CRISTO RAUL.ORG

DURUY'S

HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES

BOOK VIII

RIVALRY BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. (1066-1453)

CHAPITER XXIV.

FIRST PERIOD IN THE STRIFE; THE ENGLISH KINGS LOSE HALF OF THEIR FRENCH POSSESSIONS (1066-1217.)

Louis the Fat (1108-1137); William II and Henry I (1087-1135).—Louis VII (1137-1180) in France; Stephen and Henry II (1135­1189) in England. Abuse of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Thomas a Becket (1170).—Conquest of Ireland (1171); the King of France sustains the revolt of the sons of the English King (1173).—New character shown by French royalty in the thirteenth century : Philip Augustus (1180) and Richard the Lion-hearted (1189).—Quarrels between Philip Augustus and John Lackland ; conquest of Nor­mandy and of Poitou (1204).—Quarrel between John Lackland and Innocent III. (1207). Magna Charta (1215).

In the history of the Middle Ages, there are, if we may say so, questions which belong exclusively to that period, questions which arose and were settled during that time. Such are those that have been treated so far, the invasions and Charlemagne, feudalism, the struggles between the popes and the German emperors, and the contemporary state of society.

There are other questions on the contrary which, though they arose far back in the Middle Ages, are yet distinctly modern and have been the life of history up to our own times. Among these we may mention the rivalry existing between France and England; the development of the royal power in France, which shows us the predecessors of Louis XIV and of all the absolute monarchs of Europe in Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair, and the opposite development in England of the institutions which make the great Charter of King John the immovable basis of the English government and have prepared the way for the diffusion of free institutions throughout Europe.

That is the reason why, when we have taken Germany Italy, and Spain, where the Middle Ages lasted so long, far into the thirteenth century, we have not yet passed the end of the eleventh century in the history of France and England, where modern times, that is to say the new political and social ideas, made an early appearance.

Philip had watched with envy the success of his vassal, the Duke of Normandy, lately become King of England, though he had made no direct opposition; and he gave but a feeble support to the revolt of the Conqueror’s son. Louis the Fat, who succeeded his father in 1108, under­stood better how much danger the French royal power incurred through Normandy’s greatness. He was an energetic prince, and was first called the Wide-awake and the Bruiser, but later, on account of his size, he gained the name of Louis the Fat, without losing, it is true, any of his energy.

We have already seen how and to what extent he had assisted the communal movement ; we shall, therefore, not return to that point. In the soldiery of the communes he found an ever-ready assistance in the exigencies of police duty on the high roads of his domains. The lords of Montmorency, Montlhery, Puiset, Corbeil and Coucy, were in the habit of descending from their donjons upon the great roads to rob merchants and travelers. Philip, who had succeeded, by means of a marriage, in taking Montlhery away from the insignificant lord who was occupying it, charged his son, on his death-bed, never to let that castle, which had caused him so much trouble, escape him. Louis summoned Bouchard of Montmorency before his court for having pillaged the lands of the Abbey of St. Denis, and condemned him to restore what he had taken. He captured the castle of Puiset and destroyed it after a war of three years. He attacked another plunderer, Thomas de Marie, Lord of Coucy, who fell wounded into his hands. Louis the Fat waged war in every direction against the lawless and rapacious small nobles of his domains. When he had gained mastery over the roads, the sphere of his activity increased, and he ventured to attack the most powerful of his vassals.

On the death of the Conqueror (1087), he was succeeded in England by William II (Rufus), his second son; in Normandy by his eldest son, Robert. Robert at first attempted to take England away from his younger brother; he was unsuccessful, and joined the crusade, after having given his duchy of Normandy in pledge to this same brother for five years. William II, a king red of hair and face, and brutal in speech, was a persistent hunter in the vast forests which he and his father had multiplied in England, and ruled his subjects roughly, both priests and laymen ; they called him the “guardian of the woods and the shepherd of the deer.” He died while hunting, shot accidentally or purposely by one of his own followers.

