cent III., in the beginning of the thirteenth century, established the temporal power of the popedom on a settled basis, and obtained a positive acknowledgment of the papal supremacy, or the right principaliter et finaliter to confer the Imperial crown. It was the same pope Innocent whom we shall presently see the disposer of the crown of England in the reign of the tyrant John.

SECTION XVI.

HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN THE ELEVENTH, TWELF[!], AND PART OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURIES.

1. THE consequence of the battle of Hastings was the submission of all England to William the Conqueror. The character of this prince was spirited, haughty, and tyrannical, yet not without a portion of the generous affections. [His conduct at first was moderate; though many confiscations took place in order to reward the Norman army, yet the mass of property was left in the hands of its former possessors ;] but he afterwards disgusted his English subjects by the strong partiality he showed to his Norman followers, preferring them to all offices of trust and dignity. A conspiracy arose from these discontents, which William defeated, and avenged with signal rigour and cruelty. He determined henceforward to treat the English as a conquered people; a policy which involved his reign in perpetual commotions, which, while they robbed him of all peace of mind, aggravated the tyranny of his disposition. He deprived them of their possessions, [and reduced the great body of the people to vassalage and slavery; he endeavoured to annihilate their laws and customs, and even their language, by ordering that all the public acts and pleadings of the courts should be in the Norman language.] To his own children he owed the severest of his troubles. His eldest son Robert rose in rebellion, to wrest from him the sovereignty of Maine: and his foreign subjects took part with the rebel. William led against them an army of the English, and was on the point of perishing in fight by his son's hand. Philip I. of France had aided this rebellion, which was avenged by William, who carried havoc and devastation into the heart of his kingdom, but was killed in the enterprise by a fall from his horse, in 1087. He bequeathed England to William, his second son; to Robert he left Normandy; and to Henry, his youngest son, the effects of his mother Matilda (5000 lbs. of silver), without any inheritance in territory.

2. William the Conqueror introduced into England the feudal law, dividing the whole kingdom, except the royal demesnes, into

about 60,000 parcels of nearly equal value, called knights' fees*] bestowing the most of these on his Norman followers, under the tenure of military service, [that is, for each knight's fee the service of a soldier on horseback was due when required by the king's summons.]t By the forest laws, he reserved to himself the exclusive privilege of killing game all over the kingdom; a restriction resented by his subjects above every other mark of servitude. Preparatory to the introduction of the feudal tenures, he planned and accomplished a general survey of all the lands in the kingdom, with a distinct specification of their extent, nature, value, names of their proprietors, and an enumeration of every class of inhabitants who lived on them, 1086. This most valuable record, called by the Saxons Doomsday-book, or book of the last judgment, is preserved in the English Exchequer, and is now printed.

3. William II. (surnamed Rufus, or the Red, from the colour of his hair) inherited the vices without any of the virtues of his father. His reign is distinguished by no event of importance; and, after the defeat of one conspiracy in its outset, presents nothing but a dull career of unresisted despotism. After a reign of thirteen years, he was killed when hunting, by the random shot of an arrow, in 1100. The crown of England should have devolved on his elder brother Robert; but his absence on the first crusade in Palestine made way for the unopposed succession of his younger brother Henry. [To ingratiate himself with the people and with the nobles, Henry granted a charter which restored many of the Saxon laws, and mitigated those feudal rights claimed by the king over his tenants, and by them over theirs. But nothing did more to establish him on the throne than his marriage with Matilda or Maud, daughter of Malcolm III., king of Scotland, by Margaret, the sister of Edgar Atheling, which united the Saxon with the Norman line, and led the people to hope for a more equal and mild administration for the future.] With the most criminal ambition he then invaded his brother's dominions of Normandy; and Robert, on his return, was defeated in battle, and detained for life a prisoner in England. The crimes of Henry were expiated by his misfortunes. His only son was drowned in his passage from Normandy. His daughter Matilda, married first to the emperor Henry V.,

* Stow states 60,211 to have been the number, and others 60,215, whereof the religious houses, before their suppression, were possessed of 28,015.

