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CONCLUSION. - Augustin Thierry, History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Its Causes, and its Consequences, in England, Scotland, Ireland, & on the Continent, vol. 2 
History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Its Causes, and its Consequences, in England, Scotland, Ireland, & on the Continent, translated from the seventh Paris edition, by William Hazlitt (London: H.G. Bohn, 1856). In 2 volumes. Vol. 2.
Part of: History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Its Causes, and its Consequences, in England, Scotland, Ireland, & on the Continent, 2 vols.
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THE CONTINENTAL NORMANS AND BRETONS; THE ANGEVINS AND THE POPULATIONS OF SOUTHERN GAUL.
Birth of Arthur, duke of Brittany—Insurrection of Anjou and Maine—Policy of the king of France—Death of Arthur—Indignation of the Bretons—Invasion of Normandy—Taking of Ronen—Repentance of the Bretons—The Poitevins resist the king of France—Complete submission of Normandy—Project of a new invasion of England—Entrance of the English into Normandy—Guienne remains to the king of England—Heresy of the Toulousans and Albigenses—Crusade against the Albigenses—Additional aggrandizement of the kingdom of France—Charles of Anjou becomes count of Provence—Discontent and regrets of the Provençals—Insurrection of the cities of Provence—Termination of Provençal nationality—Limits of the kingdom of France—Character of the Basque population—Political condition of the Basques—Policy of the counts de Foix—Policy of the barons of Gascony—They pass alternately from one king to another—Confederation of the Armagnacs—The Gascons join the king of France—Conquest of Guienne by the French—Revolt of Bordeaux—Second conquest of Bordeaux—Patriotic efforts of the Armagnacs—Guienne and Gascony become parts of France.
Towards the end of the reign of Henry II., and some months after the death of his second son, Geoffroy, earl or duke of Brittany, there occurred an event of little importance in itself, but which became the cause, or at least the occasion, of great political revolutions; the widow of count Geoffroy, Constance, a woman of Breton race,1 gave birth to a son, whom his paternal grandfather, the king of England, wished to baptize in the name of Henry. But the Bretons, who surrounded the mother, were all opposed to the idea that the child, who would one day become their chief, should receive a foreign name.2 He was, by acclamation, called Arthur, and was baptized in this name, as popular with them as with the Welsh. The king of England took umbrage at this act of national will, and not venturing to remove Arthur from the Bretons, he compulsorily married the mother to one of his officers, Ranouf, earl of Chester, whom he made duke of Brittany, to the prejudice of his own grandson, now an object of suspicion in his eyes because the Breton nation loved him. But this nation, shortly after, expelled Ranouf of Chester, and proclaimed the son of Constance, still a mere boy, their chief.
This second act of national will, more serious than the first, involved the Bretons in a war with king Richard, successor to Henry II. While they were fighting for their own cause and that of young Arthur, the boy himself, directed by his mother, separated from them, and sometimes passed over to the king of England, his uncle, and sometimes to the French king, who entertained, in reference to the Bretons, similar views with those of the king of England. The ambitious projects of the king of France were assisted in Brittany, as in nearly all the western provinces of Gaul, by the general weariness of Anglo-Norman domination. Not only the Poitevins, who had for fifty years past been in continual revolt, but the Manceaux, the Tourangeaux, and even the Angevins, to whom their own counts, since they had become kings of England, had been almost entire strangers, also aspired to a great change. Without themselves desiring anything beyond an administration more devoted to their national interests, they met the policy of the king of France half way, and most imprudently aided him, in the hope of his aiding them, against the king of England.
Of all the continental provinces subject to the Normans, Guienne alone, at this time, exhibited no decided repugnance towards them, because the daughter of its ancient national chiefs, Eleanor, widow of Henry II. still lived, and tempered by her influence the harshness of the foreign government. Almost immediately after the death, by a cross-bow shot, of king Richard in Limousin, the revolution, which had been preparing some time, but which the fear of his military activity had kept in check, broke out. His brother John was recognised without opposition, king of England, and duke of Normandy and Aquitaine. But Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, separated themselves simultaneously from the Norman cause, proclaiming the young duke of Brittany their lord. The Poitevins imitated this defection, and formed, with their neighbours of the north and west, a league offensive and defensive. At the head of this league figured the Breton people, unfortunately represented by a mere boy and a woman, who, fearing to fall into the hands of the English king, gave up to the king of France, Philip II., all that the popular courage had recovered from the Anglo-Normans in the various confederate countries, and recognised his suzerainty over Anjou, Maine, and Brittany. Philip, whom the French surnamed Augustus, dismantled the towns and razed the fortresses which his new vassals had opened to him. When young Arthur, his liegeman and voluntary prisoner, addressed to him, on behalf of the people who had intrusted themselves to him, some remonstrances upon his conduct: “Am I not at liberty,” said the king, “to do as I please in my own lands?”1
Arthur soon perceived the fault he had committed in confiding himself to the mercy of one of the two kings, to escape from the other. He fled from Paris, and not knowing whither to go, delivered himself up to king John, his uncle, who, receiving him with infinite endearments, was about to imprison him, when the young duke, warned of his purpose, returned to the French king. The latter already despaired of being able to retain his new provinces, against at once the will of the inhabitants and of the king of England; he thought it better, therefore, to make with the latter an advantageous peace, and to obtain it, sacrificed his guest and protégé, whom he obliged to do homage to king John for Anjou, Maine, and Brittany. Philip, in return for these good offices, obtained peace, thirty thousand marks of gold, many towns, and the promise that, if John died without heirs, he should inherit all his possessions on the continent. In virtue of this treaty, the French garrisons of Anjou and Maine were replaced by Norman troops and by Brabançons in the pay of the king of England.
While Philip-Augustus was despoiling the young Arthur of his heritage, he was educating him at his court with his own children, and conciliating him in order to meet the contingency of a new rupture with king John. This rupture soon happened, on the occasion of a general insurrection of the Poitevins, under the direction of Hugh le Brun, count de La Marche, whom the king of England had deprived of his betrothed bride. All the barons of Poitou and those of a portion of Limousin confederated together, and when the king of France saw them compromised, hoping to profit by whatever they might venture to do, he suddenly broke the peace, and declared for them, on condition that they would take the oath of faith and homage to him. He forthwith produced Arthur on the political scene, gave him in marriage his daughter Marie, aged five years, had him proclaimed earl of the Bretons, Angevins, and Poitevins, and sent him at the head of an army to conquer the towns of Poitou, which still held out for the king of England.
The Bretons made alliance with the insurgent Poitevins, and promised to send them five hundred horse and four thousand foot. Awaiting this reinforcement, the new earl of Poitou laid siege to the town of Mirebeau, a few leagues from Poitiers, where, by a chance that proved fatal to the besiegers, the widow of Henry II. happened to be. The town was taken without much resistance, but Eleanor of Aquitaine retired into the castle, which was very strong, while Arthur and the Poitevins occupied the town. They were in the greatest security, when king John, urged by the desire of releasing his mother, appeared, after a rapid march, suddenly at the gates of Mirebeau, and made Arthur prisoner, with most of the chiefs of the insurrection. He took them into Normandy, and soon afterwards Arthur disappeared without any one knowing in what manner he had perished. Among the Normans, who had no feeling of national hatred or repugnance towards the king of England, it was said that the boy had died of sickness in the castle of Rouen, or, according to others, that he had killed himself in endeavouring to make his escape over the walls of the town. The French, animated by the spirit of political rivalry, affirmed that king John had poniarded his nephew with his own hand, one day that he was passing the Seine with him in a boat. The Bretons, who had centred all their hopes of liberty in young Arthur, adopted much the same story, but changed the scene of action, which they placed at Cherbourg, on the sea shore.1 The death of Arthur, however it happened, occasioned a great sensation, more especially in Brittany, where it was regarded as a national calamity. The same ardent imagination that had made the Bretons believe their future destiny bound up with that of the boy, filled them with an exaggerated affection for the king of France, because he was the enemy of Arthur’s murderer. It was he whom they called upon to take vengeance for the deed, promising to aid him with all their power in any hostilities he might undertake against the king of England. Never king of France had so favourable an occasion for making himself master of those Bretons who were so attached to their independence.1 Philip, as suzerain, received the plaint of the lords and bishops of Brittany as to the murder of their young duke, and cited the king of England, his vassal for Normandy, to appear before the court of the barons of France, who now began to be called pairs (peers), a name borrowed from the romances on the life of Charlemagne. King John, as was expected, did not appear before the peers, and was accordingly condemned by them. All the lands he held of the kingdom of France were declared forfeit, and the Bretons were invited to take up arms to secure the execution of this sentence, which would only be effective in being followed up by a conquest.
The conquest was made, not by the power alone of the king of France, or by the authority of the decree of his peers, but by the co-operation, the more energetic that it was voluntary, of the surrounding populations, hostile to the Normans. Philip-Augustus did but appear on the frontier of Poitou, and an universal insurrection threw open to him well nigh every fortress; and when he returned to attack Normandy, the Bretons had already invaded and occupied a great portion of it. They took by assault Mont Saint-Michel, seized upon Avranches, and burned all the villages between that town and Caen. The report of their ravages, and the terror they inspired, contributed greatly to the success of the king of France, who, with the Manceaux and the Angevins, advancing from the east, took Andelys, Evreux, Domfront, and Lisieux, and at Caen formed his junction with the Breton army.
It was the first time that Normandy had been so simultaneously attacked by all the populations which surrounded her, south, east, and north; and it was also the first time that she had had a chief so indolent and so incompetent as king John. He hunted or amused himself while Philip and his allies were taking, one after another, all the towns and fortresses of the country; in less than a year he had none left him but Rouen, Verneuil, and Château-Gaillard. The people of Normandy made great but fruitless efforts to drive back the invaders; and at length only yielded from want of succours, and because their brothers in origin, the Normans of England, secured by the ocean, were in no way anxious to relieve them from a danger which did not threaten themselves. Moreover, finding themselves, as the result of their conquest, raised above the popular condition, they had little sympathy with the burgesses and peasants on the other side of the water, though descended from the same ancestors with themselves.
The citizens of Rouen suffered all the extremities of famine before they thought of capitulating; and when their provisions entirely failed them, they concluded a truce of thirty days with the king of France, at the expiration of which they were to surrender, if they did not meantime receive succours. In the interval, they sent some of their people to England to inform king John of the extremity to which they were reduced. The envoys found the king playing at chess; he did not quit his game, or answer them until he had finished it, and then merely said: “I have no means of assisting you within the period named, so do the best you can.”1 The town of Rouen surrendered; the two places that still resisted followed the example, and the conquest of the whole country was established. This conquest, less severe upon the Normans than that of England had been upon the Saxons, was still not without its humiliation and suffering. The French razed the walls of a great many towns, and compelled the citizens of Rouen to demolish, at their own expense, their old fortifications, and to build a new castle in a place more convenient for the conquerors.2
The national vanity of the Bretons was, no doubt, flattered, when they saw their ancient enemies, those who had struck the first blows on their national independence, subjugated, in their turn, by a foreign power. But this miserable satisfaction was all the fruit they derived from the victories they had won for the king of France. Moreover, in contributing to place their neighbours under the yoke, they had placed themselves under it, it becoming impossible for them to evade the domination of a king, who was environing them on every side, and combining with his own forces all those of Normandy. The constraint of French supremacy grew more and more intolerable to them; they attempted several times, but in vain, to renew their alliance with the king of England. To drown for awhile the thought of their own lost liberty, they, with a sort of insane fury, aided the kings of France entirely to destroy that of the populations along the Loire. They laboured at the aggrandizement of the French monarchy, and, at the same time, managed to maintain, to some extent, the remains of their ancient rights against the administrative invasions of that now powerful monarchy. Of the populations of Gaul, the Breton was, perhaps, at all times, that which manifested, in the highest degree, the need of political action. This innate disposition is far from being extinct among them, as is attested by the active part they have taken, in one way and another, in recent revolutions.
After having co-operated with the Bretons in the downfal of Normandy, the Angevins lost, as a result of this event, every relic of national existence, and the Manceaux never regained the independence of which the Normans had deprived them. The earls of Anjou were replaced by seneschals of the king of France, and the domination of this king was extended beyond the Loire, as far as Poitou. The rich Poitevins were not permitted to marry their daughters to any but French husbands.1 Under this yoke, novel to them, they repented of having repudiated the patronage of the king of England, and commenced negotiations with him, in which the malcontents of Anjou and Maine took part. A general insurrection was preparing in these three provinces, when the celebrated battle of Bovines, in assuring the fortunes of the kingdom of France, intimidated the conspirators.1 The Poitevins alone adhered to their resolution, and rose against king Philip, under the same chiefs who had, with him and for him, fought against king John. But Philip soon crushed them, with the aid of those who had feared to oppose him, of the Angevins, the Manceaux, the Tourangeaux, and the Bretons, and he carried his conquests southward as far as Rochelle. Thus these unhappy populations, from the absence of mutual affection and good understanding, fell, one after the other, under the yoke, and the overthrow of the Norman power on the continent, destroying the sort of equilibrium by means of which the southern countries had remained independent, the movement began by which, sooner or later, but infallibly, the whole of Gaul was to become French.
The restoration of Normandy to the kings of England could alone arrest this impulsion of things; but the incompetence of king John and the ability of Philip-Augustus, prevented anything of the kind from taking place, notwithstanding the discontent of the country. “Although the yoke of the king was light,” says a poet of the thirteenth century, “Neustria long chafed at being subject to it; and yet, wishing well to those who wished him ill, he did not abolish their ancient laws, or give them reason to complain of being troubled with foreign regulations.”2 No revolt of any importance took place in Normandy against the French. The popular discontent exhaled in individual murmurings, in regrets for past times, and especially for “Richard the Lion-hearted, whom no Frenchman had ever equalled,” said the Norman soldiers, even in the camp of the king of France.3 The political nullity into which this nation, so renowned for its courage and its lofty pride, suddenly fell, may be attributed, perhaps, to that very pride, which forbad it to seek aid from its former subjects of Brittany, or to treat with them for an offensive league against the common oppressor. Further, the hope which the Normans had in the population that governed England, and the ancient sympathy of relationship between them and that population of gentlemen, would rapidly become extinct. When the two countries had ceased to be united under the same sceptre, the only inhabitants of England with whom the people of Normandy had frequent relations were merchants, men of English race, speaking a language foreign to the Normans, who, besides, nourished a hostile sentiment towards them, that of commercial rivalry. The ancient ties could not, therefore, fail to break between England and Normandy, while every day fresh bands were formed between the latter country and France, where the mass of the people spoke the same language with the Normans, and bore all the signs of a common origin, for every vestige of the Danish race had long ceased to exist in Normandy.
All these causes led to the result that, in less than a century after their conquest by Philip Augustus, the Normans, without scruple, nay, with ardour, espoused the enmity of the kings of France to England. In the year 1240, some of them formed an association with the Bretons for the purpose of privateering against English vessels. In each war that afterwards arose between the two countries, fleets of piratical vessels from Normandy essayed descents on the southern coast of England, for the purposes of devastation and pillage. The town of Dieppe was especially famous for these armaments. At length, when the great quarrel of succession, which occupied the whole of the fourteenth century, broke out between Philip V. and Edward III., the Normans conceived a project involving no less than a new conquest of England, a conquest as absolute, and perhaps more methodical than that of William the Bastard. The crown and all the public domains were adjudged beforehand to the chief of the expedition. All the lands of the barons and nobles of England were to belong to titled personages, the property of the commoners to the towns, and that of the churches to the clergy of Normandy.1
This project, which, after three centuries of possession, was to reduce the conquerors of England to the state in which they themselves had placed the English in race, was drawn up with the utmost detail, and presented to king Philip de Valois at his castle of Vincennes, by the deputies of the Norman nation. They requested permission to place his son, their duke, at the head of the enterprise, and offered to defray the whole expense, requiring from the king only the aid of an ally, in case of reverses. The agreement was signed, sealed, and deposited at Caen, but circumstances, which the history of the period does not detail, retarded the execution. No progress was yet made in it when, in the year 1346, the king of England landed at Cape La Hogue, to take possession of the country which he called his hereditary domain.1 The Normans, attacked unexpectedly, no more resisted the English army, than the Anglo-Normans, perhaps, would have resisted their invaders, had the projected expedition taken place. The towns were closed, the bridges cut down, the roads broken up, but nothing stayed the march of that army, whose leading chiefs, the king included, spoke no other language than French with the Norman accent.
Notwithstanding this conformity of language, no national sympathy was aroused in their favour, and the towns which opened their gates only did so from necessity. In a short time, they took Barfleur, Carentan and Saint-Lo. In the official reports, drawn up in the French language, which they sent to England, they compared these towns in size and wealth to Sandwich, Leicester, and Lincoln, to which they still gave the name of Nicole.2 At Caen, where they visited, with great ceremony, the tomb of William the Conqueror, the author of their ancestors’ fortunes, they found, among the town charters, the original of the treaty concluded between the Normans and the king of France for a new conquest, at which they were so enraged, that they pillaged and massacred the inhabitants. Then, still pillaging, they directed their course towards the ancient frontier of France, to Poissy, which they entered; then they went to Picardy, where between them and the French was fought the famous battle of Crécy.
The plan of invasion found at Caen was immediately forwarded to England, and publicly read in all the towns, in order to exasperate the popular mind against the king and against the French, from whom the Normans were now no longer distinguished. At London, the archbishop of Canterbury read this document after service, in front of the cross in St. Paul’s church-yard. As it was drawn up in the French language, all the nobles present could understand it, and it was then translated into English for the people of low condition.1 This and the other means employed to interest the English in the quarrel of their king were not without effect upon them. The ambitious passions of the master, in the minds of the subjects assumed the form of a blind hatred to all the people of France, who, on their part, amply returned hate for hate. There was but one class of men in the two countries which escaped this frenzy, that of the poor fishermen of either shore, who, during the utmost fury of the wars, never did each other harm; “never warring,” says Froissart, “but rather aiding each other; buying and selling upon the sea, one from the other, when either had had better fishing than the other.”
By a singular destiny, while Normandy, the native land of the kings and nobles of England, became a country hostile to them, Aquitaine, from the sea of Rochelle to the Pyrenees, remained subjected to their authority, without apparent repugnance. We have seen how this country had been retained under the Anglo-Norman domination, by the influence of the duchess Eleanor, the widow of Henry II. After the death of this princess, the Aquitans preserved their faith to her grandson, from fear of falling under the lordship of the king of France, who, master of Poitou, had become their immediate neighbour. Pursuing a policy observed in the middle ages, they preferred, independently of all other considerations, to have as seigneur a king whose states lay at a distance, and for this reason, that generally the remote suzerain allowed the country to govern itself according to its local laws, and by men born within it, whereas a contiguous prince seldom permitted this arrangement.
The royal power preserved in south-west Gaul, would, perhaps, have long served as a fulcrum for the still independent populations of the south against the king of France, had not an unexpected event suddenly destroyed all the strength of the country between the Mediterranean, the Rhone, and the Garonne. The county of Toulouse, and the great lordships depending on it in the thirteenth century, by alliance or vassalage, far surpassed in civilization all the other parts of the ancient Gaulish territory. A great commerce was carried on thence with the ports of the east; its towns had the same form of municipal constitution, the same liberty, with the great Italian communes, which they imitated even in external appearance. Every rich citizen built himself a house, flanked with towers, and every citizen’s son became a knight if he chose, and jousted at tournaments with the noblest.1
This tendency to equality, which gave great umbrage to the noblesse of France, Burgundy, and Germany, opening a free communication among all classes, communicated to the minds of those who dwelt on the European coasts of the Mediterranean an activity which they exercised in every species of modern culture. They possessed the most elegant literature of all Europe, and their written idiom was classic in Italy and in Spain. With them Christianity, fervent and even enthusiastic,—for they were of an impassioned nature,—did not consist in a passive submission to the doctrine and observances of the Romish church. Without revolting against that church, without being sensible of the exact degree of their dissent from her, they had, in the course of the thirteenth century, adopted new opinions, singularly combined with old dogmas opposed to the Catholic dogma.
The church, alarmed at the extension and increase of the heresy of the southern Gauls, at first employed the resources of her powerful organization to stay its progress. But it was in vain that the pontifical couriers brought to Alby, Toulouse, and Narbonne, bulls of excommunication and anathema against the enemies of the Roman faith. Heterodoxy had gained upon even the ministers of the churches whence these bulls were to be fulminated, and the bishops themselves, though more firm in the Catholic discipline, being powerless, did not know how to decide, and at length underwent the influence of the universal example. It seemed clear that this great schism, in which all classes and ranks of society participated, could only be extinguished by a blow struck on the population, in a mass, by a war of invasion, which should destroy the social order whence had emanated its independence of spirit and its precocious civilization. This was what pope Innocent III. undertook, in the first years of the thirteenth century. Abusing the example of the crusades against the Saracens, he had one preached against the inhabitants of the county of Toulouse and of the diocese of Alby, and published throughout Europe, that whoever would arm, to war against them, should obtain the remission of his sins and a share in the property of the heretics.1
Unfortunately, the times were favourable to this crusade of Christians against Christians. The conquests of the king of France in Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, had caused in these various countries the ruin or banishment of many men, and thus augmented the number of chevaliers sans avoir, of “knights with nothing,” and of reckless fortune-hunters. The pilgrimage against the Albigeois (for so the war was designated) promised less risk, and a more certain profit, than the crusade against the Arabs, and accordingly the army of the new pilgrims soon numbered fifty thousand men of every rank and nation, but especially French and Flemings. The king of France sent fifteen thousand soldiers, and the king of England allowed a body of troops to be enrolled in Guienne, under the command of the archbishop of Bordeaux.
It would exceed our limits to recount in detail all the barbarities of the crusaders at the sacking of Beziers, Carcassonne, Narbonne, and other towns, laid under the ban of the church; to say how the inhabitants were massacred without distinction of age or sex, of catholic or heretic. “Poor towns,” exclaims a poet, an eye-witness of these calamities, “how have I formerly seen you, and how see I you now.”2 From the Garonne to the Mediterranean, the whole country was devastated and subjugated; and the chief of the conquering army, Simon de Montfort, not venturing to retain for himself such vast domains, did homage for them to the king of France.
As the crusaders, whose numbers increased every day, made new conquests, the suzerainty of this king extended more and more over the south of Gaul. The county of Toulouse, and the territories of Agen, Carcassonne, and Beziers, after three centuries of independence, were thus again attached to the kingdom which had formerly possessed them. A treaty, concluded in a moment of distress, between the heir of Simon de Montfort and the successor of Philip-Augustus, soon converted this feudal supremacy into direct sovereignty. Fully to secure this immense acquisition, Louis VIII. raised an army, assumed the cross, and proceeded to the south. He passed, not without resistance, the Rhone at the bridge of Avignon, took Beaucaire and Nîmes, which he united under the authority of a seneschal, placed also a seneschal at Carcassonne, and marched upon Toulouse, whose inhabitants then were in full revolt against the crusaders and against himself.
Hatred of the French name was the national passion of the new subjects of the king of France; that name never issued from their mouths unless accompanied by some injurious epithet.1 The troubadours in their sirventes called upon the son of the count of Toulouse to come with the aid of the king of Aragon, and reconquer his heritage, making a bridge of French corses.2 During the minority which followed the death of king Louis VIII., an extensive conspiracy was formed from the Vienne to the foot of the Pyrenees, having for its object to drive back the French within their ancient limits. The chiefs of the valleys through which the Arriege flows, and where the Adour takes its source, the counties of Foix and Cominges, formed an alliance with the count de Marche and the castellans of Poitou. The king of England, too, on this occasion, did not hesitate to take a decisive part, since it was no longer a pilgrimage against heresy that was to be opposed, but the political power of the king of France. The attempt, however, had little success; the catholic clergy, zealous for French dominion, terrified the confederates by threatening them with a new crusade, and repressed the movements of the Toulousans by means of the terrible police then instituted under the name of Inquisition. Weary of a hopeless struggle, the heir of the ancient counts of Toulouse made a definitive peace with king Louis IX., ceding to him all his rights, by a treaty far from voluntary. The king gave the county of Toulouse to his brother Alphonse, already count of Poitou by a similar title, and equally against the will of the country.
Notwithstanding these accessions, the kingdom of France had not yet, on the southern side, attained the limits whither aspired the ambition of its kings, nourished by the popular traditions of the reign of Charlemagne. The banner of the gold fleur-de-lys was not yet planted on the Pyrenees, and the chiefs of the populations which inhabited the foot or the slopes of those mountains were still free to give their homage to whom they pleased. Some, it is true, offered it to the king of France; but others, and these the greater number, were faithful to the kings of Aragon or Castile, or to the king of England; and others, again, remained without any suzerain at all, holding of God alone.
While one of the brothers of Louis IX. ruled the counties of Toulouse and Poitou, the other, named Charles, was count of Anjou and Maine. Never had the family of any French king combined such power, for we must not mistake the kings of the Franks for kings of France. The limits of this kingdom, formerly bounded by the Loire, already extended, in the middle of the thirteenth century, to the Mediterranean; on the south-west, it bordered upon the possessions of the king of England in Guienne, and on the south-east, upon the independent territory which bore the old name of Provence, (Provincia.) About this time, the count of Provence, Rémond Beranger, died, leaving an only daughter, called Beatrix, under the guardianship of some relations. The guardians, masters of the girl and of the county, offered the king of France to give both the one and the other to his brother, Charles d’Anjou; and the king, having agreed to the proposed conditions, sent troops into Provence, which entered it as friends. Charles d’Anjou proceeded thither soon afterwards, and Beatrix was married to him, without having been much consulted on the subject. As for the people of the country, their aversion to a foreign count, and especially to one of French race, was unequivocal.1 They had before them the example of what their neighbours on the other side of the Rhone suffered under the government of the French. “Instead of a brave lord,” says a contemporary poet, “the Provençals are to have a master; they may no longer build towers or castles, they will no longer dare to bear lance or shield before the French. May they die rather than be reduced to such a condition!”2
These fears were soon realized. All Provence was filled with foreign officers, who, treating the natives as subjects by conquest, levied enormous imposts, confiscated estates, and imprisoned and put to death their owners without trial and without sentence. At first, these excesses of power met with little resistance, because the clergy, making itself, in the words of an old poet, a whetstone for the swords of the French,3 upheld their domination by the terrible menace of a crusade. The troubadours, accustomed to serve in the south as organs of the patriotic interest, undertook the dangerous task of arousing the people, and shaming them out of their disgraceful endurance. One of them, playing on the name of his country, said that it ought no longer to be called Proensa (the land of the preux), but Faillensa (the land of the failers), because it allowed a foreign domination to replace its national government. Other poets, in their verses, addressed the king of Aragon, the former suzerain of Provence, inviting him to come and expel the usurpers from his lands. Others, again, urged the king of England to head an offensive league against the French; their object being war, by means of which they might effect their enfranchisement. “Why is not the game commenced,” they said, “in which many a helm will be split, many a hauberk pierced?”4
Things were at this point, when the king of France, departing for the crusade in Egypt, took his brother, Charles d’Anjou, with him. News soon came that the two brothers had been made prisoners by the Saracens, and hereupon there was universal joy in Provence. It was said that God had worked this miracle to save the liberty of the country. The towns of Aix, Arles, Avignon, and Marseilles, which enjoyed an almost republican organization, made open preparations for war, repairing their fortifications, collecting provisions and arms; but the imprisonment of Charles d’Anjou was not of long duration. On his return, he began by devastating the whole district of Arles, in order to intimidate the citizens; he then blockaded them so long with a numerous army, that after enduring infinite sufferings they were fain to surrender. Such was the end of this great commune, as free in its days of prosperity as those which then flourished in Italy. Avignon, whose municipal constitution resembled that or Arles, opened its gates on the approach of Alphonse, count of Toulouse and Poitiers, who came to aid his brother in subjecting the Provençaux.1
At Marseilles, the inhabitants of all ranks took up arms, and putting out to sea, attacked the count’s fleet. But the coolness between the higher burghers and the country seigneurs and castellans produced fatal dissensions. The Marseillese were ill supported by this class of men, many of whom thought it more knightly to serve under the banner of the foreigner than to make common cause with the friends of national independence. Reduced to their own resources, the latter obtained a favourable capitulation, which, however, the count’s French agents soon violated without scruple. Their tyranny and their exactions became so insupportable, that, despite the danger, a revolt was formed against them, in which they were all seized by the people, who, however, contented themselves with imprisoning them. The insurgents took possession of the chateau Saint-Marcel, shut the gates of the city, and sustained a second siege, during which the people of Montpellier, though long enemies of the Marseillese from commercial rivalry, profited by the last moments of their own independence to succour Marseilles against the conquerors of southern Gaul. Notwithstanding this assistance, the town, attacked by superior forces, was obliged to yield. All the stores in its public arsenals were removed, and the citizens were disarmed. A knight, named Boniface de Castellane, at once warrior and poet, who, by his sirventes, had excited the insurrection of the Marseillese,1 and had then fought in their ranks, was, according to some historians, taken and beheaded. The castellans and seigneurs who had abandoned the cause of the towns, were treated by the count almost as harshly as those who had adhered to it. He used every means to depress and impoverish them, his authority being strengthened by the public misery and terror.2
The Provençals never recovered their ancient municipal liberty, or the high civilization and riches which had resulted from it. But, very singularly, after two centuries, the extinction of the house of the counts of Anjou, under which they had preserved at least a shadow of nationality, by an administration distinct from that of France, occasioned them almost as much grief as had the accession of that house. To fall under the immediate authority of the kings of France, after having been governed by counts, appeared to the people of Provence, about the close of the fifteenth century, a new national calamity. It was this popular feeling, rather than the personal qualities of René, surnamed the Good, which occasioned the long memory of him retained by the Provençals, and the exaggerated idea of public prosperity which tradition still connects with his reign.