William the Conqueror left a third son, Henry, called Beauclerc, because he wasless ignorant than the rest of his family. Robert was at Jerusalem, and Henry profited by his absence take possession of his eldest brother’s crown. He hoped to secure his possession of it by publishing a charter, the most complete and precise of any that preceded the Magna Charta. In it he fixed limits to the rights which as sovereign he possessed over his vassals in regard to feudal dues. Robert came back in 1101, took Nor­mandy again, and claimed England; where he made an unsuccessful attempt at invasion. Henry returned invasion for invasion, and in 1106 won the battle of Tinchebray ; he captured his brother, and sent him to Cardiff Castle in Wales, where he was confined during the rest of his life. Louis the Fat, fearing the too great power of his vassal, the king of England, appeared as the supporter of William , Robert’s son and consequently Henry’s nephew. It was a well-devised plan, and its success would have removed the danger which always threatened the throne of France so long as England was united with the duchy of Normandy.

The war took the form of extensive devastation, causing great suffering among the Norman peasants; the knights of the two countries, on the other hand, spared each other’s lives, or, at least, could not do each other much harm on account of their armor. Only three were killed in the fight at Brenneville [Noyon] (1119), the most important battle of the war, and one where Louis was overcome. The Pope, who had come to France to take part in the council of Rheims, where the question of investitures was under debate (1119), reconciled the two enemies, but did not satisfy the claims of William Clito. The struggle began again in 1124, and was further complicated by a war with Germany. Henry I having persuaded the emperor, his son-in-law, to attack Louis the Fat from his side, the war with Germany seemed at that time to be popular in France. That circum­stance, and also the progress recently made by the royal power, explain the fact that Louis was able to collect a large force of men at Rheims. Suger, abbot of St. Denis, the prime minister and companion of the king, and later the historian of his life, makes a pompous enumeration of them : he admits, however, that the Count of Flanders, the Count of Anjou, and the dukes of Brittany and Aquitaine did not come ; fear of the king had not, as yet, spread far. Never­theless, the Emperor Henry V. did not venture to enter France, or, rather, desisted from some other motive.

Louis the Fat ventured to make an attack upon the great vassals who had not answered his summons. An excellent opportunity offered itself to unite his designs against them with his usual zeal in defending the bishops and the Church. The Bishop of Clermont, who was at war with the Count of Auvergne, claimed that his church de­pended directly on the crown, and appealed to the king. Louis hastened to comply. He had to deal not only with the count, but also with the count’s sovereign, the Duke of Aquitaine, William IX. But the royal army presented so fine an appearance that, when William saw it, he came humbly to the camp of the king, rendered homage, and begged him to allow the Count of Auvergne to be judged by the barons (1126). The king settled the affair amicably; he had gained what he wished, the formal acknowledgment of his authority in that important part of the South.

He desired to accomplish the same in the North, and remembered that Flanders had not furnished its contingent in the year 1124. Count Charles the Good was assassinated in 1127 by a family, formerly serfs, who were very powerful at Bruges, the Van der Straten family. The lords of Flanders took up arms to avenge his death; but Louis obliged them to come to Arras to elect a count “in his presence.” He brought William Clito forward, and was so urgent in his entreaties that he made them elect him count. But hardly had he departed when the Flemings revolted against William, who perished at the siege of Alost; then, declaring that the king of France had not the right to dispose of their government, they appointed Theodoric of Alsace.

Louis the Fat finally prepared the way, not merely for the influence but for the direct dominion of the throne over the South, by the marriage of his son Louis the Young to Eleanor, the only daughter of William IX, Duke of Aquitaine : the duchy of Aquitaine included Poitou, Limousin, Bordelais, and Agenois, the old duchy of Gascony, and gave sovereignty over Auvergne, Perigord, La Marche, Saintonge, Angoumois, etc.

The accession of Louis VII to the throne gave him a dominion extending from the north to the south of the France of that date; but he did not know how to keep it. A question of investiture involved him in that second crusade which was so fatal Henry in its results to France. A dispute had arisen between Pope Innocent II and himself on the subject of the nomination of an archbishop of Bourges. St. Bernard declared for the Pope, Sugar for the King. While waging war on the Count of Champagne, who upheld the choice of the Pope, Louis burned the church of Vitry, and 1200 persons who had fled there for refuge perished in the flames. His own remorse and the excommunication that followed induced him to set out for the Holy Land, where he lost his whole army without making a single conquest, as we have seen. On his return he divorced Eleanor on the ground of consanguinity, and restored her dowry (1152), which Henry the Count of Anjou, better advised, quickly secured by marrying the offended wife.

