numerous family turned for support to the inexhaustible
charity of the King of England. Thus in 1247 a Poitevin invasion of
the king’s half-brothers and sisters recalled to his much-tried
subjects the Savoyard invasion of ten years earlier. In that single
year three of the king’s brothers and one of his sisters accepted
his invitation to make a home in England. Of these, Guy, lord of
Cognac, became proprietor of many estates. William, called from the
Cistercian abbey in which he was born William of Valence, secured,
with the hand of Joan of Munchensi, a claim to the great
inheritance that was soon to be scattered by the extinction of the
male line of the house of Marshal. Aymer of Valence, a very
unclerical churchman, obtained in 1250 his election as bishop of
Winchester, though his youth and the hostility of his chapter
delayed his consecration for ten years. Alice their sister found a
husband of high rank in the young John of Warenne, Earl of Warenne
or Surrey, while a daughter of Hugh XI. married Robert of Ferrars,
Earl of Ferrars or Derby. Others of their kindred flocked to the
land of promise. Any Poitevin was welcome, even if not a member of
the house of Lusignan. Thus the noble adventurer John du Plessis,
came over to England, married the heiress of the Neufbourg Earls of
Warwick, and in 1247 was created Earl of Warwick. The alien
invasion took a newer and more grievous shape.

The expenses of the war were still to be paid; and in 1244 Henry
assembled a council, declaring that, as he had gone to Gascony on
the advice of his barons, they were bound to make him a liberal
grant towards freeing him from the debts which he had incurred
beyond sea. Prelates, earls, and barons each deliberated apart, and
a joint committee, composed of four members of each order, drew up
an uncompromising reply. The king had not observed the charters;
previous grants had been misapplied, and the abeyance of the great
offices of state made justice difficult and good administration
impossible. The committee insisted that a justiciar, a chancellor,
and a treasurer should forthwith be appointed. This was the last
thing that the jealous king desired. Helpless against a united
council, he strove to break up the solidarity between its lay and
clerical 066elements by laying a papal order before the
prelates to furnish him an adequate subsidy. The leader of the
bishops was now Grosseteste, who from this time until his death in
1253 was the pillar of the opposition. “We must not,” he declared,
“be divided from the common counsel, for it is written that if we
be divided we shall all die forthwith.” At last a committee of
twelve magnates was appointed to draw up a plan of reform. The
unanimity of all orders was shown by the co-operation on this body
of prelates such as Boniface of Savoy with patriots of the stamp of
Grosseteste and Walter of Cantilupe, while among the secular lords,
Richard of Cornwall and ‘Simon of Leicester worked together with
baronial leaders like Norfolk and Richard of Montfichet, a survivor
of the twenty-five executors of Magna Carta. The obstinacy of the
king may well have driven the estates into drawing up the
remarkable paper constitution preserved for us by Matthew Paris.[1]
By it the execution of the charters and the supervision of the
administration were to be entrusted to four councillors, chosen
from among the magnates, and irremovable except with their consent.
It is unlikely that the scheme was ever carried out; but its
conception shows an advance in the claims of the opposition, and
anticipates the policy of restraining an incompetent ruler by a
committee responsible to the estates, which, for the next two
centuries, was the popular specific for royal maladministration.
For the moment neither side gained a decided victory. Though the
barons persisted in their refusal of an extraordinary grant, they
agreed to pay an aid to marry the king’s eldest daughter to the son
of Frederick II.

[1] Chron. Maj., iv., 366-68.

Further demands arose from the quarrel between Innocent IV.’ and
the emperor. A new papal envoy, Master Martin, came to England to
extort from the clergy money to enable Innocent to carry on his war
against Frederick. The lords told Martin that if he did not quit
the realm forthwith he would be torn in pieces. In terror he prayed
for a safe conduct. “May the devil give you a safe conduct to
hell,” was the only reply that the angry Henry vouchsafed. Even his
complaisance was exhausted by Master Martin.

On July 26, 1245, a few weeks before Martin’s expulsion, 067Innocent
IV. opened a general council at Lyons, in which Frederick was
deposed from the imperial dignity. Grosseteste, the chief English
prelate to attend the gathering, was drawn in conflicting
directions by his zeal for pope against emperor and by his dislike
of curialist exactions. This attitude of the bishop is reflected in
the remonstrance, in the name of the English people, laid before
Innocent, declaring the faithfulness of England to the Holy See and
the wrongs with which her fidelity had been requited. The
increasing demands for money, the intrusion of aliens into English
cures, and Martin’s exactions were set forth at length. Innocent
refused to entertain the petition, forced all the bishops at Lyons
to join in the deprivation of the emperor, and required every
English bishop to seal with his own seal the document by which John
had pledged the nation to a yearly tribute. No one could venture to
stand up against the successor of St. Peter, and so, despite futile
remonstrance, Innocent still had it all his own way. In 1250
Grosseteste again met Innocent face to face at Lyons, and urged him
to “put to flight the evils and purge the abominations” which the
Roman see had done so much to foster. But this outspoken
declaration was equally without result. Bold as were Grosseteste’s
words, he fully accepted the curialist theory which regarded the
pope as the universal bishop, the divinely appointed source of all
ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He could therefore do no more than
protest. If the pope chose to disregard him, there was nothing to
be done but wait patiently for better times. The plague of foreign
ecclesiastics was still to torment the English Church for many a
year.

The king’s difficulties were increased by fresh troubles in
Scotland and Wales. The friendship between Henry and his
brother-in-law, Alexander II., was weakened by the death of the
Queen of Scots and by Alexander’s marriage to a French lady in
1239. At last, in 1244, relations were so threatening that the
English levies were mustered for a campaign at Newcastle. However,
on the mediation of Richard of Cornwall, Alexander bound himself
not to make alliances with England’s enemies, and the trouble
passed away. In Wales the difficulties were more complicated.
Llewelyn ap Iorwerth died in 1240, full of years and honour. In the
last years of his reign broken health and the revolts of his eldest
son Griffith made the 068old chieftain anxious for peace with England,
as the best way of securing the succession to all his dominions of
David, his son by Joan of Anjou. Henry III., anxious that David as
his nephew should inherit the principality, granted a temporary
cessation of hostilities. After Llewelyn’s death David was accepted
as Prince of Snowdon, and made his way to Gloucester, where he
performed homage, and was dubbed knight by his uncle. Next year,
however, hostilities broke out, and Henry, disgusted with his
nephew, made a treaty with the wife of Griffith, Griffith himself
being David’s prisoner. In 1241 Henry led an expedition from
Chester into North Wales, and forced David to submit. He
surrendered Griffith to his uncle’s safe keeping and promised to
yield his principality to Henry if he died without a son. Three
years later Griffith broke his neck in an attempt to escape from
the Tower. The death of his rival emboldened David to take up a
stronger line against his uncle. A fresh Welsh expedition was
necessary for the summer of 1245, in which the English advanced to
the Conway, but were speedily forced to retire. David held his own
until his death, without issue, in March, 1246, threw open the
question of the Welsh succession.

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL RETROGRESSION AND NATIONAL PROGRESS.

069The ten years from 1248 to 1258 saw the
continuance of the misgovernment, discontent, and futile opposition
which have already been sufficiently illustrated. The history of
those years must be sought not so much in the relations of the king
and his English subjects as in Gascony, in Wales, in the crusading
revival, and in the culmination of the struggle of papacy and
empire. In each of these fields the course of events reacted
sharply upon the domestic affairs of England, until at last the
failures of Henry’s foreign policy gave unity and determination to
the party of opposition whose first organised success, in 1258,
ushered in the Barons’ War.

The relations between England and France remained anomalous.
Formal peace was impossible, since France would yield nothing, and
the English king still claimed Normandy and Aquitaine. Yet neither
Henry nor Louis had any wish for war. They had married sisters:
they were personally friendly, and were both lovers of peace. In
such circumstances it was not hard to arrange truces from time to
time, so that from 1243 to the end of the reign there were no open
hostilities. In 1248 the friendly feeling of the two courts was
particularly strong. Louis was on the eve of departure for the
crusade and many English nobles had taken the cross. Henry, who was
himself contemplating a crusade, was of no mind to avail himself of
his kinsman’s absence to disturb his realm.

The French could afford to pass over Henry’s neglect to do
homage, for Gascony seemed likely to emancipate itself from the
yoke of its English dukes without any prompting from Paris. After
the failure of 1243, a limited amount of territory between the
Dordogne and the Pyrenees alone acknowledged Henry. 070This narrower
Gascony was a thoroughly feudalised land: the absentee dukes had
little authority, domain, or revenue: and the chief lordships were
held by magnates, whose relations to their overlord were almost
formal, and by municipalities almost as free as the cities of
Flanders or the empire. The disastrous campaign of Taiilebourg
lessened the prestige of the duke, and Henry quitted Gascony
without so much as attempting to settle its affairs. In the
following years weak seneschals, with insufficient powers and
quickly succeeding each other, were unable to grapple with
ever-increasing troubles. The feudal lords dominated the
countryside, pillaged traders, waged internal war and defied the
authority of the duke. In the autonomous towns factions had arisen
as fierce as those of the cities of Italy. Bordeaux was torn
asunder by the feuds of the Rosteins and Colons. Bayonne was the
scene of a struggle between a few privileged families, which sought
to monopolise municipal office, and a popular opposition based upon
the seafaring class. The neighbouring princes cast greedy eyes on a
land so rich, divided, and helpless. Theobald IV., the poet, Count
of Champagne and King of Navarre, coveted the valley of the Adour.
Gaston, Viscount of Béarn, the cousin of Queen Eleanor,
plundered and destroyed the town of Dax. Ferdinand the Saint of
Castile and James I. of Aragon severally claimed all Gascony.
Behind all these loomed the agents of the King of France. Either
Gascony must fall away altogether, or stronger measures must be
taken to preserve it.

In this extremity Henry made Simon of Montfort seneschal or
governor of Gascony, with exceptionally full powers and an assured
duration of office for seven years. Simon had taken the crusader’s
vow, but was persuaded by the king to abandon his intention of
following Louis to Egypt. He at once threw himself into his rude
task with an energy that showed him to be a true son of the
Albigensian crusader. In the first three months he traversed the
duchy from end to end; rallied the royal partisans; defeated
rebels; kept external foes in check, and administered the law
without concern for the privileges of the great. In 1249 he crushed
the Rostein faction at Bordeaux. The same fate was meted out to
their partisans in the country districts. Order was restored, but
the seneschal utterly disregarded impartiality or justice. He
sought to rule Gascony by terrorism 071and by backing up one faction
against the other. It was the same with minor cities, like Bazas
and Bayonne, and with the tyrants of the countryside. The Viscount
of Fronsac saw his castle razed and his estates seized. Gaston of
Béarn, tricked by the seneschal out of the succession of
Bigorre, was captured, sent to England, and only allowed to return
to his home, humiliated and powerless to work further evil. The
lesser barons had to acknowledge Simon their master. On the death
of Raymond of Toulouse in 1249, his son-in-law and successor,
Alfonse of Poitiers, had all he could do to secure his inheritance,
and was too closely bound by the pacific policy of his brother to
give Simon much trouble. The truce with France was easily renewed
by reason of St. Louis’ absence on a crusade. The differences
between Gascony and Theobald of Navarre were mitigated in 1248 at a
personal interview between Leicester and the poet-king.