Thus were annexed to the kingdom of France all the provinces of ancient Gaul situate right and left of the Rhône, except Guienne and the valleys at the foot of the Pyrenees. The old civilization of these provinces received a mortal blow in their compulsory reunion with countries far less advanced in intellectual culture, in industry, and in manners. The most disastrous epoch in the history of the peoples of southern France is that at which they became French, when the king, whom their ancestors used to call the king of Paris,3 began to term them his subjects of the langue d’oc, in contradistinction to the old French of Outre-Loire, who spoke the langue d’oui. From that time the classic poetry of the south, and even the language consecrated to it, disappeared from Languedoc, Poitou, Limousin, Auvergne, and Provence. Local dialects, inelegant and incorrect, prevailed in every direction, and soon replaced the literary idiom, the beautiful language of the troubadours.1
The jurisdiction of the first seneschals of the kings of France in Languedoc, bounded on the west by that of the officers of the king of England in Aquitaine, only reached southward as far as the valleys which announce the vicinity of the great chain of the Pyrenees. It was here that the conquest of the crusaders against the Albigenses had stopped, because the profit of a war in a mountainous country, bristling with castles, built on the rocks like eagles’ nests, did not seem at all equivalent to the dangers it would involve. Thus, on the southern frontier of the possessions of the two kings there remained a free territory, extending from one sea to the other, and which, extremely narrow at its eastern and western extremities, reached towards its centre the confluence of the Aveyron and the Garonne.
The inhabitants of this territory were divided into lordships under different titles, as all the south had been before the French conquest; and these various populations, with one sole exception, presented the signs of a common origin in their language and character. This race of men, more ancient than the Celtic races of Gaul, had probably been driven back to the mountains by a foreign invasion, and, together with the western part of the Gaulish Pyrenees, they also occupied the Spanish side of these mountains. The name they gave themselves in their own language—a language differing from all the known tongues—was Escualdun, in the plural Escualdunac. Instead of this name, the Romans had employed, we know not for what reason, those of Vaques, Vasques, or Vascones, which have been retained, with certain variations of orthography, in the neo-Latin languages of Spain and Gaul. The Vasques or Basques never wholly underwent the yoke of the Roman administration which ruled all their neighbours, or, like the latter, quitted their language for the Latin tongue, or any of its modifications. They, in like manner, resisted the invasions of the Germanic peoples; and neither the Goths nor the Franks had succeeded in annexing them at all permanently to their empire. When the Franks had occupied all the large cities of the two Aquitaines, the western mountaineers became the centre and fulcrum of the frequent rebellions of the inhabitants of the plain. The Basques were thus allied against the Frank kings of the first and second race, with the Gallo-Romans, whom they disliked and whom they were accustomed to pillage in the intervals of these alliances. It was this often renewed confederation which gave the name of Vasconie or Gascony to the portion of Aquitaine situated between the mountains and the Garonne; and the difference of termination in the nominative and oblique cases of the same Latin word occasioned the distinction of Basques and of Vascons or Gascons.1
In placing themselves at the head of the great league of the natives of southern Gaul against the conquerors of the North, the only object of the Basques appears to have been their own independence, or the material profits of war, and by no means the establishment of their political sway in the plains, or the foundation of a new state; whether from excessive love of their native land, and contempt for foreign countries, or from a peculiar idiosyncrasy, ambition and the desire for renown were never their dominant passions. While with the aid of the insurgents, with whom they had so powerfully co-operated, there were formed, for the noble families of Aquitaine, the counties of Foix, Comminges, Bearn, Guienne, and Toulouse, they, as little seeking to be masters as consenting to be slaves, remained a people, a free people in their mountains and their valleys. They carried political indifference so far as to allow themselves to be nominally comprised in the territory of the count of Bearn, and in that of the king of Navarre, men of foreign race, whom they allowed to style themselves seigneurs of the Basques, on the understanding that this lordship should be in no way or degree real or effective.2
It was under this aspect that they appeared in the thirteenth century, interfering, as a nation, in the affairs of none of the surrounding countries; divided into two different suzerainties, from habit, from indifference, not from constraint, and making no attempt to form a junction as one people. The only thing that seemed nationally to interest them, was the maintenance of their hereditary customs and laws decreed in their cantonal assemblies, which they called Bilsâr. No passion, either of friendship or of hate, induced them to take part in the wars of foreigners; but if offered good pay, they were ready, individually, to enrol themselves under any banner, no matter whose or in what cause. The Basques, in common with the Navarrese and the inhabitants of the eastern Pyrenees, had, at this time, the same high reputation as light troops that the Brabançons had as heavy infantry.1 Their agility, their familiarity with rugged paths, an instinctive sharpness of wit and aptitude for stratagem, arising to a certain extent from their life of mountain hunter and shepherd, rendered them excellently suited for sudden attacks, for ambuscades, for night surprises, for forced marches in bad weather and over bad roads.
Three cantons only of the Basque country, Labour, the Valley of Soule, and Lower-Navarre, were in the ancient territory of Gaul: the rest formed part of Spain. The city of Bayonne, dependent on the duchy of Guienne, marked on the sea-coast the extreme limit of the Romane tongue, perhaps advanced somewhat more northwards in anterior centuries. At the gates of Bayonne commenced the territory of the count or viscount of Bearn, the most powerful seigneur in those parts, and whose policy generally influenced that of all the surrounding lords. He recognised no suzerain in any fixed and permanent manner, unless, perhaps, the king of Aragon, whose family was allied with his own. As to the king of England, of whom he held some fiefs near Bayonne, he by no means deemed himself at his disposal, and only swore him fealty and homage in consideration of a large sum. It was at a cheaper rate, but still for money, that this king obtained the homage of the less powerful lords of Bigorre, Comminges, of the three valleys, and of Gascony proper. They more than once, in the thirteenth century, made war, in his pay, against the king of France; but on the first indication of lofty assumption, on the first act of tyranny of their adopted suzerain, the Gascon chiefs would forthwith abandon him, and ally with his rival, or themselves form a league against him. This league, often renewed, maintained a correspondence with Guienne, for the purpose of exciting insurrection there, and its success in this way, at different epochs, would seem to indicate a prevalent desire to unite all south-western Gaul in an independent state. This notion was peculiarly agreeable to the upper classes and to the rich burghers of the towns of Guienne; but the lower orders clung to the English domination, under the persuasion that there would be no market for the wines of the country, if the English merchants ceased to trade with them.
Towards the commencement of the fourteenth century, a treaty of alliance and of marriage united in perpetuity in the same person the two lordships of Foix and Bearn, and thus founded a considerable power upon the common frontier of the kings of France and England. In the long war which, shortly after, broke out between these two kings, the first made great efforts to bring over the count of Foix to his side, and to induce him to act, in the conquest he meditated in Guienne, the part that the Bretons, the Angevins, and the Mançeaux had formerly played in that of Normandy. The count was gained by the promise, made in advance, of the towns of Dax and Bayonne; but as the expedition then undertaken did not succeed, all alliance was soon broken between the kingdom of France and the counts of Foix. Resuming their ancient position of complete political independence, the chiefs of this small state remained, as in observation, between the two rival powers, each of which made every effort to bring them to a declaration. Once, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the king of France sent Louis de Sancerre, one of his marshals, to count Gaston de Foix, to say that he had a great desire to come and see him. “He will be welcome,” answered the count, “I shall be happy to receive him.”—“But, sir,” said the marshal, “it is the king’s intention on his arrival to ascertain, clearly and distinctly, whom you will back, French or English; for you have ever maintained reserve in the war, arming at no request and at no command that you have received.” “Messire Louis,” replied the count, “if I have abstained from arming, I had good reason and warranty therein; for the war between the kings of France and England concerns not me. I hold my country of Béarn of God, my sword, and my birthright; and I am in no way called upon to place myself in the servitude or in the enmity of either the one or the other king.”1
“Such is the nature of the Gascons,” adds the old historian who relates this anecdote. “They are unstable, and never faithful to one lord for thirty years together.” Throughout the war between the kings of England and France, the reproach of fickleness, ingratitude, and perfidy was alternately applied by the two kings to the lords who desired to remain free and neutral, and whom each was intent upon securing for himself. The pettiest castellan in Gascony was courted by messages and by letters sealed with the great seal of France or of England.2 Hence the importance attained, towards the fifteenth century, by persons of whom little had been heard before, as the sires d’Albret, d’Armagnac, and many others far less powerful, such as the sires de Durfort, de Duras, and de Fezensac. To secure the alliance of the seigneur d’Albret, the chief of a little territory of heath and furze, the king of France, Charles V., gave him in marriage his sister, Isabelle de Bourbon. The sire d’Albret came to Paris, where he was received and fêted in the palace of his brother-in-law; but in the midst of this cordial reception, he could not help saying to his friends: “I will remain French, since I have promised it; but, by God, I had a better life, both I and my people, when we fought for the king of England.”3 About the same time, the sires de Durfort and de Rosan, made prisoners by the French in a battle, were both released without ransom, on condition, says a contemporary, that they would turn French, and promise, on their faith and honour, for ever to remain good Frenchmen, they and theirs.4 They swore it; but, on their return, they answered the first person who asked them the news: “Ah! sire, by constraint and menace of death, they made us become French; but we tell you, that in taking this oath, in our hearts we still kept faith to our natural lord, the king of England; and whatever we said or did, we will never be French.”1
The value set by such powerful kings on the friendship of a few barons, arose more especially from the influence which these barons, according to the party they adopted, could and did exercise over the castellans and knights of the duchy or Guienne, a great number of whom were related to them by marriage. Moreover, the Aquitans had, in general, more intimate relations with them than with the officers of the king of England, who could not speak the language of the country, or spoke it ill, and whose Anglo-Norman stateliness was altogether discordant with the vivacity and ease of the southerns. Accordingly, whenever one of the Gascon lords embraced the French party, a greater or less number of knights and squires of Aquitaine joined with him the army of the king of France. The various operation of this influence occasioned, during the whole of the fourteenth century and half of the fifteenth, constant movement among the noble population of the castles of Guienne; but far less among the bourgeoisie. This class of men adhered to the sovereignty of the king of England from the then prevalent idea that the sway of the other king would infallibly destroy all municipal liberty. The rapid decline of the communes of Languedoc, since they had become French, so deeply fixed this opinion in the minds of the Aquitans, that it made them quite superstitious on the subject. When the king of England, Edward III., assumed the title of king of France, they were alarmed, as though the mere title added to his name would altogether change his conduct towards them. Their apprehensions were so great, that, to dissipate them, king Edward thought it necessary to address to all the towns of Aquitaine a letter in which was the following passage: “We promise, in good faith, that, notwithstanding our taking possession of the kingdom of France, appertaining to us, we will not deprive you, in any manner, of your liberties, privileges, customs, jurisdictions, or other rights whatsoever, but will leave you in full enjoyment thereof, as heretofore, without any infringement by us or by our officers.”2
In the first years of the fifteenth century, the count d’Armagnac, who had for some time past been, with the sire d’Albret, at the head of a league formed among all the petty lords of Gascony, for the purpose of maintaining their independence, by relying, according to circumstances, on France or on England, formed an alliance with one of the two parties who, under the names of Orleans and Burgundy, then disputed the government of France. He engaged thus in a foreign quarrel, and brought his confederates into it, less, perhaps, from political motives than from personal interest; for one of his daughters had married the duke of Orleans, chief of the party of that name. Once mixed up with the intrigues and disputes which divided France, the Gascons, with the impetuosity of their southern temperament, displayed so great an activity, that the Orleans party soon changed its name to that of Armagnac, and the only party distinctions in the kingdom became those of Burgundians and Armagnacs. Notwithstanding the generality of this distinction, there were no true Armagnacs but those of the south, and these, enveloped as it were in a faction more numerous than themselves, forgot in their passionate partisanship the cause which had first made them league together, the independence of their native land. The interests of their country ceased to be the sole object of their policy; they no longer freely changed their suzerain and their allies, but blindly followed all the movements of a foreign faction.1
Under the reign of Charles VII., this faction involved them more deeply than they had ever before been involved in alliance with the king of France against England. After the astonishing victories which signalized the deliverance of the country invaded by the English, when, to complete this great reaction, it was resolved to expel them from the continent, and to deprive them of Guienne, the friends of the count of Armagnac all employed their utmost energies in urging la fortune de la France to this final goal. Their example induced those of the Gascon lords, who still held for the king of England, to desert him for king Charles. Of this number was the count de Foix; and this petty prince, who, a few years before, had promised the former of the two kings to conquer Languedoc for him, now undertook to superintend for the other that of the whole duchy of Aquitaine.1
A sort of superstitious terror, arising from the rapidity of the French triumphs, and the part played in them by the celebrated Maid of Orleans, now reigned in this country. It was believed that the cause of the king of France was favoured by Heaven, and when the count de Penthievre, chief of the French army, and the counts de Foix and d’Armagnac, entered on three sides the country of Guienne, they did not experience, either from the inhabitants or from the English, anything like the resistance formerly opposed to them. The English, despairing of their cause, gradually retreated to the sea; but the citizens of Bordeaux, more earnest for their municipal liberty than the English army for the dominion of its king on the continent, endured a siege of several months, nor did they capitulate at last, but on the express condition that they should be for ever exempt from taxes, subsidies, and forced loans. The city of Bayonne was the last to surrender to the count de Foix, who besieged it with an army of Bearnese and Basques, the former of whom followed him to the war because he was their seigneur, and the latter, because they hoped to enrich themselves. Neither of these two populations was in any degree interested in the cause of France; and while the Bearnese soldiers fought for king Charles, the Bearnese people looked upon the French as dangerous foreigners, and guarded their frontier against them. Once, during the siege of Saint-Sever, a French column, whether from mistake or in order to shorten its journey, entered the Bearnese territory; on the news of its march the tocsin rang in the villages, the peasants assembled in arms, and there took place between them and the troops of the king of France an engagement celebrated in the annals of the country, as the battle of Mesplede.2
The French seneschal of Guienne, who filled at Bordeaux the place of the English officer bearing the same title, did not take, before the assembled people, the ancient oath his predecessors had been accustomed to take at their installation, when they swore, in the Bordelaise tongue, to preserve to all people of the town and the country, lors franquessas, vrivileges et libertats, establimens, fors, coustumas, usages, et observences.1 Notwithstanding the capitulation of most of the towns, the duchy of Guienne was treated as a conquered territory; and this state of things, to which the Bordelais were not accustomed, so chafed them, that, less than a year after the conquest, they conspired with several castellans of the country to drive out the French with the aid of the king of England. Deputies from the town repaired to London and treated with Henry VI., who accepted their offers, and despatched four or five thousand men under John Talbot, the famous captain of the age.
The English having landed at the peninsula of Medoc, advanced without any resistance, because the main body of the French army had withdrawn, leaving only garrisons in the towns. On the news of this debarkation, there was great discussion at Bordeaux, not as to whether they should again become English, but as to the manner in which they should treat the officers and soldiers of the king of France.2 Some wished them to be allowed to depart without impediment or injury, others that full vengeance should be inflicted on them. During the discussion, the English troops arrived before Bordeaux, some citizens opened one of the gates, and most of the French who remained in the town became prisoners of war. The king of France sent, in all haste, six hundred lances and a number of archers, to reinforce the garrisons of the towns; but before these succours arrived at their destination, the army of Talbot, now joined by all the barons of the Bordelais, and four thousand men from England, reconquered nearly all the fortresses.
Meantime king Charles VII. came in person, with a numerous army, to the frontiers of Guienne. He at first endeavoured to open a correspondence with the people, but he did not succeed; no one gave his co-operation in effecting the restoration of the royal government.3 Finding himself thus reduced to depend wholly on force, he took several towns by assault, and beheaded, as traitors, all the men of the country who were found with arms in their hands. The counts de Foix and d’Albret, and the other seigneurs of Gascony, gave him, in this campaign, the same aid as in the former; they reconquered southern Guienne, while the French army fought with the English, near Castillon, a decisive battle, in which John Talbot and his son were killed. This victory opened the road to Bordeaux for the army of the king and that of the confederate lords. They formed a junction at a short distance from the town, which they sought to starve into surrender by devastating its territory; and, at the same time, a fleet of Poitevin, Breton, and Flemish vessels, entered the Gironde. The English, who formed the majority of the garrison of Bordeaux, seeing the town invested on all sides, demanded to capitulate, and constrained the citizens to follow their example. They obtained permission to embark and to take with them all those citizens who desired to accompany them; so great a number departed in this way, that for many years Bordeaux was without population and without commerce.1
In the terms of the capitulation, twenty persons only were to be banished for having conspired against the French. Among the number, were the sires de l’Esparre and de Duras; their property, and that of all the other suspected persons, served to recompense the conquerors. The king withdrew to Tours; but he left strong garrisons in all the towns, resolved, says a contemporary, to hold the rod over the heads of the people.2 And to reduce, says the same historian, the town of Bordeaux to more complete subjection than before, the French built two citadels there, the château Trompette, and the fort de Hâ. During the progress of these works, the French arrested the sire de l’Esparre, who had broken his ban; he was taken to Poitiers, where he was condemned to death, beheaded, and cut into six pieces, which were exposed in different places.
Long after this last conquest of Guienne, many of its inhabitants regretted the government of the English, and watched occasion to resume correspondence with England. Although they did not succeed in these intrigues, the effect of them was feared, and ordinances of the king of France forbad any Englishman to reside at Bordeaux. The English vessels were to leave their guns and other arms, with their powder, at Blaye; and the English merchants could not enter any house in the town, or go into the country to taste or buy wines, unless accompanied by armed men and officers appointed expressly to watch their actions and words. At a later period, these officers, useless in their former capacity, became sworn interpreters.1
Despite its regrets, the province of Guienne remained French; and the kingdom of France, extending to Bayonne, weighed, without counterpoise, upon the free territory of Gascony. The lords of the country at the foot of the Pyrenees soon felt that they had gone too far in their affection for the French monarchy. They repented, but too late, for it was no longer possible for them to struggle against that monarchy, now comprehending the whole extent of Gaul, with the exception of their petty country. Yet the majority of them courageously adventured upon the unequal contest; they sought a fulcrum in the revolt of the high noblesse of France against the successor of Charles VII., and engaged in the league which was then called le bien public.2 The peace which the French leaguers made soon after with Louis XI., for money and offices, did not satisfy the southerns, whose views in this patriotic war had been wholly different. Frustrated in their hopes, the counts d’Armagnac, de Foix, d’Albret, d’Astarac, and de Castres, addressed themselves to the king of England, inviting him to make a descent on Guienne, and promising to march to his aid with fifteen thousand fighting men, to transfer to him all the towns of Gascony, and even to secure for him Toulouse.3 But English policy was no longer favourable to wars on the continent, and the offer of the Gascons was refused. In their conviction that their ancient liberty was for ever gone, did not the province of Aquitaine once more become a separate state, several of them intrigued to induce the brother of the king of France, Charles, duke de Guienne, to declare himself independent. But the duke died of poison, as soon as Louis XI. perceived that he listened to these suggestions; and a French army besieged in Lectoure count John d’Armagnac, the most active partisan of the cause of Gascony. The town was taken by assault, and given over to fire and blood; the count perished in the massacre; and his wife, who was within two months of her confinement, was forced, by the French officers, to take a draught which was to procure abortion, but which caused her death in two days.1 A member of the family of Albret, made prisoner in this war, was beheaded at Tours; and, shortly after, a bastard of Armagnac, who attempted to restore the fortunes of his country, and succeeded in taking several places, was also captured and put to death. Lastly, James d’Armagnac, duke de Nemours, who entertained, or was supposed to entertain, similar designs, was beheaded at Paris, at the Piliers des Halles, and his children were placed under the scaffold during their father’s execution.
This terrible example was not lost upon the barons of Gascony; and although many men of that country turned their eyes to the other side of the ocean; although they long hoped the return, with English succours, of Gaillard de Durfort, sire de Duras, and the other Gascons or Aquitans who had sought refuge in England,2 no one dared undertake that which the Armagnacs had undertaken. The count de Foix, the most powerful lord of the Pyrenees, abandoned all idea of any other conduct towards the kings of France than that of a loyal servant, gallant at their court, brave in their camps, devoted to them in life and death. Most of the chiefs of these countries and the nobles of Guienne pursued the same policy; incapacitated from doing aught of themselves, they intrigued for the titles and offices which the king of France bestowed on his favourites. Many obtained these, and even supplanted the native French in the good graces of their own kings. They owed this advantage, rather brilliant than solid, to their natural shrewdness, and an aptitude for business, the result of their long and arduous efforts to maintain their national independence against the ambition of the neighbouring kings.
THE INHABITANTS OF WALES.
Wars of the Welsh against the Anglo-Normans—Complete submission of Wales—Persecution of the Welsh bards—Welsh refugees in France—Yvain of Wales—Free companies—The chevalier Rufin—Promises of the king of France to the Welsh—Insuriection of Owen Glendowr—Panic terror of the English soldiers—Landing of the French in Wales—March and retreat of the French—Termination of the insurrection of the Welsh—Wars of the succession in England—Enterprise of Henry Tudor—The Welsh under Henry VII., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and the Stuarts—Actual state of the Welsh population—Turn of mind and character of the Welsh nation—Differences of idiom in Wales—Language of Cornwall.
The reproach of fickleness and perfidy, so long lavished on the free populations of southern Gaul by their national enemies, the French and the Anglo-Normans, was constantly applied by the latter to the natives of Cambria.1 And, indeed, if it were perfidy not to recognise any right of conquest, and to make incessant efforts to shake off the foreign yoke, the Welsh were certainly the most faithless of all nations; for their resistance to the Normans, by force and by stratagem, was as pertinacious as had been that of their ancestors against the Anglo-Saxons. They carried on a perpetual war of skirmishes and ambuscades, intrenching themselves in the forests and marshes, and seldom risking an engagement on level ground with horsemen armed at all points. The wet and rainy season was that in which the Cambrians were invincible;2 they then sent away their wives and children, drove their flocks into the mountains, broke down the bridges, let loose the ponds, and beheld with delight the brilliant cavalry of their enemies sinking in the waters and mud of their marshes.3 In general the first engagements were in their favour, but in the long run force gained the victory, and a fresh portion of Wales was conquered.
The chiefs of the victorious army took hostages, disarmed the inhabitants, and forced them to swear obedience to the king and justiciaries of England; this compulsory oath was speedily violated,1 and the Welsh insurgents would besiege the castles of the foreign barons and judges. On the news of this resumption of hostilities, the hostages, imprisoned in England in the royal fortresses, were generally put to death, and sometimes the king himself had them executed in his presence. John, son of Henry II., had twenty-eight, all under age, hanged in one day, before he sat down to breakfast.2
Such were the scenes presented by the struggle of the Welsh against the Anglo-Normans, up to the period when king Edward, the first of that name since the conquest, passed the lofty mountains of North Cambria, which no king of England before him had crossed. The highest summit of these mountains, called in Welsh Craigeiri, or the snowy peak, and in English Snowdon, was considered sacred to poetry, and it was believed that whoever slept there awoke inspired.3 This last bulwark of Cambrian independence was not forced by English troops, but by an army from Guienne, composed for the most part of Basque mercenaries.4 Trained in their own mountains to military tactics almost identical with those of the Welsh, they were more adapted to surmount the difficulties of the country than the heavy cavalry and regular infantry who had hitherto been employed in the service.
In this great defeat perished a man whom his countrymen, in their old spirit of patriotic supersition, had regarded as predestined to restore the ancient British liberty. This was Llewellyn ap Griffith, chief of North Wales, who had gained more victories over the English than any of his predecessors.5 There existed an old prediction, that a prince of Wales would be crowned at London; mockingly to accomplish this prophecy, king Edward had the head of Llewellyn, crowned with a wreath of ivy, stuck on a pike on the topmost turret of the Tower of London. David, brother of this unfortunate prince, attempted to resume the war; but, taken alive by the English troops, he was hanged and quartered, and his head was placed beside that of his brother on the battlements of the Tower, where the rain and the wind bleached them together.1
It is said, that after his victory, Edward I. assembled the leaders of the conquered people, and announced to them that, out of regard to their spirit of nationality, he would give them a chief, born in their own country, and who had never spoken a single word either of French or English. All were full of joy at this, and sent forth loud acclamations.2 “Well then,” said the king, “you shall have for a chief and prince, my son, Edward, just born at Caernarvon, and whom I here name Edward of Caernarvon.” Hence the custom of giving the title of prince of Wales to the eldest sons of the kings of England.
Edward I. erected a great number of fortresses on the coasts,3 that he might at all times forward troops by sea; and cut down the forests of the interior, which might serve as a refuge for the partisan bands.4 If it be not true that he ordered the massacre of all the Welsh bards, he it was, at all events, who commenced the system of political persecution, of which this class of men were constantly the object on the part of the kings of England.5 The principal bards had perished in great numbers in the insurrectionary battles; the survivors, deprived of their protectors, after the downfal of the rich men of the country, and compelled to sing their verses, from town to town, were placed within the category of men without ostensible means of living, by the Anglo-Norman justiciaries. “Let no minstrels, bards, rhymers, or other Welsh vagabonds, be henceforth permitted to overrun the country as heretofore,” said their ordinances.6 No native Welshman could, under the same ordinances, occupy the smallest public post in his native country; to be viscount, seneschal, chancellor, judge, constable of a castle, registrar, forester, etc., it was essential to have been born in England, or in some other foreign country.7 The towns and castles were occupied by foreign garrisons, and the natives were taxed arbitrarily, or, as the royal decrees expressed it, at the discretion of their lords, to supply maintenance for the garrisons of the said castles.1
Many, forced by the conquest to expatriate themselves, passed into France, where they were well received; this emigration continued during the whole of the fourteenth century, and it is from these refugees that descend the French families that bear the now common name of Gallois or Le Gallois. The most considerable of those who proceeded thither in the reign of Philip VI. was a young man named Owen, whom the king retained in his palace, and brought up among the pages of his chamber. This Owen was of the family of Llewellyn, probably his great nephew, perhaps his grandson; and the French, who regarded him as the legitimate heir of the principality of Wales, called him Evain or Yvain of Wales.2 After the death of Philip de Valois, the young exile continued to reside at the court of France, greatly beloved by king John, by whose side he fought at the fatal battle of Poitiers. Afterwards, in the reign of Charles V., war recommencing against the English, Owen was entrusted with various military commands, and, among others, with a descent upon Guernsey, which had been English since the conquest of England by the Normans. Although a simple squire, he had more than once knights of renown under his orders; his company, as it was then called, consisted of an hundred men-at-arms, at whose head he made several campaigns in Limousin, in Perigord, and in Saintonge, against the captains of the king of England. One of his relations, John Win or Wynne, celebrated for his graceful deportment, and who was surnamed le poursuivant d’amours, served with him in this war, having, in like manner, under his banner a small troop of Welsh exiles.3
The grand-nephew of Llewellyn nourished in exile the thought of freeing his country from English domination, and of recovering, as he himself says in a charter, the inheritance of the kings of Wales, his predecessors.1 He received from king Charles V. assistance in money, munitions, and vessels; but notwithstanding this support, his ambition and his courage, he never revisited Cambria, and only encountered the English on foreign fields. He followed Duguesclin into Spain, where, for two years, the kings of France and of England waged war in the name of the rivalry of two pretenders to the throne of Castile, Peter the Cruel and Henry de Transtamare.
In one of the combats fought in this war, the earl of Pembroke and other English knights of Norman origin, were taken prisoners by the French, and, as they were being conducted to Santander, Owen went to see them, and, addressing the earl in French, said: “Come you, sir earl, to this country to do me homage for the lands you hold in the principality of Wales, of which I am heir, and which your king takes from me contrary to all right?”2 The earl of Pembroke was astonished to hear a man, whom he did not know, address him in this manner: “Who are you,” asked he, “that speak to me thus?” “I am Owen, son of the prince of Wales, whom your king of England slew, disinheriting me; but, when I can, with the aid of God and of my dear lord, the king of France, I will apply a remedy; and know, that were it place and time for me to combat you, I would prove upon you that you and your fathers, and those of the earl of Hereford, have done me and mine treason and wrong.” Hereupon one of the earl of Pembroke’s knights, named Thomas Saint-Aubin, advanced to the Welshman and said: “Yvain, if you seek to maintain that in my lord, or his father, there has been or is any treason, or that he owes you homage, or anything else, throw down your glove, and you will soon find one to take it up.” “You are a prisoner,” answered the Welshman; “I cannot in honour challenge you now, for you are not your own man, but belong to those who have taken you; when you are free, I will speak further to you on the subject, and the thing shall not remain where it is.”3 The dispute, however, had no result, for before the earl of Pembroke and Thomas Saint-Aubin had regained their liberty, Yvain of Wales died of a stiletto stab administered by a countryman of his, in whom he placed full confidence, but who had sold himself to the king of England. This murder was committed in the year 1378, near the town of Mortagne in Saintonge, then besieged by the French. The assassin effected his escape, and went into Guienne, where he was well received by the seneschal of Landes and the other English commanders.