As the King of England, Henry I, had lost his son by shipwreck, he declared his daughter Matilda heir to the throne. Matilda was the widow of the German Emperor Henry V; she married again in 1127, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, called Plantagenet because he was in the habit of wearing, by way of plume, a piece of broom (genet) in his helmet. Henry died in 1135; he had charged his nephew Stephen of Blois, whom he had loaded with domains in England, to protect the “Empress,” as Matilda was called. Stephen kept a wolf’s watch, in feudal language , that is, he took the crown of England for himself, which was the beginning of great disorder. Matilda protested and gained adherents among the Normans in England. Almost from the very beginning Stephen’s reign was a constant warfare. In the west there were incursions of the Welsh; in the north invasions of David King of Scotland, who came across the Tweed. The Normans and the Scotch met in the great battle of the Standard, near Allerton, to the north of York. The warriors of the claymore rushed on, shouting “Albin, Albin!” the old name for their country ; they broke through the enemy’s center “as through a cobweb”, but the Saxon archers and the Norman horsemen soon overpowered them. “It was a beautiful sight, to see the sting­ing flies dart humming from the quivers of the men of the South, and fall as thick as rain.” The Scotch withdrew, but kept the provinces in the north of England.

Stephen then had to fight Matilda, who landed in the south, and who supported the Norman barons of the north and west. The war was again fought at the expense of the poor Saxons. “The Normans,” said a Saxon chronicler, “seized all those who seemed to have any property in order to wrest from them their silver and gold. Some were hung over a column of smoke; some hung up by their thumbs, with fire under their feet; some they tortured by tightening a strap about their heads until it forced in the skull; others were put into the chamber of tortures. This was a kind of short, narrow, and shallow chest lined with sharp stones, where the victim was kept screwed up until his limbs were dislocated.” The Middle Ages were rich in tortures. Meantime, Stephen was taken prisoner; then Matilda in her turn just escaped capture. Stephen’s son had died ; and finally a treaty was made. It was agreed that the King should keep his crown until his death, and that then Henry of Anjou, Matilda’s son, should succeed him. He died in the following year (1154).

Henry held Normandy, Maine, and England, through his mother; Anjou and Touraine, through his father; through his wife, the duchy of Aquitaine, and its dependencies. In a word, he possessed about forty-seven of the present departments of France, and the King of France had hardly twenty. Later, by marrying one of his sons to the heiress of Brittany, he extended his power also over that country. It is strange that so vast a power, the most important then in Europe, should not have secured a lasting preponderance; and that, especially, it should not have absorbed the weak monarchy of France. But that it did not, was due to the discord prevailing in England for two centuries, first in the royal family, between husband and wife and between father and children; then in the kingdom, between the king and the clergy, and later, between the king and the barons. It was also due to the feudal inferiority of the King of England on the continent; he would have needed very large forces, impossible for him to collect on account of intestine wars, to break that bond of sovereignty which, though weak and loose at first, grew stronger and closer as time went on, and which enabled the King of France in after years to bind all the French prov­inces of England to his throne.

This was apparent as early as the reign of Henry II. He tried to make good certain claims of his wife on Toulouse. Louis VII threw himself into the city, and the vassal did not dare besiege his sovereign. He wished to limit the ex­cessive independence of the clergy; Thomas à Becket rose against him. Thomas à Becket himself at first, and later, more terrible still, his murdered ghost.

The clergy had had the privilege of jurisdiction over its own members from the time of the Roman Empire. When a clergyman was concerned in a suit, the lay tribunals were incompetent to treat the case ; it could be decided only by an ecclesiastical court. In England William the Conqueror had greatly extended the field of this privilege, called the “benefit of clergy”; his aim was to make powerful tools of his bishops, who were always docile under his strong hand. Great founders always go through the same experience : they count too much on the strength of their power; after their death it declines, and that of which they had no fear becomes in time a formidable force. We find also that the clergy was in a state which had been very often seen on the continent, for instance, under Charles Martel. The ecclesiastical benefices of which the conquered had been despoiled had been seized upon by the conquerors, and with them en­tered a spirit of license which always follows conquerors into the conquered country. So the Norman clergy, who professed themselves sent to reform the Saxon clergy, fell into the worst forms of vice : murders, acts of violence, and scandals had become common events there; during the first years of the reign of Henry II nearly a hundred homicides were recorded, committed by priests still living. Besides the fact of the natural inclination of the clergy to spare its own members, the punishment inflicted by its tribunals was comparatively light: it consisted of penance, at times severe, but the penalty was never death. Abuses crept into what had formerly been good institutions : the clergy was the only asylum in the Middle Ages which feudal violence did not dare to violate; a refuge for the weak is an admirable thing, but a refuge for crime is thrice odious. Henry II tried to remedy this evil; but he came into collision with one stronger than himself.

