sign and seal of power, was a most unfortunate mistake. He had, not unnaturally, supposed that it would strengthen the supreme authority to have in each division of his dominions a sufficient representative of royal majesty; he found that he had placed a dangerous weapon in the hands of an undutiful son. The minor irregularities of the coronation day roused his enemies to frenzy; Thomas Becket asserted that the rights of Canterbury, of the English Church, of Christianity itself, were outraged by Archbishop Roger's intrusion; and Lewis VII, hurt at the neglect of his daughter, and backed by the support of the family of Champagne, who combined careful orthodoxy with intense hatred of the house of Anjou, urged the pope to put the kingdom under interdict. Before these invitations took effect, Henry, alarmed as he might well be, hastened into France, reconciled his long quarrel with the archbishop, and authorized his return. Becket returned in December, excommunicated the opposing bishops, provoked the king to utter his angry and hasty wish to be rid of him, and expiated his imprudent and unchristian violence by a cruel death, on the 29th of December, 1170.

He was at once hailed as a martyr by Lewis VII and the house of Champagne; the monks of Canterbury were ready to accept him. as their patron saint after death, although they had cared little about him during his life; the tide of miracle began to flow immediately, and with it the tide of treason and disaffection around the person of the king.

Henry's anger and horror at the murder of the archbishop — an act which showed in its perpetrators not only great brutality, but a profound disregard for the king's reputation and for the public safety urged him to apply at once in self-defence to Rome. That done, he must keep out of the way of the hostile legation which had been despatched to Normandy. He collected his forces in the duchy, crossed to England in August, 1171, and thence to Ireland, where he remained, receiving the homages of the bishops and princes of that divided country, until he heard that the legates who were sent to absolve him had arrived in Normandy. This was in March, 1172. On receiving the news he returned as rapidly as he had come, made his submission to the papal representatives, clearing himself by oath of all complicity in the death of Becket, renouncing the Constitutions of Clarendon, and swearing adhesion to Alexander III against the anti-pope. The submission was completed at Avranches in September. As one portion of the pacification, the younger Henry was crowned a second time, on

this occasion in company with his wife, at Winchester instead of Westminster, and by the Archbishop of Rouen instead of the Archbishop of York. The long storm seemed to have ended in a profound calm.

§ 10. Henry II as King and Administrator

The examination of the administrative measures of Henry in the order of their adoption is necessary to enable us to realize at once the development of his policy, and the condition of affairs which compelled it. Nor, although in the investigation much detail is needed which at first sight seems irrelevant to the later or to the more essential history of the Constitution, is the minute inquiry to be set aside as superfluous. Henry II was, it is true, far more than an inventor of legal forms or of the machinery of taxation. He was one of the greatest politicians of his time; a man of such wide influence, great estates, and numerous connections, that the whole of the foreign relations of England during the Middle Ages may be traced directly and distinctly to the results of his alliances and his enmities. He was regarded by the Emperor Frederick, by the kings of Spain and Sicily, by the rising republics of Lombardy, by the half-savage dynasts of Norway, and by the fainting realm of Palestine, as a friend and a patron to be secured at any cost. He refused the crowns of Jerusalem and Sicily; he refused to recognize the anti-pope at a moment when the whole influence of the papacy was being employed to embarrass and distress him. His career is full of romantic episodes, and of really great physical exploits.

Yet the consent of the historians of the time makes him, first and foremost, a legislator and administrator. Ralph Niger, his enemy, tells how year after year he wore out men's patience with his annual assizes; how he set up an upstart nobility; how he abolished the ancient laws, set aside charters, overthrew municipalities, thirsted for gold, overwhelmed all society with his scutages, his recognitions, and such like. Ralph de Diceto explains how necessary a constant adaptation and readjustment of means was to secure in any degree the pure administration of justice, and lauds the promptness with which he discarded unsatisfactory measures to make way for new experiments. William of Newburgh and Peter of Blois praise him for the very measures that Ralph Niger condemns; his exactions were far less than those of his successors; he was most careful of the public peace; he bore the sword for the

punishment of evil-doers, but to the peace of the good; he conserved the rights and liberties of the Church; he never imposed any heavy tax on either England or his continental estates, or grieved the Church with undue exactions; his legal activity was especially meritorious after the storm of anarchy which preceded. In every description of his character the same features recur, whether as matters of laudation or of abuse.