Very few Cambrians consented to serve the ruler of their country; and they who came to the wars of France, under the standard of Edward III., did so on compulsion, and against their will. The Welsh who were levied, en masse, to form bodies of light infantry, brought with them into the king of England’s armies their national enmity to the English, and often quarrelled and came to blows with them; often, too, they deserted to the French with arms and baggage, or spread over the country to live as free companies. This was a profession much in vogue at this time, and in which the Cambrians excelled, from their long habit of guerilla warfare in their forests and mountains. Thus, one of these great companies, which at this period rendered themselves so celebrated and so terrible, was under the orders of a Welshman, who was called in France the chevalier Rufin, but whose real name was probably Riewan.1 This captain, under whom adventurers of all nations had assembled, had adopted, as his district of pillage, the country between the Loire and the Seine, from the frontiers of Burgundy to those of Normandy. His head-quarters were sometimes near Orleans, sometimes near Chartres: he put to ransom or occupied the little towns and the castles, and was so dreaded, that his men went in scattered troops of twenty, thirty, or forty, and none dared attack them.2
In the second half of the fourteenth century, when the kings of France and England were mutually exhausting every means of injuring each other, the former, who had learned to comprehend the national spirit of the Cambrians, sought to turn to account the patriotism of this petty nation, whose existence was scarcely suspected by his predecessors of the twelfth century.1 More than once his emissaries proceeded to north and south Wales, promising the natives the aid and protection of France, if they would rise against the English power. These agents spread themselves over the country, most of them attired as mendicant monks, a body greatly respected at this period, and whose habit was least liable to suspicion from the circumstance that it was worn by men of every nation, who made it a means of support. But the Anglo-Norman authority detected these manœuvres, and on several occasions expelled all foreigners from Wales, priests, laymen, and more especially the itinerant monks.2 It also prohibited the native Welsh from holding, upon any tenure whatever, any lands on the English territory.3 The long expected insurrection was to commence on the arrival of a French fleet in sight of the Welsh coast; for several years this fleet was expected by the Cambrians and by the English with very different feelings. Many proclamations of king Edward III. and Richard II. have this preamble: “Whereas our enemies of France propose to land in our principality of Wales—”4 followed by orders to all the Anglo-Norman lords of the country and marches of Wales, without delay, to garrison and provision their castles and fortresses, and to the justiciaries to seize and imprison, in safe custody, all men suspected of corresponding with the enemy.5
The preparations of France for a descent upon Wales, were less considerable and less prompt than the king of England feared, and the Cambrians hoped. A rumour of it spread in the year 1369, and there was then formed a project of restoring the family of Llewellyn in the person of the unfortunate Yvain of Wales; but this pretender to the crown of Cambria died; and the century passed away without any real effort. In making great promises to the Welsh, France had no other design than that of exciting an insurrection which would create a diversion of part of the forces of England; and, on their side, the Welsh, unwilling rashly to hazard a movement, awaited the arrival of the promised succours ere they would revolt. At length, weary of the delay, and impatient to recover their national independence, they put themselves in motion, taking the chance of being supported. The immediate occasion of the insurrection was a casual circumstance, of little importance in itself.
Towards the end of the year 1400, a noble Welshman, who, from an ambition to shine, had repaired to the court of England, where he was well received, offended king Henry IV. and was compelled to quit London. Partly from personal resentment and the embarrassment of his position, partly from an impulse of patriotism, he resolved to place himself at the head of a movement which all his countrymen desired, but which no one had ventured to commence. He descended from an ancient chief of the country, and was called Owen Glendowr, a name which, at the court of England, in order to give it a Norman aspect, had been converted into Glendordy.1 As soon as Owen had raised the ancient standard of the Kymrys, in the recently conquered portion of Wales, the most considerable men of these districts collected around him. Among others, there were several members of a powerful family, named Ab Tudowr, or son of Tudowr, who counted among their ancestors one Ednyfed Vychan, who, desirous of having armorial bearings, like the barons of England, had emblazoned on his escutcheon three severed Norman heads.2 On the report of this national movement, the scattered remnant of the Welsh bards became animated with a new enthusiasm, and announced Owen Glendowr as the man who was to accomplish the ancient predictions, and to restore the crown of Britain to the Kymrys. Several poems, composed on the occasion, have come down to us.3 They produced such an effect, that, in a great assembly of the insurgents, Owen Glendowr was solemnly proclaimed and inaugurated chief and prince of all Cambria. He sent messengers into South Wales to diffuse the insurrection, while the king of England, Henry IV., ordered all his loyal subjects of Wales, French, Flemish, English, and Welsh, to arm against Owen de Glendordy, self-styled prince of Wales, guilty of high treason to the royal majesty of England.4
The first engagements were favourable to the insurgents. They defeated the English militia of Herefordshire, and the Flemings of Ross and Pembrokeshire. They were about to cross the English frontier when king Henry, in person, advanced against them with considerable forces. He obliged them to retreat; but he had scarcely set foot on the Welsh territory, than incessant rains, flooding the roads, and swelling the rivers, prevented his further advance, and compelled him to encamp his army for several months in unhealthy places, where they suffered at once from sickness and hunger. The soldiers, whose imaginations were excited by fatigue and inaction, recalled to mind with terror old popular legends as to the sorceries of the Welsh,1 and believed the bad weather they suffered to be the work of supernatural powers, obedient to Owen Glendowr.2 Seized with a sort of panic terror, they refused to march further against a man who had the tempest at his disposal. This opinion gained ground among the people in England; but all Owen’s magic consisted in his indefatigable activity, and in his great ability. There was at this period, among the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, a party of malcontents who desired to dethrone king Henry IV. At their head were Henry Percy, son of the earl of Northumberland,3 a family most powerful in the country ever since the conquest, and Thomas Percy, his brother, earl of Worcester; with these the new prince of Wales established a correspondence, and the alliance they concluded attached for a moment to the cause of Welsh independence all the northern marches of Wales, between the Dee and the Severn, and more especially of the county of Chester, whose inhabitants, of pure English race, were naturally less hostile to the Cambrians than were the Normans and Flemings established in the south. But the complete defeat of the two Percys, in a battle fought near Shrewsbury, dissolved the friendly relations of the Welsh insurgents with their neighbours of English race, and left them no other resources than their own strength and their hope in the aid of the king of France.4
This king, Charles VI., who had not yet entirely fallen into imbecility, seeing the Cambrians at open hostility with the king of England, resolved to fulfil towards them his promises and those of his predecessors. He concluded with Owen Glendowr a treaty, the first article of which ran thus: “Charles, by the grace of God, king of France; and Owen, by the same grace, prince of Wales; will be united, confederated and bound to each other by the ties of true alliance, true friendship, and good and solid union, especially against Henry of Lancaster, the enemy of the said lords, king and prince, and against all his aiders and abettors.”1
Many Welshmen proceeded to France to accompany the troops which king Charles was to send, and many of them were taken in various landings which the French first attempted on the coast of England, preferring to enrich themselves with the pillage of some great town or sea-port, than to make war in the poor country of Wales,2 among mountains and marshes.
At length, however, a large fleet sailed from Brest to aid the Cambrians; it carried six hundred men-at-arms, and eighteen hundred foot soldiers, commanded by John de Rieux, marshal of France, and John de Hangest, grand-marshal of the cross-bowmen. They landed at Milford in Pembrokeshire, and seized upon that town and upon Haverford, both founded, as their names indicate, by the Flemings, who in the reign of Henry I. had taken possession of and occupied the country. The French then proceeded eastward, and, at the first purely Welsh town they reached, found ten thousand insurgents, commanded by a chief whom the historians of the time do not name. The combined forces then marched to Caermarthen, and thence to Llandovery, and thence towards Worcester, attacking and destroying on their way the castles of the Anglo-Norman barons and knights.3 Some miles from Worcester, a strong English army met them, but instead of offering them battle, it took up a position, and entrenched itself in the hills. The French and Welsh followed the example, and the two hostile bodies remained thus for a week in presence of each other, separated by a deep valley. Every day both armies formed into battle array to commence the attack, but nothing actually took place beyond some skirmishing, in which a few hundred men were killed.
The French and Welsh army soon suffered from want of provisions, the English occupying the plain around their encampments. Acting upon their usual tactics, the Welsh threw themselves by night on the baggage of the enemy, and, carrying off most of their provisions, necessitated the retreat of the English army, which, it would appear, was resolved not to commence the fight.1 The French men-at-arms, little accustomed to a dearth of food, and whose heavy armour and extensive baggage rendered incommodious and disagreeable to them warfare in a poor and mountainous country, grew weary of the enterprise, in which there was much obscure danger, and little renown to be acquired by brilliant feats of arms. Leaving therefore the Cambrians to contend with their national enemies, they quitted Wales, and landed at Saint Pol-de-Leon, relating that they had made a campaign, which in the memory of man no king of France had ventured to undertake,2 and had ravaged more than sixty leagues of country in the territories of the king of England, glorying only in the injury done to the English, and not at all in the aid they had given the Welsh, in whom, for themselves, no one in France took any interest.
The insurgents of south Wales were defeated, for the first time, in 1407, on the banks of the Usk, by an English army under the command of Henry, son of king Henry IV., who, bearing in England the title of prince of Wales, was charged with the conduct of the war against the chief elected by the Welsh. A letter which he wrote to his father, announcing this victory, is preserved among the ancient public acts of England. It is in French, the language of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, but in a French somewhat differing in orthography, grammar, and, as far as we can judge, in pronunciation, from the language of the court of France at the same period. It would appear that, with the accent of Normandy, retained in England by the men of Norman descent, another accent had gradually combined, differing from all the dialects of the French language, and which the sons of the Normans had contracted by hearing English spoken around them, and by themselves speaking the Anglo-French jargon, which was the medium of their communications with the lower classes. This, at least, may be inferred from reading the following passages,1 taken promiscuously from the letter of the son of Henry IV., “Mon tres-redoutè et três soverein seigneur et peire . . . le onzieme jour de cest present moys de Mars, vos rebelx des parties de Glamorgan, Uske, Netherwent et Overwent, feurent assemblez à la nombre de oyt mille gentz . . . A eux assemblerent vos foialx et vaillants chivalers . . . vos gentz avoient le champe; nientmeins . .”
The fortune of the Welsh insurgents constantly declined after their first defeat, although ten years elapsed between that defeat and the entire subjection of the country. Perhaps, also, their hope of the aid of the French, a hope continually deceived but still fondly cherished, caused them a kind of discouragement never felt by their ancestors, who relied only on themselves. Owen Glendowr, the last person invested with the title of prince of Wales by the election of the Welsh people, survived the ruin of his party, and died in obscurity. His son Meredith capitulated, went to England, and received his pardon from the king.2 The other chiefs of the insurrection were also pardoned, and several of them even obtained posts at the court of London, in order that they might not return to Wales, which, indeed, had ceased to be inhabitable by the Welsh, from the increased vexations of the agents of English authority. Among these Cambrians, exiles by necessity or ambition, was a member of the family of the sons of Tudowr, named Owen ap Meredith ap Tudowr, who, during the reign of Henry V., lived with him as groom of his chamber, and was very much in grace with the king, who granted him many favours, and deigned to address him as nostre chìer et foyal. His manners and handsome form made a vivid impression on queen Catherine of France, who, becoming widow of Henry V., secretly married Owen ap Tudowr or Oven Tudor, as he was called in England. He had by her two sons, Jasper and Edmund, the second of whom, on attaining manhood, married Margaret, daughter of John de Beaufort, earl of Somerset, issue of the royal family of Plantagenet.
It was at this period that the branches of this family were slaughtering each other in a dispute for the possession of the crown conquered by William the Bastard. The right of hereditary succession had by degrees prevailed over the election retained, though imperfectly, in the first periods following the conquest. Instead of interfering to adjudge the crown to the most worthy to wear it, the Anglo-Norman aristocracy contented themselves with examining which of the pretenders approached nearest by his lineage to the original stock of the Conqueror. All was decided by the comparison of those genealogical trees of which the Norman families were so proud, and which from their form were called pé de gru, or crane’s foot, in modern English, pedigree. The order of hereditary succession was tolerably peaceful so long as the direct line of descendants of Henry II. endured; but when the inheritance passed to the collateral branches, numerous pretenders on the score of hereditary right arose, and there were more factions, troubles, and discords, than the practice of election had ever occasioned. Then broke out the most hideous of civil wars, that of relations against relations, of grown men against children in the cradle. For several generations, two numerous families were killing each other, either in pitched battles or by assassination, to maintain their legitimacy, without either of the two being able to destroy the other, some member of which always started up to combat and dethrone his rival, and reign until he himself was dethroned.1 There perished in these quarrels, according to the historians of the time, sixty or eighty princes of the royal house, nearly all young, for the life of the males was brief in these families. The women, who lived longer, had time to see their sons massacred by their nephews, and the latter by other nephews or uncles, themselves speedily assassinated by some equally near relation.
In the reign of Richard III., of the house of York, who owed the crown to several assassinations, a son of Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort, named Henry, was in France, whither he had been obliged to fly as an antagonist of the York party. Weary of living in exile, and relying on the universal hatred excited by king Richard, he resolved to try his fortune in England, as a claimant of the crown, in right of his mother, a descendant of Edward III. Having neither cross nor pile,1 as an old historian expresses it, he applied to the king of France, Louis XI., who gave him some money, with which he hired three thousand men in Normandy and Brittany. He sailed from Harfleur, and, after a passage of six days, landed in Wales, the country of his paternal ancestors. On landing, he unfurled a red flag, the ancient standard of the Cambrians, as though his project were to raise the nation, and render it independent of the English.2 This enthusiastic people, over whom the power of emblems was ever very great, without examining whether the quarrel between Henry Tudor and Richard III. was not wholly foreign to them, ranged themselves, by a sort of instinct, around their old standard.
The red flag3 was planted on Snowdon, which the pretender assigned as a rendezvous for those Welsh who had promised to arm in his cause. Not one failed on the appointed day.4 Even the bards, resuming their ancient spirit, sang and prophesied, in the style of other days, the victory of the Kymrys over the Saxon and Norman enemy. But the matter in hand was by no means the release of the Cambrians from the yoke of the foreigner; all the fruit of the victory for them was to place a man with a little Welsh blood in his veins on the throne of the conquerors of Wales. When Henry Tudor arrived on the frontiers of England, he found a reinforcement of several thousand men brought to him by sir Thomas Boucher, a Norman by name and origin; other gentlemen of the western counties came with their vassals and yeomen to join the army of the pretender. He penetrated into the English territory without encountering any obstacle, as far as Bosworth in Leicestershire, where he gave battle to Richard III., defeated him, killed him, and was crowned in his stead under the title of Henry VII.
Henry VII. placed in his armorial bearings the Cambrian dragon beside the three lions of Normandy. He created a new office of poursuivant-at-arms, under the name of rouge-dragon,1 and, with the aid of the authentic or fabulous archives of Wales, traced his genealogy back to Cadwallader, the last king of all Britain, and, through him, up to Brutus, son of Æneas, the pretended father of the Britons.2 But to these acts of personal vanity was limited the gratitude of the king to the people whose devotion had procured him victory and the crown. His son, Henry VIII., while he allowed the Welsh, whom Henry VII. had ennobled for services rendered to his person, to retain the Norman titles of earls, barons, and baronets, treated, like his predecessors, the mass of the people as a conquered nation, at once feared and disliked, and undertook to destroy the ancient customs of the Cambrians, the remnant of their social state, and even their language.3
When the religious supremacy of the pope had been abolished in England, the Welsh, whom the Roman church had never aided in their attempts to maintain their national independence, adopted, without repugnance, the religious changes decreed by the English government. But this government, which gave every encouragement to the translation of the Bible, did not have it translated into Welsh; on the contrary, some natives of that country, zealous for the Reformation, having, at their own expense, published a Welsh version of the Scriptures, far from praising them, as would have been done in England, the authorities ordered the destruction of all the copies, which were taken for this purpose from the churches, and publicly burnt.4 English authority, at about the same time, attacked the historical manuscripts and documents, then more numerous in Wales than in any other country of Europe. The high families who possessed archives began to keep them secret, either as a mode of paying court to England, or to preserve them from destruction.5 Some of these families even incurred disfavour for communicating curious information to the learned men, who, towards the close of the sixteenth century, made researches into the antiquities of Wales. An estimable writer, Edward Lhuyd, author of British Archaiology, experienced infinite mortification on account of the publication of his book. This class of learning and research became matter of suspicion in the eyes of authority, and he who to prosecute it went to reside in Wales, was doubly an object of distrust. One antiquarian was actually subjected to public prosecution for an offence of this sort, in the reign of Elizabeth, the last descendant of Henry Tudor.
The Scottish family of the Stuarts showed quite as little good will to the Welsh nation; and yet, when the English rose against this family, the majority of the Welsh enrolled themselves on its side, from a sort of national opposition to the feelings of the English people. Perhaps, too, they hoped to effect some degree of freedom for themselves, amid the troubles of England, and by a compact with the royal family, whom they supported against the English. Things, however, turned out otherwise; royalty succumbed, and Wales, as being royalist, had to endure still greater oppression than before. Since that time the Welsh have tranquilly participated in all the political changes occurring in England, no longer rebelling, but still not forgetting the grounds upon which they might to themselves justify rebellion. “We will bear in mind,” says one of their writers, “that the lordships and best lands of the country are in the hands of men of foreign race, who have taken them by violence from the ancient legitimate proprietors, whose names and real heirs are well known to us.”
In general, the possessors of great domains and lordships in Wales were, up to a recent date, and probably still are, to a certain extent, harder than those in England towards their farmers and peasants; a fact, no doubt, attributable to the comparative novelty of the conquest of the Welsh provinces, not accomplished until about the fourteenth century, so that the nobles there are much newer-comers, and to the further circumstance that the tongue of the natives has always remained distinct from that of the conquerors. The species of national hostility between the seigneurs and the peasants has extended the emigration of the poorer Welsh families to the United States of America. There these descendants of the ancient Kymrys have lost their manners and their language, and have forgotten, in the bosom of the most complete liberty that civilized man can enjoy, the vain dreams of British independence. Those who have remained in the land of their ancestors retain, amidst the poverty or mediocrity of fortune which has ever been their lot, a character of haughty pride, the offspring of great recollections and long hopes, always deceived, but never abandoned. They stand with erect front before the powerful and rich of England and of their own country, “and think themselves a better and nobler race,” said a Welshman of the last century, “than this nobility of yesterday, the issue of bastards, of adventurers, and of assassins.”1
Such is the national spirit of the most energetic among the present Cambrians, and they carry it, sometimes, to such a point, that the English designate them Red-hot Welshmen. Since the revolution of America and of France, this spirit is combined in them with all the grand ideas of natural and social liberty that those revolutions have everywhere aroused. But, whilst ardently desiring the progress of high modern civilization, the enlightened inhabitants of Wales have not lost their ancient passion for their national history, language, and literature. The wealthy among them have formed associations for the publication of their numerous collections of historical documents, and with the view of reanimating, if possible, the cultivation of the old poetic talent of the bards. These societies have established annual poetical and musical meetings, for the two arts ever go hand in hand in Wales; and out of, perhaps, a somewhat superstitious respect for ancient customs, the literary and philosophical assemblies of the new bards are held in the open air, on the hills. At the time when the French revolution still made the English government tremble, these meetings, always very numerous, were forbidden by authority, on account of the democratic principles which prevailed at them.2 Now they are perfectly free, and there is every year awarded by them the prize of poetical inspiration, a faculty which the Cambrian language expresses in one word, Awen.3
The Awen is now found principally among the northern Welsh, the last who maintained their ancient social state against the invasion of the Anglo-Normans.1 It is also among them that the native language is spoken with the greatest purity, and over the largest extent of country. In the southern counties, earlier conquered, the Welsh dialect is mixed up with French and English idioms. There are, indeed, entire districts whence it has completely disappeared; and often a brook or bridle-path marks the separation of the two languages, of, on the one side, corrupt Cambrian, on the other, a barbarous English, spoken by the mixed posterity of the Flemish, Norman, and Saxon soldiers who conquered the country in the twelfth century. These men, although, for the most part, of the same condition with the conquered population, have retained a sort of hereditary disdain for it. They affect, for example, not to know the name of a single individual inhabiting the part of the hundred or parish in which Welsh is spoken. “I don’t know the man,” is the reply; “I believe there’s some such person lives somewhere in Welshland.”2
Such is the actual state of that population and that language, for which the bards of the sixth century daringly predicted eternity of duration: their prediction, however, will not, at all events, be falsified in our days. The Cambrian idiom is still spoken by a sufficiently extensive population to render its future extinction very difficult to foresee. It has survived all the other dialects of the ancient British language; for that of the natives of Cornwall came within the category of a dead language towards the close of the last century. It is true that since the tenth century, when it was driven by the Anglo-Saxons beyond the river Tamer,3 the population of Cornwall has never played any political part. At the time of the Norman conquest, it supported the English of the adjacent counties in their resistance to the foreigners, but, conquered with them, it participated in all the phases of their subsequent fate. As it gradually mingled more and more closely with the populations of English race, its original language lost ground from north to south, so that, an hundred years ago, there were only a few villages at the extremity of the promontory, where the ancient idiom of the country was still spoken. In 1776, some travellers questioned, on this subject, an old fisherman in one of these villages, who answered: “I only know four or five persons who speak British, and they are old people like myself, from sixty to eighty years of age; the young people don’t know a word of it.”1
Thus the eighteenth century beheld the end of the language of Cornwall, which now exists only in a few books. It differs in a remarkable manner from the Welsh dialect, and had probably been spoken in the ancient times by all the British tribes of the south and east, by the men whom the old annals call Loëgrwys, who, before they joined the Kymrys in Britain, dwelt, for a longer or shorter period, in the southwest of Gaul.2
Prophecy of Merlin—Nine pretenders to the throne of Scotland—Invasion of Edward I.—William Wallace—Robert Bruce—Enfranchisement of Scotland—Character of the people of the border—Social condition of the Scots—Establishment of the Reformation—English puritans—Scottish covenanters—Alliance between the two nations—Civil war in England—Misunderstanding between the two nations—Charles II. proclaimed king in Scotland—Oliver Cromwell enters Scotland—Measures taken against the Scots—Restoration of Charles II.—Persecution of the Presbyterians—Their insurrection—Battle of Bothwell-bridge—Expulsion of the Stuarts—Sympathy of the Scots for the martyrs—National character and spirit of the Scots—Present condition of the Gaelic population.
In the year 1174, William, king of Scotland, invaded the north of England; but he was conquered and taken prisoner by the Anglo-Norman barons, and his defeat was regarded as a miraculous effect of the pilgrimage that king Henry II. had made to the tomb of Thomas Beket.3 Those who took him prisoner, shut him up in the castle of Richmont, now Richmond, in Yorkshire, built, in the time of the conquest, by the Breton, Alain Fergan. This circumstance, again, was regarded as a fulfilment of a prophecy of Merlin, conceived in these terms: “He shall be bridled with a bit, forged on the shores of the Armorican gulf.”1 And what is still stranger, is that the same prophecy had, a few months before, been applied to Henry II. when closely pressed by the Breton auxiliaries of his sons.2 The king of Scotland, removed from Richmond to Falaise, only quitted his prison on renewing the oath of homage which his predecessors had sworn to the Norman kings, and then broken.3 This act of enforced submission gave the king of England very little influence over the affairs of Scotland, so long as there were no intestine divisions, that is to say, during the hundred and twenty years which elapsed, up to the death of Alexander the Third.
Royalty among the Scots had never been purely elective, for their whole social order was founded on the principle of family; but, on the other hand, hereditary royalty had never any fixed rules: and the brother was often preferred to the grandson, and even to the son of the late king. Alexander III. left neither son nor brother, but cousins in great number, most of them of Norman or French origin, by the father’s side, and bearing French names, such as Jean Bailleul, Robert de Brus, Jean Comine, Jean d’Eaucy, Nicolas de Solles, &c.4 There were nine pretenders to the crown on various titles. Unable to agree among themselves, and feeling the necessity of terminating the dispute peaceably, they submitted it to Edward I., king of England, as to their suzerain lord.5 King Edward declared for him who had the best title, according to hereditary right by primogeniture: this was John Bailleul or Baliol, as the Scotch spelt it. He was crowned, but the king of England, taking advantage of the deference which the Scots had just exhibited to him, resolved to render practical that suzerainty over them which hitherto had been purely honorary.
The king of Scotland, in order to secure support against the intrigues of his competitors, lent himself at first to the views of the king of England; he gave to Englishmen most of the offices and dignities of the kingdom, and repaired to the court of his suzerain, to do him homage and receive his orders. Encouraged by this condescension of the king his protégé, Edward went the length of demanding from him, as pledges of his fealty and allegiance, the fortresses of Berwick, Edinburgh, and Roxburgh, the strongest in all Scotland.1 But so decided a national opposition arose against this demand, that John Baliol was fain to reject it, and to refuse the English troops admission to his fortresses. Hereupon Edward summoned him to Westminster, to answer for the refusal; but, instead of obeying the summons, Baliol solemnly renounced his homage and faith as vassal. On hearing this, the king of England exclaimed, in his Norman-French: “Ah! le fol felon telle folie fait! s’il ne veint à nous, nous veindrons à ly!”2
Edward I. set out for Scotland with all his chivalry of England and Aquitaine; with English archers so skilful that they seldom threw away one of their twelve arrows, and were wont to say, jestingly, that they had twelve Scots in their pouch; and, lastly, with a body of light-armed Welsh, who more often fought with the English than with the enemy, pillaged them whenever any opportunity occurred, and most frequently remained neuter in action. Notwithstanding the courage and patriotic energy of the Scots, the progress of the war was unfavourable to them. Their king did not support them heartily, and was ever desirous of making the amend to Edward for the resistance he had undertaken, as he said, through ill and false counsel.3 Moreover, there were at this time, in Scotland, neither well-fortified towns, nor fortresses, such as those the Normans had built in England. The seigneural habitations were not donjons, surrounded by a triple wall, but small square towers, with a simple ditch, when not situated on the edge of some natural ravine. King Edward accordingly penetrated without difficulty into the lowlands of Scotland, took possession of all the towns, placed garrisons in them, and removed to London the famous stone on which the kings of the country were crowned.1 Such of the Scots as would not submit to foreign sway, took refuge in the northern and western mountains, and in the forests which adjoined them.
From one of these retreats issued the famous patriot, William Walleys or Wallace, who for seven years made war upon the English, at first as a guerilla-chief, and then at the head of an army. The conquerors called him a highway robber, a murderer, an incendiary;2 and when they took him, hanged him at London, and stuck his head on a pike on the loftiest pinnacle of the Tower. The inhabitants of the conquered portion of Scotland suffered to the utmost extent the evils that follow upon a conquest; they had foreign governors, bailiffs, and sheriffs. “These English,” says a contemporary poet, “were all avaricious and debauched; haughty and contemptuous; they insulted our wives and daughters; good, worthy, and honoured knights were put to death by the cord. Ah! freedom is a noble thing!”3
This feeling, deeply impressed in the heart of the Scots, soon rallied them round another chief—Robert de Brus, or Bruce, one of the former competitors of John Baliol. Bruce was crowned king in the abbey of Scone, at a time when there was scarce a town, from the Tweed to the Orcades, that was not in the power of the English. Without an army and without treasure, he, like Wallace, took up his quarters in the forests and mountains, whither he was pursued by his enemies, with horse and foot, and dogs trained to hunt man, like game, by the scent.4 No one in the kingdom, says Froissart, dared lodge him, in castle or in fortress. Hunted like a wild beast, he went from mountain to mountain, from lake to lake, living on the produce of the chase and of fishing, until he reached the Mull of Cantyre, whence he gained the small island of Rachin or Rath Erin, lying near the coast of Ireland.
There he planted his royal standard as proudly as though he had been at Edinburgh, sent messengers into Ireland, and obtained some succours from the native Irish, on the ground of the ancient fraternity of the two nations, and of the common hatred they bore of the Anglo-Normans. He then sent messengers to the Hebrides, and along the whole western coast, soliciting the support of the Gaelic chiefs of those districts, who, in their wild independence, were very indifferent as to what became of the population of the lowlands of Scotland, which they called Saxon alike with that of England, and for which they had scarce more affection. All the clans, however, with one exception, promised him their faith and assistance. The chiefs and barons of the lowlands, of English, Norman, or Scottish race, formed among themselves compacts of alliance and fraternity-in-arms, in life and death, for king Robert and Scotland, against any man, French, English, or Scot.1 Probably, by the first of these names, they meant the king and all the lords of England, who at that time spoke among themselves no other language than French;2 for the French, the continental French, were warm friends of the patriots of Scotland.
