Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/137

 two dates synchronise with the Norwegian revolutions under Magnus Herlingson and Swerre Birkbain, and we thus learn how the detailed accounts of those revolutions came into the English Chronicles of Benedict and Roger of Hoveden, and William of Newburgh: it was at St. Edmund's that Archbishop Eystein was entertained at the king's expense from August 1181 to February 1182. And this leads us on to the recollection that it was the Englishman Nicolas Breakspere who had been legate of the Roman see for the settlement of the Scandinavian churches, before he became pope as Adrian IV, and so liberally bestowed the realm of Ireland on the king of the English.

The intercourse with Germany under Frederick Barbarossa was steady and probably continuous; for although there was little love lost between England and the empire, and the Hohenstaufen were always somewhat drawn to France, the quarrel of Henry with Becket and that of Frederick with Alexander III so nearly coincided, that there was always a prospect that the two great sovereigns might make common cause against Lewis VII. Hence in 1165 there was a German embassy under the Archbishop of Cologne in London, and the English lords showed their orthodoxy by refusing to meet the schismatic prelate at dinner, although Henry's own envoys at Würtzburg were credibly reported to have given in the national adhesion to the antipope. The marriage of Matilda with duke Henry, his subsequent quarrel with the emperor, Henry's negotiations for the support and restoration of his son-in-law, the long exile of Henry the Lion and his stay in England, gave English society much interest in German politics; so much so, that it is from the English Chroniclers of this period that much of the German history of the time has to be written; and English writers took sides in the Welf and Hohenstaufen quarrel, describing both events and characters with partisan colouring that is rare even in their pictures of home politics. Thus, too, copies of important documents came to be preserved in the English Annals, and we are so led to infer that the relations of the Court, to whose hands primarily these documents must have come, with the recording annalists, were of