Читать книгу The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich - Thomas of Monmouth - Страница 6

Table of Contents

We are told that the boy William was twelve years of age when he was put to death by the Norwich Jews, just before the Easter Festival of 1144. This fixes his birth to the year 1132. The last event mentioned by Thomas appears to belong to 1172. We are therefore concerned with a period of 40 years, a period which covers the whole reign of Stephen and well-nigh twenty years of the reign of Henry II. Contemporary sources for the history of the former reign are so very few, and our knowledge even of the sequence of events—much less of the life of the people during these miserable years—so scanty, that a brief review of English affairs so far as may be necessary to explain some passages in the following narrative, and so far as the narrative itself throws light upon the general history of the country during the times we are concerned with—will not, I trust, be regarded as useless for the general reader. Of scholars I crave some indulgence for the introduction of matter which by them perhaps may be regarded as superfluous.

With the death of Henry I. on the 1st of December, 1135, the family of William the Conqueror, in the male line, came to an end. By the foundering of the White ship in 1120, Henry had lost his only legitimate son. The "good Queen Maud" had died in 1118. In January, 1121, the king married Adela of Louvain, but there was no issue from this second marriage. There remained to him one legitimate daughter, Matilda, who in 1114 had become the wife of the Emperor, Henry V. In 1125 the Emperor died, and next year the Empress returned to England.

At the Christmas festival of 1126 the Prelates and Barons of the realm were required to swear fealty to Matilda and accept her as the heir to the throne and to all her father's dominions in England and Normandy. Two years later (17 June, 1128), she was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, and six weeks after this event William, surnamed Clito, the Conqueror's only surviving grandson, died. His luckless father Duke Robert closed his miserable career at Cardiff 3rd February, 1134, and in the following December, as has been said, Henry the king followed his brother to the grave.

Though Matilda had borne no children to her first husband, the Emperor, yet before her father's death she had two sons by her second husband, the elder of whom, bom on the 5th March, 1133, was the future king Henry II., who at his grandfather's death was in his third year.

But when that event occurred a daughter of the Conqueror, and so a sister of Henry I., was still living. Adela or Adeliza was perhaps the most gifted woman of her age. She had manied Stephen Count of Blois, in 1080, and by him had been the mother of a large family. Her husband was slain in 1101: she herself took the veil at the Cluniac Priory of Marcigny in 1109. None the less however did she continue to be a strong and influential personage in European politics till her death in 1137.

The third son of this illustrious lady, Stephen, the Conqueror's grandson, and therefore first cousin to the Empress Matilda, was sent as a youth to be educated at the court of his uncle Henry I., and for twenty years was a conspicuous figure among the barons. He was virtually the king's adopted son, and as early as 1126 was recognised as the first layman in the kingdom after the sovereign. Nevertheless at his uncle's bidding, he, with the rest of the nobility and the bishops had on two occasions sworn fealty to the Empress Matilda as heir to the crown; and from anything that we know to the contrary he had never put forth any claim to the succession or been suspected of any treasonable or ambitious designs.

He held his peace and made no sign; but when Henry died, his prompt action secured to him the throne. He was elected to the kingdom by the citizens of London; accepted at Winchester, where he possessed himself of the royal treasury; and was crowned at Westminster at the end of December, 1135.

The Empress Matilda at once appealed to Rome; her contention being that Stephen had defrauded her of her right and had forsworn himself by breaking his oath of fealty. The decision was pronounced with very little delay and was in Stephen's favour. Meanwhile, though the Empress had her hands full on the other side of the Channel, Stephen had a difficult part to play with the disloyal factions at home.

The invasion of David king of Scotland, uncle of the Empress, ended in a kind of peace; but in that same year, 1136, the rebellion of Hugh Bigod—the first revolt on the part of his nominal supporters—disturbed the comparative quiet. After the suppression of this outbreak Stephen's position in England was a strong one. Unhappily he lacked all the necessary qualities of a ruler of men. In 1137 he crossed over to Normandy, where Matilda was unable to hold her ground. At the close of the year he was back again. Then followed the second invasion of the Scots and the decisive Battle of the Standard on the 22nd August, 1138. The triumph proved of very little use to Stephen, who, as usual, threw away his opportunities. During the next year, 1139, he contrived to put himself wrong with every class in the kingdom, the Church, the baronage, the traders, the administrators of justice and finance; and before the year 1140 was ended the long anarchy had begun.