Robert Bruce appointed as the rendezvous of his partisans a spot near the place where the western chain of mountains rises; and here was fought the decisive battle of Bannockburn. The Scotch were victorious; and their enemies, weakened by this great defeat, found themselves successively driven from all the fortified towns, and compelled to repass the Tweed in disorder, pursued in their turn by all the people of the southern lowlands, and especially by the men of the border, a population very formidable for an army in retreat.
The limits of England and Scotland were never well determined towards the west, where the country is mountainous and intersected in every direction by infinite valleys and small streams. The inhabitants of a large extent of this district were, properly speaking, neither Scots nor English, and the only national name by which they were known was that of Borderers, that is to say, people of the border or frontier. They were an aggregation of all the races of men that had come into Britain: of Britons, expelled by Anglo-Saxons; of Saxons, expelled by Normans; of Anglo-Normans or Scots banished for felonies or other crimes. This population was divided into great families, like the Celtic clans, but the names of these clans or families were, for the most part, English or French. The language of all the inhabitants was the Anglo-Danish dialect of the south of Scotland and the north of England. The chiefs and vassals lived familiarly together, the former in his embattled house, surrounded by rude palisades, and having the bed of some torrent for a moat; the latter in huts built around it. All followed the trade of marauders, their food being oxen and sheep, stolen from the inhabitants of the neighbouring plains. They made their expeditions on horseback, armed with a long lance, and having for defensive armour a quilted doublet, on which were sewn, as regularly as might be, plates of iron or brass.1
2 Though divided, administratively, into two distinct nations, and, according to the territory they occupied, subjects or Scotland or of England, they nevertheless regarded the kings of these two countries as foreigners, and were by turns Scots, when they purposed forage in England, and English, when a descent was to be made upon Scotland. They seldom fought among themselves, but in personal quarrels. As to their robberies, they exercised them without mercy, but at the same time without cruelty, as a profession having its rules and its points of honour. The richer of them assumed armorial bearings, a fashion which the Normans had introduced into England and Scotland. Their arms, which are still worn by several families of the country, are nearly all allusive to the manner of life of the ancient borderers. Generally, the field of the escutcheon is the sky with moon and stars, to signify, that the best time for the borderers was the night; the mottoes, in English or Latin, are equally significant; for example:—Watch weel—Sleep not for I watch—Ye shall want ere I want, and so on.
Scotland, restored to freedom, gave the name of saviour to Robert Bruce, a man of Norman origin, and whose ancestors, in the time of the conquest of England, had usurped, upon the Scottish territory, the town and valley of Annan. The ancient kings of Scotland had confirmed to them, by charters, possession of this domain, where the ruins of their castle are still visible. Of all the countries of Europe, Scotland is that wherein the mixture of the races has been most easily effected, and where it has left the fewest traces in the respective situation of the different classes of inhabitants. There were never villeins or peasant serfs in this country, as in England and in France, and the antiquarians have observed that the ancient acts of Scotland offer no example of the sale of the man with the land; that in none are found this form, so usual elsewhere: “With the buildings, and all the chattels, labourers, beasts, ploughs, &c.”1 From time immemorial, the burghers of the principal towns have sat in the great council of the kings of Scotland, beside the warriors of high rank, who styled themselves, in the Norman manner, knights, barons, earls, and marquises, or retained the ancient Anglo-Danish titles of thanes and lairds. When it became necessary to defend the country, the various trades’ companies marched under their own banners, led by their burgmaster. They had their honour to maintain on the field of battle, and their share of glory to win. Old popular ballads, still sung, not long since, in the southern districts of Scotland, celebrate the bravery of the shoemakers of Selkirk at the famous battle of Flodden, fought and lost, in 1513, by James IV. of Scotland.2
National opposition, or the natural reaction of the spirit of liberty against power, followed, in Scotland, the course it must ever follow in countries where the nation is not divided into two races of men, separated one from the other by a state of hereditary hostility; it was constantly and almost solely directed against the kings. In civil wars there were but two parties, that of the government and that of the body of the governed, and not, as elsewhere, three parties—royalty, the nobles, and the people. The military and opulent class never joined the kings against the people, and the people had seldom occasion to favour the royal power out of hatred to that of the nobles. In times of trouble, the struggle was between the king and his courtiers on one side, and on the other, all the orders of the nation leagued together. It is true that the active and turbulent barons and nobles of Scotland always prominently figured in political commotions, and that, to adopt the expression of one of them, they “belled the cat;”1 but their frequent acts of violence against the king’s favourites and against the kings themselves, were rarely unpopular.
Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, a new bond strengthened this kind of political alliance between the nobles and bourgeoisie of Scotland; they embraced, together, and as it were with one impulse, the most extreme opinions of religious reformation, those of Calvin. The whole population of the south and east, speaking the same language and having the same views and the same civilization, co-operated in this revolution. It was only the mountain clans and a few lords of the northern lowlands that adhered to the catholic religion, the former from a spirit of innate hostility to the lowlanders, the latter from individual conviction rather than from any esprit de corps. Even the bishops did not oppose any very vigorous resistance to the partisans of the Reformation; the only formidable opposition they met with was from the court, early impressed with the fear that religious might lead to political changes; but the innovators were triumphant in the struggle; they got possession of king James VI., still a child, and brought him up in the new doctrines.
His mother, the unfortunate Mary Stuart, ruined herself by her ignorance of the national character of the Scots; it was after a battle fought against the presbyterian reformers that she passed into England, where she perished on a scaffold. After her death, and while her son still lived in Scotland, professing, in the new spirit of his nation, the presbyterian creed in all its rigour, the line of the Tudor kings of England became extinct in the person of Elizabeth, grand-daughter of Henry VII. James, a descendant of Henry VII. on the female side, was thus the next heir to the Tudors. He came to London, where he was readily acknowledged, and assumed the title of king of Great Britain, uniting under their ancient name his two kingdoms of England and Scotland. It is from him dates the royal arms of Britain, the three lions passant of Normandy, the lion rampant of Scotland, and the harp of Ireland; and the British standard, whereon the white cross of Saint Andrew combines with the red cross of Saint George.
King James, the first of that name in England, found opinion, in reference to the religious reformation, very different in his new kingdom from what it was in Scotland. There was not among the English any generally established opinion as to religious belief. They differed on this point according as they belonged to the higher or to the lower classes of the nation, with whom the ancient hostility of the two races seemed to re-appear under new forms. Though time and the intermingling of blood had greatly abated this primitive hatred, there still lurked in men’s hearts a confused sentiment of mutual dislike and distrust. The aristocracy were strongly in favour of the modified reformation, instituted fifty years before by Henry VIII., a reformation which, simply substituting the king for the pope, as head of the Anglican church, retained for episcopacy its ancient importance. The bourgeoisie, on the contrary, inclined to the complete reformation established by the Scots, whose worship, free from bishops, was independent of all civil authority. The partisans of this opinion formed a sect, persecuted by the government, but in whom persecution did but increase their enthusiasm; they were excessively strict, even upon the smallest points, which procured for them the name of precisians or puritans. The nickname, Round-heads, by which they were ludicrously designated, was derived from their wearing their hair short and without any curl, a custom quite contrary to the fashion then followed by the gentlemen and courtiers.
The presbyterians of England had flattered themselves with the hope that they were about to see their belief reign in the person of a presbyterian king; but the triumph of this religious creed being bound up with that of the popular interest over the aristocratic interest, the king, whoever he might be, could not sanction it. The episcopal church, accordingly, was sustained under James I., as under Elizabeth, by rigorous measures against the adversaries of that church; nay more, from the habit of dwelling upon the political dangers of puritanism in England, the king formed the project of destroying it even in Scotland, where it had become the state religion, and he entered, for this purpose, into an open struggle, not only with the middle and lower classes, but with the entire nation. It was a difficult enterprise, and he made little progress in it, bequeathing it, with the crown, to his son Charles I.
Charles, extending and systematizing his father’s views, resolved to approximate the Anglican worship to the forms of catholicism, and to impose this worship, so reformed, upon the two kingdoms of England and Scotland. He thus displeased the episcopalians and the aristocratic classes of England, whilst he raised against him the whole Scottish nation. Nobles, priests, and burgesses, entering into open rebellion, assembled spontaneously at Edinburgh, and signed there, under the name of Covenant, an act of national union, for the defence of the presbyterian religion. The king levied an army, and made preparations for a war with Scotland; and on their side the Scots raised national regiments, whose hats bore this device: “For Christ’s crown and covenant.”1 Men of every rank hastened to enrol themselves in this militia, and the ministers of religion pronounced from the pulpits malediction upon every man, horse, and lance that should side with the king against the defenders of the national faith.2 The resistance of the Scots was entirely approved in England, where discontent against king Charles became general on account of his religious innovations and his attempts to govern in an absolute manner, without the concurrence of the assembly which, under the name of parliament, had never ceased to exist since the conquest.
The burgesses of England, who had at first only appeared in this assembly as men summoned before the king and barons to receive their demands for money and to comply with them, had become, by a gradual revolution, an integral part of the parliament. In connexion with a certain number of petty feudatories, called knights of the shire,1 they formed, under the name of house of commons, a section of the great national council; in the other house, that of the lords, sat the titled men, the earls, marquises, barons, and Anglican bishops. This chamber, like the other, opposed the projects of Charles I.; but there was this difference between the two houses, that the lords aimed only at maintaining the established religion and the ancient privileges of parliament, while of the commons, the majority aspired to the establishment of presbyterianism and a diminution of the royal authority.
This desire for reform, moderate enough as regarded political order, was supported out of doors by something more vehement than itself, the old instinct of popular hatred to the noble families, proprietors of nearly the entire soil of the country. The inferior classes felt the vague want of some great change; their present position was intolerable to them, but not clearly perceiving what would improve it, they attached themselves to the most extreme political opinions, as in religion to the most rigid and gloomy puritanism. It was thus that the habitual language of the sect, which sought all in the Bible, became that also of the ultras in politics. This party, placing themselves ideally in the position of the Jews amidst their enemies, gave to their opponents the names of Philistines and of sons of Belial. They borrowed from the Psalms and the prophets the threats they sent forth against the lords and bishops, threatening, in the words of the Scripture, to take up “the two-edged sword, and to bind their nobles with fetters of iron.”2
Charles I. had great difficulty in collecting men and money for the war against the Scots. The city of London refused him a loan of 300,000l., and the soldiers openly declared that they would not risk their lives merely to support the pride of the bishops. During the delays occasioned by these difficulties, the Scots, commencing the attack, invaded England and advanced to the Tyne, preceded by a manifesto in which they declared themselves brothers and friends of the English people, and called down upon themselves maledictions from on high, if they in the slightest degree injured the country or individuals. No resistance was offered them but by the royal army, which they completely defeated near Newcastle. After this victory, the generals of the Scottish army excused themselves, in proclamations addressed to the English nation, for the violence of the measures they had been obliged to adopt in the defence of their rights, and expressed the hope that their success might aid that nation in vindicating its own menaced liberties. The commons replied by voting thanks and a money-aid to the Scots; and several envoys left London to conclude a treaty of alliance and friendship between the two nations at Edinburgh.
This compact was signed in 1642, and, the same year, the English parliament, and especially the house of commons, entered into an open struggle with royal power. By degrees, the opposition became centered in the latter chamber; for the great majority of the lords, seeing whither the dispute tended, had joined the king. The lower house voted itself the sole national representation, and invested with all the rights of parliament; and while the borough members and the petty landed proprietors, thus seized upon the legislative power, the people out of doors armed spontaneously, and took possession of all the royal arsenals. On the other hand, the king, preparing for war, planted his standard with the three lions of Normandy, on the keep of Nottingham castle. All the old castles, built by the Normans or their posterity, were closed, provisioned, furnished with artillery, and war to the death began between the sons of the seigneurs and the sons of the villains of the middle ages.
In this struggle, the Scots powerfully aided the parliament of England, which, as a first step, abolished episcopacy and established the presbyterian religion. This community of worship was the basis of a new treaty or covenant between the two peoples; they became security, one for the other, for the defence of Christianity without bishops; but though this alliance was concluded in good faith, it had neither the same meaning nor the same object with the two nations. The civil war was for the Scots a religious quarrel with Charles Stuart, their countryman and national king; it would, accordingly, end for them the moment the king should acknowledge the legal existence of the presbyterian worship in England as in Scotland. With the English, on the contrary, there was an instinct of revolution, going much beyond the mere desire to reform the episcopal church. This difference in the two nations, the necessary result of their different situation, and for some time not manifest to either, was of a nature to produce discord between them as soon as it became known, which soon occurred.
At the battle of Naseby, in Northamptonshire, the royal army was completely routed, and the king himself, his retreat cut off, yielded himself voluntarily to the Scots, his countrymen, choosing to be their prisoner rather than that of the parliamentarians. The Scots transferred him to their allies, not with the intention of destroying him, but that these might oblige him to conclude a treaty advantageous to both parties. Discussions of a very different nature now arose in the English army: the point was no longer the historical question of the origin of royal and seigneural power, for as to these time had effaced all the data: ardent minds became enthusiastically impressed with the idea of substituting for the ancient form of government an order of things founded on abstract justice and absolute right. They thought they saw the prediction of this order of things in the famous epoch of a thousand years, announced by the Apocalypse, and, in their favourite phraseology, they called it the reign of Christ. These enthusiasts, in like manner, relied upon a passage in the Holy Scriptures to justify their bringing Charles I. to trial and judgment, saying that the blood shed in the civil war ought to fall upon his head, so that the people might be absolved.
During these discussions, the groundwork of which was most grave, though the form was fantastic, the parties who had latest entered upon the struggle against royalty, the lower populace and the ultra-reformers in religion, gained ground, and ejected from the revolution those who had commenced it, the landed proprietors and rich citizens, Anglicans or presbyterians. Under the name of independents, there arose by degrees a new sect, which, rejecting even the authority of ordinary priests, invested every one of the faithful with sacerdotal functions. The progress of this sect greatly alarmed the Scots; they represented that in going beyond the religious reformation, such as they had established it by common accord, the English were violating the solemn act of union concluded between the two peoples. This was the commencement of a misunderstanding which attained the highest point when the independents, having seized upon the king’s person, imprisoned him, and made him appear as a criminal before a high court of justice.
Seventy judges, selected from the house of commons, the parliamentary army, and the citizens of London, pronounced sentence of death on Charles Stuart, and the abolition of royalty. Some acted from a deep conviction of the king’s guilt; others conscientiously desired the establishment of an entirely new social order; others, again, actuated by ambition alone, aspired to the usurpation of the sovereign authority. The death of Charles I. put an end to the reign of the presbyterians in England, and to the alliance of the English with the Scots. The latter, judging of the social condition of the English by their own, could not comprehend what had taken place; they deemed themselves unworthily betrayed by their former friends; and combining with this mortification a secret national affection for the Stuarts, their countrymen, they renewed amicable relations with this family, the instant that the English so violently cast it off. While, at London, all the royal statues were being thrown down, and on their pedestals there was inscribed: The last of the kings has passed away,1 —Charles, son of Charles I., was proclaimed king in the capital of Scotland.
This proclamation did not imply, on the part of the Scots, any abandonment of the reforms they had achieved and defended, sword in hand. When the commissioners from Scotland waited, at Breda, on Charles II., who had already assumed, of his own motion, the title of king of Great Britain, they signified to him the rigorous conditions on which the parliament of Edinburgh consented to ratify this title; these were the adhesion of the king to the first covenant signed against his father, and the perpetual abolition of episcopacy. Charles II., at first, made only evasive answers, in order to gain time for a stroke which he hoped would make him king without conditions. James Graham, marquis of Montrose, at first a zealous covenanter, and then a partisan of Charles I., was charged with this enterprise. He landed in the north of Scotland, with a handful of adventurers collected on the continent, and addressing himself to the chiefs of the mountain and island clans, he proposed to them a war at once national and religious against the presbyterians of the lowlands. The highlanders, who once already in the year 1645 had risen under the command of Montrose against the authority of the covenanters, and had been completely defeated, showed little inclination for a new attack; only a few ill-organized bands descended into the lowlands, around a flag on which was painted the decapitated body of Charles I.1 They were routed: Montrose himself was taken, tried as a traitor, condemned to death, and executed at Edinburgh. Hereupon Charles II., hopeless of regaining absolute royalty, condescended to that offered him by the Scottish commissioners, signed the covenant, swore to observe it inviolably, and entered Edinburgh as king, beneath the quartered limbs of the unfortunate Montrose, suspended from the gates of the town.
While acknowledging the rights of Charles II., the Scots did not propose to aid him in reconquering royalty in England. They separated their national affairs from those of their neighbours, and only contemplated the securing to the son of Charles I. the title of king of Scotland. But the party which in England had seized upon the revolution, grew alarmed at seeing the heir of him whom they called the last of the kings established over a portion of Great Britain. Fearing an hostile attempt on his part, the independents resolved to anticipate it. General Fairfax, a rigid presbyterian, was charged with the command of the army raised to invade Scotland; but refusing to serve against a nation which, he said, had helped the good work for which he had first drawn the sword, he sent in his resignation to the house of commons. The soldiers themselves manifested no inclination to fight men whom they had so long styled our brethren of Scotland.
The successor of Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell, a man of rare political and military activity, overcame this hesitation by persuasion or violence, marched to the north, defeated the Scots and their king at Dunbar, and occupied Edinburgh. He called upon the people of Scotland to renounce Charles II., but the Scots refused to abandon in danger him whom they had involved in danger, and patiently endured the oppressions inflicted by the English army in all directions. Charles II. was far from rendering them devotion for devotion; in the extremity of Scotland’s misfortunes, deserting the presbyterians, he surrounded himself with old partisans of episcopacy, with highland chiefs, who gave the name of Saxons, Sassenachs, to their neighbours of a different religion, and debauched young nobles, to whom he said, in his orgies, that the religion of the Roundheads was not worthy of a gentleman. With the aid of the adventurers whom he assembled around him, he attempted an invasion of the western coast of England, while the English army occupied the east of Scotland. There were still in Cumberland and Lancashire many catholic families who, on his approach, took up arms for him. He hoped to raise Wales, and turn to profit the national enmity of the Cambrians to the English, but his troops were completely beaten near Worcester; and he himself fled in disguise, through many dangers, to the western coast, whence he sailed for France, leaving the Scots under the weight of the misfortunes which his coronation and his invasion of England had brought upon them.
These misfortunes were overwhelming; viewed with distrust, as a place of landing and of encampment for the enemies of the revolution, Scotland was treated as a conquered province. On the slightest appearance of revolt or opposition, her leading men were imprisoned or put to death; the thirty Scottish members, who had seats in the great council of the commonwealth of England, far from affording their fellow-citizens aid and succour, became the instruments of the foreign tyranny. Oliver Cromwell governed the Scots despotically up to the moment when, under the name of Protector, he obtained an unlimited authority over the whole of Great Britain; general George Monk, who succeeded him in Scotland, pursued a line of conduct equally harsh and cruel. Such was the state of things when, in the year 1660, after the death of the Protector and the deposition of his son, Richard Cromwell, Monk, suddenly changing sides, conspired against the republic and for the re-establishment of royalty.
The joy caused by the restoration of the Stuarts was universal in Scotland; it was not, as in England, caused simply by the sort of discouragement and political scepticism into which the ill success of the revolution had thrown men, but by a sentiment of real affection for a man whom the Scots regarded almost as the king of their choice. The return of Charles II. was not connected, in their country, with the re-establishment of an ancient social order, oppressive and unpopular; this great event appeared to their eyes, a personal restoration, as it were. They hoped that things would return to the point in which they were before the invasion of Cromwell’s army, and that the covenant, then sworn by Charles II., would be the rule of his government. They attributed the king’s former distaste for the rigidness of presbyterian discipline to youthful errors, which age and misfortune must have corrected.
But the son of Charles I. nourished in his bosom all the hatred of his grandfather and of his father against puritanism, and he felt no personal gratitude to the Scots for the gift of a kingdom which, in his opinion, was his by right of inheritance. Thinking himself, then, free from all obligation towards them, he had the covenant torn to pieces in the marketplace at Edinburgh, and bishops, sent from England, were paraded in triumph by royal officers along the streets. They required from all the ministers of worship the oath of obedience to their orders, the abjuration of the covenant, and the recognition of the absolute authority of the king in ecclesiastical matters. They who refused to take the oath were declared seditious rebels, and were violently expelled from their livings and churches, which were given to new comers, for the most part Englishmen, ignorant and of ill life. These proceeded to celebrate the services and to preach sermons, but none came to hear them, and the churches were deserted.1
The faithful, zealous in their national cause, assembled every Sunday in the bye-places and mountains, which served as refuge for the persecuted ministers; a severe law was issued against these peaceful meetings, to which the agents of authority gave the name of conventicles. Troops were quartered upon the villages whose inhabitants did not frequent their church, and many persons, suspected or convicted of having attended conventicles, were imprisoned, and even publicly whipped. These acts of severity took place principally in the south-western districts, whose population was more disposed to resistance, either from the nature of the country, covered with hills and ravines, or from a remnant of the enthusiastic and pertinacious character of the British race, from which most of them were descended. It was in these districts that the presbyterians began to meet in arms at their secret assemblies, and that whole families, quitting their houses, went to live among the rocks and marshes, in order freely to hear the exhortations of their proscribed priests, and to satisfy the requirements of their conscience.
The constantly increasing severity of the measures against the conventicles, soon occasioned an open insurrection, in which figured as chiefs many rich and influential men of the country. The movement did not extend to the eastern provinces, because the forces of the government, and the terror they inspired, augmented the nearer the vicinity to the capital. The presbyterian army was defeated on the Pentland Hills by the regular troops, who had orders to kill the prisoners, and to pursue the fugitives with enormous bloodhounds.1 After the victory, every family in Ayrshire and Galloway was required to swear an oath not to attend the presbyterian assemblies, and not to give food or refuge to a wandering minister or contumacious presbyterian. Upon the refusal of many persons, all the inhabitants in a body were declared rebels and enemies to the king; and pardons not filled up were distributed for any murders that might be committed upon them.
2 These atrocities were at length crowned by a measure more monstrous than all. The northern highland clans were authorized to descend into the plain and to commit there all the devastation which their old instinct of national hatred against the inhabitants should suggest to them. For several months eight thousand highlanders overran Ayrshire and the neighbouring counties, pillaging and killing at will. A regiment of dragoons was sent from Edinburgh to assist and protect them in their expedition. When it was thought that they had produced the desired effect, an order sealed with the great seal sent them back to their mountains, and the dragoons remained by themselves to secure the entire submission of the country.1 But the evils inflicted upon the presbyterians had augmented their fanaticism by reducing them to despair; some of the most exasperated meeting on the road archbishop Sharp, whom Charles II. had named primate of Scotland, dragged him from his carriage, and killed him in his daughter’s arms.
This crime of a few men was avenged upon the whole country by redoubled vexations and a host of executions. A second rebellion arose, more general and more formidable than the first. The presbyterian army, this time commanded by old soldiers, many of noble family, comprehended several cavalry regiments, composed of landed proprietors and rich farmers, but it was without artillery or ammunition. Every regiment had a blue flag, the favourite colour of the covenanters. Troops of women and children, following the army to the field of battle, excited the men by their cries. Sometimes, after having marched and fought a whole day, without eating or drinking, they would range in a circle round their ministers, and listen with enwrapt attention to a sermon of several hours’ duration, before they thought of seeking provisions or of taking repose.
Such was the army which, a few miles from Glasgow, routed the regiment of guards, the best cavalry of all Scotland, occupied the town, and forced a body of ten thousand men to fall back upon Edinburgh. The alarm it caused the government was such that considerable forces were sent in all haste from London, commanded by the duke of Monmouth, natural son of Charles II., a man of gentle disposition, and inclined to moderate principles, with whom were joined two lieutenants of a very different character: general Thomas Dalziel, and Graham of Claverhouse, who, neutralizing the conciliatory tendencies of Monmouth, obliged him to give battle to the insurgents near the little town of Hamilton, south of Glasgow. The Clyde, whose stream is very deep in this spot, was crossed by a long and narrow stone bridge, called Bothwell Bridge, which the presbyterians occupied. They were driven from this position by the artillery that fired upon them from the bank of the river, and by a charge of cavalry upon the Bridge. Their defeat was complete, and the English army entered Edinburgh, carrying on their pikes severed heads and hands, and bringing, tied two and two upon carts, the chiefs of the presbyterian army, and the ministers whom they had taken prisoners, who underwent with the greatest firmness torture and death, bearing testimony unto death, as they expressed it, to the truth of their national faith.1
The presbyterian party could not recover their defeat of Bothwell Bridge, and the mass of the Scots, renouncing the covenant, in the defence of which so much blood had been spilt, submitted to a kind of modified episcopacy, and acknowledged the authority of the king in ecclesiastical matters. But grief at having lost a cause that had been national for a century and a half, and the memory of the battle which had destroyed all hope of ever seeing it triumph, long survived in Scotland. Old ballads, still sung in the villages at the close of the last century, speak of Bothwell Bridge, and of the brave men who died there, with touching expressions of sympathy and enthusiasm.2 Even at the present day the peasants take off their caps when they pass the blackened stones that here and there, upon the hills and moors, mark the graves of the puritans of the eighteenth century.
As the enthusiasm and energy of the Scottish presbyterians gradually lessened, the government became less distrustful and less cruel towards them. James, duke of York, who, in the reign of his brother, Charles II., had, for pastime, witnessed the infliction of the torture upon refractory ministers, exercised no severity against them after he became king; and his endeavours to substitute catholicism for protestantism were far from exciting so much hostility in Scotland as in England. The presbyterians forgave him his love of popery, in consideration of the hatred he displayed to the episcopalians, their latest persecutors. When a conspiracy, led by the bishops and nobles of England, called in William of Orange and expelled James II., the Scottish people exhibited little enthusiasm for this revolution, lauded as so glorious on the other side of the Tweed; they even hesitated to concur in it, and their adhesion was rather the work of the members of government assembled at Edinburgh, than a genuine act of national assent. Yet the authors of the revolution of 1688 made to Scotland, in matters of religion, concessions which they had not made to England, where the intolerant laws of the Stuarts were maintained in all their rigour. On the other hand, the few obstinate enthusiasts who, under the name of Cameronians, endeavoured, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, to rekindle the half extinct flame of puritanism, were violently persecuted, and bore testimony, by the whip and pillory, on the market-place of Edinburgh. After their time, this austere and impassioned belief, which had combined into one sect the whole populations of the Scottish lowlands, was gradually concentrated in a few isolated families, distinguished from the rest by a more strict observance of the practices of their worship, a more rigid probity, or a greater affectation of it, and the habit of employing the words of the Scriptures on every occasion.
Notwithstanding the evils which the Stuarts had inflicted upon Scotland ever since they had filled the throne of England, the Scots preserved a sort of sympathy for this family, independent, in the minds of numbers, of all political or religious opinions. An instinctive aversion to the new dynasty was felt concurrently, though in unequal degree, by highlanders and by lowlanders. The former threw into it all the ardour of their ancient hatred to the people of England; among the latter, differences of social position, of connexion with the existing government, of religious belief or personal character, produced different shades of zeal in the cause of the heirs of James II. The Jacobite insurrection of 1715, and that of 1745, on the landing of the son of the Pretender, both commenced in the highlands: the second found in the towns of the south and east partisans enough to create a belief that the Celtic and Teutonic races of Scotland, hitherto enemies to each other, were about to become one nation. After the victory of the English government, its first care was to destroy the immemorial organization of the Gallic clans. It executed many chiefs of these clans on the scaffold; it removed others from the country, in order to suspend the exercise of their patriarchal authority; it constructed military roads over moor and mountain, and enrolled a great number of highlanders among the regular troops serving on the continent. As a sort of compromise with the tenacity of the Gael to their ancient customs, they were allowed to combine, in a singular manner, a portion of their national costume with the English uniform, and to retain the bagpipes, their favourite instrument.
When the Scots lost their religious and political enthusiasm, they directed to the cultivation of literature, the imaginative faculties which seem in them a last trace of their Celtic origin as Gauls or as Britons. Scotland is perhaps the only country of Europe where knowledge is really a popular acquirement, and where men of every class love to learn for learning’s sake, without any practical motive, or any view to change their condition. Since the final union of that country with England, its ancient Anglo-Danish dialect, ceasing to be cultivated, has been replaced by English as the literary language. But, notwithstanding the disadvantage experienced by every writer who employs in his works an idiom different from that of his habitual conversation, the number of distinguished authors of every class, since the middle of the last century, has been far greater in Scotland than in England, taking into account the difference of population of the two countries. It is more especially in historical composition and in narrative that the Scots excel; and we may consider this peculiar aptitude as one of the characteristic indications of their original descent; for the Irish and the Welsh are the two nations who have at greatest length and most agreeably drawn up their ancient annals.