What the extent or annual value of a knight's fee was, is not clear, there being a diversity of opinion on the subject. According to some a knight's fee contained 800 acres; according to others, 680. Lord Coke says, by the act or writ 1. Edward 11., 1307, it was measured by the value of £20 per annum, and not by any certain content of acres, Co. Litt. 69. a.

The country between the Tyne and Humber (Yorkshire and Durham) was laid waste and depopulated; and in Hampshire for an extent of thirty miles, the conqueror expelled the inhabitants, seized their property, demolished their houses, and even churches and convents, without compensating the sufferers. The most horrid tyranny and oppression was exercised under colour of forest law. The killing of beasts of chase within the limits of a forest, was as penal as the death of a man, and to be found in them was a punishable crime.

and afterwards to Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou, was destined to be his successor; but the popularity of his nephew Stephen, son of the count of Blois, defeated this intention. Henry I. died in Normandy, after a reign of thirty-five years, in 1135; and in spite of his destination to Matilda, Stephen seized the vacant throne. The party of Matilda, headed by her natural brother, the earl of Gloucester, engaged, defeated, and made Stephen prisoner. Matilda, in her turn, mounted the throne; but, unpopular from the tyranny of her disposition, she was solemnly deposed by the prevailing party of her rival, and Stephen once more restored. He found however, in Henry Plantagenet, the son of Matilda, a more formidable competitor. Of a noble and intrepid spirit, while yet a boy, he resolved to reclaim his hereditary crown; and, landing in England, won by his prowess, and the favour of a just cause, a great part of the kingdom to his interest. By treaty with Stephen, who was allowed to reign for life, he secured the succession at his death, which soon after ensued, (1154).*

4. Henry II. (Plantagenet), a prince in every sense deserving of the throne, began his reign with the reformation of all the abuses of the government of his predecessors; revoking all impolitic grants, abolishing partial immunities, regulating the administration of justice, and establishing the freedom of the towns by charters, which are at this day the basis of national liberty. Happy in the affections of his people, and powerful in the vast extent of additional territory he enjoyed on the continent in the right of his father and of his wife, the heiress of a great portion of France, his reign had every promise of prosperity and happiness; but, from one fatal source, these pleasing prospects were all destroyed. Thomas a Becket was raised by Henry from obscurity to the office of chancellor of England. On the vacancy of the see of Canterbury, the king, desirous of his aid in the correction of ecclesiastical abuses, conferred the primacy on his favourite (1162); and the arrogant Becket availed himself of that authority to abase the prerogative of his sovereign, and exalt the spiritual power above the crown. The clergy had renounced all immediate subordination to the civil magistrate, and it was disputed whether a priest could be tried for a murder, and punished by the civil court. It was determined in the affirmative by the council of Clarendon (1164), † against the opinion of Becket. Pope Alexander III. annulled the decree of the council;

The Saxon Chronicle gives the following picture of this reign. "The nobles and bishops built castles, and filled them with devilish and wicked men, and oppressed the people, cruelly torturing men for their money. They imposed taxes upon towns, and when they had exhausted them of everything, set them on fire. You might travel a day, and not find one man living in a town, nor any land in cultivation. Never did the country suffer greater evils. If two or three men were seen riding up to a town, all the inhabitants left it, taking them for plunderers. And this lasted, growing worse and worse, throughout Stephen's reign. Men said openly, that Christ and his saints were asleep."

This council of bishops and barons decided among other things, that the clergy accused of crimes should be judged by the lay courts,-that no baron should be

and Becket, who took part with the pope, was deprived by Henry of his dignities and estates. He retired to France, and avenged himself by the excommunication of the king's ministers; and Henry, in return, prohibited all intercourse with the see of Rome. At length both parties found it their interest to come to a good understanding. Becket was restored to favour, and reinstated in his primacy, when the increasing insolence of his demeanour drew from the king the hasty expression, "Will no one deliver me from an audacious and ungrateful priest," which four kinghts interpreted into a sentence of proscription, and, trusting that the deed would be grateful to their master, hastened from Normandy to England, and murdered the prelate while in the act of celebrating vespers at the altar in the Cathedral at Canterbury. For this shocking action Henry expressed the regret which he sincerely felt, and the pope indulgently granted his pardon, without requiring the repeal of the Constitutions of Clarendon, on the assurance of his dutiful obedience to the Holy Church.