Gilbert Becket, one of the London middle class, and his wife Rohesia or Matilda, both probably of Norman birth, were the parents of Thomas a Becket. Given a careful education by his father, the child became skillful in the exercises of body and of mind, was made archdeacon of Canterbury, and attracted the notice of Matilda’s son, who became much attached to him. First as tutor of the King’s eldest son, and then as chancellor, he was a conspicuous figure in the first ranks of the kingdom, and displayed a pomp and state far exceeding the most magnificent of the nobles. Finally Henry appointed him to the see of Canterbury (1162), hoping that he would be of use to him in his reforms. But the courtier vanished in the archbishop ; the dogs and birds and costly raiment all disappeared; Becket became a strict and austere priest. Henry II was irritated by this. Nevertheless he broached his plans, and in a great assembly of bishops, abbots, and barons held at Clarendon (1164), he caused the Constitutions of Clarendon to be adopted, which obliged every clerk, who was accused of crime, to appear before the king’s court of justice, forbade any ecclesiastic to leave the kingdom without the royal permission, and assigned to the king the guardianship and revenues of any vacant bishopric or benefice.

Thomas à Becket rebelled against these statutes; pursued by the murmurs of the bishops who were partisans of the king, he cried out: “I shall appeal to the sovereign pontiff, and shall summon you before him.” And withdrawing, he reached the coast of Sandwich in disguise, and embarked for France. Louis VII, received him there with favor, and after six years of fruitless effort he succeeded in reconciling him with Henry II (1170). But Becket had not wavered in the slightest. On his return to Canterbury he again excommunicated the Archbishop of York. At this news Henry II, who was then in Normandy, was filled with wrath. “What!” he cried, “a wretch who came to my court on a limping horse, who has eaten of my bread, and dares to brave me thus ! Will no one rid me of him?”. Four knights, who understood what he meant by those words, crossed over to England, and five days later the archbishop fell, assassinated by them, at the very foot of the altar (Dec. 29, 1170). The Saxons made a martyr of him, and popular imagination, with that vigorous creative power inherent in it, soon came to believe that at his tomb the blind would recover their sight, the deaf their hearing, and that even the dead would there be restored to life.

The crime came back upon Henry II, whose authority was shaken for a long time. He did not obtain indulgence from the Holy See until he had performed many acts of submission and had annulled the constitutions of Clarendon. Lastly he undertook, in the cause of the Church at Rome, an important conquest, which was of no less importance to him, and for the success of which he used the same pontifical authority to which he had been obliged to submit.

Ireland had been a Christian country since the fourth century; it was even called the “Isle of the Saints.” But shut off, as it was, at the extremity of Europe, and having kept itself free from European domination, even from that of the Romans, the “green island of Erin” covered with pasture lands, the “Pearl of the Ocean” beaten by the tides, the “wooded island” given over to savage customs in all their ferocity, to patriarchal government of the clans and annual division of the land, had preserved a certain independence even in the matter of its conversion, and did not submit either to the supremacy of the Holy See or to the strict methods of canonical discipline. But in the Middle Ages it was very dangerous to differ from the Roman communion. The Anglo-Saxons had dearly paid for their arrears in St. Peter’s tithe, at the time of William the Conqueror. Henry II promised to establish it in Ireland; in 1156 Pope Adrian IV authorized him to proceed.

An Irish chief, who had been banished by one of his rivals, called a troop of Normans to his assistance; the cross-bows and light arms of the Irish were powerless against the great iron-clad horses, and lances eight cubits long. Richard Strongbow, the chieftain of the Norman adventurers, by marrying the daughter of an Irish chieftain, found himself master of the whole of Leinster. Henry II demanded homage of him and went himself to the island (1171) all the chiefs in the south acknowledged him as their sovereign ; at the same time a synod called at Cashel put the Church of Ireland under the supremacy of the primate of England. But the northern and western parts of the island remained independent.

