Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/9

Henry II vassal and rival, might easily turn to his own advantage; Henry's brother Geoffrey, too, claimed the Angevin patrimony, which his father's will had destined for him on Henry's accession to the English throne. Early in 1156, therefore, Henry returned to France; he renewed his homage to Louis, fought Geoffrey into accepting a money-compensation for his claims, and secured his hold over Aquitaine; then he came back (1157) to enforce the surrender of a few royal castles still held by the Earls of Warren and Norfolk; to demand and win from his cousin Malcolm of Scotland the homage due from a Scottish to an English king, and the restoration of the three English counties—Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland—granted to Malcolm's father by Stephen; and to claim at the sword's point the homage of the princes of Wales. Another visit to Normandy in 1158 resulted in Henry's acquisition of the county of Nantes on the death of its ruler, his brother Geoffrey, and a successful assertion of his right to the overlordship of Brittany, with the sanction of the French king, whose daughter Margaret was now betrothed to Henry's eldest son. Next year Henry ventured to assert his wife's claim to the overlordship of Toulouse, and when the claim was denied prepared to enforce it with an army consisting of the great barons of his realm with the Scottish king at their head, and a crowd of mercenaries hired with the proceeds of a ‘great scutage,’ a tax levied upon every knight's fee throughout his dominions instead of the personal service due from the knights. The Quercy was conquered and the war carried to the gates of Toulouse, but when Louis threw himself into the city Henry withdrew, out of reverence for the feudal etiquette which forbade a vassal to fight against his overlord in person. In May 1160 a truce was made; in November Henry secured his Norman frontier by marrying his son to Margaret, and thus gaining possession of her dowry, the Vexin; a triple alliance between France, Blois, and Champagne failed to wrest from him the advantage which he had won; and he was seen as virtual arbiter of western Europe in 1162, when his adhesion to Pope Alexander III in his struggle with the emperor turned the scale in Alexander's favour, and compelled Louis, with whom the pope had taken refuge, to make a formal alliance with the English king in Alexander's presence at Chouzy.

In the intervals of his continental warfare Henry had been feeling his way towards a scheme of administrative reform in England. He had come to his throne just when the social, industrial, intellectual, and religious movements which had been stirring throughout Europe since the beginning of the century were all at their most critical stage. All of them, save the last, seemed to have been checked in England by the troubles of the anarchy, but no sooner was outward order restored than the forces which hitherto had been working in the dark confronted Henry in the light of day. He saw that the mere re-establishment of the old administrative routine of his grandfather's time could no longer suffice for a country where the very confusion of the past nineteen years, the loosening of accustomed restraints, the abeyance of accustomed authority, had fostered a new spirit of self-assertion and independent activity in burgher and yeoman and clerk, as well as in earl and baron and knight. The breakdown of the higher judicature, and the consequently unchecked corruption of the lower courts, had given an enormous advantage to the revived canon law, of which the clergy were the representatives and interpreters. The new relations, too, with the continent into which men were brought by the accession of their Angevin king were opening wider fields for commercial enterprise, which in its turn stimulated the growth of industrial activity at home, and the intercourse with foreign churchmen and foreign scholars was quickened, whence the English clergy, and through them the English people, were learning to scrutinise more closely and criticise more sharply the relations of king and people, church and state. Henry saw the opportunity which such a transitional state of society afforded for the building up of a system of financial, judicial, and military organisation in direct dependence upon the king, wherein men should find their surest safeguard amid the dangers that beset them on every side in the rapidly changing conditions of the national life. Only a few incidental notices enable us to mark some of his early steps in the path of administrative and legal reform. At the outset of his reign he had re-established in working order the old financial machinery of the exchequer and the judicial machinery of the curia regis. In 1158 he caused the debased coinage of his predecessor and that which had been illegally issued from private mints during the anarchy to be all alike superseded by a new and uniform currency. He facilitated the removal of suits from the local courts to the curia regis; he facilitated the administration of justice in the curia regis itself and in the provincial visitations of its judges, by introducing new methods of procedure; he gave a new development to the system of inquest by sworn recognitors, by applying it to an important branch of civil litigation in a