Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1100 page)

I don’t think you want to know at what date this or that baron rebelled against William or
Henry, or at what date William or Henry sent an army against the King of France or the
Welsh; I would rather that you would understand how these kings were pursuing, on the whole, two main tasks. First, they were trying to make England and Wales one compact kingdom, and, secondly, they were obliged, because they were Dukes of Normandy, to quarrel with the Kings of France. It was they, then, who founded our 800-year-long hostility to the gallant Frenchmen, which is now, happily, at an end.

The first of these tasks was mainly left to the great Norman barons, the Earls of Chester,
Shrewsbury and Gloucester, who built castles on the Welsh border and sent continual expeditions far into Wales. William II once marched himself to the foot of Snowdon, and gave the Welsh thieves a very severe lesson against stealing English cattle and murdering English settlers. Henry I started a regular colony of
Englishmen in Pembrokeshire. Welsh “princes “continued to exist till the end of the thirteenth century, but only once troubled England seriously after Henry I’s time.

In the North-west, William II completely conquered Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland, made them English ground forever,
and rebuilt the old Roman fortress of Carlisle.
On the Scottish border William I built a great fortress at Newcastle-on-Tyne; but this did not stop King Malcolm’s raids, for many Saxons,
who had lost their lands in 1066, had fled to
Scotland and helped in these raids. But
William II and Henry I managed their Scottish neighbours so cleverly that from 1095 to 1138
there were no more Scottish raids at all. During these years of peace many Norman barons got into the south of Scotland, were welcomed and were endowed with lands by King David I.

As regards the French business, there was very little real peace between the Duke of Normandy and the French King. And as the former was now King of England also, he generally got the best of it. Until the middle of the twelfth century the King of France was very poor and could get very few people to fight for him, whereas Henry I once shipped a lot of sturdy English soldiers across the Channel and won a great victory at Tenchebray, 1106, over
Norman rebels who were being aided by the

French King. As a rule, however, our kings fought their battles in France with foreign soldiers hired in Flanders. The English kings even had some sort of a fleet, for the “Cinque
Ports” (Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, and
Hastings) were obliged to furnish them a certain number of ships every year. The causes of these quarrels with France are not interesting to us. They were usually about some frontier castle which the French King had grabbed or wanted to grab from the Duke, or the Duke from the King. At one of these quarrels
William the Conqueror met his death in 1087.
A terrible king and a terrible man he had been;
but he had kept peace, and the fiercest baron had trembled before him. His one pleasure was hunting, and he was so greedy of it that he began to make a series of cruel laws against poachers which later kings kept up till 1217.
It was death to kill a stag in the royal forests.

His eldest son, Robert, was a weak, goodnatured fellow, who had once rebelled against his father, and was the darling of the turbulent barons. So William had left Normandy to
Robert and England to his second son, William,
who was called’’ Ruf us’’ from his red hair. Rufus was a violent ruffian, grasping and cruel, and mocked at everything holy; but he was strong and clever, too, a mighty warrior and leader ofmen. He had at once to meet a fearful rebellion got up by Robert, but the English freeholders turned out in crowds to help him, and he smashed the rebels and battered down their castles, as he battered down everything that came in his path. Soon he managed to grab
Normandy also from poor Robert, who was always deep in debt and trouble of every sort.

In 1096 Robert had gone to the East, and many of the turbulent French and Norman barons with him. They had gone in order to fulfil one of the noblest yet vainest dreams of those times, to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel Saracens or e( Turks,” who had recently taken Jerusalem. The Saracens bullied pilgrims who went thither to venerate the places of Christ’s earthly ministry and passion.
These expeditions from the West were called
“Crusades,” and pious adventurers went with them from all parts of Europe. A man who died upon a crusade thought that he was fairly sure of going straight to Heaven. This first
Crusade was successsful and a Christian kingdom was set up in Jerusalem, which lasted there for eighty-eight years, and, in some parts of
Palestine, for nearly two hundred years. Europe learned much from the Crusades, and many luxuries, arts and crafts were brought back to it from the East. But the name got much abused,and at last the Popes called every private quarrel of their own a crusade, promising their blessing to all who paid money to it, and scolding all who refused.