Gascony for the moment was so quiet that the rebellious hordes
called the Pastoureaux, who had desolated the royal domain,
withdrew from Bordeaux in terror of Simon’s threats. But the
expense of maintaining order pressed heavily on the seneschal’s
resources, and his master showed little disposition to assist him.
Moreover Gascony could not long keep quiet. There were threats of
fresh insurrections, and the whole land was burning with
indignation against its governor. Complaints from the Gascon
estates soon flowed with great abundance into Westminster. For the
moment Henry paid little attention to them. His son Edward was ten
years of age, and he was thinking of providing him with an
appanage, sufficient to support a separate household and so placed
as to train the young prince in the duties of statecraft. Before
November, 1249, he granted to Edward all Gascony, along with the
profits of the government of Ireland, which were set aside to put
Gascony in a good state of defence. Simon’s strong hand was now
more than ever necessary to keep the boy’s unruly subjects under
control. The King therefore continued Simon as seneschal of
Gascony, though henceforth the earl acted as Edward’s minister.
“Complete happily,” Henry wrote to the seneschal, “all our affairs
in Gascony and you shall receive from us and our heirs a recompense
worthy of your services.” For the moment Leicester’s triumph seemed
complete, but the Gascons, who had hoped that Edward’s 072establishment
meant the removal of their masterful governor, were bitterly
disappointed at the continuance of his rule. Profiting by Simon’s
momentary absence in England, they once more rose in revolt. Henry
wavered for the moment. “Bravely,” declared he to his
brother-in-law, “hast thou fought for me, and I will not deny thee
help. But complaints pour in against thee. They say that thou hast
thrown into prison, and condemned to death, folk who have been
summoned to thy court under pledge of thy good faith.” In the end
Simon was sent back to Gascony, and by May, 1251, the rebels were
subdued.

Next year Gaston of Béarn stirred up another revolt, and,
while Simon was in England, deputies from the Aquitanian cities
crossed the sea and laid new complaints before Henry. A stormy
scene ensued between the king and his brother-in-law. Threatened
with the loss of his office, Simon insisted that he had been
appointed for seven years, and that he could not be removed without
his own consent. Henry answered that he would keep no compacts with
traitors. “That word is a lie,” cried Simon; “were you not my king
it would be an ill hour for you when you dared to utter it.” The
sympathy of the magnates saved Leicester from the king’s wrath, and
before long he returned to Gascony, still seneschal, but with
authority impaired by the want of his sovereign’s confidence.
Though the king henceforth sided with the rebels, Simon remained
strong enough to make headway against the lord of Béarn.
Before long, however, Leicester unwillingly agreed to vacate his
office on receiving from Henry a sum of money. In September, 1252,
he laid down the seneschalship and retired into France. While
shabbily treated by the king, he had certainly shown an utter
absence of tact or scruple. But the tumults of Gascony raged with
more violence than ever now that his strong hand was withdrawn.
Those who had professed to rise against the seneschal remained in
arms against the king. Once more the neighbouring princes cast
greedy eyes on the defenceless duchy. In particular, Alfonso the
Wise, King of Castile, who succeeded his father Ferdinand in 1252,
renewed his father’s claims to Gascony.

The only way to save the duchy was for Henry to go there in
person. Long delays ensued before the royal visit took place, and
it was not until August, 1253, that Bordeaux saw 073her hereditary
duke sail up the Gironde to her quays. The Gascon capital remained
faithful, but within a few miles of her walls the rebels were
everywhere triumphant. It required a long siege to reduce
Bénauge to submission, and months elapsed before the towns
and castles of the lower Garonne and Dordogne opened their gates.
Even then La Réole, whither all the worst enemies of
Montfort had fled, held out obstinately. Despairing of military
success, Henry fell back upon diplomacy. The strength of the Gascon
revolt did not lie in the power of the rebels themselves but in the
support of the neighbouring princes and the French crown. By
renewing the truce with the representatives of Louis, Henry
protected himself from the danger of French intervention, and at
the same time he cut off a more direct source of support to the
rebels by negotiating treaties with such magnates as the lord of
Albret, the Counts of Comminges and Armagnac, and the Viscount of
Béarn. His master-stroke was the conclusion, in April, 1254,
of a peace with Alfonso of Castile, whereby the Spanish king
abandoned his Gascon allies and renounced his claims on the duchy.
In return it was agreed that the lord Edward should marry Alfonso’s
half-sister, Eleanor, heiress of the county of Ponthieu through her
mother, Joan, whom Henry had once sought for his queen. As Edward’s
appanage included Aquitaine, Alfonso, in renouncing his personal
claims, might seem to be but transferring them to his sister.

In May, 1254, Queen Eleanor joined Henry at Bordeaux. With her
went her two sons, Edward and Edmund, her uncle, Archbishop
Boniface, and a great crowd of magnates. In August Edward went with
his mother to Alfonso’s court at Burgos, where he was welcomed with
all honour and dubbed to knighthood by the King of Castile, and in
October he and Eleanor were married at the Cistercian monastery of
Las Huelgas. His appanage included all Ireland, the earldom of
Chester, the king’s lands in Wales, the Channel Islands, the whole
of Gascony, and whatsoever rights his father still had over the
lands taken from him and King John by the Kings of France. Thus he
became the ruler of all the outlying dependencies of the English
crown, and the representative of all the claims on the Aquitanian
inheritance of Eleanor and the Norman inheritance of William the
Conqueror. The caustic 074St. Alban’s chronicler declared that Henry
left to himself such scanty possessions that he became a “mutilated
kinglet”.[1] But Henry was too jealous of power utterly to renounce
so large a share of his dominions. His grants to his son were for
purposes of revenue and support, and the government of these
regions was still strictly under the royal control. Yet from this
moment writs ran in Edward’s name, and under his father’s direction
the young prince was free to buy his experience as he would. Soon
after his son’s return with his bride, Henry III. quitted Gascony,
making his way home through France, where he visited his mother’s
tomb at Fontevraud and made atonement at Pontigny before the shrine
of Archbishop Edmund. Of more importance was his visit to King
Louis, recently returned from his Egyptian captivity. The cordial
relations established by personal intercourse between the two kings
prepared the way for peace two years later.

[1] Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., v.,
450.

Edward remained in Gascony about a year after his father. He
checked with a stern hand the disorders of his duchy, strove to
make peace between the Rosteins and Colons, and failing to do so,
took in 1261 the decisive step of putting an end to the tumultuous
municipal independence of the Gascon capital by depriving the
jurats of the right of choosing their mayor.[1] Thenceforth
Bordeaux was ruled by a mayor nominated by the duke or his
lieutenant. Edward’s rule in Gascony has its importance as the
first experiment in government by the boy of fifteen who was later
to become so great a king. Returning to London in November, 1255,
he still forwarded the interests of his Gascon subjects, and an
attempt to protect the Bordeaux wine-merchants from the exactions
of the royal officers aroused the jealousy of Henry, who declared
that the days of Henry II. had come again, when the king’s sons
rose in revolt against their father. Despite this characteristic
wail, Edward gained his point. Yet his efforts to secure the
well-being of Gascony had not produced much result. The hold of the
English duke on Aquitaine was as precarious under Edward as it had
been in the days of Henry’s direct rule.

[1] See Bémont, Rôles Gascons,
i., supplément, pp. cxvi.-cxviii.

The affairs of Wales and Cheshire involved Edward in
responsibilities even more pressing than those of Gascony. 075On the
death of John the Scot without heirs in 1237, the palatinate of
Randolph of Blundeville became a royal escheat. Its grant to Edward
made him the natural head of the marcher barons. The Cheshire
earldom became the more important since the Welsh power had been
driven beyond the Conway. Since the death of David ap Llewelyn in
1246, divisions in the reigning house of Gwynedd had continued to
weaken the Welsh. Llewelyn and Owen the Red, the two elder sons of
the Griffith ap Llewelyn who had perished in attempting to escape
from the Tower, took upon themselves the government of Gwynedd,
dividing the land, by the advice of the “good men,” into two equal
halves. The English seneschal at Carmarthen took advantage of their
weakness to seize the outlying dependencies of Gwynedd south of the
Dovey. War ensued, for the brothers resisted this aggression. But
in April, 1247, they were forced to do homage at Woodstock for
Gwynedd and Snowdon. Henry retained not only Cardigan and
Carmarthen, but the debatable lands between the eastern boundary of
Cheshire and the river Clwyd, the four cantreds of the middle
country or Perveddwlad, so long the scene of the fiercest warfare
between the Celt and the Saxon. Thus the work of Llewelyn ap
Iorwerth was completely undone, and his grandsons were confined to
Snowdon and Anglesey, the ancient cradles of their house.

It suited English policy that even, the barren lands of Snowdon
should be divided. As time went on, other sons of Griffith ap
Llewelyn began to clamour for a share of their grandfather’s
inheritance. Owen, the weaker of the two princes, made common cause
with them, and David, another brother, succeeded in obtaining his
portion of the common stock. Llewelyn showed himself so much the
most resourceful and energetic of the brethren that, when open war
broke out between them in 1254, he easily obtained the victory.
Owen was taken prisoner, and David was deprived of his lands.
Llewelyn, thus sole ruler of Gwynedd, at once aspired to follow in
the footsteps of his grandfather. He overran Merioneth, and
frightened the native chieftains beyond the Dovey into the English
camp. His ambitions were, however, rudely checked by the grant of
Cheshire and the English lands in Wales to Edward.

076Besides the border palatinate, Edward’s Welsh
lands included the four cantreds of Perveddwlad, and the districts
of Cardigan and Carmarthen. Young as he was, he had competent
advisers, and, while he was still in Aquitaine, designs were formed
of setting up the English shire system in his Welsh lands, so as to
supersede the traditional Celtic methods of government by feudal
and monarchical centralisation. Efforts were made to subject the
four cantreds to the shire courts at Chester; and Geoffrey of
Langley, Edward’s agent in the south, set up shire-moots at
Cardigan and Carmarthen, from which originated the first beginnings
of those counties. The bitterest indignation animated Edward’s
Welsh tenants, whether on the Clwyd or on the Teivi and Towy. They
rose in revolt against the alien innovators, and called upon
Llewelyn to champion their grievances. Llewelyn saw the chance of
extending his tribal power into a national principality over all
Wales by posing as the upholder of the Welsh people. He overran the
four cantreds in a week, finding no resistance save before the two
castles of Deganwy and Diserth. He conquered Cardigan with equal
ease, and prudently granted out his acquisition to the local
chieftain Meredith ap Owen. Nor were Edward’s lands alone exposed
to his assaults. In central Wales Roger Mortimer was stripped of
his marches on the upper Wye, and Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn, the lord
of upper Powys, driven from the regions of the upper Severn. In the
spring of 1257 the lord of Gwynedd appeared in regions untraversed
by the men of Snowdon since the days of his grandfather. He
devastated the lands of the marchers on the Bristol Channel and
slew Edward’s deputy in battle. “In those days,” says Matthew
Paris, “the Welsh saw that their lives were at stake, so that those
of the north joined together in indissoluble alliance with those of
the south. Such a union had never before been, since north and
south had always been opposed.” The lord of Snowdon assumed the
title of Prince of Wales.

Edward was forced to defend his inheritance. Henry III. paid
little heed to his misfortunes, and answered his appeal for help by
saying: “What have I to do with the matter? I have given you the
land; you must defend it with your own resources. I have plenty of
other business to do.” Nevertheless, Henry accompanied his son on a
Welsh campaign in August, 1257. 077The English army got no further
than Deganwy, and therefore did not really invade Llewelyn’s
dominions at all. After waiting idly on the banks of the Conway for
some weeks, it retired home, leaving the open country to be ruled
by Llewelyn as he would, and having done nothing but revictual the
castles of the four cantreds. Next year a truce was made, which
left Llewelyn in possession of the disputed districts. Troubles at
home were calling off both father and son from the Welsh war, and
thus Llewelyn secured his virtual triumph. Though fear of the
progress of the lord of Gwynedd filled every marcher with alarm,
yet the dread of the power of Edward was even more nearly present
before them. The marcher lords deliberately stood aside, and the
result was inevitable disaster. Edward found that the territories
handed over to him by his father had to be conquered before they
could be administered, and Henry III.’s methods of government made
it a hopeless business to find either the men or the money for the
task.

