Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/142

 ranks of the baronage, it is impossible now to distinguish whether the English or the Norman strain was the strongest in any given Englishman. And for a similar reason, it is not necessary to include the Norman and Angevin provinces in our calculation. Many of the great families from which Norman bishops were taken, such as the Beaumonts and the Bohuns, were equally powerful on both sides of the channel, and, it may be added, in the Norman kingdom of Sicily also. Such men as Rotrou of Beaumont, Archbishop of Rouen, and Henry of Beaumont, Bishop of Bayeux, not only were members of a kinship which counted the English Earls of Warwick and Leicester, and the Norman Counts of Meulan as cousins, but were near relations of the Sicilian kings, and knew how to push in the southern regions the fortunes of their servants: the broken up condition of France left potentates like the Counts of Champagne and Flanders able to treat on an equal footing with the royalties around them, and to govern their own churches quite as freely as the King of France or the Emperor could govern theirs. Hence there was a good deal of international promotion as a matter of course. I shall, however, name only the greatest names: and first take the Englishmen who were promoted abroad.

The two most eminent instances in France and the French speaking countries are the two Johns, John of Poictiers and John of Salisbury; the latter a name that is so intimately bound up with our literary history that it may be adduced to illustrate almost every sort of distinction. John of Poictiers was a native of Kent, probably of Canterbury itself; he was one of the fellow-scholars with Becket and Roger of Pont l'Evêque in the household of Archbishop Theobald, which, as I shall have to note presently, was at that time a substitute in England for the as yet undeveloped Universities; he ran neck and neck with those great candidates for promotion, and managed, by the adroitness and moderation of his conduct, to steer clear of the difficulties in which they were constantly embroiled with either one another or some third party. Promoted early in the reign of Henry to the rich stall of treasurer at York, John became in 1162