Meanwhile Matilda the Empress had landed at Arundel on the 30th September, 1139, and been received into the castle there by Adela, the widowed Queen of Henry I. Matilda had failed to keep her hold on Normandy—perhaps the time had come to wrench England from the grasp of the usurper.

But Matilda was almost as little fitted for dealing with the difficult position in which she found herself as Stephen himself was. At the battle of Lincoln, 2nd February, 1141, the king was made prisoner after fighting like a hero. A week later Matilda was recognised 'Lady of England' at Winchester; and though she was never crowned she exercised for awhile all the functions of sovereignty. In May she was met at St Alban's by the citizens of London, and thence was conducted in a grand procession to Westminster, and confirmed the recent election of Robert, a monk of Reading, as bishop of London. Her triumph was short; the citizens of London soon rose against her and drove her out. In August she was again at Winchester: she occupied the castle while the city was being reduced to flames, for wherever she moved, horror and ruin followed in her train.

On the 14th September she was once more a fugitive, riding as men ride (usu masculine) to Devizes, and when subsequently she reached Gloucester she was carried on a bier and wrapped about with grave-clothes, for she could not trust her very followers. Meanwhile Earl Robert of Gloucester endeavouring to escape from the city by another road fell into the hands of the king's mercenaries at Stourbridge, where it seems Stephen's queen, the other Matilda, had her headquarters. The Earl was at once handed over to William of Ypres, and confined in the castle of Rochester. The fortunes of war had changed rapidly indeed. The two Matildas had now each lost her absolutely essential chief and leader. Matilda the Queen was clamouring for her husband the king; Matilda the Empress was helpless without the support and championship of her half brother the Earl. Fierce and stubborn as ever, the Empress would hear of no compromise, but she had to yield at last, and at the beginning of November the two prisoners were exchanged, and there was a pause. The exhaustion of both parties stopped hostilities for awhile, but Stephen was clearly gaining ground and Matilda was losing it. In December, 1141, Henry Bishop of Winchester called a council at Westminster, at which the king attended, and there Stephen was once more proclaimed the lawful king of England, to whom obedience was due, and excommunication was pronounced upon all who should support Matilda's claims to the crown. Almost the whole of 1142 passed away without any decisive passage of arms between the two parties. In December Stephen, acting with great vigour and skill, besieged the Empress at Oxford, and pressed her so hard that she escaped with great difficulty by another romantic flight at night time through the snow.

Already in the spring of 1143 her cause must have seemed to herself well-nigh desperate. She had almost played her last card, when she made her bid for the support of Geoffrey de Mandeville. But when that faithless adventurer's devastation of the Isle of Ely, of Ramsey Abbey, of Cambridge and the country round, came to an end by his death in August, 1144, there was no help for Matilda and her party, if party it might be called, in which every one was working for his own ends. There was no place for loyalty or patriotism or honour in the hearts of men possessed by the sordid passion of greed.

When Stephen kept his feast at Lincoln and wore his crown in the Minster on Christmas Day, 1146, he may well have felt that he was more a king than he had ever been before, though he was still very far from being a sovereign ruler; that he could never be in the England where he had been for eleven years a lord of misrule.

The close of the year 1147 is memorable for the death of Robert, the great Earl of Gloucester, 3rd October, half brother of the Empress and her most powerful supporter. Then at last she gave up the hopeless struggle, and in the spring of 1148 she slipped away from England never to return: the port from whence she sailed, and the exact date of her departure, are unknown.

* * * * *

In May, 1149, young Henry made a fruitless expedition into England; he met with little support, he was only 16 years old, his time had not yet come. He went back to Normandy in January, 1150; he could afford to wait; others were doing his work, by doing their own work so very badly, and preparing his way before him. In 1152, Stephen proposed at an assembly of the bishops that his son Eustace should be crowned and associated with himself in the kingdom. At the bidding of the Pope (Eugenius III.), Archbishop Theobald refused to perform the ceremony, and in his refusal was supported by all his suffragans. Stephen flung them all into prison, and then, as usual, set them free again. Meanwhile disorder seems to have prevailed extensively. The robber bands were too many to be dealt with in detail, and the castles gave them refuge in spite of the king's forces. In January, 1133, young Henry came again; fortune seemed to be turning in his favour, but, says the Chronicler, neither side wished the other to gain any decided advantage, they desired no king to reign over them. Only the bishops, with the primate Theobald at their head, seemed to be consistently active in their efforts to bring about peace.

While some arrangements in this direction were apparently going on in Oxfordshire, Eustace in an outburst of fury deserted his father and rode eastward, vowing he would lay waste the land wherever he came. He got as far as Bury St Edmund's. While he sat at meat in the Abbey on the 2nd February he was struck down by an apoplectic fit and died in the monastery he had come to pillage.