England still resounded with complaints of misgovernment, and
demands for the execution of the charters. Before going to Bordeaux
in 1253, Henry obtained from the reluctant parliament a
considerable subsidy, and pledged himself as “a man, a Christian, a
knight, and a crowned and anointed king,” to uphold the charters.
During his absence a parliament, summoned by the regents, Queen
Eleanor and Richard of Cornwall, for January, 1254, showed such
unwillingness to grant a supply that a fresh assembly was convened
in April, to which knights of the shire, for the first time since
the reign of John, and representatives of the diocesan clergy, for
the first occasion on record, were summoned, as well as the
baronial and clerical grandees. Nothing came of the meeting save
fresh complaints. The Earl of Leicester became the spokesman of the
opposition. Hurrying back from France he warned the parliament not
to fall into the “mouse-traps” laid for them by the king. In
default of English money, enough to meet the king’s necessities was
extorted from the Jews, recently handed over to the custody of
Richard of Cornwall. After his return from France at the end of
1254, Henry’s renewed requests for money gave coherence to the
opposition. Between 1254 and 1258 the king’s exactions, and an
effective organisation for withstanding them, developed on parallel
lines. To the old sources of discontent were 078added grievances
proceeding from enterprises of so costly a nature that they at last
brought about a crisis.

The foremost grievance against the king was still his
co-operation with the papacy in spoiling the Church of England.
Though the death of the excommunicated Frederick II. in 1250 was a
great gain for Innocent IV., the contest of the papacy against the
Hohenstaufen raged as fiercely as ever. Both in Germany and in
Italy Innocent had to carry on his struggle against Conrad,
Frederick’s son. After Conrad’s death, in 1254, there was still
Frederick’s strenuous bastard, Manfred, to be reckoned with in
Naples and Sicily. Innocent IV. died in 1254, but his successor,
Alexander IV., continued his policy. A papalist King of Naples was
wanted to withstand Manfred, and also a papalist successor to the
pope’s phantom King of the Romans, William of Holland, who died in
1256.

Candidates to both crowns were sought for in England. Since 1250
Innocent IV. had been sounding Richard, Earl of Cornwall, as to his
willingness to accept Sicily. The honourable scruple against
hostility to his kinsman, which Richard shared with the king,
prevented him from setting up his claims against Conrad. But the
deaths both of Conrad and of Frederick II.’s son by Isabella of
England weakened the ties between the English royal house and the
Hohenstaufen, and Henry was tempted by Innocent’s offer of the
Sicilian throne for his younger son, Edmund, a boy of nine, along
with a proposal to release him from his vow of crusade to Syria, if
he would prosecute on his son’s behalf a crusading campaign against
the enemies of the Church in Naples. Innocent died before the
negotiations were completed, but Alexander IV. renewed the offer,
and in April, 1255, Peter of Aigueblanche, Bishop of Hereford,
accepted the preferred kingdom in Edmund’s name. Sicily was to be
held by a tribute of money and service, as a fief of the holy see,
and was never to be united with the empire. Henry was to do homage
to the pope on his son’s behalf, to go to Italy in person or send
thither a competent force, and to reimburse the pope for the large
sums expended by him in the prosecution of the war. In return the
English and Scottish proceeds of the crusading tenth, imposed on
the clergy at Lyons, were to be paid to Henry. On October 18, 1255,
a cardinal invested Edmund with a ring that symbolised his
appointment. 079Henry stood before the altar and swore by St.
Edward that he would himself go to Apulia, as soon as he could
safely pass through France.

The treaty remained a dead letter. Henry found it quite
impossible to raise either the men or the money promised, and
abandoned any idea of visiting Sicily in person. Meanwhile Naples
and Sicily were united in support of Manfred, and discomfited the
feeble forces of the papal legates who acted against him in
Edmund’s name. At last the Archbishop of Messina came from the pope
with an urgent request for payment of the promised sums. It was in
vain that Henry led forth his son, clothed in Apulian dress, before
the Lenten parliament of 1257, and begged the magnates to enable
him to redeem his bond. When they heard the king’s speech “the ears
of all men tingled”. Nothing could be got save from the clergy, so
that Henry was quite unable to meet his obligations. He besought
Alexander to give him time, to make terms with Manfred, to release
Edmund from his debts on condition of ceding a large part of Apulia
to the Church,—to do anything in short save insist upon the
original contract. The pope deferred the payment, but the respite
did Henry no good. Edmund’s Sicilian monarchy vanished into
nothing, when, early in 1258, Manfred was crowned king at Palermo.
Before the end of the year, Alexander cancelled the grant of Sicily
to Edmund. Yet his demands for the discharge of Henry’s obligations
had contributed not a little towards focussing the gathering
discontent.[1]

[1] For Edmund’s Sicilian claims, see W.E. Rhodes’
article on Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, in the English
Historical Review, x. (1895), 20-27.

While Henry was seeking the Sicilian crown for his son, his
brother Richard was elected to the German throne. Since William of
Holland’s death in January, 1256, the German magnates, divided
between the Hohenstaufen and the papalist parties, had hesitated
for nearly a year as to the choice of his successor. As neither
party was able to secure the election of its own partisan, a
compromise was mooted. At last the name of Richard of Cornwall was
brought definitely forward. He was of high rank and unblemished
reputation; a friend of the pope yet a kinsman of the Hohenstaufen;
he was moderate and conciliatory; he had enough money to bribe the
electors 080handsomely, and he was never likely to be so
deeply rooted in Germany as to stand in the way of the princes of
the empire. The Archbishop of Cologne became his paid partisan, and
the Count Palatine of the Rhine accepted his candidature on
conditions. The French party set up as his rival Alfonso X. of
Castile, who, despite his newly formed English alliance, was quite
willing to stand against Richard. At last, in January, 1257, the
votes of three electors, Cologne, Mainz, and the Palatine, were
cast for Richard, who also obtained the support of Ottocar, King of
Bohemia. However, in April, Trier, Saxony, and Brandenburg voted
for Alfonso. The double election of two foreigners perpetuated the
Great Interregnum for some sixteen years. Alfonso’s title was only
an empty show, but Richard took his appointment seriously. He made
his way to Germany, and was crowned King of the Romans on May 17,
1257, at Aachen. He remained in the country nearly eighteen months,
and succeeded in establishing his authority in the Rhineland,
though beyond that region he never so much as showed his face.[1]
The elevation of his brother to the highest dignity in Christendom
was some consolation to Henry for the Sicilian failure.

[1] See for Richard’s career, Koch’s Richard
von Cornwallis, 1209-1257, and the article on Richard, King
of the Romans, in the Dictionary of National
Biography.

The nation was disgusted to see maladministration grow worse and
worse; the nobles were indignant at the ever-increasing sway of the
foreigners; and several years of bad harvests, high prices, rain,
flood, and murrain sharpened the chronic misery of the poor. The
withdrawal of Earl Richard to his new kingdom deprived the king and
nation of an honourable if timid counsellor, though a more capable
leader was at last provided in the disgraced governor of Gascony.
Simon still deeply resented the king’s ingratitude for his
services, and had become enough of an Englishman to sympathise with
the national feelings. Since his dismissal in 1253 he had held
somewhat aloof from politics. He knew so well that his interests
centred in England that he declined the offer of the French regency
on the death of Blanche of Castile. He prosecuted his rights over
Bigorre with characteristic pertinacity, and lawsuits about his
wife’s jointure from her first husband exacerbated his relations
with Henry. It cannot, however, be said that the two were as 081yet
fiercely hostile. Simon went to Henry’s help in Gascony in 1254,
served on various missions and was nominated on others from which
he withdrew. His chosen occupations during these years of
self-effacement were religious rather than political; his dearest
comrades were clerks rather than barons.

Among Montfort’s closer intimates, Bishop Grosseteste was
removed by death in 1253. But others of like stamp still remained,
such as Adam Marsh, the Franciscan mystic, whose election to the
see of Ely was quashed by the malevolence of the court; Eudes
Rigaud, the famous Archbishop of Rouen, and Walter of Cantilupe,
Bishop of Worcester, who formed a connecting link between the
aristocracy and the Church. Despite the ineffectiveness of the
clerical opposition to the papacy, the spirit of independence
expressed in Grosseteste’s protests had not yet deserted the
churchmen. Clerks had felt the pinch of the papal exactions, had
been bled to the uttermost to support the Sicilian candidature, and
had seen aliens and non-residents usurping their revenues and their
functions. More timid and less cohesive than the barons, they had
quicker brains, more ideas, deeper grievances, and better means of
reaching the masses. If resentment of the Sicilian candidature was
the spark that fired the train, the clerical opposition showed the
barons the method of successful resistance. The rejection of
Henry’s demands for money in the assemblies of 1257 started the
movement that spread to the baronage in the parliaments of 1258. In
the two memorable gatherings of that year the discontent, which had
smouldered for a generation, at last burst into flame. In the next
chapter we shall see in what fashion the fire kindled.

The futility of the political history of the weary middle period
of the reign suggests, to those who make the history of the state
the criterion of every aspect of the national fortunes, a
corresponding barrenness and lack of interest in other aspects of
national life. Yet a remedy for Henry’s misrule was only found
because the age of political retrogression was in all other fields
of action an epoch of unexampled progress. The years during which
the strong centralised government of the Angevin kings was breaking
down under Henry’s weak rule were years which, to the historian of
civilisation, are among the most fruitful in our annals. In vivid
contrast to the tale of misrule, the 082historian can turn to the revival
of religious and intellectual life, the growing delight in ideas
and knowledge, the consummation of the best period of art, and the
spread of a nobler civilisation which make the middle portion of
the thirteenth century the flowering time of English medieval life.
It is part of this strange contrast that Henry, the obstacle to all
political progress, was himself a chief supporter of the religious
and intellectual movements which were so deeply influencing the
age.

Much has been said of the alien invasion, and of the strong
national opposition it excited. But insularity is not a good thing
in itself, and the natural English attitude to the foreigners
tended to confound good and bad alike in a general condemnation.
Even the Savoyards were by no means as evil as the English thought
them, and Henry in welcoming his kinsmen was not merely moved by
selfish and unworthy motives; he believed that he was showing his
openness to ideas and his welcome to all good things from
whencesoever they came. There were, in fact, two tendencies,
antagonistic yet closely related, which were operative, not only in
England but all over western Europe, during this period. Nations,
becoming conscious and proud of their unity, dwelt, often
unreasonably, on the points wherein they differed from other
peoples, and strongly resented alien interference. At the same time
the closer relations between states, the result of improved
government, better communications, increased commercial and social
intercourse, the strengthening of common ideals, and the
development of cosmopolitan types of the knight, the scholar, and
the priest, were deepening the union of western Christendom on
common lines. Neither the political nor the military nor the
ecclesiastical ideals of the early middle ages were based upon
nationality, but rather on that ecumenical community of tradition
which still made the rule of Rome, whether in Church or State, a
living reality. In the thirteenth century the papal tradition was
still at its height. The jurisdiction of the papal curia
implied a universal Christian commonwealth. World-wide religious
orders united alien lands together by ties more spiritual than
obedience to the papal lawyers. The academic ideal was another and
a fresh link that connected the nations together. To the ancient
reasons for union—symbolised by the living Latin speech of
all clerks, of all scholars, 083of all engaged in serious affairs-were
added the newer bonds of connexion involved in the common knightly
and social ideals, in the general spread of a common art and a
common vernacular language and literature.

