middle ages the clerk guilty of theft or assault, riot or murder,
could plead his orders, and escape from the harsh justice of the
king’s officers to the milder penalties of the bishop’s tribunal.
“Benefit of clergy” became an intolerable anomaly, all the more
so because the privilege was extended in practice not only to all
persons actually in minor orders, but to all who claimed them;
any criminal who could read had a fair chance of being reckoned
a clerk. Another concession which Henry was forced to make
was that the appeals to Rome of litigants in ecclesiastical suits
should be freely permitted, provided that they made an oath
that they were not contemplating any wrong to the English
crown or the English church, a sufficiently easy condition. Such
appeals became, and remained, innumerable and vexatious.
Pope Alexander also extorted from the king a pledge that he
would relinquish any customs prejudicial to the rights of the
Church which had been introduced since his accession. To
the pope this meant that the Constitutions of Clarendon were
disavowed; to the king, who maintained that they were in the
main a mere restatement of the customs of William I., it bore
no such general interpretation. The points were fought out in
detail, and not settled for many years. Practically it became
the rule to regard suits regarding land, or presentations to benefices,
as pertaining to the king’s court, while those regarding
probate, marriage and divorce fell to the ecclesiastical tribunal.
The question of election to bishoprics and abbacies went back
to the stage which it had reached in the time of Henry I.; the
choice was made in canonical form, by the chapters or the
monasteries, but the king’s recommendation was a primary
factor in that choice. When the electors disregarded it, as was
sometimes the case, there was friction; a weak king was sometimes
overruled; a strong one generally got his way in the end.
Becket’s death, then, gave a qualified triumph to the church party, and he was rightly regarded as the successful champion of his caste. Hence they held his death in grateful remembrance; the pope canonized him in 1173, and more churches were dedicated to him during the next two centuries than to any other English saint. In the eyes of most men his martyrdom had put the king so much in the wrong that the obstinacy and provocative conduct which had brought it about passed out of memory. His life of ostentatious austerity, and the courage with which he met his death, had caused all his faults to be forgotten. Henry himself felt so much the invidious position in which he was placed that even after making his submission to the pope’s legates at Avranches in 1172, he thought it necessary to do penance before Becket’s tomb in 1174, on which occasion he allowed himself to be publicly scourged by the monks of Canterbury, who inflicted on him three cuts apiece.
Between the outbreak of the king’s quarrel with Becket at the council of Woodstock and the compromise of Avranches no less than ten years had elapsed—the best years of Henry’s manhood. During this period his struggle with the Church had been but one of his distractions. His policy of imperial aggrandisement had been in progress. In 1163 he had completed the conquest of South Wales; the marcher lords were now in possession of the greater part of the land; the surviving Welsh princes did homage for the rest. In 1166 Henry got practical possession of the duchy of Brittany, the only remaining large district of western France which was not already in his hands. Conan, the last prince of the old Breton house, recognized him as his lord, and gave the hand of his heiress Constance to Geoffrey, the king’s third son. When the count died in 1171 Henry did not transfer the administration of the land to the young pair, who were still but children, but retained it for himself, and clung to it jealously long after his son came of age. Intermittent wars with France during these years were of small importance; Henry never pushed his suzerain to extremity. But the Angevin dominions were extended in a new direction, where no English king had yet made his power felt.
The distressful island of Ireland was at this moment enjoying
the anarchy which had reigned therein since the dawn of history.
Its state had grown even more unhappy than before since
the Danish invasions of the 10th century, which had not
welded the native kingdoms into unity by pressure from without—as
had been the case in England—but had simply complicated
Conquest
of Ireland.
affairs, by setting up two or three alien principalities
on the coastline. As in England, the vikings had
destroyed much of the old civilization; but they had
neither succeeded in occupying the whole country nor had they
been absorbed by the natives. The state of the island was much
like that of England in the days of the Heptarchy: occasionally
a “High King” succeeded in forcing his rivals into a precarious
submission; more usually there was not even a pretence of a
central authority in the island, and the annals of objectless
tribal wars formed its sole history. King Henry’s eyes had
been fixed on the faction-ridden land since the first years of his
reign. As early as 1155 he had asked and obtained the approval
of Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever sat upon the
papal throne, for a scheme for the conquest of Ireland. The
Holy See had always regarded with distaste the existence in the
West of a nation who repudiated the Roman obedience, and
lived in schismatical independence, under local ecclesiastical
customs which dated back to the 5th century, and had never
been brought into line with those of the rest of Christendom.
Hence it was natural to sanction an invasion which might bring
the Irish within the fold. But Henry made no endeavour for
many years to utilize the papal grant of Ireland, which seems
to have been made under the preposterous “Donation of Constantine,”
the forged document which gave the bishop of Rome
authority over all islands. It was conveniently forgotten that
Ireland had never been in the Roman empire, and so had not even
been Constantine’s to give away.
Not till 1168, thirteen years after the agreement with Pope Adrian, did the interference of the English king in Ireland actually begin. Even then he did not take the conquest in hand himself, but merely sanctioned a private adventure of some of his subjects. Dermot MacMorrough, king of Leinster, an unquiet Irish prince who for good reasons had been expelled by his neighbours, came to Henry’s court in Normandy, proffering his allegiance in return for restoration to his lost dominions. The quarrel with Becket, and the French war, were both distracting the English king at the moment. He could not spare attention for the matter, but gave Dermot leave to enlist auxiliaries among the turbulent barons of the South Welsh Marches. The Irish exile enlisted first the services of Maurice Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzstephen, two half-brothers, both noted fighting men, and afterwards those of Richard de Clare, earl of Pembroke, an ambitious and impecunious magnate of broken fortunes. The two barons were promised lands, the earl a greater bribe—the hand of Dermot’s only daughter Eva and the inheritance of the kingdom of Leinster. Fitzgerald and Fitzstephen crossed to Ireland in 1169 with a mere handful of followers. But they achieved victories of an almost incredible completeness over Dermot’s enemies. The undisciplined hordes of the king of Ossory and the Danes of Wexford could not stand before the Anglo-Norman tactics—the charge of the knights and the arrow-flight of the archers, skilfully combined by the adventurous invaders. Dermot was triumphant, and sent for more auxiliaries, aspiring to evict Roderic O’Connor of Connaught from the precarious throne of High King of Ireland. In 1170 the earl of Pembroke came over with a larger force, celebrated his marriage with Dermot’s daughter, and commenced a series of conquests. He took Waterford and Dublin from the Danes, and scattered the hosts of the native princes. Early in the next spring Dermot died, and Earl Richard, in virtue of his marriage, claimed the kingship of Leinster. He held his own, despite the assaults of a great army gathered by Roderic the High King, and of a viking fleet which came to help the conquered jarls of Waterford and Dublin. At this moment King Henry thought it necessary to interfere; if he let more time slip away, Earl Richard would become a powerful king and forget his English allegiance. Accordingly, with a large army at his back, he landed at Waterford in 1171 and marched on Dublin. Richard did him homage for Leinster, engaging to hold it as a palatine earldom, and not to claim the name or rights of a king. The other adventurers
