Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/326

 278 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The death of Henry I in 1 135 raised the question whether England and Normandy should go to his daughter Matilda The Plan- or to his nephew Stephen, and civil war rent tage.net P° s " England for nearly twenty years over this dis- Henry II puted succession. The two rivals imported paid soldiers from the Continent to fight their battles, and while these devastated the land, the feudal nobles built castles and lorded it over their localities as they pleased. Matilda, a rather haughty and disagreeable lady, had married the able Count of Anjou of the Plantagenet house, Geoffrey the Fair (11 29-1 151), who was fifteen years her junior. After ten years of fighting he gained Normandy in 1 144 ; ten years later their son, Henry Plantagenet, on the death of Stephen, became Henry II of England. When the Capetian king, Louis VII, had committed the political error of divorcing for personal reasons his wife, the imperious and capricious and frivolous Eleanor, heiress of the great Duchy of Aqui- taine with its attendant fiefs of Poitou and Gascony, young Henry had married her in ri§2. He was only twenty-one when he became King of England in 11 54. This made him ruler in his own and in his wife's name of territories from Scotland to the Pyrenees — he also later occupied a small portion of Ireland — and lord of over half the fiefs of Gaul. He did not, however, thereby become the monarch of a vast empire; instead, he was the lord of a number of distinct feudal states, which were out of sympathy with one another and most of which were only too ready to rebel against their lord, even if he had been a native of their own locality in- stead of a foreign intruder, such as Henry seemed to them. Henry, however, was a ruler of great energy and ability who played an important part in English history, as we shall see later. With the disruption of Charlemagne's empire and the incoming of the feudal period which we have just been Feudal law describing, almost all the written law of the previous period went out of use. Several new sources of law now existed; one was the feudal court for vassals and another was the manorial court for peasants.