As Latin expressed the one series of ties, so did French
represent the other. The France of St. Louis meant two things. It
meant, of course, the French state and the French nationality, but
it meant a great deal more than that. The influence of the French
tongue and French ideals was wider than the political influence of
the French monarchy. French was the common language of knighthood,
of policy, of the literature that entertained lords and ladies, of
the lighter and less technical sides of the cosmopolitan culture
which had its more serious embodiments in Latin. To the Englishman
of the thirteenth century the French state was the enemy; but the
English baron denounced France in the French tongue, and leant a
ready ear to those aspects of life which, cosmopolitan in reality,
found their fullest exposition in France and among French-speaking
peoples. In the age which saw hostility to Frenchmen become a
passion, a Frenchman like Montfort could become the champion of
English patriotism, English scholars could readily quit their
native land to study at Paris, the French vernacular literature was
the common property of the two peoples, and French words began to
force their way into the stubborn vocabulary of the English
language, which for two centuries had almost entirely rejected
these alien elements. In dwelling, however briefly, on the new
features which were transforming English civilisation during this
memorable period, we shall constantly see how England gained by her
ever-increasing intercourse with the continent, by necessarily
sharing in the new movements which had extended from the continent
to the island, no longer, as in the eleventh century, to be
described as a world apart. Neither the coming of the friars, nor
the development of university life and academic schools of
philosophy, theology, and natural science, nor the triumph of
gothic art, nor the spread of vernacular literature, not even the
scholarly study of English law nor the course of English political
development-not one of these movements could have been what it was
without the close interconnexion of the various parts of the
European commonwealth, which was 084becoming more homogeneous at the
same time that its units were acquiring for themselves sped
characteristics of their own.

In the early days of Henry III.’s reign, a modest alien invasion
anticipated the more noisy coming of the Poitevin or the
Provençal. The most remarkable development of the
“religious” life that the later middle age was to witness had just
been worked out in Italy. St. Francis of Assisi had taught the cult
of absolute poverty, and his example held up to his followers the
ideal of the thorough and literal imitation of Christ’s life. Thus
arose the early beginnings of the Minorite or Franciscan rule. St.
Dominic yielded to the fascination of the Umbrian enthusiast, and
inculcated on his Order of Preachers a complete renunciation of
worldly goods which made a society, originally little more than a
new type of canons regular, a mendicant order like the Franciscans,
bound to interpret the monastic vow of poverty with such
literalness as to include corporate as well as individual
renunciation of possessions, so that the order might not own lands
or goods, and no member of it could live otherwise than by labour
or by alms. In the second chapter of the Dominican order, at
Whitsuntide, 1221, an organisation into provinces was carried out;
and among the eight provinces, each with its prior, then
instituted, was the province of England, where no preaching friar
had hitherto set foot, and over it Gilbert of Freynet was appointed
prior. Then Dominic withdrew to Bologna, where he died on August 6.
Within a few days of the saint’s death, Friar Gilbert with thirteen
companions made his way to England. In the company of Peter des
Roches the Dominican pioneers went to Canterbury, where Archbishop
Langton was then residing. At the archbishop’s request Gilbert
preached in a Canterbury church, and Langton was so much delighted
by his teaching that henceforth he had a special affection for the
new order. From Canterbury the friars journeyed to London and
Oxford. Mindful of the work of their leaders at Paris and Bologna,
they built their first English chapel, house, and schools in the
university town. Soon these proved too small for them, and they had
to seek ampler quarters outside the walls. From these beginnings
the Dominicans spread over England.

The Franciscans quickly followed the Dominicans. On September
10, 1224, there landed at Dover a little band of four 085clerks and five
laymen, sent by St. Francis himself to extend the new teaching into
England. At their head was the Italian, Agnellus of Pisa, a deacon,
formerly warden of the Parisian convent, who was appointed
provincial minister in England. His three clerical companions were
all Englishmen, though the five laymen were Italians or Frenchmen.
Like the Dominican pioneers, the Franciscan missionaries first went
to Canterbury, where the favour of Simon Langton, the archdeacon,
did for them what the goodwill of his brother Stephen had done for
their precursors. Leaving some of their number at Canterbury, four
of the Franciscans went on to London, and thence a little later two
of them set out for Oxford. Alike at London and at Oxford, they
found a cordial welcome from the Dominicans, eating in their
refectories, and sleeping in their dormitories, until they were
able to erect modest quarters in both places. The brethren of the
new order excited unbounded enthusiasm. Necessity and choice
combined to compel them to interpret their vow of poverty as St.
Francis would have wished. They laboured with their own hands at
the construction of their humble churches. The friars at Oxford
knew the pangs of debt and hunger, rejected pillows as a vain
luxury, and limited the use of boots and shoes to the sick and
infirm. The faithful saw the brethren singing songs as they picked
their way over the frozen mud or hard snow, blood marking the track
of their naked feet, without their being conscious of it. The
joyous radiance of Francis himself illuminated the lives of his
followers. “The friars,” writes their chronicler, “were so full of
fun among themselves that a deaf mute could hardly refrain from
laughter at seeing them.” With the same glad spirit they laboured
for the salvation of souls, the cure of sickness, and the relief of
distress. The emotional feeling of the age quickly responded to
their zeal. Within a few years other houses had arisen at
Gloucester, at Nottingham, at Stamford, at Worcester, at
Northampton, at Cambridge, at Lincoln, at Shrewsbury. In a
generation there was hardly a town of importance in England that
had not its Franciscan convent, and over against it a rival
Dominican house.

The esteem felt for the followers of Francis and Dominic led to
an extraordinary extension of the mendicant type. New orders of
friars arose, preserving the essential attribute of 086absolute
poverty, though differing from each other and from the two
prototypes in various particulars. Some of these lesser orders
found their way to England. In the same year as Agnellus, there
came to England the Trinitarian friars, called also the Maturins,
from the situation of their first house in Paris, an order whose
special function was the redemption of captives. In 1240 returning
crusaders brought back with them the first Carmelite friars, for
whom safer quarters had to be found than in their original abodes
in Syria. This society spread widely, and in 1287, to the disgust
of the older monks, it laid aside the party-coloured habit, forced
upon it in derision by the infidels, and adopted the white robe,
which gave them their popular name of White Friars. Hard upon
these, in 1244, came also the Crutched Friars, so called from the
red cross set upon their backs or breasts; but these were never
deeply rooted in England. The multiplication of orders of friars
became an abuse, so that, at the Council of Lyons of 1245, Innocent
IV abolished all save four. Besides Dominicans and Franciscans the
pope only continued the Carmelites, and an order first seen in
England a few years later, the Austin friars or the hermits of the
order of St. Augustine. These made up the traditional four orders
of friars of later history. Yet even the decree of a council could
not stay the growth of new mendicant types. In 1257 the Friars of
the Penance of Jesus Christ, popularly styled Friars of the Sack,
from their coarse sackcloth garb, settled down in London, exempted
by papal dispensation from the fate of suppression; and even later
than this King Richard’s son, Edmund of Cornwall, established a
community of Bonhommes at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire.

The friars were not recluses, like the older orders, but active
preachers and teachers of the people. The parish clergy seldom held
a strong position in medieval life. The estimation in which the
monastic ideal was held limited their influence. They were, as a
rule, not much raised above the people among whom they laboured. If
the parish priest were a man of rank or education, he was too often
a non-resident and a pluralist, bestowing little personal attention
on his parishioners. Nor were the numerous parishes served by monks
in much better plight. The monastery took the tithes and somehow
provided for the services; but the efforts of Grosseteste 087to secure
the establishment of permanent stipendiary vicarages in his diocese
exemplify the reluctance of the religious to give their
appropriations the benefit of permanent pastors, paid on an
adequate scale. It was an exceptional thing for the parish
clergymen to do more than discharge perfunctorily the routine
duties of their office, and preaching was almost unknown among
them. The friars threw themselves into pastoral work with such
devotion as to compel the reluctant admiration of their natural
rivals, the monks. “At first,” says Matthew Paris,[1] “the
Preachers and the Minorites lived a life of poverty and extreme
sanctity. They busied themselves in preaching, hearing confessions,
the recital of divine service, in teaching and study. They embraced
voluntary poverty for God’s sake, abandoning all their worldly
goods and not even reserving for themselves their food for
to-morrow.” A special field of labour was in the crowded suburbs of
the larger towns, where so often they chose to erect their first
convents. The care of the sick and of lepers was their peculiar
function. Their sympathy and charity carried everything before
them, and they remained the chief teachers of the poor down to the
Reformation. They ingratiated themselves with the rich as much as
with the poor. Henry III. and Edward selected mendicants as their
confessors. The strongest and holiest of the bishops, Grosseteste,
became their most active friend. Simon of Montfort sought the
advice and friendship of a friar like Adam Marsh. The mere fact
that Stephen Langton and Peter des Roches were their first patrons
in England shows how they appealed alike to the best and worst
clerical types of the time.

[1] Chron. Maj., v., 194.

Men and women of all ranks, while still living in the world and
fulfilling their ordinary occupations, associated themselves to the
mendicant brotherhoods. Besides these tertiaries, as they
were called, still wider circles sought the friars’ direction in
all spiritual matters and showed eagerness to be buried within
their sanctuaries. Nor did the friars limit themselves to pastoral
care. They won a unique place in the intellectual history of the
time. They made themselves the spokesmen of all the movements of
the age. They were eager to make peace, and Agnellus himself
mediated between Henry III. and the earl marshal. 088They were the
strenuous preachers of the crusades, whether against the infidel or
against Frederick II. The Franciscans taught a new and more
methodical devotion to the Virgin Mother. The friars upheld the
highest papal claims, were constantly selected as papal agents and
tax-gatherers, and yet even this did not deprive them of their
influence over Englishmen. Their zeal for truth often made them
defenders of unpopular causes, and it was much to their honour that
they did not hesitate to incur the displeasure of the Londoners by
their anxiety to save innocent Jews accused of the murder of
Christian children. The parish clergy hated and envied them as
successful rivals, and bitterly resented the privilege which they
received from Alexander IV of hearing confessions throughout the
world. Not less strong was the hostility of the monastic orders
which is often expressed in Matthew Paris’s free-spoken abuse of
them. They were accused of terrorising dying men out of their
possessions, of laxity in the confessional, of absolving their
friends too easily, of overweening ambition and restless
meddlesomeness. They were violent against heretics and enemies of
the Church. They answered hate with hate. They despised the
seculars as drones and the monks as lazy and corrupt. The
dissensions between the various orders of friars, and particularly
between the sober and intellectual Dominicans and the radical and
mystic Franciscans, were soon as bitter as those between monks and
friars, or monks and seculars. But when all allowances have been
made, the good that they wrought far outbalanced the evil, and in
England at least, the mendicant orders exhibited a nobler
conception of religion, and of men’s duly to their fellowmen than
had as yet been set before the people. If the main result of their
influence was to strengthen that cosmopolitan conception of
Christendom of which the papacy was the head and the friars the
agents, their zeal for righteousness often led them beyond their
own rigid platform, and Englishmen honoured the wandering friar as
the champion of the nation’s cause.

Like the religious orders, the universities were part of the
world system and only indirectly represented the struggling
national life. The ferment of the twelfth century revival
crystallised groups of masters or doctors into guilds called
universities, with a strong class tradition, rigid codes of rules,
089and
intense corporate spirit. The schools at Oxford, whose continuous
history can be traced from the days of Henry II., had acquired a
considerable reputation by the time that his grandson had ascended
the throne. Oxford university, with an autonomous constitution of
its own since 1214, was presided over by a chancellor who,
though in a sense the representative of the distant diocesan at
Lincoln, was even in the earliest times the head of the scholars,
and no mere delegate of the bishop. Five years earlier the Oxford
schools were sufficiently vigorous to provoke a secession, from
which the first faint beginnings of a university at Cambridge
arose. A generation later there were other secessions to Salisbury
and Northampton, but neither of these schools succeeded in
maintaining themselves. Cambridge itself had a somewhat languid
existence throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, and was
scarcely recognised as a studium generale until the bull of
John XXII. in 1318 made its future position secure. In early days
the university owed nothing to endowments, buildings, social
prestige, or tradition. The two essentials was the living voice of
the graduate teacher and the concourse of students desirous to be
taught. Hence migrations were common and stability only gradually
established. When, late in Henry III.’s reign, the chancellor,
Walter of Merton, desired to set up a permanent institution for the
encouragement of poor students, he hesitated whether to establish
it at Oxford, or Cambridge, or in his own Surrey village. Oxford,
though patriots coupled it with Paris and Bologna, only gradually
rose into repute. But before the end of Henry III.’s reign it had
won an assured place among the great universities of western
Europe, though lagging far behind that of the supreme schools of
Paris.