The last of Stephen's successes was his capture of the Castle of Ipswich from Hugh Bigod, the turbulent East Anglian magnate. After this there were months of negotiation and uncertainty, till at length, on the 6th November, a settlement was arrived at by the treaty of Wallingford. Stephen was to adopt Henry as his son, retaining his regal dignity for life, and surrendering the rule and administration of the kingdom to Henry, who was acknowledged as the heir to the throne.

Stephen died on the 25th October, 1154, and Henry II. was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on the 19th December following.

The Chroniclers from whom we derive what knowledge we possess of Stephen's reign vie with one another in declaiming bitterly against the horrors of the times. 'It was the period at which, for once, the feudal principle got its way in England,' that is, the period when the forces of disruption were at work with none to hold them under control. But yet, when it is asserted that the whole machinery of government, of justice and of police came to a stop, there are some reasons to show that this is an exaggerated view of the situation. To begin with, the power of the Church was still formidable, and the bishops arid the clergy had still some means of enforcing their discipline—that is, they had something in the shape of a coercive executive behind them; and while this was so there was clearly a force somewhere which was at work for righteousness, and affording some grounds of hope, even to the despairing, that better days might be coming by and bye.

Indications are not wanting that during all this time of political and civil confusion, when the tyranny of brute force was playing frightful havoc through the land, Norfolk suffered less than any other part of England. The narrative of Brother Thomas strongly corroborates this view in many curious particulars.

There is in one of the registers of St Edmund's Abbey quoted by Blomefield a report of a very remarkable meeting held, about the year 1150, in the bishop's garden at Norwich in obedience to a summons from the king. On this occasion Sir Hervey de Glanvil, then a very old man, is reported to have made a speech to the assembly declaring that he had constantly attended the county and hundred court for above 50 years as they who were present all knew. The inference is plain, that the old formalities of the courts had been kept up during all the troubles of the weary days of confusion, and that justice and the laws—such as they were—were actually administered, or were believed to be administered, according to ancient precedent under officials duly authorized to discharge their functions. The account which Brother Thomas gives of the intervention of the Sheriff John in defence of the Jews in 1144 furnishes us with a striking illustration of this.

Norwich Castle was a fortress of great importance in the days of Henry I. and had been held for the king by Hugh Bigod as constable and governor of the city. In 1122, Henry had bestowed a charter upon the citizens of Norwich, retaining the castle in his own hands, and committing it to the custody not of Earl Hugh (as he afterwards became) but of the Sheriff of Norfolk. Hugh resented the setting up of an officer of the king whose power in the county tended to become greater than his own, and when in 1136 Stephen fell ill, and the report spread that he was dead, Hugh Bigod (apparently by a coup de main) got possession of the castle for a little time, but was soon compelled to surrender it. From that time the castle continued to be held for the king by the Sheriffs of Norfolk as his representatives; it was garrisoned by a force whose pay was provided from a special impost known as the 'Castle ward,' and yielding a revenue sufficient to cover also the necessary expense of keeping up the repairs of the defences.

The Sheriff of Norfolk in the later years of Henry I. was Robert Fitz Walter: his father Walter had been one of the followers of William Malet, whose services to the Conqueror were so bountifully rewarded with lands in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Walter himself appears to have held lands at Caen in Normandy, whence he is designated by the writers of the Domesday returns as Walter de Cadomo. In the next generation his son Robert appears to have been known in common parlance as Robert of Caen, and this name, spelt in the charters of the 12th century phonetically, assumes quite surprising varieties of form, from de Kayni to Caxineto and even more unrecognisable contortions. In the Pipe Rolls of Henry II., from 1158 to 1169, the name is variously spelt de Caineto, de Caisnei and de Caime, and the members of the family are known as founders or large benefactors to more than one of the East Anglian religious houses, especially the Benedictine Priory of Horsham St Faith's and the Augustinian Priory of Coxford in Norfolk, and the considerable Cistercian Abbey of Sibton in Suffolk. Their chief place of residence was at Mileham, in the hundred of Launditch, where are still to be seen the remains of an important Roman camp, extensive earthworks, indicative of Saxon or Danish occupation, and the ruins of the castle which Robert Fitz Walter occupied, and where his eldest son John de Caisnei died, as the monk Thomas charitably insinuates, by the special judgment of God. The Sheriff at this time was the most important personage in the county: 'The governor of the shire, the captain of its forces, the president of its court, and a distinctively royal officer appointed by the king, dismissible at a moment's notice, strictly accountable to the king's exchequer.' The office tended to become hereditary, and, as it was elsewhere, so it was in East Anglia.