Civilization, which makes rapid progress among all the branches of the Scottish population, has now penetrated beyond the lowland towns into the highlands. Perhaps, however, in seeking to propagate it there, the means adopted of late years have been too violent, have been more calculated to effect the destruction than the amelioration of the Gaelic race. Converting their patriarchal supremacy into seigneural rights of property over all the land occupied by their clans, the heirs of the ancient chiefs, the English law in their hands, have expelled from their habitations hundreds of families to whom this law was absolutely unknown. In place of the dispossessed clans, they have established immense flocks and a few agriculturists from other parts, enlightened, industrious persons, capable of carrying into execution the most judicious plans of cultivation. The great agricultural progress of Rosshire and Sutherlandshire is greatly vaunted; but if such an example be followed, the race of the most ancient inhabitants of Britain, after having preserved itself for so many centuries and among so many enemies, will disappear, without leaving any other trace than a vicious English pronunciation in the places where its language used to be spoken.
THE NATIVE IRISH AND THE ANGLO-NORMAN IRISH.
Effect of the conquest in Ireland—Degeneration of the Anglo-Irish—Tenacity of the natives—Invasion of Edward Bruce—Reform and civilization of Ireland—Influence of the Irish bards—Common hatred to England—Catholicism of the Irish—Entire completion of the territorial conquest—Religious and patriotic insurrections—Alliance of the Irish with Charles I.—Invasion of Ireland by Cromwell—Attitude of the Irish on the restoration of the Stuarts—Invasion of William III—Political association of the Irish—White Boys—Hearts of Oak—Right Boys—Volunteers—Patriotic views of the Volunteers—Their provincial assemblies—Peep-o’-day Boys—Defenders—The United Irishmen—Influence of the French revolution—The Orangemen—Organization of the United Irishmen—Succours from France—First symptoms of insurrection—Rise of the United Irishmen—Irish republic—Attack upon Dublin—Defeat of the United Irishmen—Rise of the Presbyterians—Landing of the French in Ireland—Their defeat—Termination of the rebellion—The Union.
The conquest of Ireland by the Anglo-Normans is perhaps the only conquest where, after the first disasters, the slow and imperceptible course of events has not brought about a gradual amelioration in the state of the conquered people. Without having ever enfranchised themselves from the foreign domination, the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons have still made great progress in prosperity and civilization. But the native Irish, though apparently placed in a similar position, have been constantly declining for the last five centuries; and yet that population is gifted by nature with great vivacity of mind and a remarkable aptitude for every class of intellectual labour. Although the soil of Ireland is fertile and adapted for cultivation, its fecundity has been alike unprofitable to the conquerors and to their subjects; so that notwithstanding the extent of their domains, the posterity of the Normans has become gradually impoverished, in common with that of the Irish. This singular and mournful destiny, which weighs almost equally on the old and on the new inhabitants of Erin, has for its cause the vicinity of England, and the influence which her government has exercised, ever since the conquest, over the internal affairs of that island.
This influence has always manifested itself at a time and in a manner to disturb the course of amicable relations which time and the custom of living together were tending to establish between the Anglo-Irish and the Irish by race. The intervention of the kings of England, whatever its ostensible aim, has always had the effect of keeping up the primitive separation and hostility. In times of war, they assisted the men of Anglo-Norman race; when the latter had compelled the natives to tranquillity, the kings, jealous of their power, and fearing a political separation, studied in every mode to injure and weaken them. Thus it became impossible that the struggle between the two populations should ever terminate, whether by the victory of the one or of the other, or by their complete fusion. This fusion, a rapid one had it taken place, would have presented a phenomenon which has not been met with elsewhere. Attracted by the gentleness of character and sociability of the natives, their conquerors felt an irresistible tendency to assimilate with the conquered, to adopt their manners, their language, and even their dress. The Anglo-Normans became Irish; they exchanged their feudal titles of earl and baron for patronymic surnames; the Dubourgs called themselves Mac-William-Bourg; the De Veres, Mac-Swine; the Delangles, Mac-Costilagh; the Fitz-Urses, Mac-Mahon; and the Fitz-Geraulds, Mac-Gheroit.1 They acquired a taste for Irish song and poetry, they invited the bards to their tables, and entrusted their children to women of the country. The Normans of England, so haughty towards the Saxons termed this degeneration.
To check the degeneration, and maintain entire the ancient manners of the Anglo-Irish, the kings and parliament of England made many laws, most of them very severe.2 Every Norman or Englishman by race, who married an Irishwoman, or wore the Irish dress, was treated as an Irishman—that is to say, as a serf in body and goods. Royal ordinances were published, regulating the cut of the hair and beard in Ireland, the number of ells of stuff that were to go to a dress, and the colour of the stuff. Every merchant of English race who traded with the Irish was punished by the confiscation of his merchandise; and every Irishman found travelling in the part of the island inhabited by the Anglo-Normans, especially if he were a bard, was considered and treated as a spy.3 Every lord, suspected of liking the Irish, became, for that sole offence, the mark of political persecution; and, if he were rich and powerful, he was accused of seeking to become king of Ireland, or, at least, of a desire to separate that kingdom from the crown of England. The great council of barons and knights of Ireland, who, like those of England, assembled every year in parliament, was regarded with almost as much scorn and hatred as were the national assemblies held by the native Irish on the hills.4 Every sort of freedom was refused to the parliament of Ireland: it could not assemble until the king sanctioned the purposes of its convocation, and even then it only passed laws sent ready drawn up from England. At the same time, the English government employed all its means of action upon the native Irish, to make them renounce their national customs and their ancient social order. It caused the archbishops, nearly all of them men from England, to declare that the ancient laws of the country, those which had governed Ireland in the ages when she was called the Island of the Saints, were abominable to God.5 Every Irishman convicted of having submitted any case to judges of his nation, was excommunicated, and ranked among those whom the ordinances of England called les irreys anemis nostre seigneur le rey.1
To counteract the efforts made by the English government to destroy their ancient manners, the Irish applied themselves with obstinate pertinacity to maintain them.2 They manifested a violent aversion to the polish and refinement of the Anglo-Norman manners: “Ne faisant compte,” says the historian Froissart, “de nulle jolivetè, et ne volant avoir aucune connoissance de gentillesse, mais demeurer en eur rudesse première.”3 This rudesse was only external, for the Irish, when they chose, could live with foreigners and gain their affection, especially if they were enemies to the English. They concluded against the latter political alliances with several of the continental kings; and when, in the fourteenth century, the Scot, Robert Bruce, was named king by his countrymen, bodies of Irish volunteers crossed the sea to support him. After the entire enfranchisement of Scotland, Edward Bruce, brother of Robert, made a descent upon the north of Ireland, to aid the natives to regain their country, and the Anglo-Norman degenerates, to take vengeance for the vexations inflicted on them by their king.4 In fact, several of the latter, and among others, the Lacys, joined the Scottish army, which, in its march southwards, sacked several towns and dismantled many castles built by the sons of the companions of John de Courcy, the first conqueror of Ulster. Several families, who possessed great domains in those parts, such as the Audelys, the Talbots, the Touchets, the Chamberlains, the Mandevilles, and the Sauvages, all Normans by name and origin, were obliged to quit the country.5 On his arrival at Dundalk, Edward Bruce was elected and crowned king of Ireland, despite the excommunication pronounced by the pope against him, his aiders and abettors.6
But his reign lasted only a year, and he was killed in a battle lost against considerable forces sent from England. The Scottish troops were recalled to their own country, and by degrees the Anglo-Normans regained their domination in Ireland, without, however, attaining their former limits towards the north. Most of Ulster remained Irish, and the few Norman families seen there after these events were poor, or had formed relations with the natives. By degrees, even the descendants of the conqueror, John de Courcy, degenerated.1 Notwithstanding the short duration and the little effect of the conquest of Edward Bruce, its recollection remained deeply imprinted on the mind of the Irish people. His name was applied to many places he had never visited, and many a castle, not built by him, was called Bruce Castle, as in Wales, and in the south of Scotland, many ruins bear the name of Arthur.
Things in Ireland resumed the same situation as before; the natives making no further conquests over the Anglo-Normans by their arms, did so by their manners, and the degeneration continued. The measures taken against this evil, consisting, for the most part, of laws as to the manner in which people should divert themselves and dress, and of prohibitions of the stuffs most common in the country, and consequently the least expensive, occasioned daily inconvenience and loss to the English population established in Ireland, whose resentment confirmed their attachment to the manners it was sought to compel them to quit, against their will and against the nature of things. As to the Irish by race, the action of the government upon them was limited in time of peace to the attracting to England their numerous chiefs and princes, and to the procuring for the king of England the guardianship and custody of their sons. It was considered a great achievement to give them a taste for the lordly pomp and aristocratic manners of the time: this was called first the reform, and then the civilization of Ireland.
But the habit of familiarity between persons of different conditions was so deeply rooted in this country, that the Anglo-Norman knights, charged with the education of the young heirs of the ancient kings of Erin, could never make them discontinue the custom of eating at the same table with their bards and followers, or from shaking hands with every one.1 Few of the Irish chieftains who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, obtained charters of Anglo-Norman nobility, and the titles of earl or baron, long retained these titles, foreign to their language, and having no relation to the history, manners, and social order of their nation. They became weary of bearing them, preferring to be called, as before, O’Neil or O’Brien, instead of earl of Thomond or of Tyrone. Even where they did not themselves adopt this course, public opinion often obliged them to renounce these signs of alliance with the enemies of their country; for public opinion had organs respected and feared by every Irishman.
These organs of popular praise or blame were the bards, poets, and musicians by profession, whose immemorial authority was founded on the passion of the Irish for poetry and song. They formed in Ireland a sort of constituted body, whose advice was sought in all important matters; and the duties of a good king, according to ancient political maxims, were to honour the bards and to conform to the laws. Ever since the invasion of the Anglo-Normans, the corporation of bards had taken part against them, and not a member of the body had ever belied his attachment to the ancient liberty of the country. The chief objects of praise in their verses were the enemies of the English government, and they pursued with their most biting satire all who had made peace with it, and had accepted any favour from it. Lastly, they boldly ranked above the princes and chiefs, friends to the kings of England, the rebels and bandits, who, from hatred to the foreign power, exercised armed robbery, and pillaged by night the houses of the Saxons.2 Under this name the natives comprised all the English or Normans who did not speak the Erse language, but, probably, a mixed dialect of French and old English. They accorded the name of Irish only to themselves and to those who had adopted their idiom, while in England the name of English was denied to the men of that nation established in Ireland, who were called Irois in the Norman language, and, in the English, Irse or Irisch, the only distinction between them and the genuine Irish being that the latter were called wild Irish.
The situation of the Anglo-Irish, detested by the natives around them, and despised by their countrymen across the Channel, was one of singular difficulty. Obliged to struggle against the action of the English government, and, at the same time, to resort to the support of that government against the attacks of the ancient population, they were, by turns, Irish against England, and English against the inhabitants of Gaelic race. This embarrassment could only be terminated by the rupture of the tie of dependence which bound them to England, and by the complete establishment of their domination over the natives. They simultaneously aimed at this double object; and, on their side, the natives also endeavoured to separate themselves from England, by recovering their lands and throwing off all authority not purely Irish. Thus, though the policy of the Irish by conquest and that of the Irish by race were naturally based upon mutual hostility, there was still a common point at which the views of these two classes of men concurred: the desire to restore to Ireland its independence as a state. These complex interests, which the natural course of things was ill calculated to bring to a simple order of relations, were complicated still more in the sixteenth century, by a revolution which added the seeds of religious dissension to the ancient elements of political hostility.
When king Henry VIII. had, for his own benefit, abolished the papal supremacy in England, the new religious reformation, established without difficulty over the eastern coast of Ireland, and in the towns where English was spoken, made little progress in the interior of the country. The native Irish, even when they understood English, were little inclined to hear sermons preached in that language; and, besides, the missionaries sent from England, acting upon the instructions they had received, enjoined it upon them as an article of faith to renounce their ancient usages, and to adopt the manners of the English.1 Their aversion to those manners, and to the government which sought to impose them, extended to the Reformation and to the reformers, whom they were accustomed to designate by the simple name of Saxons, Sassons. On the other hand, the Norman or English families, settled in places remote from the sea, and in some measure beyond the reach of authority, resisted the attempts made to persuade or force them to change their religion. They clung to catholicism, and this again knitted fresh ties of sympathy between them and the Irish. This change had also the effect of connecting with the general affairs of Europe, the quarrel of the native Irish against the sons of their invaders, a quarrel hitherto confined to the corner of land which it actually occupied. It became, thenceforward, a portion of the great contest between catholicism and protestantism; and the demands for foreign aid made by the population of Ireland, were no longer addressed merely to tribes of the same origin, peopling part of Scotland, but to the Catholic powers, to the pope, and to the kings of Spain and France.1
The popes, more especially, those ancient enemies of Ireland, who had authorised its conquest by Henry II., and had excommunicated all the natives who armed against the English power, now became their firm allies, and were loved by them with all their soul, as they loved whatsoever gave them the hope of recovering their independence. But the court of Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries converted this unfortunate country into the focus of political intrigues, entirely foreign to its enfranchisement. By means of their apostolic nuncios, and more especially of the order of the Jesuits, who, on this occasion, displayed their wonted ability, the popes effected the formation in Ireland of a party of pure catholics, as hostile to the Irish of race, become protestants, as to the English themselves, and detesting the latter, not as usurpers, but as anti-papists. In the rebellions which afterwards broke out, this party played a part distinct from that of the Irish catholics who took up arms from simple motives of patriotism; it is easy to perceive this difference, even in the enterprises wherein these two classes of men acted together and in concert.1
Under favour of the troubles resulting from religious contests, and the encouragement which the Catholic powers afforded to the insurgents of all parties, the old cause of the native Irish seemed to regain some force; their energy was aroused, and the bards sang that a new soul had descended upon Erin.2 But the enthusiasm created by religious dissensions had also communicated itself to the Anglo-Irish reformers, and even to the English, who, about the end of the sixteenth century, served in the wars of Ireland with more ardour than ever, as in a sort of protestant crusade. Their zeal furnished queen Elizabeth with more money and troops for these wars than any English monarch had obtained before her. Resuming with great means and vast activity the incomplete work of the conquest, Elizabeth recovered the northern provinces, and invaded the west, which had hitherto resisted. All this territory was divided into counties, like England, and governed by English, who, with a view, as they said, to civilise the wild Irish, made them perish by thousands of hunger and misery.
James I. pursued the work of this civilization by seizing a number of chiefs, and having them tried at London for past or present rebellion. According to the old Anglo-Norman law, they were condemned to lose their domains, as felons to their liege lord; and, under this name of domains, care was taken to comprise the whole extent of country occupied by the clans whom they ruled, seeing that in England the tenants of every lordship were only the farmers of the lord for longer or shorter terms. By means of this arbitrary assimilation of two orders of things entirely different, king James confiscated in Ireland whole districts, which he sold, in lots, to adventurers, as they were called. The dispossessed clans sought refuge in the mountains and forests, whence they soon issued in arms to attack the new English colonies; but they were repulsed by superior forces, and the province of Ulster, which had been the principal theatre of the war, was declared forfeit, and all titles of proprietorship within it declared null and void. They were not even allowed to remove their furniture; and a company of capitalists was established in London to effect the colonization of this district upon an uniform plan. They hired a number of Scottish labourers and artisans, who sailed from Galloway, and established themselves in Ireland, in the neighbourhood of Derry, which, under the name of Londonderry, became a manufacturing town. Other emigrants from the same nation passed in succession into the north of Ireland, and formed there a new population and a new religious party; for they were zealous presbyterians, and, in point of creed, equally hostile to the Anglicans and to the catholics.
The troubles arising in England at the beginning of the reign of Charles I., again encouraged the party of old Ireland and of the Irish papists; at first, because the struggle in which the government was engaged with the English people, lessened its means of action externally, and, afterwards, because the king’s marked inclination for catholicism seemed to promise the catholics his support, or, at least, his sanction. The purely religious faction, under the command of an Anglo-Irishman, George Moor, was the first to rise up against what it called the tyranny of the heretics. It obtained little success, so long as that portion of the people which nourished political hatred against the English remained quiet, or did not assist it; but as soon as the native Irish, led by Phelim O’Connor, took part in the civil war, that war was pushed forward more vigorously, and had for its object, not the triumph of the catholics, but the extirpation of all the foreign colonists, of ancient or of recent date. The presbyterian colonists of Ulster and the Anglican inhabitants of the western provinces were attacked in their houses, amid cries of Erin go Bragh! (Hurrah for Ireland!) and it is calculated that forty thousand persons perished at this time, in various ways.
The news of this massacre produced a great impression in England, and although the victory obtained by the men of Irish race was in reality a great blow to the power of the king, the parliament accused him of having promoted the slaughter of the protestants. He warmly vindicated himself from the accusation, and, to remove all suspicion, sent to Ireland troops that he would fain have retained in England for the maintenance of his authority. The parliament gave, by anticipation, the lands of the rebels to those who would furnish money for the expenses of the war. The English army gave no quarter to any Irishman, rejecting even the submission of those who offered to lay down their arms. Despair communicated fresh strength to the fanatics in religion or patriotism. Though their military resources were far inferior, they resisted the English, and even recovered from them the province of Ulster, whence they expelled many families of Scottish race. Become thus again masters of the greater part of Ireland, they formed a council of national administration, composed of bishops, ancient chiefs of tribes, feudal lords of Anglo-Norman origin, and deputies chosen in each county by the native population.
When the civil war broke out between the king and the parliament of England, the national assembly of the Irish carried on a correspondence with both these parties, offering to join that which should most amply recognise the independence of Ireland. Whatever may have been the diplomatic skill natural to the Irish, it was difficult to effect a formal union between them and the parliamentarians; for the latter were at this time animated with a fierce hatred to the papists; the king came to terms more easily and more promptly with the confederates. By a treaty signed at Glamorgan, they engaged to furnish him with ten thousand men; and, in return, he made concessions to them, which were almost equivalent to the abdication of his royalty, as far as Ireland was concerned. This union did not hold, but it was the king who first violated it, by substituting for it a private treaty with those of the Anglo-Irish who had espoused the quarrel of the royalists of England, at the head of whom was the duke of Ormond. The mass of the confederates, who, their object being a total separation, were not a whit more royalist than parliamentarian, were not comprehended in this alliance, and even the papist party was excluded from it, because political interests alone were contemplated. Under the conduct of the papal nuncio, this party formed a stricter alliance than ever with the native party, which recognised as its chief a man of the name of O’Neil; but the intrigues of the nuncio and the intolerance of the priests, who had obtained great influence over the unenlightened multitude, again embroiled the affairs of the Irish, by confounding the religious with the patriotic cause. A few of the stronger minded alone continued to view these two interests in a distinct manner; and, after the condemnation to death of Charles I., they opened negotiations with the founders of the republic, while the Anglicans and presbyterians of Ireland, joining the duke of Ormond, proclaimed Charles II.
The alarmed republicans despatched to Ireland their best captain, Oliver Cromwell, who, in the ardour of his zeal and the inflexibility of his policy, carried on against all parties a war of extermination, and even undertook to complete fully and finally the conquest of the island. After having distributed among his troops, who were in arrears of pay, the lands taken from the rebels, he renewed, upon a larger scale, the great expropriation executed by James I. Instead of expelling the Irish, house by house and village by village, which enabled them to collect in the neighbouring forests, the western province of Connaught was assigned as the sole habitation for all the natives and for the Anglo-Irish catholics. All such received orders to repair thither, within a given time, with their families and goods; and when they were assembled there, a cordon of troops was formed round them, and death was denounced upon any who should cross that line. The vast extent of territory thus rendered vacant was sold by the government to a company of rich capitalists, who retailed it in lots to new colonists and speculators.
Thus arose in Ireland, beside the Irish of race, the old Anglo-Irish, and the Scotch presbyterians, a fourth population, distasteful to the former, both on account of its origin and of its recent establishment in the country. No serious discord took place between them so long as the republic of England remained powerful under the protectorate of Cromwell; but after his death, when the English government fell into anarchy, there was formed in Ireland, for the restoration of the Stuarts, a party composed, for the most part, of Anglo-Irish protestants or catholics, with a small minority of natives. The bulk of the latter, hostile by instinct to every enterprise tending to place the country under the power of an Englishman, far from giving their adhesion to the party of Charles II., openly opposed his being proclaimed king of Great Britain and Ireland. The dispute between the pure Irish and the royalists grew so warm, that both sides took up arms, and several engagements took place; but the friends of the Stuarts, comprising all the colonists, old and new, got the better of a population which the late government had disorganized and impoverished.
Charles II., who felt that his re-establishment was owing to the lassitude of parties, carefully avoiding whatever might revive them, made little change in Ireland. He resisted the demands made by the papists and the natives to resume possession of their property, occupied by the soldiers or the new colonists; but under the reign of his successor, James II., himself a catholic, the catholic party, aided by the royal authority, acquired great ascendancy in Ireland. All the civil and military offices were given to papists, and the king, who doubted the result of the struggle he was maintaining in England against public opinion, essayed to organize in Ireland a force capable of supporting him. It was in this island that, after his deposition, he sought refuge. He assembled at Dublin a parliament, composed of papists and native Irish. The latter, previous to any other discussion, called upon king James to recognise the entire independence of Ireland; the king refused, unwilling to abandon any of his ancient prerogatives, but offered, as a compromise, not to tolerate any other religion than catholicism. The Irish, inflexible in their purpose of political enfranchisement, answered by a message, that since he separated himself from their national cause, they would manage their affairs without him.1 It was amidst these dissensions that the new king of England, William III., landed in Ireland with considerable forces, and gained, over the two confederate parties of the old Irish and the papists, the decisive battle of the Boyne.
The conquest of Ireland by William III. was followed by confiscations and expropriations which planted in the island one more English colony, round which rallied the zealous protestants and all the friends of the revolution, who assumed the appellation of Orangemen. The entire administration of public affairs passed into their hands, and the catholics no longer filled any office; but the protestants who oppressed them, were themselves oppressed by the government of England, as, for five centuries past, the English established in Ireland had ever been. Their industry and commerce were cramped by prohibitive duties, and the Irish parliament was seldom permitted to assemble. Under queen Anne, this parliament was deprived of the few rights that remained to it; and, as if to extenuate the wrong in the eyes of the Anglicans, and to blind them to their own interest by flattering their religious animosities, the papists were fiercely persecuted. They were disqualified from holding landed property or farms on long terms, and even from bringing up their children at home. But community of suffering, though in a very unequal degree, united in one opposition the protestants and the Anglo-Irish catholics, or Irish by race, who formed a new party, entirely political, under the name of Patriots. They all agreed upon one point, the necessity of rendering Ireland independent of England; but the former desired this solely out of hatred to the government, and the latter out of hatred to the English nation, or, rather, to the English race. This is proved by satires, composed in the middle of the last century, against the sons of Erin who learned and spoke English.1
The patriot party augmented by degrees, and, on several occasions, came to blows with the English party, on the report, true or false, that it was intended finally to suppress the parliament of Ireland. At about the same time, the great landed proprietors of the south and the east began to convert their arable lands into pasture, with a view to increase their revenues by the breeding of cattle. This agricultural change occasioned the expulsion of a great number of small farmers, the ruin of many poor families, and a great cessation of work for the labourers, who were mostly Irish by race, and catholics. The discharged labourers, and others who were without work, and who thought they had as much right as the lord himself to the lands on which, from time immemorial, they had fed their sheep, assembled in organized troops. Armed with guns, swords, and pistols, and preceded by bagpipes, they overran the country, breaking down the fences, levying contributions on the protestants, and enrolling the catholics in their association, assuming the title of White Boys, from the white shirt they all wore as a rallying token.2 Several persons of Irish origin, and of some fortune, joined this association, which, it would appear, was negotiating with the king of France and the son of the Pretender, Charles Edward, when the latter was defeated at Culloden. It is not precisely known what their political projects were; it is probable that they would have acted in concert with the French expedition, which was to be commanded by M. de Conflans;1 but when France renounced this plan, the efforts of the White Boys were confined to a petty warfare against the agents of the royal authority.
In the northern counties, another association was formed under the name of Hearts of Oak; its members, for mutual recognition, wore an oak branch in their hats: farmers, evicted on the expiration of their lease, also united and armed, under the name of Hearts of Steel; and, at last, a fourth society, still more closely knit together, appeared in the southern counties, under the name of Right Boys. All those who joined it, swore to pay no tithes to any priest, not even to catholics, and to obey the orders of no one, except those of a mysterious chief, called Captain Right.2 This oath was so strictly observed, that in many places the officers of the government could not, at any price, obtain men to execute the sentences pronounced upon Right Boys.
While the struggle between these various associations and the civil and military authority was occasioning infinite disorder and spoliation in the country, some landed proprietors and young men of rich protestant families formed, under the name of Volunteers, a counter-association for the sole purpose of maintaining the public peace; at their own expense they furnished themselves with horses and arms, and patrolled night and day the places where there was any disturbance. The rupture of England with her colonies of North America had just involved her in a declaration of war from France, Spain, and Holland. All the troops employed in Ireland were recalled, and this country remained exposed to the aggressions of these three powers, and of the privateers which infested the seas. The great Anglo-Irish proprietors making loud complaints on this subject to the ministry, the answer was, “Arm, and look to yourselves.”3
The rich class zealously availed themselves of this permission. The companies of volunteers previously formed, served as a model and nucleus for the organization of a body of national militia, which, under the same name, soon increased to the number of forty thousand men. As it was almost wholly composed of Anglo-Irish protestants, the government, so far from distrusting it, presented it with a large quantity of arms and ammunition. Those who conceived the original idea of this great military association, had no other object than the defence of the Irish soil against the enemies of England; but Ireland was so wretched, every class of men underwent there such vexations, that, as soon as the volunteers felt their power, they resolved to employ it in ameliorating, if possible, the condition of the country. A new spirit of patriotism was developed among them, embracing with equal kindliness all the inhabitants of the island, without distinction of race or of religion. The catholics who entered the association were eagerly received, and arms were given them, notwithstanding the old law which reserved the use of them to protestants alone. The Anglican soldiers gave the military salute, and presented arms to the chaplains of the catholic regiments;1 monks and ministers of the reformed church shook hands and mutually congratulated each other.
In every county the volunteers held political meetings, each of which sent deputies to form a central assembly, with full power to act as representing the Irish nation.2 This assembly, held in Dublin, passed various resolutions, all based on the principle that the English parliament had no right to make laws for Ireland, and that this right rested wholly in the Irish parliament. The government, entirely occupied with the war against the United States of America, and having no force capable of counterbalancing in Ireland the organization of the volunteers, acknowledged, in a bill passed in 1783, the legislative rights of the two Irish chambers. Further, the habeas corpus act, securing every English subject from illegal imprisonment, was, now for the first time, introduced into Ireland. But these enforced concessions were far from being made in good faith; and as soon as peace was concluded in 1784, the agents of the government began to suggest to the volunteers to dissolve as useless, and to order the disarming of the catholics, according to the laws. Several regiments declared that they would only lay down their arms with their lives, and the protestants, concurring in this declaration, announced that their subaltern-officers and arms should be at the service of any Irishman who wished to exercise himself in military evolutions.1
This spirit of mutual toleration was considered extremely formidable by the English government, which accordingly employed itself in destroying it, and in reviving the old religious and national hatred. It effected this object to a certain extent, by impeding the political meetings, and clubs of the volunteers, and by intimidating or seducing many members of this society. The rich were the first to desert, as being, in general, more cautious and less ardent than people of inferior condition. Deprived of its ancient chiefs, the association fell into a sort of anarchy, and the influence of unenlightened men was soon apparent in the gradual abandonment of the great principle of nationality, which, for a moment, had effaced all party distinctions. Following up some personal disputes, the more fanatic protestants began, in various places, forcibly to disarm the papists; there was formed for this purpose, a society under the name of Peep-o’-day Boys, because it was generally at this hour they entered the houses of the catholics. The latter, as a security against their violence, formed, under the name of Defenders, a counter-association, which did not always confine itself to defensive measures, but attacked the protestants in reprisal; this association gradually numbered all the catholics who withdrew from the society of the volunteers, whose dissolution became complete in all the counties, except Dublin, where it was retained as a municipal police. The society of Peep-o’-day Boys having, as it would seem, no distinct political object, contented itself with partial aggressions upon its antagonists; but the Defenders, the majority of whom were of Irish race, were animated with the instinctive aversion of the natives of Ireland towards all foreign colonists. Whether from the recollection of a former alliance or from conformity of character and manners, the Irish by race had a greater inclination for the French than for any other nation; the leading Defenders, who, for the most part, were priests or monks, kept up a correspondence with the cabinet of Versailles, in the years which preceded the French revolution.