5. The most important event of the reign of Henry II. was the conquest of Ireland. The Irish, an early civilised people, and among the first of the nations of the West who embraced the Christian religion, were, by frequent invasions of the Danes, and their own domestic commotions, replunged into barbarism for many ages. In the twelfth century the kingdom consisted of five separate sovereignties, Ulster, Leinster, Munster, Meath, and Connaught; but these were subdivided among an infinite number of petty chiefs, owning a very weak allegiance to their respective sovereigns. Dermot Macmorrogh, expelled from his kingdom of Leinster for a rape on the daughter of the king of Meath, sought protection from Henry, and engaged to become his feudatory, if he should recover his kingdom by the aid of the English. Henry empowered his subjects to invade Ireland; and, while Strongbow earl of Pembroke, and his followers, were laying waste the country, landed in the island himself in 1172, and received the submission of a great number of the independent chiefs. Roderick O'Connor, prince of Connaught, whom the Irish elected nominal sovereign of all the provinces, resisted for three years the arms of Henry, but finally acknowledged his dominion by a solemn embassy to the king at Windsor. The terms of the submission were, an annual tribute of every tenth hide of land, to be applied for the support of government, and an obligation of allegiance to the crown of England; on which conditions the Irish should retain their possessions, and Roderick his kingdom; except the territory of the Pale, or that part which the English barons had subdued before the arrival of Henry.

6. Henry divided Ireland into counties, appointed sheriffs in each, and introduced the laws of England into the territory of excommunicated without the consent of the king, and that no appeal to the pope, from sentences pronounced in England, should be allowed.

the Pale; the rest of the kingdom being regulated by their ancient laws, till the reign of Edward I., when, at the request of the nation, the English laws were extended to the whole kingdom; and in the first Irish parliament, which was held in the same reign, Sir John Wogan presided as deputy of the sovereign. From that time, for some centuries, there was little intercourse between the kingdoms; nor was the island considered as fully subdued till the reign of Elizabeth, and of her successor James I.

7. The latter part of the reign of Henry II. was clouded by domestic misfortune. His children, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John, instigated by their unnatural mother, rose in rebellion, and with the aid of Louis VII., king of France, prepared to dethrone their father. While opposing them with spirit on the Continent, his kingdom was invaded by the Scots under William (the Lion). He hastened back to England, defeated the Scots, and made their king his prisoner. Two of his sons, Henry and Geoffrey, expiated their offences by an early death; but Richard, once reconciled, was again seduced from his allegiance, and, in league with the king of France, plundered his father's Continental dominions. The spirit of Henry was unequal to his domestic misfortunes, and he died of a broken heart in the fifty-eighth year of his age, July 6, 1189, an ornament to the English throne, and a prince surpassing all his contemporaries in the valuable qualities of a sovereign. To him England owed her first permanent improvements in arts, in laws, in government, and in civil liberty.

8. Richard I. (Cœur de Leon), on the death of his father, expressed the greatest remorse for his former conduct, and he turned with disgust from those who had encouraged him in his rebellion, and gave his confidence to those faithful ministers who had opposed his ambition. The love of military glory was his ruling passion, and to acquire it, he immediately on his accession set out for the Holy Land, on the third crusade against the Infidels, after plundering his subjects of an immense sum of money to defray the charges of the enterprise. Forming a league with Philip Augustus of France, the two monarchs joined their forces, and, acting for some time in concert, were successful in the taking of Acre or Ptolemais in 1191; but Philip, jealous of his rival's glory, soon returned to France, while Richard had the honour of defeating the heroic Saladin in the battle of Ascalon, with prodigious slaughter of his enemies. He prepared now for the siege of Jerusalem; but, finding his army wasted with famine and fatigue, he was compelled to end the war by a truce with Saladin, in which he obtained a free passage to the Holy Land for every Christian pilgrim. Wrecked in his voyage homeward, and travelling in disguise through Germany, Richard was seized, and detained in prison, by command of the emperor Henry VI. The king of France ungenerously opposed his release,