The question already asked recurs, How many of the innovating expedients of his policy were his own? Some parts of it bear a startling resemblance to the legislation of the Frank emperors, his institution of scutage, his assize of arms, his inquest of sheriffs, the whole machinery of the jury which he developed and adapted to so many different sorts of business - almost all that is distinctive of his genius is formed upon Karolingian models, the very existence of which within the circle of his studies or of his experience we are at a loss to account for. It is probable that international studies in the universities had attained already an important place; that the revived study of the Roman law had invited men to the more comprehensive examination of neighboring jurisprudence. But whilst the Roman law met with a cold reception in England, and whilst the minutiae of feudal legislation as it was then growing up gained admission only at a later period, and were under Henry repressed rather than encouraged, we here and there come across glimpses of the imperial system which had died out on the soil from which it sprang.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Stubbs, Historical Introductions to the Rolls Series. Maitland, Canon Law in England, pp. 132 ff., on Henry II and the clergy. Stephens, History of the English Church, 1066-1272, for Henry and the Church. Mrs. John Richard Green, Henry II. Kate Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings. Ramsay, The Angevin Empire. Adams, Political History of England, 10661216, chaps. xiii-xv. For the condition of the realm on the accession of Henry II, Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville. The important documents are to be found in Adams and Stephens, Select Documents of English Constitutional History.

CHAPTER V

THE TRUE NATURE OF MAGNA CARTA

No document in the history of institutions is more famous than Magna Carta. Generation after generation of Englishmen looked back upon it as the fountain of their liberties and read into its general clauses the authority for new claims and privileges which rose from time to time. As a result of this re-reading of the Charter in the light of the interests of succeeding ages, there grew up around it a mass of tradition that obscured its original meaning. It is comparatively recently that scholars have begun to recognize that the document must be studied, not in the light of modern ideas on personal, civil, and political rights, but rather in the light of mediæval law and custom. A casual reading of the document will lead to innumerable erroneous conclusions; each clause is thorny with difficult problems; and the fundamental character of the document itself is in dispute. The most recent and authoritative commentary on Magna Carta is by Dr. McKechnie, to whose work every cautious student will turn before venturing hasty conclusions on the meaning of the respective clauses.

§ 1. Former Views on the Character of Magna Carta1

Does the Great Charter really, as the orthodox traditional view so vehemently asserts, protect the rights of the whole mass of humble Englishmen equally with those of the proudest noble? Is it really a great bulwark of the constitutional liberties of the nation, considered as a nation, in any broad sense of that word? Or is it rather, in the main, a series of concessions to feudal selfishness wrung from the king by a handful of powerful aristocrats? On such questions, learned opinion is sharply divided, although an

McKechnie, Magna Carta, pp. 130 ff. By permission of Dr. McKechnie and The Macmillan Company, New York.

overwhelming majority of authorities range themselves on the popular side, from Coke (who assumes in every page of his Second Institute that the rights won in 1215 were as valuable for the villein as for the baron) down to writers of the present day. Lord Chatham, in one of his great orations, insisted that the barons who wrested the Charter from John established claims to the gratitude of posterity because they "did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people"; and Sir Edward Creasy, in citing Chatham's words with approval, caps them with more ecstatic words of his own, declaring that one effect of the Charter was "to give and to guarantee full protection for property and person to every human being that breathes English air." Lord Chatham, indeed, spoke with the unrestrained enthusiasm of an orator; yet staid lawyers and historians like Blackstone and Hallam seem to vie with him in similar expressions. "An equal distribution of civil rights to all classes of freemen forms the peculiar beauty of the charter," so we are told by Hallam. Bishop Stubbs unequivocally enunciated the same doctrine. "Clause by clause the rights of the commons are provided for as well as the rights of the nobles. . . . This proves, if any proof were wanted, that the demands of the barons were no selfish exactions of privilege for themselves."

Dr. Gneist is of the same opinion. "Magna Carta was a pledge of reconciliation between all classes. Its existence and ratification maintained for centuries the notion of fundamental rights as applicable to all classes in the consciousness that no liberties would be upheld by the superior classes for any length of time, without guarantees of personal liberties for the humble also."

"The rights which the barons claimed for themselves," says John Richard Green, before proceeding to enumerate them, "they claimed for the nation at large." The testimony of a very recent writer, Dr. Hannis Taylor, may close this series. "As all three orders participated equally in its fruits, the great act at Runnymede was in the fullest sense of the term a national act, and not a mere act of the baronage on behalf of their own special privileges." It would be easy to add to this "cloud of witnesses," but enough has been said to prove that it has been a common boast of Englishmen, for many centuries, that the provisions of the Great Charter were intended to secure, and did secure, the liberties of every class and individual of the nation, not merely those of the feudal magnates on whose initiative the quarrel was raised.