Hostility of England and France.in rents and taxes, and they led to continual quarrels, mostly about frontier castles, with the French King Louis VII and his successor, Philip II. Henry and his son, Richard I, in fact did well in keeping their huge loosely-knit bundle of provinces together as long as they did. John, who succeeded Richard, lost all the best parts of them at once.
For the Kings of France were doing just what our kings were doing; they were trying to make all Frenchmen feel that they were one people. So Henry, Richard and John were really fighting a losing battle in France. For the details of that battle I do not care two straws. Moreover, our sympathies ought to be on the side of the French Kings, unless they invaded England.
Henry II as Law-giver.What really matters to us is what Henry was doing in England. You may be sure that he gave no one any rest there, neither his many friends, nor his few foes. The greatest thing England owes to him is the system of Law, which really began in his reign, and has gone on being improved by skilful lawyers ever since. Till his reign, all the King’s servants, sheriffs, officers, bishops and the rest, had acted as judges, rent-collectors, soldiers, taxing-men without distinction; and the King’s Courts of Justice had been held wherever the King happened to be. But Henry picked out specially trained men for judges, and confined them to the one business of judging. He chose men who knew some Roman Law, and who would be able to improve our stupid. old-fashioned customs by its light. He swept away a great many of such customs, among other things the fines for murder, which he treated by hanging; he built prisons in every county, and kept offenders in them until the judges came round ‘on circuit’, as, you know, they still do