The end of the reign of Henry II was taken up by quarrels with his sons; Eleanor, who was annoyed by the favor shown Fair Rosamond by the king, stirred them up to revolt, and the King of France held himself in readiness to profit by the result. The eldest son Henry, in the meantime, had received from his father in 1169 Maine and Anjou; the second, Richard the Lion-hearted, had Aquitaine; Geoffrey, the third son, became Duke of Brittany; while the youngest, John, had nothing; he was called John Lack­land. The eldest son desired Normandy, too. The two younger brothers believed a revolt necessary for themselves; so they all three took up arms and paid homage to the King of France. Henry sent out against them, to the continent, mercenaries trained to the trade of war. In England, where the revolt might spread, he undertook to win over the people, by appeasing the shades of Thomas à Becket. Barefooted and clothed in a simple woolen gown, he repaired to the tomb of his martyr, passed a day and night there in prayer, on his knees on the stone, without eating or drinking, while his bishops scourged him. After which, “he departed joyfully.” It was all over ; the penance was accomplished, the load of remorse removed, and public opinion reconciled. From that time he was victorious over the King of Scotland as well as the King of France, with whom he signed the treaty of Montlouis (1174). But he could not settle matters with his sons, who had the French provinces ready to support their cause. The south had seized with joy the opportunity to “drive away the sceptre of the north.” The troubadour knights, with Bertram de Born at their head, inflamed the people with their warlike poetry, brilliant and sonorous as a clarion. In 1183 and in 1188 there were new revolts ; Henry even saw his youngest and best beloved son, John, raising his hand against him. He died, cursing them all (1189).

These quarrels saved Louis VII from dangers which otherwise he would assuredly have called down upon his head, for he was much more of a monk than an active and resolute king. Yet he still encouraged the communal movement. Twenty-five charters are signed with his name. But, like his father before him, he did not wish any of them on his own lands. At Orleans a communal movement was harshly suppressed. Sometimes he even aided the feudal lords in doing on their domains what he was doing on his own.

The figure of his minister is more pleasing to contemplate,—Suger, who advised him not to go on the crusade, and continued to remind him of it from the time of his departure, adjuring him “by the oath of his coronation,” no longer to abandon his flock to the ravening wolves. Here we see the first indications of the new character assumed by French royalty. From the ninth to the twelfth century the king had lived, but royalty seemed dead, for the public powers which ought to have remained in its hand had been seized by all the great proprietors, and were used by them as domain powers. This aristocratic revolution, which had destroyed the unity of the country for three centuries, was followed by another which endeavored to unite the scattered members of the French community to take away from the feudal lords the rights they had usurped, in order to return them to the crown. The monarchical revolution, making the king sole judge, sole administrator, and sole legislator of the country, began with Louis the Fat, Philip Augustus, and St. Louis, and was not accomplished until the reign of Louis XIV, because of various circumstances, such as, for instance, the hundred years war in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the religious wars in the sixteenth, which interrupted the progress of the great interior development.

Philip Augustus (1180), son of Louis VII, retrieved his father’s mistakes. It is noticeable that he was the last king to be consecrated before his accession. This pre­caution lost its usefulness when the Capetian royal family had thoroughly established itself.

Philip Augustus was remarkable for the patience he always showed in waiting for a favorable opportunity. When fifteen years old and menaced by his vassals, he said : “Whatever they may do now, it pleases me to endure their villainies, violence, and outrageous conduct. If it is God’s will, they will grow feeble and old and I shall grow in strength and wisdom; then it will be my turn for revenge.” His first acts showed that he was a pious king; he robbed and banished the Jews, and in those days that was con­sidered a pious duty. He allowed them to come back, it is true, on the payment of a fine. The Jews were periodically banished and called back in this way. They were like a sponge, which was allowed to fill itself with the gold of the middle classes and the nobility, and which was then squeezed into the royal treasury; at each reprieve the active tribe began anew to work, and the pressure recommenced as soon as they had repaired their fortunes. The most useful act of the beginning of Philip’s reign was the acquisition of Vermandois, Valois, and Amiens, which were yielded to him by the heiress in order to obtain his protection against Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders. When he had become master of the county of Amiens, the bishop, who held sovereign power there, demanded homage in virtue of his new title. “The king pays no man homage,” he replied. It was a new and pregnant principle, and changed the nature of the fiefs acquired by the crown. So when they passed out of his hands again, in the form of appanages, it was under very different conditions from the other feudal domains.

