Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/11

Henry II before the sheriffs and the itinerant justices, to be by them dealt with according to rules laid down in the same assize, on the presentment of twelve freemen of every hundred, and four of every township, bound by oath in full shire-court, to denounce all known malefactors in their districts; and he summarily set aside all claims to exemption, either from service on the juries or from liability to the interference of sheriffs and justices, founded on private jurisdictions or special franchises of any kind. In four ways especially Henry's assize is a landmark in English history. It was the first attempt made by an English king to put forth a code of laws, as distinct from a mere reassertion of traditional ‘custom.’ It was the first attempt to break down the feudal system of government by bringing its countless independent jurisdictions and irresponsible tribunals into subjection to one uniform judicial administration. It re-established once for all, so far as England was concerned, the old Teutonic principle of the right and the duty of a people to govern itself, in its own courts and by its own customary procedure, as against the Roman law which was fast taking its place in continental Europe; and it opened an almost boundless field for the training of the English people in self-government, by bringing home to every man his share in the administration of justice and police. About the same time Henry seems to have issued the assize of novel disseisin, which enabled any man disseised of his freehold without legal sentence to claim within a given period reinstatement by a writ from the king. The act whereby Henry thus ‘cast his protection over possession made the disturbance of seisin a cause of complaint to the king himself,’ though apparently little noticed at the time, was in fact ‘perhaps the greatest event in the history of English law’ (, Introd. to Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, Selden Soc., i. liv).

At the moment when Henry thus opened a new era in the history of English government, he was in the hottest of his fight with the church. In vain had he sought to prevent the pope and the French king from espousing the cause of Thomas; still more vainly had he driven into exile every man, woman, and child who could be charged with any sort of connection with the primate; Pope Alexander, ill as he could afford it at the moment, risked a breach with England by receiving Thomas honourably. Louis offered a shelter in France to him and his fellow-sufferers, and Henry found himself held up to the general scorn and indignation of orthodox Christendom. He turned to the eagerly-offered alliance of the emperor and the antipope, promised his daughter's hand to the emperor's cousin, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, and threatened to withdraw from Alexander the spiritual obedience of the whole Angevin dominions. A Welsh war furnished him with a means of evading the consequences of these pledges, and of gaining a breathing space, which was turned to good account for England by the issuing of the assize of Clarendon. In Lent 1166 he recrossed the Channel to take up again the threads, complicated as they were by his embroilment with the church, of his continental policy; to reopen diplomatic relations with all parties at once: with the Marquis of Montferrat, whose influence at Rome was secured for the royal cause by the offer of a daughter of England as wife for his son; with the duke and the nobles of Brittany, whose heiress Henry was bent upon wedding to his third son, Geoffrey; with Louis of France, whose assent was needed for this arrangement, and also for the recognition of little Henry as heir of Normandy and Anjou, and for that of the second son, Richard, as heir of Aquitaine; with the emperor on one hand and with his Lombard foes on the other; with the kings of Castile and Sicily, who proposed to become Henry's sons-in-law; with the discontented barons of Aquitaine, who were profiting by the troubles of their Angevin duke to break loose from his hated control; as well as with Thomas and Alexander, who were perpetually threatening to lay the English kingdom under interdict and excommunicate the king himself. In four years the work seemed all but done; Henry had secured the alliance of Germany and of Castile by the marriages of his two elder daughters, Matilda and Eleanor (1168–9); he had betrothed his youngest daughter, Joanna, to King William of Sicily (1169); he had broken the opposition of the Bretons in three successive campaigns (1166–9), and gained the French king's formal sanction to his plans for his three sons in the treaty of Montmirail (January 1169). In an unlucky hour he resolved to complete the new settlement of his dominions by the coronation of his eldest son, a scheme which he had planned seven years before, but which had been set aside owing to his quarrel with Thomas, who as metropolitan of all England was alone qualified to crown an English king. Now, seeing no hope of agreement with Thomas, Henry was rash enough to fall back upon a license for the boy's coronation by Archbishop Roger of York, granted by the pope three years ago, but since withdrawn; and at his command Roger, though forbidden by both Thomas and Alexander under pain of