This revolution made a vivid impression on the more patriotic of the various sects of Irish. There was then at Dublin a Catholic committee, formed of rich persons and priests of that religion, who undertook to transmit to the government the complaints and demands of their co-religionists; hitherto they had limited themselves to humble petitions, accompanied with protestations of devotion and loyalty; but, suddenly changing their tone, the majority of the members of the catholic committee resolved that it was now time to demand, as a natural right, the abolition of the laws against catholicism, and to invite every catholic to arm in assertion of this right. At the same time, there was formed at Belfast, a locality occupied by the Scottish colonists introduced into Ireland under James I., a presbyterian club, whose special object it was to consider the political state of Ireland and the means of reforming it. The Dublin committee speedily proposed to this club an alliance founded on community of interest and opinion, and the presidents of the two assemblies, one of them a catholic priest, and the other a Calvinist minister, carried on a political correspondence. These amicable relations became the basis of a new association, that of the United Irishmen, whose object was a second time to rally all the inhabitants of the island in one party. Clubs of United Irishmen were established in many towns, and especially in those of the east and south, all organized on the same model, and governed by similar rules. The various parties, united in this new alliance, made mutual concessions: the catholics published an explanation of their doctrines, and a disavowal of all hostility to other Christian sects; the majority, at the same time, making a formal renunciation of all claims to the lands taken at different times from their ancestors.
Thus the mainspring of English domination in Ireland was broken by the reconciliation of all the classes of her population, and the government accordingly adopted vigorous measures against what it called, by a new word, the revolutionary spirit. The habeas corpus act was suspended, but the association of United Irishmen, nevertheless, continued to recruit its numbers in all the counties, and to carry on friendly communication with the nation which invited all others to become free like itself. The festival of the French Federation was celebrated at Dublin on the 14th July, 1790, and in the course of 1791 many addresses were sent from all parts of Ireland to the Constituent assembly.1 When the coalition at Pilnitz declared war against France, the United Irishmen of Belfast voted supplies of money to the French armies, and on learning the retreat of the duke of Brunswick, had public rejoicings in many towns.2 In general, the Irish patriots aimed at following and imitating the movements of the French revolution. They established a national guard, like that of France; and the soldiers of this body, clothed and armed by subscription, saluted each other by the name of citizen. In 1793, they all became republicans, in language and in principles: Anglicans, Calvinists, and papists, united in this; and the titular catholic archbishop of Dublin, in one of his pastoral letters, endeavoured to prove from the example of the Italian republics of the middle ages, that the catholics were the creators of modern democracy.3
The ill success of the French revolution struck a heavy blow at the power of the United Irishmen, by diminishing their own confidence in the infallibility of their principles, and by giving a sort of authority to the accusations of their enemies. The English ministry seized the moment at which this hesitation of opinion was manifested, to make the catholics a concession, which it had hitherto denied them; it gave them the privilege of bringing up their children themselves, and of exercising some of their political rights: the object being to represent the Irish Union to the papists as needless for the future, and, if they continued to agitate, to render them odious to the other sects, in imputing to them the secret design of exterminating the protestants. The bands of Defenders, who still overran several counties, gave weight to these imputations; and the Anglicans of Connaught, more readily alarmed in consequence of their limited numbers amidst the native Irish, armed spontaneously in the year 1795, and formed associations under the title of Orangemen. Their political dogma was the rigorous maintenance of the order of things established by William III., and of all the oppressive laws made, since his reign, against the catholics and the men of Irish race. From the outset, they displayed a fanaticism which rendered them formidable to such of their neighbours as differed from them in religion or in origin; nearly fourteen hundred families emigrated, southward and eastward, to escape this new persecution.
Several acts of cruelty, committed by the Orangemen on the catholics, excited great hatred against them; and all the violence exercised by the military and civil agents of the government were laid to their charge; such as the torture inflicted on suspected persons, and the destruction of the printing presses. A man accused of being an Orangeman at once became the object of popular vengeance; and, as this accusation was vague, it was easy for evil-intentioned men to make use of it for the purpose of destroying whom they chose; every protestant had reason to fear incurring it. The bond of Irish union was greatly weakened by this mutual hatred and distrust of the two religious parties; to remedy the evil by a more concentrated organization, the public association was replaced by a secret society, based on an oath and passive obedience to chiefs whose names were only known by a few associates. The society was divided into sections, communicating with each other by means of superior committees, composed of deputies elected from among the body. There were district committees and provincial committees; and above these was a directory of five members, who regulated the whole union, which consisted of nearly an hundred thousand members. The superior and inferior chiefs formed a military hierarchy, with the ranks of lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, general, and general-in-chief. Every associate, who possessed the means, was to furnish himself, at his own expense, with fire-arms, powder, and ball; among the poorer members, pikes were distributed, made by subscription and in great numbers by members of the union. This new plan of organization was carried into execution in 1796, in Munster, Leinster, and Ulster; but Connaught was not so prompt, owing to the vigilance of the Orangemen, and the support they afforded to the agents of authority.1
The men whom the Irish Union acknowledged as their superior chiefs were of various origin and religion: Arthur O’Connor, who, in the popular opinion, was descended from the last king of all Ireland; lord Edward Fitz-Gerald, whose name connected him with the old Norman family of the Fitz-Geraulds; father Quigley, an Irishman by birth, and a zealous papist; Theobald Wolf-Tone, a lawyer of English origin, professing the philosophical opinions of the eighteenth century. Priests of every religion were members of the society; in general, they filled the higher stations; but there was no jealousy among them, or even distrust of the sceptical doctrines of some of the associates. They urged their parishioners to read much and variously, and to form reading-clubs at the houses of the schoolmasters or in the barns. Sometimes ministers of one religion were seen preaching in the church of another; an auditory, composed half of catholics and half of Calvinists, would listen with earnest attention to the same sermon, and then receive at the church-door a distribution of philosophical tracts, such as the Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine, of which many copies were printed at Belfast.1
This tendency to subject their particular habits or creed to the views and orders of the Union, was exhibited in the lower classes by a total abstinence from all strong liquors, an abstinence difficult to observe in a damp, cold climate. The Directory recommended it, in 1796, to all the members, in order that each might cease to pay to the English government the duty on spirits;2 and towards the close of the same year, they announced by printed circulars the approaching arrival of a French fleet. Fifteen thousand men, in fact, who left France under the command of general Hoche, arrived in Bantry bay, but a tempest, which dispersed their vessels, prevented their landing.
This unexpected incident, and the tardiness of the Executive Directory of France in preparing a second expedition, gave the English government leisure to labour actively at the destruction of the Irish Union; visits by day and by night were made more frequently than ever upon suspected persons. In houses where arms were supposed to be concealed, the occupants were forced to confession, by the application, if they refused to answer, of various kinds of torture; the most usual being to half hang them, to whip them until they were half flayed, and to tear off the hair and the skin with a pitch cap. The Irish, driven to extremity by these cruelties, resolved to begin the insurrection, without waiting for the arrival of the French; pikes were fabricated, and balls cast with renewed activity. The government saw what was going on; for the larger trees near the towns were cut down and taken away at night, the leaden spouts disappeared from every house, and the catholics frequented the churches and confessionals oftener than usual. But notwithstanding this accession of zeal, their good understanding with the protestants did not cease to exist; a man who, in the beginning of 1798, was executed at Carrickfergus, as an agent of the United Irishmen, was accompanied to the scaffold by a monk and two presbyterian ministers.
In this state of things, one of the delegates from Leinster to the Irish Union, not pressed by any imminent danger, or gained over by considerable offers, but suddenly seized with a sort of panic terror, denounced to a magistrate of Dublin, a partisan of the government, the place where the committee of which he was a member was to hold one of its sittings. Upon this information thirteen persons were seized, with papers compromising many others. Numerous arrests took place, and four days after, an assemblage of several thousand men, armed with pikes and muskets, collected some miles from Dublin, and marched upon the city.1
This was the commencement of the insurrection of the United Irishmen, which, for a moment, extended over the whole country between Dublin and the Wicklow mountains, intercepting all communication between the capital and the southern provinces. The precautions of defence adopted at Dublin, where there was plenty of artillery, secured that city from the attack of the insurgents; but several other less considerable towns fell into their hands. The first engagement between them and the royal troops took place on the hill of Tara, where, in ancient times, the general assembly of the Irish used to be held. The battalions of United Irishmen had green flags, upon which was painted a harp, surmounted, in lieu of a crown, with a cap of liberty, and the English words, liberty or death, or the Irish motto, Erin go bragh. The catholic members bore with them to the fight absolutions signed by a priest, upon which was drawn a tree of liberty; in the pockets of many of the dead were found books of litanies, and translations of the republican songs of France.1
The catholic priests, who nearly all held posts in the insurgent army, employed their influence to prevent the mal-treatment of those protestants, against whom, though not members of the Union, it had no political grievance. They saved many of these from falling victims to the fanaticism which animated the lower ranks of the army, and their constant cry was: “This is not a religious war.” Whatever may have been their other excesses, the insurgents always respected women,2 which neither the Orangemen nor even the English officers did, notwithstanding their pretensions to honour and refinement. These soldiers, who made the murder of a single prisoner matter of bitter reproach against the rebels, handed over their own without scruple to the executioner, because they said, this was the law. There were whole counties in revolt, where not a single protestant was killed; but not one of the insurgents, taken in arms, obtained his life; so that the chiefs of the United Irishmen said emphatically: “We fight with the cord round our necks.”
According to the instructions of the Irish Directory, the insurrection should have commenced on the same day and the same hour in every town; but the arrest of the leaders, in compelling the persons compromised to hasten their outbreak, destroyed the concert, which alone could assure success to this perilous enterprise. The movement was only from place to place, and the associates remote from Dublin, having time to reflect, suspended their active co-operation until the insurrection should have attained certain territorial limits. In a short time, it extended to Wexford, where a provisional government was installed, under the name of Executive Directory of the Irish Republic. The green flag was unfurled on the arsenals and public buildings, and a few small vessels were equipped as cruizers, under the flag of the insurgents.3 They formed an entrenched camp, which became their head-quarters, on Vinegar Hill, near Wexford. They had some artillery there; but, entirely without field-pieces, they were, in order to make their way into towns, compelled to dash in upon the enemy’s cannon, a mode of fighting the most destructive of all, but which they practised with characteristic gaiety.1 At the assault upon Ross, in Cork, a piece of heavy cannon, planted at one of the gates, with its discharges of grape-shot, stayed the assailants. One of the insurgents rushed forward to the mouth of the piece, and thrusting his arm into it, shouted: “Forward, boys, I’ve stopped it!”2
The insurgent chiefs, thinking that to take the capital would determine all the towns that still hesitated, made a desperate attack upon Dublin; it failed completely, and the failure was fatal to the Irish cause. Shortly after, a battle lost near Wicklow restored that town to the royal troops, and, from this time, discouragement and divisions took possession of the patriot ranks: they were accusing and repudiating their chiefs, while an English army was advancing, by forced marches, against the camp at Vinegar Hill. With the aid of its artillery, it drove out the insurgents, most of whom were armed only with pikes, and pursuing them in the direction of Wexford, obliged them to evacuate that town, where the new republic perished, after a month’s existence. The Irish made a sort of regular retreat, from hill to hill, but as they had no cannon, they could not make a stand anywhere, and the want of provisions soon compelled them to disband. The prisoners were tortured to extract from them the names of their chiefs; but they denounced none but those who were already dead or prisoners.3 Thus terminated the eastern and southern insurrection, but, during its last moments, another broke out in the north, among the presbyterians of Scottish race.
This population, in general more enlightened than the catholics, were calmer and more deliberate in their proceedings. They waited for news of the southern revolt to be confirmed ere they would act. But the delay occasioned by this caution gave the government time to take its measures; and when the insurrection commenced with the attack upon Antrim, this town had been strengthened by an accession of infantry and cavalry, with cannon and howitzers. The presbyterians, joined by some catholics of English or Irish origin, made the attack on three sides, having no artillery but a six-pounder, in so bad a condition that it could only be fired twice, and another without a carriage, which they had hastily mounted on the trunk of a tree and two small cart-wheels. For a moment they were masters of the town and of a part of the English artillery; but fresh reinforcements from Belfast obliged them to retire, while fifteen hundred men, posted on the Derry road, intercepted the succours they expected from that quarter.
The insurrection broke out with more success in Down, where the Irish, after defeating the royal troops, formed, near Ballinahinch, a camp similar to that on Vinegar Hill. Here was fought a decisive battle, in which the insurgents were defeated, but not until they had approached the English cannon so closely as to touch them. The royal soldiers took Ballinahinch, and punished the town by burning it. Belfast, which had been, in some measure, the moral focus of the insurrection, remained in the hands of the government, and this circumstance produced upon the northern insurgents the same impression that the fruitless attack upon Dublin had made upon their northern brethren. Their discouragement was accompanied by the same symptoms of division: false or exaggerated reports of the cruelties committed by the catholics upon the protestants of the southern counties, alarmed the presbyterians, who thought themselves betrayed, and that the patriotic struggle in which they had engaged had degenerated into a war of religion; they accepted an amnesty, after which their principal leaders were tried and put to death.1
The victory of the English government over the insurgents of Leinster and Ulster destroyed the Irish Union, and, in great measure, its spirit; men of different sect and origin had scarce anything further in common than their disgust at the existing state of things, and the hope of a French invasion. On the news of the late insurrections, the Executive Directory of France had, at length, yielded to the intreaties of the Irish agents, and granted them some troops, who landed in the west of Ireland a month after all was at an end in the north, east, and south. These succours consisted of about fifteen hundred men of the army of Italy and of that of the Rhine, commanded by general Humber. They entered Killala, a little town of Mayo, and after making all the English garrison prisoners, unfurled the green flag of the United Irishmen. The general, in his proclamations, promised a republican constitution under the protection of France, and invited all the people, without distinction of religion, to join him. But in this district, which had given birth to the first societies of Orangemen, the protestants were, in general, fanatic foes of the papists, and devoted to the government: few of them complied with the invitation of the French, the greater number hiding themselves or taking to flight. The catholics, on the contrary, came in great numbers, and despite all that was said at the time of the irreligion of the French, the priests did not hesitate to declare for them, and, with all their powers of persuasion, urged their parishioners to take up arms. Several of these ecclesiastics had been driven from France by the revolutionary persecutions, yet these were as ready as the rest to fraternize with the soldiers.1 One of them went so far as to offer his chapel for a guardhouse. New patriotic songs were composed in which the French words, ça ira, en avant! were mixed up in English verses, with old Irish burthens.
The French and their allies marched southwards. Entering Ballina, they found in the market-place a man hanging from a gibbet, for having distributed insurgent proclamations; all the soldiers, one after the other, gave the corpse the republican salute. The first encounter took place near Castlebar, where the English troops were completely defeated, and, in the following night, fires lighted on all the hills gave the signal of insurrection to the population between Castlebar and the sea. The plan of the French was to march as rapidly as possible upon Dublin, collecting on their way the Irish volunteers; but the discord which reigned between the protestants and the catholics of the west rendered the number of these volunteers much less than it would have been in the eastern provinces.
While general Humber’s fifteen hundred men were advancing into the country, their position becoming hourly more difficult, from the non-extension, in a proportionate degree, of the insurrection, thirty thousand English troops were marching against them from different points.1 The general manœuvred for some time to prevent their junction, but, obliged to fight a decisive battle at Ballinamuck, he capitulated for himself and his men, without any stipulations in favour of the insurgents, who retreated alone to Killala, where they endeavoured to defend themselves. They could not maintain the post; the town was taken and plundered by the royal troops, who, after having massacred a great number of Irish, drove the remainder into the neighbouring mountains and forests. Some of them formed bands there, and carried on a sort of guerilla warfare; others, to escape judicial pursuit, lived in caverns which they never quitted, and whither their relations brought them food.2 Most of those who could not conceal themselves in this way were hanged or shot.
Amidst the disunion of the different Irish sects and parties, their old hatred to the English government continued to manifest itself by the assassination of its agents, in the places where the insurrection had manifested itself, and elsewhere by partial revolts, which broke out a year later.3 In general, all classes of the population had their eyes fixed upon France: at the victories of the French they rejoiced, at those of the English they mourned. Their hope was that France would not give peace to England, without stipulating expressly for the independence of Ireland: they retained this hope up to the treaty of Amiens. The publication of this treaty created universal dejection among them. Two months after the conclusion of the peace, many refused to credit it, and said, impatiently: “Is it possible that the French have become Orangemen?”4 The English ministry profited by the general depression to tighten the political bond between Ireland and England by the abolition of the ancient Irish parliament. Although this parliament had never done much good to the country, men of all parties clung to it as a last sign of national existence, and the project of uniting England and Ireland under one legislature displeased even those who had assisted the government against the insurgents of 1798. They combined their discontent with that of the people, and assembled to remonstrate; but their opposition extended no further.
There is now but one parliament for the three united kingdoms, and it is from this assembly, the immense majority of which are English, that Ireland awaits the measures and laws that are to pacify her. After many years of vain solicitations, after many menaces of insurrection, one of her numerous wounds has been healed, by the emancipation of the catholics, who may now exercise public functions and sit in the united parliament; but many other grave questions remain to be settled. The exorbitant privileges of the Anglican church, the changes violently operated in property by wholesale confiscations and spoliations, and lastly, beyond all the quarrels of race, of sect and of party, the supreme question, that of the national independence and the Repeal of the Union between Ireland and England; such are the causes whence, sooner or later, may again arise the sad scenes of 1798. Meantime, the misery of the lower population, hereditary hatred, and a permanent hostility to the agents of authority, multiply crime and outrage, and convert a fertile country, whose people are naturally sociable and intellectual, into the most uninhabitable spot in Europe.
THE ANGLO-NORMANS AND THE ENGLISH BY RACE.
Poitevin courtiers in England—Alliance between the Saxons and Normans—League of the barons against king John—Magna Charta—Expulsion of the foreigners—Louis of France called in by the Anglo-Norman barons—Retreat of the French—Return of the Poitevins—Second insurrection of the Anglo-Norman barons—Simon de Montfort—His popularity—Language of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy—State of the higher classes of England—Impressment of aitisans—Labourers—State of the land—Peasants or cottagers in England—Great fermentation among the peasants—Political writings circulated in the country districts—Insurrection of the peasants—The insurgents march upon London—Their first demand—Their conduct in London—Their interview with Richard II.—The insurgents quit London—Wat Tyler and John Ball—Murder of Wat Tyler—The king deceives the insurgents—Dispersion and terror of the insurgents—Alarm of the gentry throughout England—Proclamation of Richard II.—Termination of the peasants’ insurrection—Things remain in their former state—Individual enfranchisements—Separation of the parliament into two chambers—Position of the commons in the parliament—French the language of the court and the nobility—French literature in England—Revival of English poetry—Character of the new English language—The Norman idiom becomes extinct in England—Dissolution of the Norman society—Remnant of the distinction between the two races.
After the conquest of Anjou and Poitou by king Philip-Augustus, many men of these two countries, and even those who had conspired against the Anglo-Norman domination, conspired against the French, and allied themselves with king John. This monarch gave them no efficacious aid; all he could do for those who had exposed themselves to persecution on the part of the king of France, by intriguing or taking up arms against him, was to give them an asylum and a welcome in England. Thither repaired, from necessity or from choice, a great number of these emigrants, intellectual, adroit, insinuating men, like all the southern Gauls, and better fitted to please a king than the Normans, generally more slow-witted and of less pliant temperament.1 The Poitevins, accordingly, speedily attained infinite favour at the court of England, and even supplanted the old aristocracy in the good graces of king John. He distributed among them all the offices and fiefs at his disposal, and even, under various pretexts, deprived several rich Normans of their posts in favour of these new comers. He married them to the heiresses who were under his wardship, according to the feudal law, and made them guardians of rich orphans under age.1
The preference thus manifested by the king for foreigners, whose ever-increasing avidity drove him to greater exactions than all his predecessors had committed, and to usurp unprecedented powers over persons and property, indisposed all the Anglo-Normans towards him. The new courtiers, feeling the precariousness of their position, hastened to amass all they could, and made demand upon demand. In the exercise of their public functions, they were more eager for gain than had been any former functionaries; and, by their daily vexations, rendered themselves as odious to the Saxon citizens and serfs as they already were to the nobles of Norman origin. They levied on the domains the king had given them more aids and taxes than any lord had ever demanded, and exercised more rigorously the right of toll on the bridges and highroads, seizing the horses and goods of the merchants, and only paying them, says an old historian, in tallages and mockery.2 Thus they harassed, at once and almost equally, the two races of men who inhabited England, and who, since their violent approximation, had not as yet experienced any one suffering, or sympathy, or aversion, in common.
The hatred to the Poitevins and the other favourites of the king, brought together, for the first time, two classes of men, hitherto, as a general rule, standing apart from each other. Here we may date the birth of a new national spirit, common to all born on English soil. All, in fact, without distinction of origin, are termed natives, by the cotemporary authors, who, echoing the popular rumour, impute to king John the design of expelling, if not of exterminating the people of England, and giving their estates to foreigners.3 These exaggerated alarms were, perhaps, even more strongly felt by English burghers and farmers than by the lords and barons of Norman race, who yet were alone really interested in destroying the foreign influence, and in forcing king John to revert to his old friends and countrymen.
Thus, in the commencement of his reign, John was in a position closely resembling that of the Saxon king Edward, on his return from Normandy.1 He menaced the rich and noble of England, or, at least, gave them reason to think themselves menaced, with a sort of conquest, operated, without apparent violence, in favour of foreigners, whose presence wounded, at the same time, their national pride and their interests.2 Under these circumstances, the barons of England adopted against the courtiers from Poitou and Guienne, and against the king who preferred them to his old liegemen, the same course that the Anglo-Saxons had adopted against Edward and his Norman favourites—that of revolt and war. After having signified to John, as their ultimatum, a charter of Henry I., determining the limits of the royal prerogative, on his refusal to keep within the legal limits that his predecessors had recognised, the barons solemnly renounced their oath of fealty, and defied the king, the manner at this period of declaring mortal war. They elected for their chief, Robert Fitz-Walter, who took the title of Marshal of the army of God and of holy church, and acted, in this insurrection, the part played by the Saxon Godwin, in that of 1052.3
Fear of the gradual operation, in favour of Poitevin priests, of the ecclesiastical deprivations with which the Norman conquest had, at one blow, struck the entire clergy of English race, and at the same time, a sort of patriotic enthusiasm, added the Anglo-Norman bishops and priests to the party of the barons against king John, though this king was then in high favour with the pope. He had renewed to the holy see the public profession of vassalage made by Henry II. after the murder of Thomas Beket; but this act of humility, far from being as useful to the cause of John as it had been to that of his father, only served to bring down upon him public contempt, and the reproaches even of the clergy, who felt themselves endangered in their dearest interests, the stability of their offices and possessions. Abandoned by the Anglo-Normans, king John had not, like Henry I., the art of raising in his favour the English by origin, who, besides, no longer constituted a national body capable of aiding, en masse, either party. The burghers and serfs immediately depending on the barons, were far more numerous than those of the king; and, as to the inhabitants of the great towns, though they enjoyed privileges and franchises granted by the royal power, yet a natural sympathy drew them to that side which comprehended the majority of their countrymen. The city of London declared itself for those who unfurled their banners against the foreign favourites, and the king suddenly found himself left with no other supporters of his cause, than men born out of England, Poitevins, Gascons, and Flemings, commanded by Savari de Mauléon, Geoffroy de Bouteville, and Gautier de Buck.1
John, alarmed at seeing in his adversaries’ ranks all the zealous asserters of the independence of the country, whether as sons of the conquerors or as native English, subscribed the conditions required by the revolted barons. The conference took place in a large meadow called Runnymede, between Staines and Windsor, where both armies encamped; the demands of the insurgents having been discussed, were drawn up in a charter, which John confirmed by his seal. The special object of this charter was to deprive the king of that branch of his power by means of which he had fostered and enriched men of foreign birth at the expense of the Anglo-Normans. The population of English race was not forgotten in the treaty of peace which its allies of the other race formed with the king. Repeatedly, during the civil war, the old popular demand for the good laws of king Edward had figured in the manifestoes, which claimed, in the name of the English barons, the maintenance of the feudal liberties;2 but it was not, as under Henry I., the Saxon laws which the charter of the Norman king guaranteed to the descendants of the Saxons. It would seem, on the contrary, that they who drew up this memorable act, desired formally to abolish the distinction between the two races, and to have in England merely various classes of one people, all, to the very lowest, entitled to justice and protection from the common law of the land.
The charter of king John, since called Magna Charta,1 secured the rights of liberty and property of the classes of
John, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Earl of Anjou, to the Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, Earls, Barons, Justiciaries of the Forests, Sheriffs, Governors, and Officers, and to all Bailiffs, and others his faithful subjects, greeting. Know ye, that we, in the presence of God, and for the health of our soul, and the souls of all our ancestors and heirs, and to the honour of God and the exaltation of his Holy Church, and amendment of our Kingdom, by advice of our venerable Fathers, Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Henry, Archbishop of Dublin, William, Bishop of London, Peter of Winchester, Jocelin of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh of Lincoln, Walter of Worcester, William of Coventry, Benedict of Rochester, Bishops, and Master Pandulph, the Pope’s Sub-Deacon and ancient Servant, Brother Aymeric, Master of the Temple in England, and the Noble Persons, William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, William, Earl of Salisbury, William, Earl of Warren, William, Earl of Arundel, Alan de Galoway, Constable of Scotland, Warin Fitz Gerald, Peter Fitz Herbert, and Hubert de Burgh, Seneschal of Poitou, Hugh de Neville, Matthew Fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip Albiney, Robert de Roppell, John Marshall, John Fitz Hugh, and others our liege men, have, in the first place, granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed, for us and our heirs for ever:
Norman origin, and at the same time established the right of the classes of Saxon origin to enjoy the ancient customs so favourable to them. It guaranteed their municipal franchises to the city of London and to all the towns of the kingdom; it modified the royal and seigneural statute-labour on the repair of castles, roads, and bridges; it gave special protection to merchants and traders, and, in suits against peasants, it prohibited the seizure of their crops or agricultural implements.
The principal article, if not as to ultimate results, at least in reference to the interests of the moment, was that by which the king promised to send out of the kingdom all the foreigners whom he had invited or received, and all his foreign troops. This article seems to have been received with great joy by all the people of England, without distinction of origin; perhaps, indeed, the English by race attached higher importance to it than to all the rest. That hatred of foreign domination which for a century and a half past had vainly fermented in men’s souls, impotent against the order of things established by the Norman conquest, was let loose against the new comers whom king John had enriched and laden with honours. From the moment in which their expulsion was legally pronounced, every Saxon lent his aid to execute the decree; the more noted foreigners were besieged in their houses, and upon their retreat their domains were pillaged.1 The peasants stopped on the roads all whom public report, right or wrong, indicated as foreigners. They called upon them to pronounce some English words, or, at all events, a sentence of the mixed language employed by the nobles in conversing with the inferior population; and when the suspected person was convicted of inability to speak either Saxon or Anglo-Norman, or to pronounce these languages with the accent of southern Gaul, he was maltreated, despoiled, and imprisoned without scruple, whether knight, priest, or monk. “It was a sad thing,” says a contemporary author, “for the friends of the foreigners to see their confusion, and the ignominy with which they were overwhelmed.”1
After having, against his will, and in bad faith, signed the charter, king John retired to the Isle of Wight, to await in security the occasion to resume the war. He solicited of the pope and obtained a dispensation from the oath he had sworn to the barons, and the excommunication of those who remained in arms to enforce his observance of his word. But no bishop in England consenting to promulgate this sentence, it remained without effect. The king, with what money he had left, hired a fresh body of Brabançons, who found means to land on the southern coast, and who, by their skill and military discipline, gained at first some advantages over the irregular army of the confederate barons and burghers. Thereupon, the former, fearing to lose all the fruit of their victory, resolved, like the king, to obtain foreign aid: they addressed themselves to Philip-Augustus, and offered to give his son Louis the crown of England, if he would come to them at the head of a good army. The treaty was concluded; and young Louis arrived in England with forces enough to counterbalance those of king John.
The entire conformity of language which then existed between the French and the Anglo-Norman barons necessarily modified, with the latter, the distrust and dislike ever inspired by a foreign chief; but it was different with the mass of the people, who, in reference to language, had no more affinity with the French than with the Poitevins. This dissonance, combined with the spirit of jealousy which speedily manifested itself between the Normans and their auxiliaries, rendered the support of the king of France more prejudicial than useful to the barons. Germs of dissolution were beginning to develop themselves in this party, when king John died, laden with the hatred and contempt of the entire population of England, without distinction of race or condition, actuated by which, the historians of the period, ecclesiastics though they be, give king John no credit for his constant submission to the holy see: in the history of his life they spare him no injurious epithet; and, after relating his death, they compose or transcribe epitaphs, such as these: “Who weeps, or has wept, the death of king John? hell, with all its foulness, is sullied by the soul of John.”1
Louis, son of Philip-Augustus, assumed, by the consent of the barons, the title of king of England; but the French who accompanied him soon conducted themselves as in a conquered country. The greater the resistance of the English to their vexations, the more harsh and grasping did they become. The accusation, so fatal to king John, was made against Louis of France: it was said that, in concert with his father, he had formed the project of exterminating or banishing all the rich and noble of England, and of replacing them by foreigners. Aroused by national interests, all parties united in favour of prince Henry, son of John, and the French, left alone, or nearly so, accepted a capitulation which gave them their lives, on condition of their immediate departure.