He formed a close alliance with the rebellious Richard, and they were inseparable friends so long as Henry II lived : they ate at the same table, slept in the same bed. They resisted the king of England and dictated their conditions; both also pledged themselves to set out together on the third crusade. King Richard, who succeeded his father in 1189, was a somewhat lawless knight, brilliant but brutal, a hard fighter as we should now say, and as such inclined to rule his people with an iron hand : for the rest he was a bold and caustic poet, imaginative even in his exac­tions, as, for instance, when he conceived the idea of losing his royal seal and of having another made, so that all those who had charters were obliged to have them sealed anew—for a consideration. He sold everything, offices, castles, and villages, and departed for the crusade, where his hard fighting won him the name of the Lion-hearted.

The third crusade, which has already been described, was a complete failure, but it had no fatal results for France, as had the preceding crusade. Though Richard proved himself the bravest man there, yet Philip appeared as the sovereign of the English king. He was the first to return, and while his rival was fighting in Palestine and afterwards was kept a prisoner in Austria, he made use of his time to work the ruin of the too powerful house of England. He came to an understanding with one of Richard’s brothers, who had been left at home, John Lackland, for they both hoped to share the spoils. But Richard, escaping from the prison where the German emperor had kept him, notwithstanding his given word to the contrary, made haste to avenge himself on his brother and his rival. The former bought his pardon by killing a French garrison which he had conveyed into one of the castles; Philip Augustus preferred to go to war. It began in Normandy and was fought with violence. Richard, both troubadour and king, waged it and sang it at the same time. He defeated Philip near Gisors, but derived little advantage from his victory. Pope Innocent III interposed and made them sign a truce of five years (January, 1199). Two months later, Richard was killed, struck by an arrow at the siege of the castle of Chalus in Limousin, where he was trying to carry off a treasure which had been found by the lord of the castle. But though he had ruled his subjects badly and had constantly plundered them, he was a lamented and popular hero. “With him was interred, in the opinion of many, the glory and the honor of chivalry.”

The crown of England should go, by right, to Arthur, the young son of Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, and John’s elder brother; but the latter usurped it. Anjou, Poitou, and Touraine, which were weary of English domination, surrendered to Arthur and invoked the protection of Philip. The King of France undertook to defend Arthur and then abandoned him (1200), as soon as he had obtained from John the advantages desired in his selfish policy. He took up arms again, however, when he saw the possibility of great benefits to himself in the revolt of all his French possessions from the King of England. To gain them at the least possible expense he left the burden of the war to Arthur. The unfortunate young man was conquered, captured, killed, and thrown, it was said, into the Seine by John himself (1203). This murder gave Philip Augustus the opportunity he desired; as the avenger of a crime which roused universal indignation, he sum­moned John to appear at his court. John demanded sureties for his safe coming and going. “For coming, you may have them,” was the reply: “your return will depend upon the decision of the peers.” John did not go. Philip, delighted with this forfeiture, seized all the fortresses in Normandy and even entered Rouen : that rich province, whence the conquerors of England had set out, was French from that time, and Brittany, which was dependent on it, became an immediate fief of the king (1204). Philip assumed the guardianship of Alice, Arthur’s sister, and later gave both the heritage and the heiress to one of his relations, Peter Beauclerc. The occupation of Poitou, Touraine, and Anjou followed this great conquest, so that the royal domain was suddenly much increased and well protected toward the west.

John’s baseness had given France those fair provinces: his quarrel with the Holy See and with his barons secured her possession of them. He had his father’s feelings in regard to the clergy; to gain control over them he appointed one of his tools to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The suffragan bishops protested, and Pope Innocent III, insisting upon a new election, had the trust given to the English Cardinal Stephen Langton (1207). John Lackland was exceedingly angry. He drove the monks out of Canterbury, and when three bishops came to see him in the name of the Pope he threatened to have them beaten if they did not withdraw. He swore, “by the teeth of God”, that he would cut off the nose of any Roman who should enter his kingdom, and spoke of throwing all the English clergy into the sea. If the reports of the day are to be believed, he went so far as to intend becoming a Mussulman in order to obtain help from the Emir Al-Moumenin of Morocco. The end of all this senseless rage was his rushing to the other extremes when excommunicated and threatened with an invasion by Philip Augustus, who was authorized by Innocent III to conquer England. He groveled before the Holy See, and promised tribute and acknowledged himself a vassal (1213).