The growing fame of the university of Oxford was a matter of
national importance. Down to the early years of the thirteenth
century a young English clerk who was anxious to study found his
only career abroad, and was too often cut off altogether from his
mother country. Among the last of this type were the Paris
mathematician, John of Holywood or Halifax, Robert Curzon,
cardinal, legate, theologian, and crusader, and Alexander of Hales.
Stephen Langton, who did important work in revising the text of the
Vulgate, might well have been one of those lost to England but for
the 090wisdom of Innocent III who restored him, in
the fulness of his reputation and powers, to the service of the
English Church. Not many years younger than Langton was his
successor Edmund of Abingdon, but the difference was enough to make
the younger primate a student of the Oxford schools in early life.
Though he left Oxford for Paris, Edmund returned to an active
career in England, when experience convinced him of the vanity of
scholastic success. Bishop Grosseteste, another early Oxford
teacher of eminence, probably studied at Paris, for so late as 1240
he held up to the Oxford masters of theology the example of their
Paris brethren for their imitation. The double allegiance of Edmund
and Grosseteste was typical. A long catalogue of eminent names
adorned the annals of Oxford in the thirteenth century, but the
most distinguished of her earlier sons were drawn away from her by
the superior attractions of Paris. England furnished at least her
share of the great names of thirteenth century scholasticism, but
of very few of these could it be said that their main obligation
was to the English university. It was at Paris that the academic
organisation developed which Oxford adopted. At Paris the great
intellectual conflicts of the century were fought. There the
ferment seethed round that introduction of Aristotle’s teaching
from Moorish sources which led to the outspoken pantheism of an
Amaury of Bène. There also was the reconciliation effected
between the new teacher and the old faith which made Aristotle the
pillar of the new scholasticism that was to justify by reason the
ways of God to man. In Paris also was fought the contest between
the aggressive mendicant friars and the secular doctors whom they
wished to supplant in the divinity schools.

There is little evidence of even a pale reflection of these
struggles in contemporary Oxford. English scholars bore their full
share in the fight. It was the Englishman Curzon who condemned the
heresies of Amaury of Bène. Another Englishman, Alexander of
Hales, issued in his Summa Theologiæ the first effective
reconciliation of Aristotelian metaphysic with Christian doctrine
which his Paris pupils, Thomas Aquinas, the Italian, and Albert the
Great, the German, were to work out in detail in the next
generation. Hales was the first secular doctor in Europe who in
1222, in the full pride of his powers, abandoned his position in
the university to embrace the voluntary 091poverty of the Franciscans
and resume his teaching, not in the regular schools but in a
Minorite convent. And at the same time another English doctor at
Paris, John of St. Giles, notable as a physician as well as a
theologian, dramatically marked his conversion to the Dominican
order by assuming its habit in the midst of a sermon on the virtues
of poverty. All these famous Englishmen worked and taught at Paris,
and it was only a generation later that their successors could
establish on the Thames the traditions so long upheld on the banks
of the Seine.

The establishment of the Dominicans and Franciscans at Oxford
gave an immense impetus to the activity of the university. The
Franciscans appointed as the first lector of their Oxford
convent the famous secular teacher Grosseteste, who ever after held
the Minorites in the closest estimation. Grosseteste was the
greatest scholar of his day, knowing Greek and Hebrew as well as
the accustomed studies of the period. A clear and independent
thinker, he was not, like so many of his contemporaries, overborne
by the weight of authority, but appealed to observation and
experience in terms which make him the precursor of Roger Bacon.
Grosseteste’s successor as lector was himself a Minorite,
Adam Marsh, whose reputation was so great that Grosseteste was
afraid to leave him when sick in a French town, lest the Paris
masters should persuade him to teach in their schools. Adam’s
loyalty to his native university withstood any such temptation, and
from that time Oxford began to hold up its head against Paris. Even
before this, Grosseteste persuaded John of St. Giles to transfer
his teaching from Paris to Oxford, where he remained for the rest
of his life.

The intense intellectual activity of the thirteenth century
flowed in more than one channel, and Englishmen took their full
share both in building up and in destroying. Two Englishmen of the
next generation mark in different ways the reaction against the
moderate Aristotelianism and orthodox rationalism which their
countryman Hales first brought into vogue. These were the
Franciscan friars, Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. Bacon, though he
studied at Paris as well as at Oxford, is much more closely
identified with England than with the Continent. His sceptical,
practical intellect led him to heap scorn on Hales and his
followers and to plunge into audacities of 092speculation which cost him
long seclusions in his convent and enforced abstinence from writing
and study. In his war against the Aristotelians, the intrepid friar
upheld recourse to experiment and observation as superior to
deference to authority, in language which stands in strange
contrast to the traditions of the thirteenth century. Grosseteste,
who also had preferred the teachings of experience to the appeal to
the sages of the past, was the only academic leader that escaped
Bacon’s scathing censure. When his order kept him silent, Roger was
bidden to resume his pen by Pope Clement IV. A generation still
later, Duns Scotus, probably a Lowland Scot, who taught at Paris
and died at Cologne in 1308, emphasised, sharply enough, but in
less drastic fashion, the reaction against the teaching of Hales
and Aquinas, by accepting a dualism between reason and authority
that broke away from the Thomist tradition of the thirteenth
century and prepared the way for the scholastic decadence of the
fourteenth. After France, England took a leading part in all these
movements; and even in France English scholars had a large share in
making that land the special home of the Studium, as Italy
was of the Sacerdotium and Germany of the
Imperium.

This intellectual ferment had its results on practical life.
Though the university was cosmopolitan, the individual members of
it were not the less good citizens. A patriot like Grosseteste
strove to his uttermost to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win
them back from Paris. Oxford clerks fought the battle of England
against the legate Otto, and we shall see them siding with
Montfort. The eminently practical temper of the academic class
could not neglect the world of action for the abstract pursuit of
science. Eager as men were to know, to prove, and to inquire, the
age had little of the mystical temperament about it. The studies
which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon law,
attracted the thousands for whom philosophy or theology had little
attraction. Never before was there a career so fully opened to
talent. The academic teacher’s fame took him from the lecture-room
to the court, from the university to the episcopal throne, and so
it was that the university influenced action almost as profoundly
as it influenced thought, and affected all classes of society
alike. The struggles of poor students like Edmund of Abingdon or
093Grosseteste must not make us think that the
universities of this period were exclusively frequented by humble
scholars. The academic career of a rich baron’s son like Thomas of
Cantilupe, living in his own hired house at Paris with a train of
chaplains and tutors, receiving the visits of the French king, and
feeding poor scholars with the remnants from his table, is as
characteristic as the more common picture of the student begging
his way from one seat of learning to another, and suffering the
severest privations rather than desert his studies. Yet the
function of the studium as promoting a healthy circulation
between the various orders of medieval society, must not be
ignored.

Partly to help on the poor, partly to encourage men to devote
themselves to the pursuit of knowledge, endowments began to arise
which soon enhanced the splendour of universities though they
lessened their mobility and their freedom. The mendicant convents
at Paris and Oxford prepared the way for secular foundations, at
first small and insignificant, like that which, in the days of
Henry III., John Balliol established at Oxford for the maintenance
of poor scholars, but soon increasing in magnitude and distinction.
The great college set up by St. Louis’ confessor at Paris for the
endowment of scholars, desirous of studying the unlucrative but
vital subject of theology, was soon imitated by the chancellor of
Henry III. Side by side with Robert of Sorbon’s college of 1257,
arose Walter of Merton’s foundation of 1263, and twenty years later
Bishop Balsham’s college of Peterhouse extended the “rule of
Merton” to Cambridge.

The academic movement was not all clear gain. The humanism, of
the twelfth century was crushed beneath the weight of the
specialised science and encyclopædic learning of the thirteenth.
We should seek in vain among most theologians or the philosophers
of our period for any spark of literary art; and the tendency
dominant in them affected for evil all works written in Latin. Even
the historians show a falling away from the example of William of
Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden. The one English chronicler of
the thirteenth century who is a considerable man of letters,
Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half of it, before the academic
tradition was fully established, and even with him prolixity
impairs the art without injuring the colour of his work. The 094age of
Edward I., the great time of triumphant scholasticism, is recorded
in chronicles so dreary that it is hard to make the dry bones live.
Walter of Hemingburgh, the most attractive historian of the time,
belongs to the next generation: and his excellencies are only great
in comparison with his fellows. Something of this decadence may be
attributed to the falling away of the elder monastic types, whose
higher life withered up from want of able recruits, for the secular
and mendicant careers offered opportunities so stimulating that few
men of purpose, or earnest spiritual character, cared to enter a
Benedictine or a Cistercian house of religion. Something more may
be assigned to the growing claims of the vulgar tongue on literary
aspirants. But the chief cause of the literary defects of
thirteenth century writers must be set down to the doctrine that
the study of “arts”—of grammar, rhetoric and the
rest—was only worthy of schoolboys and novices, and was only
a preliminary to the specialised faculties which left little room
for artistic presentation. Science in short nearly killed
literature.

It was the same with the vulgar tongues as with Latin. French
remained the common language of the higher classes of English
society, and the history of French literature belongs to the
history of the western world rather than to that of England. The
share taken in it by English-born writers is less important than in
the great age of romance when the contact of Celt and Norman on
British soil added the Arthurian legend to the world’s stock of
poetic material. The practical motive, which destroyed the art of
so many Latin writers, impaired the literary value of much written
in the vernacular. We have technical works in French and even in
English, such as Walter of Henley’s treatise on Husbandry,
composed in French for the guidance of stewards of manors, and
translated, it is said by Grosseteste, into English for the benefit
of a wider public. Grosseteste is also said to have drawn up in
French a handbook of rules for the management of a great estate,
and he certainly wrote French poetry. The legal literature, written
in Latin or French, and illustrated by such names as Bracton,
Britton, and “Fleta,” shows that there was growing up a school of
earnest students of English law who, though anxious, like Bracton,
to bring their conclusions under the rules of Roman jurisprudence,
began to treat their science with an independence 095which secured
for English custom the opportunity of independent development. Of
more literary interest than such technicalities were the rhyming
chronicles, handed on from the previous age, of which one of the
best, the recently discovered history of the great William Marshal,
has already been noticed. The spontaneity of this poem proves that
its language was still the natural speech of the writer, and impels
its French editor to claim for it a French origin. As the century
grew older there was no difficulty in deciding whether French works
were written by Englishmen or Frenchmen. The Yorkshire French of
Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle, and the jargon of the Year
Books, attest how the political separation of the two lands,
and the preponderance in northern France of the dialect of Paris,
placed the insular French speech in strong contrast to the language
of polite society beyond the Channel. Yet barbarous as Anglo-French
became, it retained the freshness of a living tongue, and gained
some ground at the expense of Latin, notably in the law courts and
in official documents.

English was slowly making its way upwards. There was a public
ready to read vernacular books, and not at home with French. For
their sake a great literature of translations and adaptations was
made, beginning with Layamon’s English version of Wace’s
Brut, which by the end of the century made the cycle of
French romance accessible to the English reader. Many works of
edification and devotion were written in English; and Robert of
Gloucester’s rhyming history appealed to a larger public than the
Yorkshire French of Langtoft. It is significant of the trend of
events that the early fourteenth century saw Langtoft himself done
into English by Robert Mannyng, of Bourne. While as yet no
continuous works of high merit were written in English, there was
no lack of experiments, of novelties, and of adaptations. Much
evidence of depth of feeling, power of expression, and careful art
lies hidden away in half-forgotten anonymous lyrics, satires, and
romances. The language in which these works were written was
steadily becoming more like our modern English. The dialectical
differences become less acute; the inflections begin to drop away;
the vocabulary gradually absorbs a larger romance element, and the
prosody drops from the forms of the West Saxon period into measures
and modes that reflect a living connexion with 096the contemporary
poetry of France. Thus, even in the literature of a not too
literary age, we find abundant tokens of that strenuous national
life which was manifesting itself in so many different ways.

