Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/327

Rh THE GllEAT CHARTER.] ENGLAND 309 L from them earldoms and promises of kingdoms. It was in alliance with him that Englishman, German, and Fleming stood side by side when all three were overcome by the French king at Bouviues. In other parts of the empire, we find Henry seeking a wife for his sou John in Savoy, and bringing a saint from Grenoble to rule at Witham and at Lincoln. But more than all, England, as a power, began at this period to take a direct share in the crusades. In dividual Englishmen of both races had fought in earlier crusades, and had entered the service of the eastern aecru- emperors. But Henry himself took the vow of a crusader, des. and Richard carried that vow into effect. In foreign lands the Poitevin ^count appeared as an English king, and his followers, of whatever race or speech, were looked on as Englishmen. The fame of England was thus spread through all lands ; yet it was in the reigns of Richard and John that the crown of England was humbled as it never was before or since Richard became the man of the emperor for his kingdoms; John became the man of the popo. That he also offered to become the man of the Almohade Commander of the Faithful reads almost like a piece of satire; but the evidence on which the story rests cannot be lightly cast aside. nquest Within the island world of Britain the power of England rose for a moment under Henry II. to a greater height than it had ever risen at any earlier time. Or we might say that another island world, less only than Britain itself, was brought into relation with the world of Britain, as the world of Britain was brought into relation with the world of Europe. The first Angevin king of England became the first English lord of Ireland. The connexion between the two islands had been growing close for a long time. Shadowy tales are told of a dominion exercised by Eadgar and by Cnut on the eastern shore of Ireland. It is more certain that, under the two Williams and under Henry I., first the Danish settlers, and then the Irish themselves, entered into spiritual relations with the see of Canterbury which could hardly fail to grow into temporal relations with the crown of England. One Irish king was, if not the vassal, at least the attached friend, of Henry I. One of the first acts of Henry II. was to obtain a bull from the one English pope, Hadrian IV., granting him the dominion of the island of Ireland. But the conquest of the new realm was begun only by private adventurers in 1169. For one moment, in 1171, the conquest seemed to be a reality. Ths Irish princes became the men of Henry, who pre sently granted the kingdom of Ireland to his son John. But in truth all that was clone was to begin that long and dreary tale of half-conquest and local warfare which gave Ireland five centuries of greater wretchedness than England had endured in the first five years of Norman dominion. As if from a feeling how unreal the claim was, the kingly style granted to John was dropped by John himself; and, till the reign of Henry VIII., the king of England took from his precarious Irish dominion no higher title than Lord. Utions On the Welsh frontier the endless warfare went on; but &quot;* _ this cannot be called a period of conquest. The armies of Henry II. suffered at least one defeat at the hands of the Britons : and the contemporary writer John of Salisbury ventures to regret that England had not in his day a leader like Harold to guard her frontier. Under John we find the first connexion by marriage between the ruling houses of England and Wales. A natural daughter of John was married to the Welsh prince Llywelyn. From this time the position of the Welsh princes changes, and they begin to play a certain part in the internal affairs of England. On the Scottish frontier Henry II. took back the earldoms land, of Northumberland and Cumberland, which had been yielded to David and his sou. Presently the share taken by William the Lion in the revolt of the English barons Special was avenged in 1174 by his defeat and captivity, and by submis his acknowledgment of a supremacy of an altogether new si u of kind on ths part of the English overlord. For the first time, Scottish lords, as well as Scottish kings, did homage to Henry ; and, for the first time also, Scottish castles were placed in his hands. But when the chivalrous Richard was selling everything, he sold back these newly acquired rights. The relations in which the kingdom of Scotland, the earldom of Lothian, and the territorial fief of what we may now best distinguish as Scottish Cumberland, stood to the English crown fell back to their former state, to form materials for a great controversy a hundred years later. With regard to language, this period is one in which the Use of use of Latin becomes universal in all public documents. French There are still a few English writs of the early days of M a. Henry II., and the first known French document comes faslllon from the hand of Stephen Langton in the year of the Great Charter. The truth is that the men of this time were so familiar with, the use of all three languages, English, French, and Latin, that it is rarely indeed that any writer thinks it needful to mention which of the three a man spoke at any particular moment. But it is clear that, by the end of the 12th century, English was understood and spoken by all classes. It is equally clear that a fashion now set in in favour of French merely as a fashion. Richard was altogether non-resident, and could have had little influence on such matters. But John, and after him Henry III., kept a foreign court in England. Though born in the land, they were far more strangers than Henry II. had been. Thus, at the very moment when French had lost its position as the natural speech of one class of the inhabitants of England, it came to the front again as a mere courtly speech, foreign to all. In short, in regard to language, as in regard to matters of fashion generally, the Norman period was succeeded by a French period. But neither French nor English was at this time the tongue of solid literature, as distinguished from writings which are Litera- merely popular or merely courtly. Such writings were ture. severally English and French. But all the learned writings of a learned age were in Latin. Neither in English nor in French is there any original English history of this time, unless we except the rhyming chronicles of Wace and Benoit de Saiute More, which are writings essentially Norman, though incidentally bearing on English matters. Our Latin materials for the history of this time are abundant. We have the so-called Benedict of Peterborough; we have Histo- Roger of Howden and Gervase of Canterbury ; we have rians of Ralph de Diceto and the critical William of Newburgh. ||eiiry The quarrel between Henry and Thomas gave rise to an end less crop of letters, lives, and documents of all kinds. The expedition of Richard I. finds its place among the histories of the crusades. And, while history was thus abundant, legend was not wanting. The actual life of Geoffrey of Mon- mouth belongs to the days of Henry I. and Stephen; but it was in the second half of the century that his writings began to have a lasting influence. His wild fables of Arthur and Legendi earlier British kings seem at the outside to have preserved of Ar- a few distorted scraps of genuine West-Welsh history. But thur&amp;gt; they gave birth to a vast legendary literature, Latin, French, and English, which has done more perhaps than any other one cause to make Englishmen forget that they were Englishmen. And, beside history and legend, there was also at this time no lack of Latin literature of a more general kind, such as the writings of John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, and the often misunderstood Walter Map or Mapes. Among many others these may pass as some of the chief ; but the literature of this age, of all classes, is overflowing. Many of these writers were real scholars,