The History of England | Page 9

earldoms in England were so perverted; originally they were offices like the modern lords-lieutenancies of the shires; gradually they became hereditary titles. The only remedy the king had was to deprive the earls of their power, and entrust it to a nominal deputy, the sheriff. In France, the sheriff (_vice-comes_, _vicomte_) became hereditary in his turn, and a prolonged struggle over the same tendency was fought in England. Fortunately, the crown and country triumphed over the hereditary principle in this respect; the sheriff remained an official, and when viscounts were created later, in imitation of the French nobility, they received only a meaningless and comparatively innocuous title.
Some slight check, too, was retained upon the crown owing to a series of disputed successions to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy had always been in theory elective, and William had been careful to observe the form. His son, William II, had to obtain election in order to secure the throne against the claims of his elder brother Robert, and Henry I followed his example for similar reasons. Each had to make election promises in the form of a charter; and election promises, although they were seldom kept, had some value as reminders to kings of their duties and theoretical dependence upon the electors. Gradually, too, the kings began to look for support outside their Norman baronage, and to realize that even the submerged English might serve as a makeweight in a balance of opposing forces. Henry I bid for London's support by the grant of a notable charter; for, assisted by the order and communications with the Continent fostered by Norman rule, commerce was beginning to flourish and towns to grow. London was already distancing Winchester in their common ambition to be the capital of the kingdom, and the support of it and of other towns began to be worth buying by grants of local government, more especially as their encouragement provided another check on feudal magnates. Henry, too, made a great appeal to English sentiment by marrying Matilda, the granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, and by revenging the battle of Hastings through a conquest of Normandy from his brother Robert, effected partly by English troops.
But the order, which the three Norman sovereigns evolved out of chaos, was still due more to their personal vigour than to the strength of the administrative machinery which they sought to develop; and though that machinery continued to work during the anarchy which followed, it could not restrain the feudal barons, when the crown was disputed between Henry's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen. The barons, indeed, had been more successful in riveting their baronial yoke on the people than the kings had been in riveting a monarchical yoke on the barons; and nothing more vividly illustrates the utter subjection of Anglo- Saxons than the fact that the conquerors could afford to tear each other to pieces for nineteen years (1135-1154) without the least attempt on the part of their subjects to throw off their tyranny. There was no English nation yet; each feudal magnate did what he pleased with his own without fear of royal or popular vengeance, and for once in English history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence. The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to broaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and assert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to depose sovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization, had it been able to assert a power of putting down the barons from their castles and raising the peasantry from their bondage.
Deliverance could only come by royal power, and in Henry II, Matilda's son, Anjou gave England a greater king than Normandy had done in William the Bastard. Although a foreigner, who ruled a vast continental empire and spent but a fraction of his days on this side of the Channel, he stands second to none of England's makers. He fashioned the government which hammered together the framework of a national state. First, he gathered up such fragments of royal authority as survived the anarchy; then, with the conservative instincts and pretences of a radical, he looked about for precedents in the customs of his grandfather, proclaiming his intention of restoring good old laws. This reaction brought him up against the encroachments of the church, and the untoward incident of Becket's murder impaired the success of Henry's efforts to establish royal supremacy. But this supremacy must not be exaggerated. Henry did not usurp ecclesiastical jurisdiction; he wanted to see that the clerical courts did their duty; he claimed the power of moving them