Art rather than literature reflected the deeper currents of the
thirteenth century. Architecture, the great art of the middle age,
was in its perfection. The inchoate gothic which the Cistercians
brought from Burgundy to the Yorkshire dales, and William of Sens
transplanted from his birthplace to Canterbury, was superseded by
the more developed art of St. Hugh’s choir at Lincoln. In the next
generation the new style, imported from northern France, struck out
ways of its own, less soaring, less rigidly logical, yet of
unequalled grace and picturesqueness, such as we see in Salisbury
cathedral, which altogether dates from the reign of Henry III. Here
also, as in literature, foreign models stood side by side with
native products. Henry III.’s favourite foundation at Westminster
reproduced on English soil the towering loftiness, the vaulted
roofs, the short choir, and the ring of apsidal chapels, of the
great French minsters. This was even more emphatically the case
with the decorations, the goldsmith’s and metal work, the
sculpture, painting, and glass, which the best artists of France
set up in honour of the English king’s favourite saint. In these
crafts English work would not as yet bear a comparison with
foreign, and even the glories of the statuary of the façade
of Wells cannot approach the sculptured porches of Amiens or Paris.
As the century advanced some of the fashions of the French
builders, notably as regards window tracery, were taken up in the
early “Decorated” of the reign of Edward I.; and here the claims of
English to essential equality with French building can perhaps be
better substantiated than in the infancy of the art. But all these
comparisons are misleading. The impulse to gothic art came to
England from France, like the impulse to many other things. Its
working out was conducted on English local lines, ever becoming
more divergent from those of the prototype, though not seldom
stimulated by the constant intercourse of the two lands.

The new gothic art enriched the medieval town with a splendour
of buildings hitherto unknown, which symbolised the growth of
material prosperity as well as of a keener artistic 097appreciation. In
the greater towns the four orders of friars erected their large and
plain churches, designed as halls for preaching to great
congregations. The development of domestic architecture is even
more significant than the growth of ecclesiastical and military
buildings. Stone houses were no longer the rare luxuries of Jews or
nobles. Never were the towns more prosperous and more energetic.
They were now winning for themselves both economic and
administrative independence. Magnates, such as Randolph of Chester,
followed the king’s example by granting charters to the smaller
towns. Even the lesser boroughs became not merely the abodes of
agriculturists but the homes of organised trading communities. It
was the time when the merchant class first began to manifest itself
in politics, and the power of capital to make itself felt. Capital
was almost monopolised by Jews, Lombards, or Tuscans, and the
fierce English hatred of the foreigner found a fresh expression in
the persecution of the Hebrew money-lenders and in the increasing
dislike felt for the alien bankers and merchants who throve at
Englishmen’s expense. The fact that so much of English trade with
the continent was still in the hands of Germans, Frenchmen, and
Italians made this feeling the more intense. But there were limits
even to the ill-will towards aliens. The foreigner could make
himself at home in England, and the rapid naturalisation of a
Montfort in the higher walks of life is paralleled by the
absorption into the civic community of many a Gascon or German
merchant, like that Arnold Fitz Thedmar,[1] a Bremen trader’s son,
who became alderman of London and probably chronicler of its
history. Yet even the greatest English towns did not become strong
enough to cut themselves off from the general life of the people.
They were rather a new element in that rich and purposeful nation
that had so long been enduring the rule of Henry of Winchester. The
national energy spurned the feebleness of the court, and the time
was at hand when the nation, through its natural leaders, was to
overthrow the wretched system of misgovernment under which it had
suffered. Political retrogression was no longer to bar national
progress.

[1] See for Arnold the Chronica majorum et
vicecomitum Londoniarum in Liber de antiquis legibus,
and Riley’s introduction to his translation of Chronicles of the
Mayors and Sheriffs of London (1863).

CHAPTER VI.

THE BARONS’ WAR.

098During the early months of 1258, the aliens
ruled the king and realm, added estate to estate, and defied all
attempts to dislodge them. Papal agents traversed the country,
extorting money from prelates and churches. The Welsh, in secret
relations with the lords of the march, threatened the borders, and
made a confederacy with the Scots. The French were hostile, and the
barons disunited, without leaders, and helpless. A wretched harvest
made corn scarce and dear. A wild winter, followed by a long late
frost, cut off the lambs and destroyed the farmers’ hopes for the
summer. A murrain of cattle followed, and the poor were dying of
hunger and pestilence. Henry III. was in almost as bad a plight as
his people. He had utterly failed to subdue Llewelyn. A papal agent
threatened him with excommunication and the resumption of the grant
of Sicily. He could not control his foreign kinsfolk, and the
rivalry of Savoyards and Poitevins added a new element of turmoil
to the distracted relations of the magnates. His son had been
forced to pawn his best estates to William of Valence, and the
royal exchequer was absolutely empty. Money must be had at all
risks, and the only way to get it was to assemble the magnates.

On April 2 the chief men of Church and State gathered together
at London. For more than a month the stormy debates went on. The
king’s demands were contemptuously waved aside. His exceptional
misdeeds, it was declared, were to be met by exceptional measures.
Hot words were spoken, and William of Valence called Leicester a
traitor. “No, no, William,” the earl replied, “I am not a traitor,
nor the son of a traitor; your father and mine were men of a
different stamp,” 099An opposition party formed itself under the
Earls of Gloucester, Leicester, Hereford, and Norfolk. Even the
Savoyards partially fell away from the court, and a convocation of
clergy at Merton, presided over by Archbishop Boniface, drew up
canons in the spirit of Grosseteste. In parliament all that Henry
could get was a promise to adjourn the question of supply until a
commission had drafted a programme of reform. On May 2 Henry and
his son Edward announced their acceptance of this proposal;
parliament was forthwith prorogued, and the barons set to work to
mature their scheme.

On June 11 the magnates once more assembled, this time at
Oxford. A summons to fight the Welsh gave them an excuse to appear
attended with their followers in arms. The royalist partisans
nicknamed the gathering the Mad Parliament, but its proceedings
were singularly business-like. A petition of twenty-nine articles
was presented, in which the abuses of the administration were laid
bare in detail. A commission of twenty-four was appointed who were
to redress the grievances of the nation, and to draw up a new
scheme of government. According to the compact Henry himself
selected half this body. It was significant of the falling away of
the mass of the ruling families from the monarchy, that six of
Henry’s twelve commissioners were churchmen, four were aliens,
three were his brothers, one his brother-in-law, one his nephew,
one his wife’s uncle. The only earls that accepted his nomination
were the Poitevin adventurer, John du Plessis, Earl of Warwick, and
John of Warenne, who was pledged to a royalist policy by his
marriage to Henry’s half-sister, Alice of Lusignan. The only
bishops were, the queen’s uncle, Boniface of Canterbury, and Fulk
Basset of London, the richest and noblest born of English prelates,
who, though well meaning, was too weak in character for continued
opposition. Yet these two were the most independent names on
Henry’s list. The rest included the three Lusignan brothers, Guy,
William, and Aymer, still eight years after his election only elect
of Winchester; Henry of Almaine, the young son of the King of the
Romans; the pluralist official John Mansel; the chancellor, Henry
Wingham; the Dominican friar John of Darlington, distinguished as a
biblical critic, the king’s confessor and the pope’s agent; and the
Abbot of Westminster, an old man pledged by long years of
dependence to do 100the will of the second founder of his house.
In strong contrast to these creatures of court favour were the
twelve nominees of the barons. The only ecclesiastic was Walter of
Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, and the only alien was Earl Simon
of Leicester. With him were three other earls, Richard of Clare,
Earl of Gloucester, Roger Bigod, earl marshal and Earl of Norfolk,
and Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford. Those of baronial rank were
Roger Mortimer, the strongest of the marchers, Hugh Bigod, the
brother of the earl marshal, John FitzGeoffrey, Richard Grey,
William Bardolf, Peter Montfort, and Hugh Despenser.

The twenty-four drew up a plan of reform which left little to be
desired in thoroughness. The Provisions of Oxford, as the new
constitution was styled, were speedily laid before the barons and
adopted. By it a standing council of fifteen was established, with
whose advice and consent Henry was henceforth to exercise all his
authority. Even this council was not to be without supervision.
Thrice in the year another committee of twelve was to treat with
the fifteen on the common affairs of the realm. This rather narrow
body was created, we are told, to save the expense involved in too
frequent meetings of the magnates. A third aristocratic junto of
twenty-four was appointed to make grants of money to the crown. All
aliens were to be expelled from office and from the custody of
royal castles. New ministers, castellans, and escheators were
appointed under stringent conditions and under the safeguard of new
oaths. The original twenty-four were not yet discharged from
office. They had still to draw up schemes for the reform of the
household of king and queen, and for the amendment of the exchange
of London. Moreover, “Be it remembered,” ran one of the articles,
“that the estate of Holy Church be amended by the twenty-four
elected to reform the realm, when they shall find time and
place”.

For the first time in our history the king was forced to stand
aside from the discharge of his undoubted functions, and suffer
them to be exercised by a committee of magnates. The conception of
limited monarchy, which had been foreshadowed in the early
struggles of Henry’s long reign, was triumphantly vindicated, and,
after weary years of waiting, the baronial victors demanded more
than had ever been suggested by the most free 101interpretation
of the Great Charter. The body that controlled the crown was, it is
true, a narrow one. But whatever was lost by its limitation, was
more than gained by the absolute freedom of the whole movement from
any suspicion of the separatist tendencies of the earlier
feudalism. The barons tacitly accepted the principle that England
was a unity, and that it must be ruled as a single whole. The
triumph of the national movement of the thirteenth century was
assured when the most feudal class of the community thus frankly
abandoned the ancient baronial contention that each baron should
rule in isolation over his own estates, a tradition which, when
carried out for a brief period under Stephen, had set up “as many
kings or rather tyrants as lords of castles”. The feudal period was
over: the national idea was triumphant. This victory becomes
specially significant when we remember how large a share the barons
of the Welsh march, the only purely feudal region in the country,
took in the movement against the King.

The unity of the national government being recognised, it was
another sign of the times that its control should be transferred
from the monarch to a committee of barons. At this point the rigid
conceptions of the triumphant oligarchy stood in the way of a wide
national policy. Since the reign of John the custom had arisen of
consulting the representatives of the shire-courts on matters of
politics and finance. In 1258 there is not the least trace of a
suggestion that parliament could ever include a more popular
element than the barons and prelates. On the contrary, the
Provisions diminished the need even for those periodical assemblies
of the magnates which had been in existence since the earliest dawn
of our history. For all practical purposes small baronial
committees were to perform the work of magnates and people as well
as of the crown. Yet it must be recognised that the barons showed
self-control, as well as practical wisdom, in handing over
functions discharged by the baronage as a whole to the various
committees of their selection. The danger of general control by the
magnates was that a large assembly, more skilled in opposition than
in constructive work, was almost sure to become infected by
faction. By strictly limiting and defining who the new rulers of
England were to be, the barons approached a combination of
aristocratic control with the stability and continuity resulting
from limited numbers 102and defined functions. It is likely, however,
that in bestowing such extensive powers on their nominees, they
were influenced by the well-grounded belief that the new
constitution could only be established by main force, and that,
even when abandoned by the king, the aliens would make a good fight
before they gave up all that they had so long held in England. The
success of the new scheme largely depended upon the immediate
execution of the ordinance for the expulsion of the foreigners.