A prudent yet wicked English king like Rufus stayed at home in spite of the Pope’s scoldings,
and grabbed as much as he could of the property of his neighbours who went upon the Crusade.

When Robert came back he found that he had lost another chance. Rufus had been shot in the year 1100, while hunting in the New Forest,
and his youngest brother, Henry, had seized the crown of England. Of course Robert rebelled,
and the great barons, both of England and Normandy, with him. But, equally of course,
Henry and his faithful Englishmen made short work of every rebellion. English chroniclers called Henry I the 44 Lion of Justice,” and it was not a bad name for him. Though cruel and selfish, he was a much more respectable character than Rufus, and he kept order splendidly. He was a man of learning, which till then had been unusual in royal families. “An unlearned king,” he used to say, “is a crowned ass.” Only one of his descendants, before the eighteenth century, was wholly unlearned, and that was Edward II, who came to a bad end.
Henry endeared himself to his Englishmen by marrying the last princess of the old Saxon race,

Edith, daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland,
who was the great-great-granddaughter of
Ethelred the Unready. Among Henry’s courtiers and servants we often find the names of
Englishmen as well as Normans, though all the highest places in the Church were still held by Normans or by men of mixed race. Well able to fight, and quite ready to do so when it was necessary, Henry, like other clever kings,
avoided all unnecessary wars, and got on well with the Scottish and sometimes even with the
French kings.

But his only son was drowned in the wreck of the
White Ship
in crossing the Channel; and when Henry died, in 1135, his heir was his only daughter, Matilda, whose second husband was
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in France.
Now no woman had ever reigned in England,
and so, when Count Stephen of Blois, son of
William I’s daughter Adela, appeared in London and claimed the crown, he was welcomed as,
King, although he and most of the barons had already promised to uphold the claim of Matilda. Stephen was known to be a kind-hearted fellow who would not rule too strictly; he was in fact just like his uncle Robert.

Alas for England! Matilda, naturally enough,
claimed her “ rights,” and civil war began almost at once. Nothing could have suited the baronsbetter. They changed sides continually and fought now for Stephen and now for Matilda,
as long as there was any one left to fight. “For nineteen winters,” says the old English chronicler, who was still writing in his monastery at Peterboro, “this went on.” Castles sprang up everywhere, “full of devils,” who tortured men for their riches, made war for sport, burned towns and corn crops, coined their own money and compelled the poor to take it in payment.
At the end of the reign it was said there were over three hundred unlicensed castles in England. Poor Stephen did his best; he flew hither and thither besieging these castles, but seldom had patience to take one. He and Matilda
(who was just as bad, and a horrid female into the bargain) could only think of bribing the great barons to fight for them by heaping lands,
riches, and offices on them; and, between the pair of them, the treasures of the crown of
England were soon spent. The King of Scots,
David I, who was Matilda’s cousin, rushed in at the very beginning with a great army of wild men, and, though the Yorkshiremen gave him a sound thrashing at the “Battle of the Standard,” near Northallerton (1138), he stuck to
Cumberland, and Stephen soon tried to bribe him by giving him Northumberland also. So,
as the old chronicler says, “it seemed to Eng-lishmen as if God slept and all His saints.” The
Church alone remained a refuge for the oppressed, and, naturally enough, the Church came out at the end of it all, not only much richer, but with much more power over the hearts of men.

At last, in 1152, young Henry, the son of Matilda and Geoffrey, made peace at Wallingford with Stephen, who was now an old and wornout man. Henry was to govern England as chief minister while Stephen lived, and then to succeed to the crown. And in two years
Stephen died and Henry II became King of
England.