The kingdom of England having thus reverted to an Anglo-Norman, the charter of John was confirmed, and another, called the Forest Charter,1 giving the right of the chace to
Edward, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Guyan, to all to whom these presents shall come, sendeth greeting. We have seen the Charter of the Lord Henry our father, sometime King of England, concerning the Forest, in these words:
“Henry, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and of Guyan, &c. as in the beginning of the Great Charter. the possessors of estates, was granted by Henry III. to the men of Norman race. But ere many years had elapsed, the new king, son of a Poitevin woman, who had again married in her own country, sent for and welcomed his uterine brothers, and many other men, who came, as in the time of king John, to seek their fortune in England. Family affection, and the easy, agreeable humour of the new Poitevin emigrants, had the same influence upon Henry III. as upon his predecessor; the great offices of the court, and the civil, military and ecclesiastical dignities, were once more heaped upon men born abroad. After the Poitevins flocked in the Provençals, because king Henry had married a daughter of the count of Provence; and after them, came Savoyards, Piedmontese, and Italians, distant relations or protégés of the queen, all attracted by the hope of wealth and advancement. Most of them attained their object, and the alarm of a new invasion of foreigners spread as rapidly and excited as much indignation as in the preceding reign. In the public complaints on the subject, the terms formerly employed by the Saxon writers, after the conquest, were repeated; it was said that, to obtain favour and fortune in England, it was only necessary not to be English.1
A Poitevin, named Pierre Desroches, the favourite minister and confident of the king, when he was called upon to observe the charter of king John and the laws of England, was wont to reply: “I am no Englishman, to know aught of these charters or these laws.”1 The confederation of the barons and burghers was renewed in an assembly held in London, at which the principal citizens swore to will all that the barons should will, and to adhere firmly to their laws. Shortly afterwards, most of the bishops, earls, barons, and knights of England, having held a council at Oxford, leagued together for the execution of the charters and the expulsion of the foreigners, by a solemn treaty, drawn up in French, and containing the following passage: “We make known to all, that we have sworn upon the holy gospel, and are bound together by this oath, and promise in good faith that each and all of us will aid one another against all men; and if any go counter to this, we shall hold him our mortal foe.”2
Singularly enough, the army assembled on this occasion to destroy the foreign influence, was commanded by a foreigner, Simon de Montfort, a Frenchman by birth, and brother-in-law of the king.3 His father had acquired great military reputation and immense wealth in the crusades against the Albigenses, and he himself was not deficient either in talent or in political skill. As is almost ever the case with men who throw themselves into a party from which their interest and position would seem naturally to exclude them, he displayed more activity and determination in the struggle against Henry III. than the Norman Robert Fitz-Walter had shown in the first civil war. A stranger to the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, he seems to have had much less repugnance than they to fraternize with men of English descent; and it was he who, for the first time since the conquest, summoned the commons to deliberate on public affairs, with the bishops, barons, and knights of England.
War thus commenced once more between the men born on English soil, and the foreigners who held offices and lordships there. The Poitevins and the Provençals were those whose expulsion was most ardently pursued. It was more peculiarly against the near relations of the king and queen, such as Guillaume de Valence and Pierre de Savoie, that the hatred of all classes of the population was directed;1 for the native English embraced with renewed ardour the cause of the barons, and a singular monument of this alliance subsists in a popular ballad on the taking of Richard, the king’s brother, and emperor elect of Germany. This ballad is the first historical document that exhibits the mixture of the Saxon and French languages, though the mixture, as yet, is but a sort of patchwork, and not a regular fusion, like that which later gave birth to modern English.2
After several victories gained over the king’s party, Simon de Montfort was killed in a battle, and the ancient patriotic superstition of the people was awakened in his favour. As an enemy to the foreigner, and, in the words of a contemporary, defender of the rights of legitimate property, he was honoured with the same title that popular gratitude had assigned to those who, in the time of the Norman invasion, sacrificed themselves in the defence of the country. Like them, Simon received the title of defender of the native people; it was denounced as false and wicked to call him traitor and rebel;3 and, in common with Thomas Beket, he was proclaimed saint and martyr.4 The leader of the army of the barons against Henry III. was the last man in whose favour was manifested this disposition to confound together the two enthusiasms of religion and of politics; a disposition peculiar to the English race, and which was not shared by the Anglo-Normans; for although Simon de Montfort had done far more for them than for the citizens and serfs of England, they did not sanction the beatification accorded him by the latter, and left the poor country people to visit alone the tomb of the new martyr, and seek miracles there.1 Such miracles were not wanting, as we learn from various legends; but as the aristocracy gave no encouragement to the popular superstition, the miracles were soon lost sight of.2
Notwithstanding the esteem which Simon de Montfort had manifested towards the men of Saxon origin, an enormous distance still separated them from the sons of the Normans. The chief chaplain of the army of the barons, Robert Grosse-Tête, bishop of Lincoln, one of the most ardent promoters of the war against the king, reckoned but two languages in England, Latin for the learned, and French for the unlearned; it was in the latter tongue that, in his old age, he wrote books of piety for the use of the laity, neglecting altogether the English language and those who spoke it.3 The poets of the same period, even the English by birth, composed their verses in French when they sought honour and profit from them. It was only the singers of ballads and romances for the burghers and peasants, who used the pure English, or the mixed Anglo-French language, that was the ordinary means of communication between the higher and lower classes. This intermediate idiom, the gradual formation of which was a necessary result of the conquest, was at first current in the towns where the two races were more mingled together, and where the inequality of conditions was less than in the country. Here it insensibly replaced the Saxon tongue, which, now only spoken by the poorest and rudest classes of the nation, fell as much beneath the new Anglo-Norman idiom as this was beneath the French, the language of the court, of the baronage, and of all who had any pretensions to refinement of manners.4
The rich citizens of the great towns, and more especially those of London, sought, from interest or vanity, by Frenchisizing their language more or less skilfully, to imitate the nobles and approach nearer to them; they thus early acquired the habit of saluting each other by the title of sire, and even of styling themselves barons.
The citizens of Dover, Romney, Sandwich, Hythe, and Hastings, towns of extensive commerce, which were then, as they still are, called the cinque ports, or the five ports of England par excellence, assumed, in imitation of the Londoners, the title of Norman nobility, using it corporately in their municipal acts, and individually in their private relations. But the genuine Norman barons considered this pretension outrecuidente. “It is enough to make one sick,” they said, “to hear a villein call himself a baron.”1 When the sons of the citizens arranged a tournament of their own, in some field of the suburbs, the seigneurs would send their valets and grooms to disperse them, with the intimation that skilled feats of arms did not appertain to rustics, and mealmen, and soap-sellers, such as they.2
Despite this indignation of the sons of the conquerors at the resistless movement which tended to approximate to them the richest portion of the conquered population, this movement was sensibly manifested during the fourteenth century, in the towns upon which royal charters had conferred the right of substituting magistrates of their own election for the seigneural viscounts and bailiffs. In these corporate towns, the burghers, strong in their municipal organization, commanded far more respect than the inhabitants of the petty towns and hamlets, which remained immediately subject to royal authority; but a long time elapsed ere that authority paid to the citizens individually the same consideration and respect as to the body of which they were members. The magistrates of the city of London, under the reign of Edward III., admitted to the royal feasts, already participated in that respect for established authority which distinguished the Anglo-Norman race; but the same king who entertained, at the third table from his own, the lord mayor and aldermen, treated almost as a serf of the conquest every London citizen, who, neither knight nor squire, exercised any trade or mechanical art. If, for example, he desired to embellish his palace, or to signalize himself by decorating a church, instead of engaging the best painters of the city to come and work for a given sum, he issued to his master-architect an order in the following terms: “Know, that we have charged our friend, William of Walsingham, to take from our city of London as many painters as he shall need, to set them to work in our pay, and to keep them as long as they are needed; if any be refractory, let him be arrested and kept in one of our prisons, there to abide until further orders.”1 Again, if the king conceived a fancy for music and singing after his dinner, he, in like manner, sent forth officers of his palace to bring before him the best players and singers they could find, in London or the suburbs, without any reference whatever to their own inclinations.2 And thus, too, on the eve of departure for the French wars, we find king Edward requiring from his chief engineer twelve hundred stoneballs for his war-machines, and authorising him to take stonemasons and other artisans, wherever he could find them, to labour in the quarries, under penalty of imprisonment.3
Such was still, at the end of the fourteenth century, the condition of those whom several historians of the time call the villains of London: and as to the country villains, whom the Normans, Frenchisizing the old Saxon names, called bondes, cotiers, or cotagers, their personal sufferings were far greater than those of the burghers, and without any compensation; for they had no magistrates of their own choice, and among themselves there was no one to whom they gave the title of sire or lord.4 Unlike the inhabitants of the towns, their servitude was aggravated by the regularisation of their relations with the seigneurs of the manors to which they belonged; the ancient right of conquest was subdivided into a host of rights, less violent in appearance, but which involved the class of men subject to them in numberless shackles. Travellers of the fourteenth century express their astonishment at the multitude of serfs they saw in England, and at the extreme hardness of their condition in that country,5 compared with what it was on the continent, and even in France. The word bondage conveyed, at this period, the last degree of social misery; yet this word, to which the conquest had communicated such a meaning, was merely a simple derivative from the Anglo-Danish bond, which, before the invasion of the Normans, signified a free cultivator and father of a family living in the country; and it is in this sense that it was joined with the Saxon word hus, to indicate a head of a house, husbond, or husband, in modern English orthography.1
Towards the year 1381, all those in England who were called bonds, that is to say, all the cultivators, were serfs of body and goods, obliged to pay heavy aids for the small portion of land which supported their family, and unable to quit this portion of land without the consent of the lords, whose tillage, gardening, and cartage of every kind, they were compelled to perform gratuitously. The lord might sell them with their house, their oxen, their tools, their children, and their posterity, as is thus expressed in the deeds: “Know that I have sold such a one, my naif (nativum meum), and all his progeny, born or to be born.”2 Resentment of the misery caused by the oppression of the noble families, combined with an almost entire oblivion of the events which had elevated these families, whose members no longer distinguished themselves by the name of Normans, but by the term gentlemen, had led the peasants of England to contemplate the idea of the injustice of servitude in itself, independently of its historical origin.
In the southern counties, whose population was more numerous, and especially in Kent, the inhabitants of which had preserved a vague tradition of a treaty concluded between themselves and William the Conqueror for the maintenance of their ancient rights and liberties,3 great symptoms of popular agitation appeared in the commencement of the reign of Richard II. It was a time of excessive expense with the court and all the gentlemen, on account of the wars in France, which all attended at their own cost, and wherein each vied with the other in the magnificence of his train and his armour. The proprietors of the lordships and manors overwhelmed their farmers and serfs with taxes and exactions, alleging, for every fresh demand, the necessity of going to fight the French on their own ground, in order to prevent their making a descent upon England. But the peasants said: “We are taxed to aid the knights and squires of the country to defend their heritages; we are their slaves, the sheep from whom they shear the wool; all things considered, if England were conquered, we should lose much less than they.”1
These and similar thoughts, murmuringly exchanged on the road, when the serfs of the same or of neighbouring domains met each other on their return from labour, became, after awhile, the theme of earnest speeches, pronounced in a sort of clubs, where they collected in the evening.2 Some of the orators were priests, and they derived from the Bible their arguments against the social order of the period. “Good people,” they said, “things may not go on in England, and shall not, until there be no more villains or gentlemen among us, but we be all equal, and the lords no more masters than we. Where is their greater worth, that they should hold us in serfage? We all come from the same father and mother, Adam and Eve. They are clothed in fine velvet and satin, lined with ermine and minever; they have meat, and spices, and good wines; we, the refuse of the straw, and for drink, water. They have ease and fine mansions, we pain and hard labour, the rain and the wind, in the open fields.” Hereupon the whole assembly would exclaim tumultuously: “There shall be no more serfs; we will no longer be treated as beasts; if we work for the lords, it shall be for pay.”3 These meetings, held in many parts of Kent and Essex, were secretly organized, and sent deputies into the neighbouring counties to seek the counsel and aid of men of the same class and opinion.4 A great association was thus formed for the purpose of forcing the gentlemen to renounce their privileges. A remarkable feature of the confederation is, that written pamphlets, in the form of letters, were circulated throughout the villages, recommending to the associates, in mysterious and proverbial terms, perseverance and discretion. These productions, several of which have been preserved by a contemporary author, are written in a purer English, that is to say, less mixed up with French, than are other pieces of the same period, destined for the amusement of the rich citizens. Except as facts, however, these pamphlets of the fourteenth century have nothing curious about them; the most significant of them is a letter addressed to the country people by a priest, named John Ball, which contains the following passages: “John Ball greeteth you all well, and doth give you to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, will and skill; God speed every idle one; stand manfully together in truth and helping. If the end be well, then is all well.”1 Notwithstanding the distance which then separated the condition of the peasants from that of the citizens, and more especially from that of the London citizens, the latter, it would appear, entered into close communication with the serfs of Essex, and even promised to open the gates of the city to them, and to admit them without opposition, if they would come in a body to make their demands to king Richard.2 This king had just entered his sixteenth year, and the peasants, full of simple good faith, and a conviction in the justice of their cause, imagined that he would enfranchise them all in a legal manner, without their needing to resort to violence. It was the constant theme of their conversations: “Let us go to the king, who is young, and show him our servitude; let us go together, and when he shall see us, he will grant us his grace of his own accord; if not, we will use other means.”3 The association formed round London was rapidly extending, when an unforeseen incident, in compelling the associates to act before they had attained sufficient strength and organization, destroyed their hopes, and left to the progress of European civilization the gradual abolition of servitude in England.
In the year 1381, the necessities of the government, arising from the prosecution of the war and the luxury of the court, occasioned the levy of a poll-tax of twelvepence for every person, of whatever station, who had passed the age of fifteen. The collection of this tax not having produced as much as had been expected, commissioners were sent to inquire into the subject. In their examination of the noble and rich, they were courteous and considerate, but towards the lower classes they were excessively rigorous and insolent. In several villages of Essex, they went so far as an attempt to ascertain the age of young girls in an indecent manner. The indignation caused by these outrages created an insurrection, headed by a tiler, named Walter, or familiarly Wat, and surnamed, from his trade, Tyler. This movement created others, in Sussex, Bedfordshire, and Kent, of which the priest, John Ball, and one Jack Straw were appointed leaders.1 The three chiefs and their band, augmented on its march by all the labourers and serfs it met, proceeded towards London “to see the king,” said the simpler among the insurgents, who expected everything from the mere interview. They marched, armed with iron-tipped staves, and rusty swords and axes, in disorder, but not furious, singing political songs, two verses of which have been preserved:
They plundered no one on their way, but, on the contrary, paid scrupulously for all they needed.2 The Kentish men went first to Canterbury to seize the archbishop, who was also chancellor of England; not finding him there, they continued their march, destroying the houses of the courtiers and those of the lawyers who had conducted suits brought against serfs by the nobles. They also carried off several persons whom they kept as hostages; among others a knight and his two sons; they halted on Blackheath, where they entrenched themselves in a kind of camp. They then proposed to the knight whom they had brought with them, to go as messenger from them to the king, who on the news of the insurrection had withdrawn to the Tower of London. The knight dared not refuse; taking a boat, he proceeded to the Tower, and kneeling before the king: “Most dread lord,” he said, “deign to receive without displeasure the message I am fain to bring; for, dear lord, it is by force I come.” “Deliver your message,” answered the king; “I will hold you excused.” “Sire, the commons of your kingdom intreat you to come and speak with them; they will see no one but yourself; have no fear for your safety, for they will do you no evil, and will always hold you their king; they will show you, they say, many things it is necessary for you to know, and which they have not charged me to tell you; but, dear lord, deign to give me an answer, that they may know I have been with you, for they hold my children as hostages.” The king having consulted with his advisers, said “that if on the following morning the peasants would come as far as Rotherhithe, he would meet them, and speak with them.” This answer greatly delighted them. They passed the night in the open air as well as they could, for they were nearly sixty thousand in number, and most of them fasted, for want of food.1
Next day, the 12th of June, the king heard mass in the Tower; and then, despite the entreaties of the archbishop of Canterbury, who urged him not to compromise himself with shoeless vagabonds,2 he proceeded in a barge, accompanied by some knights, to the opposite shore, where about ten thousand men from the camp at Blackheath had collected. When they saw the barge approach, “they,” says Froissart, “set up shouts and cries as if all the devils from hell had come in their company,” which so terrified the king’s escort that they intreated him not to land, and kept the barge at a distance from the bank. “What would you have?” said the king to the insurgents: “I am here to speak with you.” “Land, and we will show you more readily what we would have.” The earl of Salisbury, answering for the king, said: “Sirs, you are not in fit order for the king to come to you;” and the barge returned to the Tower. The insurgents went back to Blackheath, to tell their fellows what had occurred, and there was now but one cry among them: “To London, to London, let us march upon London.”3
They marched accordingly to London, destroying several manor-houses on their way, but without plundering them of anything: arrived at London-bridge, they found the gates closed; they demanded admission, and urged the keepers not to drive them to use violence. The mayor, William Walworth, a man of English origin, as his name indicates, wishing to ingratiate himself with the king and the gentry, was at first resolved to keep the gates shut, and to post armed men on the bridge to stop the peasants; but the citizens, especially those of the middle and lower classes, so decidedly opposed this project, that he was fain to renounce it. “Why,” said they, “why are we not to admit these good folk? they are our people, and whatever they do is for us.”1 The gate was opened, and the insurgents, over-running the city, distributed themselves among the houses in search of food, which every one readily gave them, from good will or from fear.
Those who were first satisfied, hastened to the palace of the duke of Lancaster, called the Savoy, and set fire to it, out of hatred to this lord, the king’s uncle, who had recently taken an active part in the administration of public affairs. They burned all his valuable furniture, without appropriating a single article; and threw into the flames one of their party whom they detected carrying something away.2 Actuated by the same sentiment of political vengeance, unmixed with other passion, they put to death, with a fantastic mockery of judicial forms, several of the king’s officers. They did no harm to men of the citizen and trading class, whatever their opinions, except to the Lombards and Flemings, who conducted the banks in London, under the protection of the court, and several of whom, as farmers of the taxes, had rendered themselves accomplices in the oppression of the poor. In the evening, they assembled in great numbers in Saint Catherine’s-square, near the Tower, saying they would not leave the place until the king had granted them what they required; they passed the night here, from time to time sending forth loud shouts, which terrified the king and the lords in the Tower. The latter held counsel with the mayor of London as to the best course to be pursued in so pressing a danger: the mayor, who had deeply compromised himself with the insurgents, was for violent measures. He said nothing could be easier than to defeat, by a direct attack with regular forces, a set of people, running in disorder about the streets, and scarce one in ten of whom was well armed. His advice was not followed, the king preferring the counsel of those who said: “If you can appease these people by good words, it were best and most profitable; for if we begin a thing we cannot achieve, we shall never regain our ground.”1
In the morning, the insurgents who had passed the night in St. Catherine’s-square, set themselves in motion, and declared that unless the king came to them forthwith, they would take the Tower by assault, and put to death all that were within it. The king sent word that if they would remove to Mile-end, he would meet them there without fail, and shortly after their departure he accordingly followed them, accompanied by his two brothers, by the earls of Salisbury, Warwick, and Oxford, and by several other barons. As soon as they had quitted the Tower, those insurgents who had remained in the city entered it by force, and running from chamber to chamber, seized the archbishop of Canterbury, the king’s treasurer, and two other persons, whom they decapitated, and then stuck their heads upon pikes. The main body of the insurgents, numbering fifty thousand men, was assembled at Mile-end when the king arrived. At sight of the armed peasants, his two brothers and several barons were alarmed, and left him, but he, young as he was, boldly advanced, and addressing the rioters in the English tongue, said: “Good people, I am your king and sire; what want you? what would you have from me?” Those who were within hearing of what he said, answered: “We would have you free us for ever, us, our children, and our goods, so that we be no longer called serfs or held in serfage.” “Be it so,” said the king; “return to your houses, by villages, as you came, and only leave behind you two or three men of each place. I will have forthwith written, and sealed with my seal, letters which they shall carry with them, and which shall freely secure unto you all you ask, and I forgive you all you have done hitherto; but you must return every one of you to your houses, as I have said.”2
The simple people heard this speech of the young king with great joy, not imagining for a moment that he could deceive them; they promised to depart separately, and did so, quitting London by different roads. During the whole day, more than thirty clerks of the royal chancery were occupied in writing and sealing letters of enfranchisement and pardon, which they gave to the deputies of the insurgents, who departed immediately upon receiving them. These letters were in Latin, and ran thus:
“Know that, of our special grace, we have enfranchised all our lieges and subjects of the county of Kent, and of the other counties of the kingdom, and discharged and acquitted all and several of them from all bondage and serfage.
“And that, moreover, we have pardoned these said lieges and subjects their offences against us, in marching to and fro in various places, with armed men, archers, and others, as an armed force, with banners and pennons displayed.”1
The chiefs, and especially Wat Tyler and John Ball, more clear-sighted than the rest, had not the same confidence in the king’s words and charter. They did all they could to stay the departure and dispersion of the men who had followed them, and succeeded in collecting several thousand men, with whom they remained in London, declaring that they would not quit it until they had obtained more explicit concessions, and securities for such concessions.
Their firmness produced its effect upon the lords of the court, who, not venturing as yet to employ force, advised the king to have an interview with the chiefs of the revolt in Smithfield. The peasants, having received this notification, repaired thither to await the king, who came, escorted by the mayor and aldermen of London, and by several courtiers and knights. He drew up his horse at a certain distance from the insurgents, and sent an officer to say that he was present, and that the leader who was to speak for them might advance. “That leader am I,” answered Wat Tyler, and heedless of the danger to which he exposed himself, he ordered his men not to move hand or foot until he should give them a signal, and then rode boldly up to the king, approaching him so near that his horse’s head touched the flank of Richard’s steed. Without any obsequious forms, he proceeded explicitly to demand certain rights, the natural result of the enfranchisement of the people, namely, the right of buying and selling freely in towns and out of towns, and that right of hunting in all forests, parks, and commons, and of fishing in all waters, which the men of English race had lost at the conquest.1
The king hesitated to reply; and, meantime, Wat Tyler, whether from impatience, or to show by his gestures that he was not intimidated, played with a short sword he had in his hand, and tossed it to and fro.2 The mayor of London, William Walworth, who rode beside the king, thinking that Wat Tyler menaced Richard, or simply carried away by passion, struck the insurgent a blow on the head with his mace, and knocked him from his horse. The king’s suite surrounded him, to conceal for a moment what was passing; and a squire of Norman birth, named Philpot,3 dismounting, thrust his sword into Tyler’s heart and killed him. The insurgents, perceiving that their chief was no longer on horseback, set themselves in motion, exclaiming: “They have slain our captain! let us kill them all!” And those who had bows, bent them to shoot upon the king and his train.4
King Richard displayed extraordinary courage. He quitted his attendants, saying, “Remain, and let none follow me;” and then advanced alone towards the peasants, forming in battle array, whom he thus addressed: “My lieges, what are you doing? what want you? you have no other captain than I. Tyler was a traitor; I am your king, and will be your captain and guide; remain at peace, follow me into the fields, and I will give you what you ask.”5
Astonishment at this proceeding, and the impression ever produced on the masses by him who possesses the sovereign power, induced the main body of the insurgents to follow the king, as it were, by a mechanical instinct. While Richard withdrew, talking with them, the mayor hastened into the city, rung the alarm-bell, and had it cried through the streets: “They are killing the king! they are killing the king!” As the insurgents had quitted the city, the English and foreign gentlemen, and the rich citizens, who sided with the nobles, and who had remained in arms in their houses with their people, fearful of pillage, all came forth, and, several thousand in number, the majority being on horseback and completely armed, hastened towards the open fields about Islington, whither the insurgents were marching in disorder, expecting no attack. As soon as the king saw them approach, he galloped up to them, and joining their ranks, ordered an attack upon the peasants, who, taken by surprise and seized with a panic terror, fled in every direction, most of them throwing down their arms. Great carnage was made of them, and many of the fugitives, re-entering London, concealed themselves in the houses of their friends.1
The armed men who, at so little risk, had routed them, returned in triumph, and the young king went to receive the felicitations of his mother, who said to him: “Hola, fair son, I have this day undergone much pain and fear for you!” “Certes, madam, I can well believe it,” answered the king; “but you may now rejoice, and thank God, whom we may justly praise, seeing that I have this day recovered my kingdom of England and my inheritance which I had lost.” Knights were made on this occasion, as in the great battles of the period, and the first whom Richard II. honoured with this distinction were the mayor Walworth and the squire Philpot, who had assassinated Wat Tyler. The same day, a proclamation was made, from street to street, in the king’s name, ordering all who were not natives of London, or who had not lived there a complete year, to depart without delay; and setting forth that if any stranger was found therein the next morning, he should lose his head as a traitor to the king and kingdom.2 The insurgents who had not yet quitted the city, hereupon dispersed in every direction. John Ball and Jack Straw, knowing they should be seized if they showed themselves, remained in concealment, but they were soon discovered and taken before the royal officers, who had them beheaded and quartered. This intelligence spread around London, stayed in its march a second body of revolted serfs, who, advancing from the remoter counties, had been longer on their road; intimidated with the fate of their brethren, they turned back and dispersed.1
Meantime, all the counties of England were in agitation. Around Norwich, the great landholders, gentlemen, and knights hid themselves; several earls and barons, assembled at Plymouth for an expedition to Portugal, fearing an attack from the peasants of the neighbourhood, went on board their ships, and although the weather was stormy, anchored out at sea. In the northern counties, ten thousand men rose, and the duke of Lancaster, who was then conducting a war on the borders of Scotland, hastened to conclude a truce with the Scots, and sought refuge in their country. But the turn of affairs in London soon revived the courage of the gentry in all parts; they took the field against the peasants, who were ill armed and without any place of retreat, while the assailants had their castles, wherein, the drawbridge once raised, they were secure. The royal chancery wrote, in great haste, to the castellans of cities, towns and boroughs, to guard well their fortresses, and let no one enter, under pain of death. At the same time it was everywhere announced that the king would enfranchise under his royal seal all serfs who remained quiet, which greatly diminished the excitement and energy of the people, and gave them less interest in their chiefs. The latter were arrested in various places, without much effort being made to save them: all were artisans for the most part, with no other surname than the appellation of their trade, as Thomas Baker, Jack Miller, Jack Carter, and so on.2
The insurrection being completely at an end from the defeat of the insurgents, the imprisonment of the chiefs, and the relaxation of the moral bond which had united them, proclamation was made by sound of trumpet, in the towns and villages, in virtue of a letter addressed by the king to all his sheriffs, mayors and bailiffs of the kingdom, thus conceived:—
“Make proclamation, without delay, in every city, borough and market town, that all and every tenant, free or otherwise, do, without resistance, difficulty, or delay, the works, services, aids, and labour, to their lords due, according to ancient custom, and as they were wont to do before the late troubles in various counties of the kingdom;
“And rigorously prohibit them longer to delay the said services and works, or to demand, claim, or assert any liberty or privilege they did not enjoy before the said troubles.
“And whereas, at the instance and importunity of the insurgents, certain letters patent under our seal were granted to them, giving enfranchisement from all bondage and serfage to our lieges and subjects, as also, the pardon of the offences committed against us by the said lieges and subjects;
“And whereas the said letters were issued from our court, without due deliberation, and considering that the concession of the said letters manifestly tended to our great prejudice and to that of our crown, and to the expropriation of us, the prelates, lords, and barons of our realms, and of holy church;
“With the advice of our council, we, by these presents, revoke, cancel and annul the said letters, ordering further, that those who have in their possession our said charters of enfranchisement and pardon, remit and restore them to us and our council, by the fealty and allegiance they owe us, and under penalty of forfeiture of all they can forfeit to us.”1
Immediately after this proclamation, a body of horse traversed, in every direction, the counties inhabited by the insurgents who had obtained charters. A judge of the king’s bench, Robert Tresilyan, accompanied the soldiers, and made a circuit with them of every village, publishing on his way, that all who had letters of enfranchisement and pardon must surrender them to him without delay, under penalty of military execution upon the entire body of the inhabitants. All the charters brought to him were torn and burned before the people; but, not content with these measures, he sought out the first promoters of the insurrection, and put them to death with terrible tortures, hanging some, four times over, at the corners of the town, and drawing others and throwing their entrails into the fire, while themselves yet breathed.2 After this, the archbishop, bishops, abbots, and barons of the kingdom, with two knights from each shire, and two burgesses from each borough town, were convoked in parliament, by letters from king Richard.1 The king set forth to this assembly, the grounds of his provisional revocation of the charters of enfranchisement, adding that it was for them to decide whether the peasants were to be freed or not.
“God forbid,” answered the barons and knights, “we should subscribe to such charters. ’Twere better for us all to perish in one day; for of what use our lives, if we lose our heritages.”