Robert FitzWalter was succeeded in the shrievalty by his eldest son John, and when John de Caisnei died without issue, 1146, his brother William appears to have been appointed in his place and continued to hold the office till 1163, when, it seems, he was dismissed from it, probably in consequence of certain investigations which were commenced this very year into the maladministration of the sheriffs, and which resulted in the discovery that William de Caisnei was very heavily in debt to the crown, and moreover was deep in the books of the Norwich Jews.

Under the strong rule of these sheriffs holding the castle for the king, it is evident that the Norwich citizens were kept well in hand, and when the king visited the city to hold a judicial enquiry, the picture we get is the picture of an assembly where the pleadings are listened to with all due attention and the trial is adjourned not without some dignity and an appearance of sober impartiality.

Before this, however, the conduct of Sheriff John in protecting the Jews from the fury of the secular clergy assembled in synod and in delivering them from the necessity of submitting to the ordeal, indicates that the chief magistracy was in good hands. Brother Thomas asserts that the Jews bribed the sheriff; and if by that we are to understand that they paid him heavily for troubling himself to protect them in the interest of justice and equity, it is not unlikely to be true. But when they tried to do the like with the bishop, Thomas says Bishop Turbe would hold no intercourse with them; which again clearly means that he would not listen to reason, or for an instant concede that they were to be treated with as human beings whose rights were to be regarded, or their testimony believed.

Nor was the influence of the sheriff occupying Norwich Castle limited to the narrow area of his urban jurisdiction. What the cause of quarrel was between the sheriff and the brothers Edward and Robert is not apparent, but it is clear that the men were afraid of being arrested, and that they were hiding from the sheriff's officers, who were in search of them. Trade and commerce seem to have been going on without any great let or hindrance. People were making pilgrimages to foreign shrines or came on pilgrimage to Norwich to St William's shrine and travelled about the country with no fear of molestation; and though the Norfolk coast in the 12th century was indented by very many little seaports which have since then been silted up or have disappeared by the incursions of the sea, we hear of no piracy among the Norfolk people, though we do hear of pirates on the Lincoln coast, who appear to have held their captives to ransom and treated them cruelly while they detained them.

Even the case of the murder of the Jew Eleazar by the followers of Sir Simon de Novers, though undoubtedly an instance of the defiance of law indicating the existence of a great deal of ruffianism, yet resulting as it did in the trial of the knight and the great exertions that were made to obtain an acquittal, shows that there was a belief that some redress might be looked for from the king and that such abominable outrages were not going on commonly, had not ceased to be regarded with indignation nor were allowed to remain unpunished.

The case of Sir William de Whitwell at first reading does seem to be a bad one. But freed from the exaggerations with which Brother Thomas has wrapped it round it may be doubted whether anything more happened than has happened often enough before or since, when an uncle and his nephew have come to words and blows and the stronger has treated the weaker with savage brutality.

But the sheriff was not the only dispenser of justice in the country in Stephen's time. Thomas incidentally makes mention of certain officials whose authority was recognised in the districts over which they exercised some sort of magisterial sway. These were the decani.

The exact nature of the jurisdiction of the decanus, the extent of his authority and the duties of his office in the 12th century, it would be extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to define. The word is said in the laws of Edward the Confessor to be the equivalent of the Saxon tyenthe-heved, and signified an official whose duties were concerned with minor offences and adjudicating on disputes between neighbours in the same vill. The deeanus is frequently mentioned in the Polypticwii of Abbot Irminon, in the 9th century, and its learned editor Guerard has discussed the functions of the office with his usual care and sagacity. The decanus appears in the Lombard, Visigoth, and Salic laws, and the term indicates a civil judge whose official position may perhaps be traced to the decanus of the Roman army. In the 13th century he appears at Norwich as a kind of justice of the peace with a recognised and special authority and position over a more or less extended area; translated into modern language he may be characterised as a police magistrate with considerable power of enforcing his sentences. The ecclesiastical dean may thus be regarded as an official exercising the same functions in causes ecclesiastical as the other did in civil matters, while the deans of Norwich, Bedingham and Lincoln, whom we meet with in the following pages, are the legitimate representatives and descendants of the tyenthe-heved of the laws of Edward the Confessor and of a much earlier time.

