The History of England | Page 9

was to prove very dangerous in the other spheres of
politics. Office tended to become hereditary, and to be regarded as the
private property of the family rather than a position of national trust,
thus escaping national control and being prostituted for personal ends.

The earldoms in England were so perverted; originally they were
offices like the modern lords-lieutenancies of the shires; gradually they
became hereditary titles. The only remedy the king had was to deprive
the earls of their power, and entrust it to a nominal deputy, the sheriff.
In France, the sheriff (_vice-comes_, _vicomte_) became hereditary in
his turn, and a prolonged struggle over the same tendency was fought
in England. Fortunately, the crown and country triumphed over the
hereditary principle in this respect; the sheriff remained an official, and
when viscounts were created later, in imitation of the French nobility,
they received only a meaningless and comparatively innocuous title.
Some slight check, too, was retained upon the crown owing to a series
of disputed successions to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy had
always been in theory elective, and William had been careful to
observe the form. His son, William II, had to obtain election in order to
secure the throne against the claims of his elder brother Robert, and
Henry I followed his example for similar reasons. Each had to make
election promises in the form of a charter; and election promises,
although they were seldom kept, had some value as reminders to kings
of their duties and theoretical dependence upon the electors. Gradually,
too, the kings began to look for support outside their Norman baronage,
and to realize that even the submerged English might serve as a
makeweight in a balance of opposing forces. Henry I bid for London's
support by the grant of a notable charter; for, assisted by the order and
communications with the Continent fostered by Norman rule,
commerce was beginning to flourish and towns to grow. London was
already distancing Winchester in their common ambition to be the
capital of the kingdom, and the support of it and of other towns began
to be worth buying by grants of local government, more especially as
their encouragement provided another check on feudal magnates.
Henry, too, made a great appeal to English sentiment by marrying
Matilda, the granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, and by revenging the
battle of Hastings through a conquest of Normandy from his brother
Robert, effected partly by English troops.
But the order, which the three Norman sovereigns evolved out of chaos,
was still due more to their personal vigour than to the strength of the

administrative machinery which they sought to develop; and though
that machinery continued to work during the anarchy which followed,
it could not restrain the feudal barons, when the crown was disputed
between Henry's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen. The barons,
indeed, had been more successful in riveting their baronial yoke on the
people than the kings had been in riveting a monarchical yoke on the
barons; and nothing more vividly illustrates the utter subjection of
Anglo- Saxons than the fact that the conquerors could afford to tear
each other to pieces for nineteen years (1135-1154) without the least
attempt on the part of their subjects to throw off their tyranny. There
was no English nation yet; each feudal magnate did what he pleased
with his own without fear of royal or popular vengeance, and for once
in English history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence.
The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within
its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and
refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to broaden
its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and assert that to it
belonged principally the right to elect and to depose sovereigns. Greater
still would have been its services to civilization, had it been able to
assert a power of putting down the barons from their castles and raising
the peasantry from their bondage.
Deliverance could only come by royal power, and in Henry II,
Matilda's son, Anjou gave England a greater king than Normandy had
done in William the Bastard. Although a foreigner, who ruled a vast
continental empire and spent but a fraction of his days on this side of
the Channel, he stands second to none of England's makers. He
fashioned the government which hammered together the framework of
a national state. First, he gathered up such fragments of royal authority
as survived the anarchy; then, with the conservative instincts and
pretences of a radical, he looked about for precedents in the customs of
his grandfather, proclaiming his intention of restoring good old laws.
This reaction brought him up against the encroachments of the church,
and the