The first step taken to carry out the Provisions was the
appointment of the new ministers. The barons insisted on the
revival of the office of justiciar, and a strenuous and capable
chief minister was found in Hugh Bigod. It was advisable to go
cautiously, and some of the king’s ministers were allowed to
continue in office. An appeal to force was necessary before the new
constitution could be set up in detail. The Savoyards bought their
safety by accepting it; but the Poitevins, seeing that flight or
resistance were the only alternatives before them, were spirited
enough to prefer the bolder course. They were specially dangerous
because Edward and his cousin, Henry of Almaine, the son of the
King of the Romans, were much under their influence. In the
Dominican convent at Oxford the baronial leaders formed a sworn
confederacy not to desist from their purpose until the foreigners
had been expelled. There were more hot words between Leicester and
William, the most capable of the Lusignans. The Poitevins soon
found that they could not maintain themselves in the face of the
general hatred. On June 22 they fled from Oxford in the company of
their ally, Earl Warenne. They rode straight for the coast, but
failing to reach it, occupied Winchester, where they sought to
maintain themselves in Aymer’s castle of Wolvesey. The magnates of
the parliament then turned against them the arms they professed to
have prepared against the Welsh. Headed by the new justiciar, Hugh
Bigod, they besieged Wolvesey. Warenne abandoned the aliens, and
they gladly accepted the terms offered to them by their foes. They
were allowed to retain their lands and some of their ready money,
on condition of withdrawing from the realm and surrendering their
castles. By the middle of July they had crossed over to France.
With them disappeared the whole of 103the organised opposition to the
new government. Edward, deprived of their support, swore to observe
the Provisions.

Immediately on the flight of the Lusignans the council of
Fifteen was chosen after a fashion which seemed to give the king’s
friends an equal voice with the champions of the aristocracy. Four
electors appointed it, and of these two were the nominees of the
baronial section, and two of the royalist section of the original
twenty-four. The result of their work showed that there was only
one party left after the Wolvesey fiasco. While only three of the
king’s twelve had places on the permanent council, no less that
nine of the fifteen were chosen from the baronial twelve. It was
useless for Archbishop Boniface, John Mansel, and the Earl of
Warwick to stand up against the Bishop of Worcester, the Earls of
Leicester, Norfolk, Hereford, and Gloucester, against John
FitzGeoffrey, Peter Montfort, Richard Grey, and Roger Mortimer.
Moreover, of the three, John Mansel alone could still be regarded
as a royalist partisan. There were three of the fifteen chosen from
outside the twenty-four. Of these, Peter of Savoy, Earl of
Richmond, might, like his brother Boniface, be regarded as an
alien, though hatred of the Poitevins had by this time made
Englishmen of the Savoyards. The other two, the marcher-lord James
of Audley and William of Fors, Earl of Albemarle, were of baronial
sympathies. It was the same with the other councils.

Inquiry was made as to abuses. Gradually the royal officials
were replaced by men of popular leanings. The sheriffs were changed
and were strictly controlled, and four knights from each shire
assembled in October to present to the king the grievances of the
people against the out-going sheriffs. The custody of the castles
was put into trusty and, for the most part, into English hands.
Finally the king was forced to issue a proclamation, in which he
commanded all true men “steadfastly to hold and to defend the
statutes that be made or are to be made by our counsellors”. This
document was issued in English as well as in French and Latin. A
copy of the English version was sent to every sheriff, with
instructions to read it several times a year in the county court,
so that a knowledge of its contents might be attained by every man.
It is perhaps the first important proclamation issued in English
since the coming of the Normans. Early in 1259 104Richard, King of
the Romans, set out to revisit England. He was met at Saint Omer by
a deputation of magnates, who told him that he could only be
allowed to land after taking an oath to observe the Provisions.
Richard blustered, but soon gave in his submission. His adhesion to
the reforms marks the last step in the revolution.

The new constitution worked without interruption until the end
of 1259. Throughout that period domestic affairs were uneventful,
and the efforts of the ministry were chiefly concerned in securing
peace abroad. In 1258 Wales had been in revolt, Scotland
unfriendly, and France threatening. A truce, ill observed, was made
with Llewelyn, who found it worth while to be cautious, seeing that
his natural enemies, but sometime associates, the marchers, had a
preponderant share in the government. The Scots were easier to
satisfy, for there was at the time no real hostility between either
kings or peoples. The chief event of this period is the conclusion
of the first peace with France since the wars of John and Philip
Augustus. The protracted negotiations which preceded it took the
king and his chief councillors abroad, and that made it easier to
carry on the new domestic system without friction.

Since the friendly personal intercourse held between Henry and
Louis IX. in 1254, the relations between England and France had
become less cordial. The revival of the English power in Gascony,
the Anglo-Castilian alliance, and the election of Richard of
Cornwall to the German kingship irritated the French, to whom the
persistent English claim to Normandy and Anjou, and the repudiation
of the Aquitanian homage, were perpetual sources of annoyance. The
French championship of Alfonso against Richard achieved the double
end of checking English pretensions, and cooling the friendship
between England and Castile. St. Louis, however, was always ready
to treat for peace, while the revolution of 1258 made all parties
in England anxious to put a speedy end to the unsettled relations
between the two realms. Negotiations were begun as early as 1257,
and made some progress; but the decisive step was taken immediately
after the prorogation of the reforming parliament in the spring of
1258. During May a strangely constituted embassy treated for peace
at Paris, where Montfort and Hugh Bigod worked side by side with
two of the Lusignans and Peter of 105Savoy. They concluded a
provisional treaty in time for the negotiators to take their part
in the Mad Parliament. The unsettled state of affairs in England,
however, delayed the ratification of the treaty. Arrangements had
been made for its publication at Cambrai, but the fifteen dared not
allow Henry to escape from their tutelage, and Louis refused to
treat save with the king himself. There were difficulties as to the
relation of the pope and the King of the Romans to the treaty,
while Earl Simon’s wife Eleanor and her children refused to waive
their very remote claims to a share in the Norman and Angevin
inheritances, which her brother was prepared to renounce. As ever,
Montfort held to his personal rights with the utmost tenacity, and
the self-seeking obstinacy of the chief negotiator of the treaty
caused both bad blood and delay. At last he was bought off by the
promise of a money payment, and the preliminary ratifications were
exchanged in the summer of 1259. On November 14 Henry left England
for Paris for the formal conclusion of the treaty. There were great
festivities on the occasion of the meeting of the two kings, but
once more Montfort and his wife blocked the way. Not until the very
morning of the day fixed for the final ceremony were they satisfied
by Henry’s promise to deposit on their behalf a large sum in the
hands of the French. Immediately afterwards Henry did homage to
Louis for Gascony.

The chief condition of the treaty of Paris was Henry’s
definitive renunciation of all his claims on Normandy, Anjou,
Maine, Touraine, and Poitou, and his agreement to hold Gascony as a
fief of the French crown. In return for this, Louis not only
recognised him as Duke of Aquitaine, but added to his actual
possessions there by ceding to him all that he held, whether in
fief or in demesne, in the three dioceses of Limoges, Cahors, and
Périgueux. Besides these immediate cessions, the French king
promised to hand over to Henry certain districts then held by his
brother, Alfonse of Poitiers, and his brother’s wife Joan of
Toulouse, in the event of their dominions escheating to the crown
by their death without heirs. These regions included Agen and the
Agenais, Saintonge to the south of the Charente, and in addition
the whole of Quercy, if it could be proved by inquest that it had
been given by Richard I. to his sister Joan, grandmother of Joan of
Poitiers, 106as her marriage portion. Moreover the French
king promised to pay to Henry the sums necessary to maintain for
two years five hundred knights to be employed “for the service of
God, or the Church, or the kingdom of England.”[1]

[1] For the treaty and its execution see M.
Gavrilovitch, Étude sur le traité de Paris de
1259 (1899).

The treaty was unpopular both in France and England. The French
strongly objected to the surrender of territory, and were but
little convinced of the advantage gained by making the English king
once more the vassal of France. English opinion was hostile to the
abandonment of large pretensions in return for so small an
equivalent. On the French side it is true that Louis sacrificed
something to his sense of justice and love of peace. But the
territory he ceded was less in reality than in appearance. The
French king’s demesnes in Quercy, Périgord, and Limousin
were not large, and the transference of the homage of the chief
vassals meant only a nominal change of overlordship, and was
further limited by a provision that certain “privileged fiefs” were
still to be retained under the direct suzerainty of the French
crown. As to the eventual cessions, Alfonse and his wife were still
alive and likely to live many years. Even the cession of Gascony
was hampered by a stipulation that the towns should take an “oath
of security,” by which they pledged themselves to aid France
against England in the event of the English king breaking the
provisions of the treaty. Perhaps the most solid advantage Henry
gained by the treaty was financial, for he spent the sums granted
to enable him to redeem his crusading vow in preparing for war
against his own subjects. It was, however, an immense advantage for
England to be able during the critical years which followed to be
free from French hostility. If, therefore, the French complaints
against the treaty were exaggerated, the English dissatisfaction
was unreasonable. The real difficulty for the future lay in the
fact that the possession of Gascony by the king of a hostile nation
was incompatible with the proper development of the French
monarchy. For fifty years, however, a chronic state of war had not
given Gascony to the French; and Louis IX. was, perhaps, politic as
well as scrupulous in abandoning the way of force and beginning a
new 107method of gradual absorption, that in the end
gained the Gascon fief for France more effectively than any
conquest. The treaty of Paris was not a final settlement. It left a
score of questions still open, and the problems of its gradual
execution involved the two courts in constant disputes down to the
beginning of the Hundred Years’ War. For seventy years the whole
history of the relations between the two nations is but a
commentary on the treaty of Paris.

During his visit to Paris Henry arranged a marriage between his
daughter Beatrice and John of Brittany, the son of the reigning
duke. In no hurry to get back to the tutelage of the fifteen, he
prolonged his stay on the continent till the end of April, 1260.
Yet, abroad as at home, he could not be said to act as a free man.
It was not the king so much as Simon of Montfort who was the real
author of the French treaty. Indeed, it is from the conclusion of
the Peace of Paris that Simon’s preponderance becomes evident. He
was at all stages the chief negotiator of the peace and, save when
his personal interests stood in the way, he controlled every step
of the proceedings. If in 1258 he was but one of several leaders of
the baronial party in England, he came back from France in 1260
assured of supremacy. During his absence abroad, events had taken
place in England which called for his presence.

After their triumph in 1258, the baronial leaders relaxed their
efforts. Contented with their position as arbiters of the national
destinies, they made little effort to carry out the reforms
contemplated at Oxford. The ranks of the victors were broken up by
private dissensions. Before leaving for France, Earl Simon
violently quarrelled with Richard, Earl of Gloucester. It was
currently believed that Gloucester had grown slack, and Simon rose
in popular estimation as a thorough-going reformer who had no mind
to substitute the rule of a baronial oligarchy for the tyranny of
the king. His position was strengthened by his personal qualities
which made him the hero of the younger generation; and his
influence began to modify the policy of Edward the king’s son, who,
since the flight of his Poitevin kinsmen, was gradually arriving at
broader views of national policy. Even before his father’s journey
to France, Edward took up a line of his own. In the October
parliament of 1259, he listened to a petition presented to the
108council by the younger nobles[1] who
complained that, though the king had performed all his promises,
the barons had not fulfilled any of theirs. Edward thereupon
stirred up the oligarchy to issue an instalment of the promised
reforms in the document known as the Provisions of Westminster.
During Henry’s absence in France the situation became strained. The
oligarchic party, headed by Gloucester, was breaking away from
Montfort; and Edward was forming a liberal royalist party which was
not far removed from Montfort’s principles. Profiting by these
discords, the Lusignans prepared to invade England. The papacy was
about to declare against the reformers. When the monks of
Winchester elected an Englishman as their bishop in the hope of
getting rid of the queen’s uncle, Alexander IV. summoned Aymer to
his court and consecrated him bishop with his own hands.

[1] “Communitas bacheleriae Angliæ,” Burton
Ann., p. 471. See on this, Engl. Hist. Review,
xvii. (1902), 89-94.