He tried to avenge himself for his disgrace by forming a vast coalition against Philip Augustus. He was to attack France on the southwest while the German Emperor Otto IV, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne, and all the princes of the Netherlands were to make their attack on the North. But France rose to repel the foreign invasion. The king’s son, Louis, went to oppose the English king in Poitou; and Philip, with the remainder of the chivalry, and the communal soldiers of the North, marched toward the enemy, met them near the bridge of Bouvines, on the Marq, entered Lille and Tournai, and having incurred great dan­gers, secured a complete victory (Aug. 29, 1214).

Philip seems not to have reaped all the advantages that he might from his great success. He acquired no new land; Flanders remained in the possession of the wife of Ferrand, the county of Boulogne in the hands of Renaud’s daughter, and John of England bought a truce which left him Saintonge and Guienne. But he had repelled a formidable invasion, had put an emperor and a king to flight, had foiled the designs of several great vassals, finally had given the Capetian dynasty the baptism of glory which it had lacked till that time, and had revealed France to herself. His triumph, in fact, roused something in his country hitherto unknown there, the national spirit, patriot­ism; a weak feeling as yet, in spite of the explosion of public joy, and several times it seemed to have been extinguished, but it always reappeared with victorious energy. France had now a nation and a king.

The nobility of France again bore witness to their warlike activity in two great enterprises: the fourth crusade, which changed the Greek empire into a French empire, and the war against the Albigenses, which secured the intractable population of the South to the French dominion.

Philip took part in neither of these expeditions. He allowed his nobles to consume their resources and their energies in these wars, which were of twofold advantage to France, both in the consequent establishment of order in the kingdom, and in the glory shed on its name in distant lands. He wrote to the Pope, who was urging him to en­gage in a crusade against the Albigenses, “I am flanked by two great and terrible lions, the Emperor Otto and King John ; accordingly I cannot leave France.” After their experience at Bouvines, however, neither one nor the other caused him much annoyance.

While his allies had been suffering defeat in Flanders, John had been defeated in Poitou. Returning to his island conquered and humiliated, he found his barons in insurrection. Stephen Langton, the primate, was at their head. They did not feel secure while they were in the power of a tyrant who had no respect for anything, and they wished to place bounds to his caprice. They brought out again the charter of Henry I, and when the King was holding his court at Worcester, at Christmas time, they presented them­selves well-armed before him and asked him to confirm the privileges granted to them by that charter. John evaded the question, asked for time, and at last declared that he would grant nothing: “Why don’t they ask me for my kingdom?” he cried, livid with rage. But the barons were determined not to yield: they proclaimed themselves the “army of God and of His holy Church,” entered London amid the cheers of the multitude, and on the 15th of June, 1215, on the plain of Runnymede, near Windsor, they forced the king to sign the Magna Charta, the fundamental basis of English liberties.

When the charter had been signed and the barons had separated, John, who was beside himself with rage, wished to tear it to pieces : he, the cynic, heaped imprecations on his own head for having yielded, and swore to give England over to plunder and pillage. He appealed to the Pope, Innocent III, who on his own authority declared the great charter null and void and released the King from his oaths. Then he called in his mercenaries from the continent, who laid the country waste in every direction, until the barons, in wrath, offered the crown to Louis, son of Philip Augustus and nephew of John through his wife, Blanche of Castile. Innocent III threatened Philip Augustus with excommunication, and the King pretended that he would like to stop his son. But Louis replied to him : “Sire, I am your liege man for the lands which you have given me in France; but it does not belong to you to decide upon the fate of England.” So Louis proceeded in his enterprise, and notwithstanding an excommunication from the Pope, he landed in England, on May 30, 1216. The effect of an excommunication had grown weaker by the force of repetition, and would not have hindered the success of the French prince in the least, had it not been that John died of an attack of indigestion in 1216. He left a child, Henry III. The barons knew that this child king would be worth more to their cause than a foreign prince, who no doubt would be little likely to respect their privileges after his victory was gained, and who would have the assistance of French forces in time of need. Louis’s cause was gradually abandoned, and he was obliged to return to France in 1217.

The first period in the strife between France and England ends with the death of John Lackland and Philip Augustus. Beginning with the year 1217, the histories of the two countries, which had run together so long, followed separate courses for one hundred and twenty years. Each one returned to its own way of life; France grew more and more monarchical, England more and more constitutional, and they met only at long intervals, in a few combats. We must now take up as separate histories what we have studied for a time as a united history.