A century later, and even down to the close of the 14th century, we come upon this functionary continually in the proceedings of the Leets in Norwich. These Norwich deans are, if I mistake not, invariably laymen, and I cannot doubt that Mr Hudson has for once been wrong in confounding the civil with the ecclesiastical functionary. The civil dean must have disappeared by the absorption of his duties into those of other magistrates. The office of the ecclesiastical dean "was—at the Reformation—merged in that of the Archdeacon" only to be revived under the designation of "Rural Dean" in quite modern times.

Though it can hardly have been but that during all the reign of Stephen some of the old police organization survived and continued to some extent operative for the restraining the rapacity of some and punishing the violence of others, we must remember that legal procedure, courts of justice and even the very conception of statute law—in the sense we now attach to those terms—can scarcely be said to have existed in England during those bad times.

The wonderful revival of the study of Roman law exercised indeed upon all the keenest intellects of the 12th century an unparalleled fascination, and tended to draw away the thoughts and attention of many illustrious men even from the study of Theology. "It was as if a new gospel had been revealed."

When, in 1149, Archbishop Theobald brought over into England Master Vacarius, one of the most celebrated Jurists of his time, and a crowd of scholars began eagerly to attend his lectures, Stephen set his face like a flint against the new learning and its great exponent, and tried to silence him by forbidding him to teach Roman law in England, and even prohibited the use of his books in the land.

It was one of the many, and not the least stupid, blunders which the king committed, and the more so because his orders could not be carried out. It was the crying need of the time that the ethical sentiments of the people should be educated to higher conceptions of justice and fair play. That truth for its own sake should be supremely desirable, only the very few were prepared to admit. A poor wretch accused of a crime was almost assumed to be guilty till he could prove the negative. Every one, judging from his own experience, took it for granted that every one else was inclined to violence, fraud, or enormous wickedness, and sure to commit these things if the chance of detection were reduced to a minimum. In truth it was more probable that a man charged with a heinous crime should be guilty than innocent.

If there was no sufficient evidence to substantiate the charge on the one hand, and yet no sufficient number of compurgators to support the denial on the other, there was only one way of settling the point. Let the appeal be made to the Judgment of God. An accuser had nothing to lose by this horrible challenge; the accused stood to lose everything. Godwin the priest could urge this upon the synod with a light heart; to the Jews it meant extermination, as Bishop Turbe himself admitted almost in so many words.

"Down to the ninth century," says Professor Maitland, "the opposition of the Church appears to have kept ordeal outside the recognised law." Three hundred years before this, however, it appears to have been commonly resorted to among the Franks; and Gregory of Tours describes with some minuteness a case where the ordeal of boiling water was put in force in his own day.

Dr H. C. Lea of Philadelphia has dealt with the whole subject in his usual exhaustive manner, and has found traces of the invocation of the Judgment of God among many and various races of mankind at the very dawn of history. In England the most common forms of the ordeal were that of boiling water (judicium aquæ ferventis), and the judicium ferri, or ordeal by red-hot iron. Instances of either one or the other are not very frequently to be met with in our English annals till the 12th century, but then they became hideously common. Both forms are named in the laws of Edward the Confessor, A.D. 1043—1066. The judicium ferri is mentioned in the so-called statutes of William the Conqueror; the water ordeal is referred to in the Assize of Clarendon A.D. 1166.

In the very valuable collection of Pleas of the Crown edited by Prof. Maitland for the Selden Society in 1887, there are no fewer than fifteen instances of a resort to the ordeal by water, and nine to the ordeal by hot iron between the years 1200 and 1225; in one case, both forms of the dreadful process appear to have been put in force simultaneously. When the cry rose up from the cruel crowd at the Norwich synod, calling for the Judgment of God, the denials and protestations of the wretched Jews went for nothing, and if the fierce-eyed fanatics could have had their way, there would have been just as little chance of escape for their victims as there had been a thousand years before, when just such a loud and hateful cry had been answered by flinging the Christians to the lions. Happily the time was coming when these detestable perversions of justice, which had too long been allowed to go on under the blasphemous pretence of invoking the Heavenly Father to do justice between man and man, were abolished. The popes had very early set themselves against the ordeal: but it took a long time before the populace or their rulers could be brought to a better mind and to regard these abominations in their true light.

Though the Lateran Council of 1215 formally forbade any ecclesiastic taking part in these ordeals, and though by this time all the great theologians condemned and denounced them as having no warrant in divine law and forbidden by the Church—yet the superstition, like every other superstition, died hard, and the other form of ordeal—the trial by combat—survived long after the others had ceased to be sanctioned or resorted to.