Early in 1260, Montfort went back to England and made common
cause with Edward. Despite the king’s order that no parliament
should be held during his absence abroad, Montfort insisted that
the Easter parliament should meet as usual at London. The
discussions were hot. Montfort demanded the expulsion of Peter of
Savoy from the council, and Edward and Gloucester almost came to
blows. The Londoners closed their gates on both parties, but the
mediation of the King of the Romans prevented a collision. Henry
hurried home, convinced that Edward was conspiring against him. The
king threw himself into the city of London, and with Gloucester’s
help collected an army. Meanwhile Montfort and Edward, with their
armed followers, were lodged at Clerkenwell, ready for war. Again
the situation became extremely critical, and again King Richard
proved the best peacemaker. Henry held out against his son for a
fortnight, but such estrangement was hard for him to endure. “Do
not let my son appear before me,” he cried, “for if I see him, I
shall not be able to refrain from kissing him.” A reconciliation
was speedily effected, and nothing remained of the short-lived
alliance of Edward with Montfort save that his feud with Gloucester
continued until the earl’s death.

109The dissensions among the barons encouraged
Henry to shake off the tutelage of the fifteen. As soon as he was
reconciled with his son, he charged Leicester with treason.[1]
“But, thanks be to God, the earl answered to all these
points with such force that the king could do nothing against him.”
Unable to break down his enemy by direct attack, Henry followed one
of the worst precedents of his father’s reign by beseeching
Alexander IV. to relieve him of his oath to observe the Provisions.
On April 13, 1261, a bull was issued annulling the whole of the
legislation of 1258 and 1259, and freeing the king from his sworn
promise.

[1] Bémont, Simon de Montfort,
Appendix xxxvii., pp. 343-53.

William of Valence was already back in England, and restored to
his old dignities. His return was the easier because his brother,
Aymer, the most hated of the Poitevins, had died soon after his
consecration to Winchester. On June 14, 1261, the papal bull was
read before the assembled parliament at Winchester. There Henry
removed the baronial ministers and replaced them by his own
friends. Chief among the sufferers was Hugh Despenser, who had
succeeded Hugh Bigod as justiciar; and Bigod himself was expelled
from the custody of Dover Castle. In the summer Henry issued a
proclamation, declaring that the right of choosing his council and
garrisoning his castles was among the inalienable attributes of the
crown. England was little inclined to rebel, for the return of
prosperity and good harvests made men more contented.

The repudiation of the Provisions restored unity to the
baronage. The defections had been serious, and it was said that
only five of the twenty-four still adhered to the opposition. But
the crisis forced Leicester and Gloucester to forget their recent
feuds, and co-operate once more against the king. They saw that
their salvation from Henry’s growing strength lay in appealing to a
wider public than that which they had hitherto addressed. Still
posing as the heads of the government established by the
Provisions, they summoned three knights from each shire to attend
an assembly at St. Alban’s. This appeal to the landed gentry
alarmed the king so much that he issued counter-writs to the
sheriffs ordering them to send the knights, not to the baronial
camp at St. Alban’s, but to his own court 110at Windsor. Neither party was
as yet prepared for battle. The death of Alexander IV, soon after
the publication of his bull tied the hands of the king. At the same
time the renewed dissensions of Leicester and Gloucester paralysed
the baronage. Before long Simon withdrew to the continent, leaving
everything in Gloucester’s hands. At last, on December 7, a treaty
of pacification was patched up, and the king announced that he was
ready to pardon those who accepted its conditions. But there was no
permanence in the settlement, and the king, the chief gainer by it,
was soon pressing the new pope, Urban IV., to confirm the bull of
Alexander. On February 25, 1262, Urban renewed Henry’s absolution
from his oath in a bull which was at once promulgated in England.
Montfort then came back from abroad and rallied the baronial party.
In January, 1263, Henry once more confirmed the Provisions, and
peace seemed restored. The death of Richard of Gloucester during
1262 increased Montfort’s power. His son, the young Earl Gilbert,
was Simon’s devoted disciple, but he was still a minor and the
custody of his lands was handed over to the Earl of Hereford.
Montfort’s personal charm succeeded in like fashion in winning over
Henry of Almaine.

The events of 1263 are as bewildering and as indecisive as those
of the two previous years. Amidst the confusion of details and the
violent clashing of personal and territorial interests, a few main
principles can be discerned. First of all the royalist party was
becoming decidedly stronger, and fresh secessions of the barons
constantly strengthened its ranks. Conspicuous among these were the
lords of the march of Wales, who in 1258 had been almost as one man
on the side of the opposition, but who by the end of 1263 had with
almost equal unanimity rallied to the crown.[1] The causes of this
change of front are to be found partly in public and partly in
personal reasons. In 1258 Henry III., like Charles I. in 1640, had
alienated every class of his subjects, and was therefore entirely
at the mercy of his enemies. By 1263 his concessions had procured
for him a following, so that he now stood in the same position as
Charles after his concessions to the Long 111Parliament made it possible
for him to begin the Civil War in 1642. A new royalist party was
growing up with a wider policy and greater efficiency than the old
coterie of courtiers and aliens. Of this new party Edward was the
soul. He had dissociated himself from Earl Simon, but he carried
into his father’s camp something of Simon’s breadth of vision and
force of will. He set to work to win over individually the remnant
that adhered to Leicester. What persuasion and policy could not
effect was accomplished by bribes and promises. Edward won over the
Earl of Hereford, whose importance was doubled by his custody of
the Gloucester lands, the ex-justiciar Roger Bigod, and above all
Roger Mortimer.

[1] On this, and the whole marcher and Welsh
aspect of the period, 1258-1267, see my essay on Wales and the
March during the Barons’ Wars in Owens College Historical
Essays, pp. 76-136 (1902).

The change of policy of the marchers was partly at least brought
about by their constant difficulties with the Prince of Wales.
During the period immediately succeeding the Provisions of Oxford,
Llewelyn ceased to devastate the marches. A series of truces was
arranged which, if seldom well kept, at least avoided war on a
grand scale. Within Wales Llewelyn fully availed himself of the
respite from English war. Triumphant over the minor chiefs, he
could reckon upon the support of every Welsh tenant of a marcher
lord, and at last grew strong enough to disregard the truces and
wage open war against the marchers. It was in vain that Edward, the
greatest of the marcher lords, persuaded David, the Welsh prince’s
brother, to rise in revolt against him. Llewelyn devastated the
four cantreds to the gates of Chester, and at last, after long
sieges, forced the war-worn defenders of Deganwy and Diserth to
surrender the two strong castles through which alone Edward had
retained some hold over his Welsh lands. It was the same in the
middle march, where Llewelyn turned his arms against the Mortimers,
and robbed them of their castles. Even in the south the lord of
Gwynedd carried everything before him. “If the Welsh are not
stopped,” wrote a southern marcher, “they will destroy all the
lands of the king as far as the Severn and the Wye, and they ask
for nothing less than the whole of Gwent.” Up to this point the war
had been a war of Welsh against English, but Montfort sought
compensation for his losses in England by establishing relations
with the Welsh. The alliance between Montfort and their enemy had a
large share in bringing about the secession of the 112marchers. Their
alliance with Edward neutralised the action of Montfort, and once
more enabled Henry to repudiate the Provisions.

In the summer of 1263, Edward and Montfort both raised armies.
Leicester made himself master of Hereford, Gloucester, and Bristol,
and when Edward threw himself into Windsor Castle, he occupied
Isleworth, hoping to cut his enemy off from London, where the king
and queen had taken refuge in the Tower. But the hostility of the
Londoners made the Tower an uneasy refuge for them. On one
occasion, when the queen attempted to make her way up the Thames in
the hope of joining her son at Windsor, the citizens assailed her
barge so fiercely from London Bridge that she was forced to return
to the Tower. The foul insults which the rabble poured upon his
mother deeply incensed Edward and he became a bitter foe of the
city for the rest of his life. For the moment the hostility of
London was decisive against Henry. Once more the king was forced to
confirm the Provisions, agree to a fresh banishment of the aliens,
and restore Hugh Despenser to the justiciarship. This was the last
baronial triumph. In a few weeks Edward again took up arms, and was
joined by many of Montfort’s associates, including his cousin,
Henry of Almaine. Even the Earl of Gloucester was wavering. The
barons feared the appeal to arms, and entered into negotiations.
Neither side was strong enough to obtain mastery over the other,
and a recourse to arbitration seemed the best way out of an
impossible situation. Accordingly, on December, 1263, the two
parties agreed to submit the question of the validity of the
Provisions to the judgment of Louis IX.

The king and his son at once crossed the channel to Amiens,
where the French king was to hear both sides. A fall from his horse
prevented Leicester attending the arbitration, and the barons were
represented by Peter Montfort, lord of Beaudesert castle in
Warwickshire, and representative of an ancient Anglo-Norman house
that was not akin to the family of Earl Simon. Louis did not waste
time, and on January 23, 1264, issued his decision in a document
called the “Mise of Amiens,” which pronounced the Provisions
invalid, largely on the ground of the papal sentence. Henry was
declared free to select his own wardens of castles and ministers,
and Louis expressly annulled 113“the statute that the realm of England
should henceforth be governed by native-born Englishmen”. “We
ordain,” he added, “that the king shall have full power and free
jurisdiction over his realm as in the days before the Provisions.”
The only consolation to the barons was that Louis declared that he
did not intend to derogate from the ancient liberties of the realm,
as established by charter or custom, and that he urged a general
amnesty on both parties. In all essential points Louis decided in
favour of Henry. Though the justest of kings, he was after all a
king, and the limitation of the royal authority by a baronial
committee seemed to him to be against the fundamental idea of
monarchy. The pious son of the Church was biassed by the authority
of two successive popes, and he was not unmoved by the indignation
of his wife, the sister of Queen Eleanor. A few weeks later Urban
IV. confirmed the award.

The Mise of Amiens was too one-sided to be accepted. The
decision to refer matters to St. Louis had been made hastily, and
many enemies of the king had taken no part in it. They, at least,
were free to repudiate the judgment and they included the
Londoners, the Cinque Ports, and nearly the whole of the lesser
folk of England. The Londoners set the example of rebellion. They
elected a constable and a marshal, and joining forces with Hugh
Despenser, the baronial justiciar, who still held the Tower,
marched out to Isleworth, where they burnt the manor of the King of
the Romans. “And this,” wrote the London Chronicler, “was the
beginning of trouble and the origin of the deadly war by which so
many thousand men perished.” The Londoners did not act alone.
Leicester refused to be bound by the award, though definitely
pledged to obey it. It was, he maintained, as much perjury to
abandon the Provisions as to be false to the promise to accept the
Mise of Amiens. After a last attempt at negotiation at a parliament
at Oxford, he withdrew with his followers and prepared for
resistance. “Though all men quit me,” he cried, “I will remain with
my four sons and fight for the good cause which I have sworn to
defend—the honour of Holy Church and the good of the realm.”
This was no mere boast. The more his associates fell away, the more
the Montfort family took the lead. While Leicester organised
resistance in the south, he sent his elder sons, Simon and Henry,
to head the revolt in the midlands and the west.

114There was already war in the march of Wales
when Henry Montfort crossed the Severn and strove to make common
cause with Llewelyn. But the Welsh prince held aloof from him, and
Edward himself soon made his way to the march. At first all went
well for young Montfort. Edward, unable to capture Gloucester and
its bridge, was forced to beg for a truce. Before long he found
himself strong enough to repudiate the armistice and take
possession of Gloucester. Master of the chief passage over the
lower Severn, Edward abandoned the western campaign and went with
his marchers to join his father at Oxford, where he at once stirred
up the king to activity. The masters of the university, who were
strong partisans of Montfort, were chased away from the town. Then
the royal army marched against Northampton, the headquarters of the
younger Simon, who was resting there, and, on April 4, the king and
his son burst upon the place. Their first assault was unsuccessful,
but next day the walls were scaled, the town captured, and many
leading barons, including young Simon, taken prisoner. The victors
thereupon marched northwards, devastated Montfort’s Leicestershire
estates, and thence proceeded to Nottingham, which opened its gates
in a panic.