CHAPTER IV

HENRY II TO HENRY III,
1154-1272: THE BEGINNINGS OF
PARLIAMENT

The young man of twenty-one whom we call
Henry II came to a country absolutely wasted with civil war. When he died, thirty-five years later, he left it the richest, the most peaceful, the most intelligent, and most united kingdom in Europe. There is no misery like that of civil war; there have been two civil wars since that date, one in the fifteenth and one in the seventeenth century; and of course during these wars the country people suffered. But so firmly did the sense of law and order, which
Henry II drove into his people’s heads, take root, that there was no complete upset of civil life, even in these later civil wars. We cannot of course attribute all the later good fortune of the country to one man, not even to such a great and wise man as Henry II. His path had been prepared for him long before, and he was extraordinarily fortunate in his opportunity.A great revival of intelligence had already begun all over Europe, and a great revival of trade, no doubt largely owing to the lessons learned in the Crusades. Long-neglected books of Roman Law had been found, and French and Italian lawyers were reading them. Schools were increasing, and even “universities,” of which Oxford was the first in England, were beginning. The towns had been gaining in riches in spite of the civil war; London, to which
Henry I had given a 4’charter,” allowing it to govern itself and keep its own customs, was even more ahead of the other English towns than it is to-day. The difference of race between Norman and Englishman was being forgotten. We were growing into one “people.”
The worst followers of the worst barons had killed each other off during the war, or gone away to the Crusades. Henry had little difficulty in getting rid of those that remained,
and knocking down their ramshackle castles.

But great as the opportunity was, it would have been of no use if Henry had not been a very great man; one of the greatest kings who ever lived. His power of work, and of making other people work, was amazing; he seemed to have a hundred pairs of eyes. Laziness was to him the one unpardonable crime. For pomp, even for dignity, he cared nothing. He was cursed,as all kings of his race were, with the most frightful temper; but he was merciful and forgiving when his rage was over. Norman on the mother’s side, English on the grandmother ‘s, he was the most French of Frenchmen by his father’s family, the House of Anjou.
He had just married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress in Europe, who owned all Southwestern France, from the River Loire to the
Pyrenees.

Aquitaine, or “ Gascony,” or “Guienne,” as the southern part of it is called, was a land of small and very turbulent nobles, who could never get enough fighting. Even Henry never succeeded in keeping them in order. But of course,
with all this land, and with the riches of England at his back, Henry ought to have been a much more powerful man than his “overlord,”
the King of France. Yet the truth is that all these different French provinces, — Normandy,
Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Aquitaine — were rather a trouble than an advantage to him. They cost more to keep in order than they brought in in rents and taxes, and they led to continual quarrels, mostly about frontier castles, with the
French King Louis VII and his successor,
Philip II. Henry and his son, Richard I, in fact did well in keeping their huge loosely knit bundle of provinces together as long as theydid. John, who succeeded Richard, lost all the best parts of them at once.

For the kings of France were doing just what our kings were doing; they were trying to make all Frenchmen feel that they were one people.
So Henry, Richard, and John were really fighting a losing battle in France. For the details of that battle I do not care two straws. Moreover,
our sympathies
ought
to be on the side of the
French kings, unless they invaded England.

What really matters to us is what Henry was doing in England. You may be sure that he gave no one any rest there, neither his many friends, nor his few foes. The greatest thing
England owes to him is the system of Law,
which really began in his reign, and has gone on being improved by skilful lawyers ever since. Till his reign, all the King’s servants,
sheriffs, officers, bishops, and the rest had acted as judges, rent collectors, soldiers, taxing-men without distinction; and the King’s courts of justice had been held wherever the King happened to be. But Henry picked out specially trained men for judges, and confined them to the one business of judging. He chose men who knew some Roman Law, and who would be able to improve our stupid, old-fashioned customs by its light. He swept away a great many of such customs, among other things thefines for murder, which he treated by hanging;
he built prisons in every county, and kept offenders in them until the judges came round
“on circuit,” as, you know, they still do four times a year. The judges gave these offenders a fair trial, in which some sort of “jury” of their neighbours had a hand; and if they were found guilty they were hanged — which surprised them a good deal. The King could not wholly put down the barons’ private courts of justice,
but he took away every shred of real power from them; his sheriffs, he said, were to go
everywhere,
no matter what privileges a baron might claim.
Another splendid thing which Henry did was to establish one coinage for the whole country,
stamped at his royal mint; and woe it was to the man who “uttered” false coins!