Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/10

Henry II in a ‘great assize,’ which sanctioned the settlement of disputes concerning land by the sworn verdict of twelve chosen knights of the district, instead of by ordeal of battle between the claimants as heretofore. He broke through the dependence of the crown upon its feudal tenants for the supply of a military force by a series of skilfully planned innovations, culminating in the scutage of 1159, which, while it conferred a benefit upon the tenants-in-chivalry by exempting them from service beyond sea, swept away their old exemption from money-taxation, and enabled the king henceforth to replace them whenever he chose by a paid force under his own immediate control.

But the scutage touched other privileges besides those of the tenants-in-chivalry; it was levied not only upon the knight's fees of the lay lords, but also, and more stringently, upon those held under the churches. It was thus Henry's first step towards the execution of a plan for breaking down the barriers which, under the name of clerical immunities, kept a large part of the population free of all legal restraint save that of the canon law, and altogether beyond the reach of his kingly authority and justice. The chief agent of Henry's reforms hitherto had been his chancellor, Thomas Becket, and it was to secure for his plans the co-operation of Thomas on a wider scale, and in a capacity which would add enormously to its value and usefulness, that he set constitutional tradition, ecclesiastical propriety, and public opinion all alike at defiance by raising his brilliant, worldly chancellor to the primacy of all England (June 1162). Instead of co-operation, he met from his new archbishop an uncompromising opposition. His proposal of a change in the mode of levying the land-tax, which would have transferred its profits from the sheriffs to the exchequer, was defeated by Thomas's resistance (July 1163); his attempts to bring criminal clerks to justice broke against the shield of the canon law with which Thomas sheltered the delinquents; his demand, made in a great council at Westminster (October 1163), for a public acknowledgment of what he called the ‘customs of his grandfather,’ in other words, of his royal supremacy over all persons and all causes throughout his realm, was answered by the bishops, under their primate's guidance, with a declaration that they would only agree to the customs ‘saving the rights of their order;’ and a vague verbal promise of assent which he at last wrung from them was revoked as soon as the customs were set forth in the form of written constitutions at the council of Clarendon (January 1164). Henry saw that in making Thomas archbishop he had but laid a stumbling-block across his own path, and he thrust it roughly aside. In October 1164 he summoned Thomas before a council at Northampton to answer a string of charges concerning his conduct as chancellor and as archbishop. From the outset it was plain that the primate's condemnation was a foregone conclusion. Insults of every kind were heaped upon him; every offer of compromise was scornfully rejected or made vain by the introduction of some new and unexpected charge; the bishops were compelled to join with the lay barons in sitting in judgment on their primate, till a prohibition from Thomas himself, enforced by an appeal to Rome, scared them into a protest to which Henry found it necessary to yield; the lay lords, with ‘certain sheriffs and lesser barons ancient in days’ whom the king had summoned to join them, were ready to depose the archbishop as a traitor, but he checked the delivery of their sentence by another appeal to the pope, fought his way out of the council, and finally escaped over sea.

Thomas's flight left Henry master of the field, and the constitutions of Clarendon were put in force at once. By these constitutions disputes about presentations and advowsons were transferred from the ecclesiastical to the royal courts; appeals to Rome without leave from the king, and ordination of villeins without leave from their lords, were forbidden; the right of sanctuary was annulled as regards chattels forfeited to the crown; clerks were made amenable to lay tribunals; the provisions of the ‘great assize’ were applied to disputes about church lands; and an appeal to the witness of twelve local jurors summoned by the sheriff was introduced to protect laymen from injustice in the bishops' courts. With these provisions those ‘customs’ of the Norman kings which forbade bishops and beneficed clerks to quit the realm or excommunicate the king's tenants-in-chief without his license, and regulated the election and the temporal liabilities of bishops, were now for the first time coupled together in a written code, which Henry probably meant as the first instalment of a much wider code, whereby he hoped to remodel the entire legal and administrative system of the country. Two years later, in fact, he boldly undertook to deal single-handed, on his own sole responsibility, with the whole question of the administration of justice in all criminal cases whatsoever. In his assize of Clarendon (February 1166) he applied the principle of jury-inquest to criminal cases by ordaining that in every shire criminals should be arrested and brought