The act of parliament ratifying the measures already taken, was drawn up in French, having probably been discussed in that language.2 We do not know what share the deputies of the towns took in the debate, or even whether they were present at it; for although they were convoked, in the same form as the knights of the shire, they often assembled separately, or only remained in the common chamber during the discussion of the taxes to be imposed on merchandise and commerce. However, whatever may have been the part taken in the parliament of 1381, by the borough-members, the affection of the commoner class towards the cause of the insurgents is beyond a doubt. In many a place did they repeat the words of the Londoners: “These are our people, and whatever they do, is for us.” All who, not being noble or gentle, censured the insurrection, were ill regarded by public opinion, and this opinion was so decided, that a contemporary poet, Gower, who had enriched himself by composing French verses for the court, deemed it an act of courage to publish a satire, in which the insurgents were ridiculed.3 He declares that this cause has numerous and important partisans, whose hatred may be dangerous, but that he will rather expose himself to the danger than abstain from speaking the truth. It will thus seem probable, that, if the rebellion, begun by peasants and shoeless vagabonds, had not been so soon quelled, persons of a higher class might have assumed the conduct of it, and, with better means of success, might have effected its object. Then indeed, ere long, as a contemporary historian expresses it, toute noblesse et gentillesse might have disappeared from England.1
Instead of this, matters remained in the order established by the conquest, and the serfs, after their defeat, continued to be treated in the terms of the proclamation, which said to them, “Villains you were and are, and in bondage you shall remain.”2
Notwithstanding the failure of the open attempt they had made, at once to free themselves from servitude and to destroy the distinction of condition which had succeeded the distinction of race, the natural movement tending gradually to render this distinction less marked, still continued, and individual enfranchisements, which had commenced long before this period, became more frequent. The idea of the injustice of servitude in itself, and, whatever its origin, ancient or recent, the grand idea, that had formed the bond of the conspiracy of 1381, and to which the instinct of liberty had elevated the peasants before it reached the gentry, at length came upon the latter.
In the moments when reflection becomes calmer and more profound, when the voice of interest or avarice is hushed before that of reason, in moments of domestic sorrow, of sickness, and of the peril of death, the nobles repented of possessing serfs, as of a thing not agreeable to God, who had created all men in his own image. Numerous acts of enfranchisement, drawn up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, have this preamble: “As God, in the beginning, made all men free by nature, and afterwards human laws placed certain men under the yoke of servitude, we hold it to be a pious and meritorious thing in the eyes of God to deliver such persons as are subject to us in villainage, and to enfranchise them entirely from such services. Know then, that we have emancipated and delivered from all yoke of servitude, so and so, our naïfs of such a manor, themselves, and their children, born and to be born.”3
These acts, very frequent in the period we have referred to, and of which we find no instance in preceding centuries, indicate the birth of a new public spirit opposed to the violent results of the conquest, and which appears to have been developed, at once among the sons of the Normans and among the English, at the epoch, when from the minds of both had disappeared every distinct tradition of the historical origin of their respective position. Thus the great insurrection of the villains in 1381, would seem the last term of the series of Saxon revolts, and the first of another order of political movements. The rebellions of the peasants which afterwards broke out, had not the same character of simplicity in their motives, or of precision in their object. The conviction of the absolute injustice of servitude, and of the unlawfulness of the seigneural power, was not their sole moving cause; passing interests or opinions had more or less share in them. Jack Cade, who in 1448 acted the same part as Wat Tyler in 1381, did not, like the latter, put himself forward as simply the representative of the rights of the commons against the gentlemen; but, connecting his cause and the popular cause with the aristocratic factions which then divided England, he represented himself to be a member of the royal family, unjustly excluded from the throne. The influence of this imposture upon the minds of the people in the northern counties and in that same county of Kent, which, seventy years before, had taken for its captains, tilers, bakers, and carters, proves that a rapid fusion had been taking place between the political interests of the different classes of the nation, and that a particular order of ideas and of sympathies was no longer connected, in a fixed manner, with a particular social condition.
At about the same period, and under the influence of the same circumstances, the parliament of England took the form under which it has become celebrated in modern times, permanently separating into two assemblies, the one composed of the high clergy, the earls and barons, convoked by special letters from the king; the other of the petty feudatories or knights of the shire, and the burgesses of the towns, elected by their peers. This new combination, which brought together the merchants, almost all of them of English origin, and the feudal tenants, Normans by birth, or accounted such from the possession of their fiefs and their military titles, was a great step towards the destruction of the ancient distinction by race, and the establishment of an order of things wherein all the families should be classed solely by their political importance and territorial wealth. Still, notwithstanding the sort of equality which the meeting of the burgesses and knights in a chamber of their own seemed to establish between these two classes of men, that which had been heretofore inferior retained for awhile the token of its inferiority. It was present at the debates on political matters, on peace and war, taking no part in them, or withdrew altogether during these discussions, coming in merely to vote the taxes and subsidies demanded by the king from personal property.
The assessment of these imposts had, in former times, been the sole reason for summoning the burgesses of English race to the presence of the Anglo-Norman kings; the richer among them, as among the Jews, were rather ordered than invited to appear before their lord. They received the command to attend the king at London, and met him where they could find him—in his palace, in the open street, or in the suburbs on a hunting party. But the barons and knights whom the king assembled to counsel him, and to discuss with him the affairs which regarded the community, or, as it was then termed, the cominalté of the kingdom, were received in a very different manner, were treated with all dignity and honour. They found at court everything prepared for their reception: courtoisie, entertainments, knightly display, and royal pomp. After the fêtes, they had with the king, what the old writers call grave conferences on the state of the country;1 whilst the business of the deputies of towns was limited to the giving their adhesion, as briefly as possible, to the taxes propounded by the barons of the exchequer.
The habit gradually adopted by the kings of convoking the villains of their cities and boroughs, no longer in an irregular, casual manner, according to the wants of the moment, but at fixed and periodical times, when they held their court three times a year, made but slight difference in the ancient practice, in other respects, of which the reader has observed a striking instance in the time of Henry II. The forms employed in reference to the burgesses became, it is true, less contemptuous, when they were no longer summoned merely before the king, but were convoked in full parliament, among the prelates, barons, and knights. Yet the object of their admission into this assembly, where they occupied the lowest benches, was still a simple vote of money; and the taxes demanded from them still exceeded those required from the clergy and landholders, even when the assessment was a general one. For example, when the knights granted a twentieth or fifteenth of their revenues, the grant made by the burgesses was a tenth or a seventh. This difference was always made, whether the deputies of towns assembled separately, in the place where parliament was held, whether they were convoked in another town, or whether they assembled with the knights of the shire, elected like themselves, while the high barons received their letters of summons personally from the king.1 The commons, accordingly, in the fifteenth century, were by no means eager to attend parliament, and the towns themselves, far from regarding their electorial privilege as a precious right, often solicited exemption from it. The collection of the public acts of England contains many petitions to this effect, with several royal charters in favour of particular towns, maliciously constrained, say these charters, to send men to parliament.2
The business of the knights and that of the burgesses, seated in the same chamber, differed according to their origin and social condition. The field of political discussion was boundless for the former; for the latter, it was limited to questions of imposts on commerce, on imports and exports. But the extension attained in the fifteenth century by commercial and financial measures, naturally augmented the parliamentary importance of the burgesses; they acquired by degrees, in monetary matters, a greater participation in public affairs than the titled portion of the lower chamber or even than the upper house. This revolution, the result of the general progress of industry and commerce, soon produced another; it banished from the lower chamber, called the house of the commonalty or commons, the French language, which the burgesses understood and spoke very imperfectly.
French was still, in England, at the end of the fifteenth century, the official language of all the political bodies; the king, the bishops, judges, earls, and barons spoke it, and it was the tongue which the children of the nobles acquired from the cradle.1 Preserved for three centuries and a half amidst a people who spoke another tongue, the language of the English aristocracy had remained far behind the progress made, at this same period, by the French of the continent.2 There was something antiquated and incorrect about it, certain phrases peculiar to the provincial dialect of Normandy; and the manner of pronouncing it, as far as we can judge from the orthography of the old acts, greatly resembled the accent of Lower Normandy. Moreover, this accent, brought into England, had acquired in the course of time a certain tinge of Saxon pronunciation. The speech of the Anglo-Normans differed from that of Normandy, by a stronger articulation of particular syllables, and, more especially, of the final consonants.
One cause of the rapid decline of the French language and poetry in England, was the total separation of this country from Normandy, in consequence of the conquest of the latter by Philip Augustus. The emigration of the literary men and poets of the langue d’oui to the court of the Anglo-Norman kings, became, after this event, less easy and less frequent. No longer sustained by the example and imitation of those who came from the continent to teach them the new forms of the beau langage, the Norman poets resident in England lost, during the thirteenth century, much of their former grace and facility. The nobles and courtiers delighted in poetry, but disdaining themselves to write verse or compose books, the trouveres who sang in royal and noble halls were fain to seek pupils among the sons of the traders and inferior clergy of English origin, and speaking English in their ordinary conversation. It was naturally more or less a matter of effort with these men to express their ideas and feelings in another language than that of their infancy, and this effort at once impeded the perfection of their works, and rendered them less numerous. From the end of the thirteenth century, most of those who, whether in the towns or in the cloister, felt a taste and talent for literature, sought to treat in the English language, the historical or imaginative subjects that had hitherto been only clothed in the Norman language.
A great many attempts of this kind appeared in succession during the first half of the fourteenth century. Some poets of this epoch, those chiefly who enjoyed or sought the favour of the higher classes of society, composed French verses; others, contenting themselves with the approbation of the middle classes, wrote for them in their own language; others, combining the two languages in one poem, alternated them by couplets, and sometimes even by verses.1 Gradually the scarcity of good French books composed in England became such, that the higher orders were obliged to obtain from France the romances or tales in verse with which they beguiled the long evenings, and the ballads which enlivened their banquets and courtly entertainments. But the war of rivalry which at the same period arose between France and England, inspiring the nobles of the two nations with a mutual aversion, lessened for the Anglo-Normans the attraction of the literature imported from France, and constrained the gentlemen, tenaciously delicate on the point of national honour, to content themselves with the perusal of the works of native authors. Those, indeed, who resided at London, and frequented the court, were still enabled to satisfy their taste for the poetry and language of their ancestors; but the lords and knights who lived on their estates, were fain, under penalty of utter ennui, to give admission to English story-tellers and ballad-singers, hitherto disdained as only fit to amuse the burghers and villains.2
These popular writers distinguished themselves from those who, at the same period, worked for the nobles, by an especial attachment to country people, farmers, millers, or innkeepers. The writers in the French tongue ordinarily treated this class of persons with supreme contempt, giving them no place whatever in their poetical narrations, whose personæ were all individuals of high degree, powerful barons and noble dames, damoiselles and gentle knights. The English poets, on the contrary, took for the subjects of their mery tales, plebeian adventures, such as those of Piers Ploughman, and historiettes, such as those we find occupying so large a space in the works of Chaucer. Another characteristic common to nearly all these poets, is a sort of national distaste for the language of the conquest:—
says one of them.1 Chaucer, one of the greatest wits of his time, slily contrasts the polished French of the court of France, with the antiquated and incorrect Anglo-Norman dialect, in drawing a portrait of an abbess of high degree:—
Bad as it was, the French of the English nobles had, at least, the advantage of being spoken and pronounced in an uniform manner, while the new English language, composed of Norman and Saxon words, and idioms promiscuously put together, varied from one county to another, and even from town to town.3 This language, which took its commencement in England from the first years of the conquest, was successively augmented with all the French barbarisms used by the English, and all the Saxon barbarisms used by the Normans, in their endeavours to understand one another. Every person, according to his fancy or the degree of his knowledge of the two idioms, borrowed phrases from them, and arbitrarily joined together the first words that came into his head. It was a general aim with people to introduce into their conversation as much French as they could remember, by way of imitating the great, and appearing themselves distinguished personages.1 This mania, which, according to an author of the fourteenth century, had taken possession even of the peasants, rendered it difficult to write the English of the period in a way to be generally understood. Notwithstanding the merit of his poems, Chaucer expresses a fear that the multiplicity of the provincial dialects will prevent their being appreciated, out of London, and prays God grant that his book may be understood by all who read it.2
Some years before this, a statute of Edward III. had, not ordered, as several historians say, but simply permitted causes to be pleaded in English before the civil tribunals. The constantly increasing multiplicity of commercial transactions and of suits arising out of them, had rendered this change more necessary under that reign than before, when parties to a suit, who did not understand French, were fain to remain in ignorance of the proceedings. But in the suits against gentlemen before the high court of parliament, which took cognizance of treason, or before the courts of chivalry, which decided affairs of honour, the ancient official language continued to be employed. And, further, the custom was retained in all the courts, of pronouncing sentence in French, and of drawing up the record in that language. In general, it was a habit with the lawyers, of every class, even while pleading in English, to introduce every moment French words and phrases, as Ah! sire, je vous jure; Ah! de par Dieu! A ce j’assente! and other exclamations, with which Chaucer never fails to interlard their discourse, when he introduces them in his works.
It was during the first half of the fifteenth century, that the English language, gradually coming more into favour as a literary language, ended by entirely superseding French, except with the great lords, who, ere they entirely abandoned the idiom of their ancestors, diverted themselves equally with works in both languages. The proof of the equality which the language of the commons had now attained, is furnished by the public acts, which from about the year 1400, are indifferently drawn up in French and in English. The first statute of the house of commons in the English language bears date 1425; we do not know whether the upper house retained beyond this period the idiom of the aristocracy and of the conquest, but, from the year 1450, we find no more French acts on the statute book of England. Some letters, however, written in French by the nobles, and a few French epitaphs, are posterior to this epoch. Certain passages of the historians prove also, that, towards the close of the fifteenth century, the kings of England and the lords of their court understood and spoke French perfectly well;”1 but this knowledge was now merely a personal accomplishment with them, and not a necessity. French was no longer the first language lisped by the children of the nobles; it simply became for them, in common with the ancient languages and the continental tongues, the object of voluntary study, and the complement to a good education.
Thus, about four centuries after the conquest of England by the Normans, disappeared the difference of language, which, in combination with the inequality of social condition, had marked the separation of the families descended from the one or the other race. This entire fusion of the two primitive idioms, a certain indication of the union of the races, was perhaps accelerated, in the fifteenth century, by the long and sanguinary civil war of the houses of York and Lancaster. In destroying a great number of noble families, in creating among them political hatred and hereditary rivalry, in obliging them to form party alliances with people of inferior condition, this war powerfully contributed to the dissolution of the aristocratic society which the conquest had founded. During well nigh a century, the mortality among the men who bore Norman names was immense, and their places were necessarily filled by their vassals, their servants, and the burghers of the other race. The numerous pretenders to the crown, and the kings created by one party and treated as usurpers by the other, in their earnestness to obtain friends, had no time to be nice in the choice, or to observe the old distinctions of birth and condition. The great territorial domains founded by the invasion, and perpetuated thus far in the Norman families, now passed into other hands, by confiscation or purchase, while the late possessors, expropriated or banished, sought a refuge and begged their bread in foreign courts, in France, in Burgundy, in Flanders, in all the countries whence their ancestors had departed for the conquest of England.1
We may assign the reign of Henry VII. as the epoch when the distinction of ranks ceased to correspond with that of races, as the commencement of the society now existing in England. This society, composed of new elements, has still in great measure retained the forms of the old; the Norman titles remain, and, very singularly, the surnames of several extinct families have themselves become titles, conferred by letters patent of the king, with that of earl or baron. The successor of Henry VII. was the last king who prefixed to his ordinances the old form, “Henry, eighth of the name since the conquest;”2 but up to the present day the kings of England preserve the custom of employing the old Norman language, when they sanction or reject legislative bills: Le roy le veult; le roy s’advisera, le roy remercie ses loyaux subjects, accepte leur benevolence, et aynsi le veult. These forms, which seem, after the lapse of seven hundred years, to connect English royalty with its foreign origin, have yet, ever since the fifteenth century been heard, year after year, in the English parliament, without revolting the feelings of any one. It is the same with the genealogies and titles that carry back the existence of certain noble families to the invasion of William the Bastard, and the great territorial properties to the division made at that epoch.
No popular tradition relative to the division of the inhabitants of England into two hostile peoples existing, and the distinction between the two elements of which their present language is formed having disappeared, no political passions connect themselves with these now forgotten facts. Normans and Saxons exist only in history; and as the latter fill the less brilliant part, the mass of English readers, little versed in the national antiquities, willingly deceive themselves as to their origin, and regard the sixty thousand companions of William the Conqueror as the common ancestors of all the people of England. Thus a London shopkeeper and a Yorkshire farmer say: “our Norman ancestors,” just as would a Percy, a Darcy, a Bagot, or a Byron. The Norman, Poitevin, or Gascon names are no longer exclusively, as in the fourteenth century, the tokens of rank, power, and great estates, and it were inconsistent with reason to apply to the present times the old verses quoted in the epigraph to this work. Yet a fact, certain in itself and readily verified, is, that of an equal number of family names, taken, on the one hand, from the class of nobles, of country squires, gentlemen, and, on the other, from the trading, artizan, and agricultural classes, the names of French aspect are found in far greater proportion among the former. Such is all that now remains of the ancient separation of the races, and only within this limit can we now repeat the words of the old chronicler of Gloucester:
Of the Normans be these high men, that be of this land,
[1 ] See Book VIII.
[2 ] Hemingford, Chron., p. 507.
[1 ] Dom Lobineau, Hist. de Bretagne, i. lib. vi. p. 181.
[1 ] Dumoulin, Hist. Generale de Normandie, p. 514.
[1 ] See ante, Books I. II. III. and VIII.
[1 ] Dumoulin, H. de Normandie, p. 524-5.
[2 ] Willelm. Briton, Philippid., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvii. 213.
[1 ] Matth. Paris, ii. 688.
[1 ] Chroniques de St. Denis; Recueil des Hist. de France, xvii. 413.
[2 ] Willelm. Brit., ut sup. p. 214.
[3 ] Nicolaus de Braia, Gesta Ludovici VIII., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., XVII. 322.
[1 ] Robert. de Avesbury, Hist. de mirab. gestis Edwardi III., (Hearne) p. 130, et seq.
[1 ]Ib. p. 123.
[2 ] Et est la ville pluis grosse que n’est Nichole. (Robert. de Avesbury, ut sup. p. 125.)
[1 ]Ib. p. 130, et seq.
[1 ] Domos civitatis turrigeras. (Script. rer. Gallic. et. Francic., xviii. 580.) Dom Vaissette, H. Generale de Languedoc.
[1 ] Dom Vaissette, ut sup. iii. 130. Sismondi, Hist. des Français, vi. 270, et seq.
[1 ] Frances bevedor, fals Frances. (Ib. passim.)
[1 ] Provinciales Francos habent odio inexorabili. (Matth. Paris, ii. 654.)
[2 ] Millot, Hist. des Troubadours, ii. 239.
[4 ]Ib. p. 277.—Millot, loc. sup. cit. p. 145.
[1 ] Gaufridi, Hist de Provence, i. 140, et seq.
[1 ] Raynouard, iv. 214.
[2 ] Gaufridi, ut sup. i. 142, 145. Millot, ut sup. ii. 40.
[3 ] Regis parisiani. (Willelm. Brit., ut sup. p. 246.)
[1 ] See ante, Books X. and XI.
[1 ] Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., iii., v., vi., vii., passim.
[2 ] Marca, Hist. de Bearn, passim.
[1 ] Bascli, seu Basculi, Navarri, Arragonenses.
[1 ] Froissart, (ed. de Denis Sauvage, 1559) vol. iii. cap. cxxxix., p. 358, 359.
[2 ] Rymer, Fædera ii., iii., iv., passim.
[3 ] Froissart, iii., xxii., p. 75.
[4 ]Ib. ii. cap. iii. p. 6.
[1 ] Froissart, ii., cap. iii. p. 6.
[2 ] Rymer, (ed. of the Hague) ii. pars. iv. p. 77.
[1 ] Monstrelet, Chronique, i. 154.
[1 ] Dom Vaissette, ut sup. v. 15.
[2 ] Olhagaray, Hist. de Foix, Bearn et Navarre, p. 352.
[1 ] Chronique Bourdeloise, fol. 24.
[2 ] Monstrelet, iii. 41.
[3 ]Ib. p. 55.
[1 ] Chronique Bourdeloise, fol. 38.
[2 ] Monstrelet, iii. 63.
[1 ] At Bordeaux they were called corretiers. (Chronique Bourdeloise, fol. 36.)
[2 ] Philippe de Comines, Memoires (edit. de Denis Godefroy, 1649), p. 9.
[3 ] Dom Vaissette, ut sup. v. 40.
[1 ] Dom Vaissette, p. 47.
[2 ] Rymer, Fædera, v. pars iii. p. 64.
[1 ] Wallensium fides est fidei carentia. (Matth. Paris, ii. 437.)
[2 ]Ib. p. 938.
[1 ]Ib. 638.
[2 ] Antequam cibum sumeret, fecit viginti octo pueros. . . patibulo suspendi. Deinde cum sedisset ad mensam cibis intendens et potibus. . . (Ib. p. 231.)
[3 ] Pennant, Tour in Wales (the Journey to Snowdon), ii. 179.
[4 ] De Vasconensibus atque Basclis. (Matth. West., Flor. Hist., p. 411.)
[5 ] See Appendix XXV.
[2 ] Quod Wallensibus multum placuit. (Ib. p. 433.)
[3 ] Ranulf. Hygden, Polychronicon, lib. i., apud Rer. Anglic. Script. (Gale) iii. 188.
[5 ] Cambrian Register for 1796, p. 463, et seq.
[6 ] Rymer, Fædera, iii. pars iv. p. 200.
[1 ]Ib. p. 199.
[2 ] Froissart, i. cap. ccliii. p. 551, and cap. cccv. p. 420.
[3 ] The names of three other distinguished Welshmen, Edward Ap Owen, Owen Ap Griffith, and Robin ab Llwydin, figure in the roll-calls or lists of men-at-arms, towards the close of the fourteenth century. See Appendix Nos. XXVI-XXX.
[1 ] See Appendix No. XXXI.
[2 ] Froissart, i. cap. cccvi. 421, et seq.
[3 ]Ib. ii. cap. xvii. p. 28, 29.
[1 ]Ib. i. cap. clxxviii. p. 206.
[1 ] See Book VIII.
[2 ] Rymer, ii. pars iii. p. 72.
[3 ]Ib. iii. pars iii. p. 97.
[4 ]Ib. iii. pars ii. p. 165 and 173.
[5 ]Ib. p. 173.
[1 ] Rymer, iii. pars iv. p. 191—198.
[2 ] Pennant, Tour in Wales, ii. 260.
[3 ] Cambrian Biography, p. 273.
[4 ] Rymer, Fædera, iii. pars iv. p. 191, and iv. pars i. p. 15.
[1 ] See Book XI.
[3 ] Rymer, iv. pars i. p. 49.
[4 ] See Appendix XXXII.
[1 ] Rymer, iv. pars i. p. 69.
[2 ] Monstrelet, i. 14.
[3 ] Chron. Britann.; Lobineau, Hist. de Bretagne, ii. 366.
[1 ] Monstrelet, i. 17.
[2 ] Chronique Britann., loc. sup. cit.
[1 ] “My greatly dreaded and most sovereign lord and father,—the eleventh day of this present month of March, your rebels of Glamorgan, Uske, Netherwent and Overwent, were assembled to the number of eight thousand men; your faithful and valiant knights assembled against them, your men kept the field; nevertheless—” (Rymer, iv. pars i. p. 79.)
[2 ]Ib. pars ii. p. 153.
[1 ] Philippe de Comines, Mem., p. 97.
[1 ]Ib. p. 256.
[2 ] Pennant, Tour in Wales, i. 31.
[3 ] See Book I.
[4 ] Pennant, ut sup. ii. 375.
[1 ]Ib. i. 31. Rymer, iv. passim.
[2 ] Cambro-Britons, i. 456.
[3 ] Archaiology of Wales, i. preface x.
[1 ] Cambrian Register for 1796, p. 241, 242.
[2 ]Ib. 465, in notâ.
[3 ]Ib. p. 438.
[1 ] Cambrian Register for 1796, p. 438.
[3 ] See Book II.
[1 ] Miscellaneous Tracts, published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, v. 83.
[2 ] See Book I.
[3 ] See Book X.
[1 ] Matth. Paris, i. 130.
[2 ] See Book X.
[3 ] Matth. Paris, i. 131.
[4 ] Annales Waverleienses, ut sup. p. 243.
[1 ] Henric. Knyghton, De event Angl., lib. iii. cap. ii. ut sup. col. 2478.
[2 ] “Ah! is the mad knave knave enough for this? If he will not come to us, we will go to him.” (Joh. de Fordun, Scoti-chronicon, p. 969.)
[3 ] Cum nous par nostre malvès counsaile et faus...(Knyghton, col. 2481.)
[1 ] See Book VIII.
[3 ] David Barbour, The Bruce, p. 12.
[4 ] The king Edward with hornes and hounes him soght. (Hardyng’s Chronicle, cap. clxviii. at the word Edward the First.)
[1 ] Walter Scott, Lord of the Isles, notes to canto ii.
[1 ] Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. i.
[1 ] Avec les batimens et tout le cheptel, manants, bestiaux, charrues, &c.—Cum terris, domibus, ædificis, accolabus, mancipris vineis, sylvis, &c. (Spelman, Glossar. verbo Accola.) See Pinkerton, Hist. of Scotland, i. 252.
[2 ] See Appendix No. XXXIII.
[1 ] Motto of Archibald Douglas, earl of Augus, in the reign of James III. of Scotland.
[1 ] Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. i.
[1 ] In the Anglo-Norman language, Chivaler de Countee.
[2 ] Psalm cxlix.
[1 ] Exiit tyrannus, regum ultimus.
[1 ] Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. i.
[1 ] Burnet, History of his own Time (London, 1725), i. 230, et seq.
[1 ] The chased and tossed Western men (Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.)
[1 ] Burnet, ut sup. ii. 738.
[1 ] Burnet, ut sup. p. 830.
[2 ] See Appendix, No. XXXIV.
[1 ] Spenser, State of Ireland, p. 13.
[2 ] Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, ii. 367—371.
[3 ] Harris, Hibernica, i. 83, et seq.
[4 ]Ib. p. 79—102.
[5 ] Statutes of Edward I.
[1 ] The Irish enemies of our lord the king. Rotul. Parliam. Anno xx. Henrici vi.
[2 ] Harris, Hibernica, part i. p. 101.
[3 ] Froissart, vol. iv. cap. lxiii. p. 201.
[4 ] In auxilium nostrum et juvamen. (Joh. de Fordun, Scoti-chronico, iii. 925.)
[5 ] Campion, History of Ireland, p. 82.
[6 ] Rymer, Fædera, pars vol. ii. p. 118.
[1 ] Campion, p. 84, et seq.
[1 ] Froissart, vol. iv. cap. lxiii. p. 202.
[2 ] Spenser, State of Ireland.
[1 ] Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, pp. 52, 3.
[1 ] Sir R. Musgrave, Memoirs of the different Rebellions in Ireland, i. 25—8. This work, compiled, for the most part, from original documents, exhibits a complete view of the rebellions that have taken place in Ireland. The author, one of the agents of the government in the troubles of 1798, is, indeed, prejudiced against the Irish, but this very partiality more fully confirms all the facts he relates to their advantage.
[1 ] Musgrave, ut sup. p. 74.
[2 ] See the Transactions of the Hibernian Society of Dublin.
[1 ] Musgrave, ut sup. i. 31.
[1 ] Transactions of the Hibernian Society of London.
[2 ] Musgrave, ubi sup. p. 38.
[1 ] Musgrave, ubi sup., p. 38.
[2 ]Ib. p. 53.
[3 ]Ib. p. 55, 6.
[1 ] Musgrave, 55, 6.
[1 ] Musgrave, pp. 58, 9.
[1 ] Musgrave, ut sup. p. 133.
[2 ]Ib. p. 134.
[3 ]Ib. p. 146.
[1 ] Musgrave, ut sup. p. 158.
[1 ] Musgrave, ut sup. p. 189.
[2 ]Ib. p. 286.
[1 ] Musgrave, p. 247.
[1 ] Musgrave, p. 543 et seq.
[2 ]Ib. p. 555.
[3 ]Ib. p. 506.
[1 ] Musgrave, 507.
[3 ]Ib. p. 524.
[1 ] Musgrave, i. 80—100.
[1 ] Musgrave, i. 418, ii. 142.
[1 ] Musgrave, ii. 175.
[2 ]Ib. iii. 180.
[3 ]Ib. ii. 525.
[4 ]Ib. 526.
[1 ] Matthew Paris, ii. 386.
[1 ] Musgrave, p. 389.
[2 ]Ib. p. 816.
[3 ] Venit ergo ad hoc omne hominum in Angham cum mulieribus et parvulis, ut, expulsis indigenis à regno et penitus exterminatis, ipsi jure perpetuo terram possiderent. (Mat. Paris, i. 269.)
[1 ] See Book III.
[2 ] Quod sæpius gravati videbant aliegenas suis bonis saginari. (Matth. Paris, ii. 445.)
[3 ] Matth. Paris, i. 254. See Book III.
[1 ] Matth. Paris, i. 268.—Et aliarum regionum transmarinarum omnes qui alienis inhiabant, vespertiliones et exules excommunicati, homicidæ quibus patria fuit exilium non refugium. (Ib.)
[2 ] Orta est discordia inter regem Angliæ et barones, hís exigentibus ab eo leges Edwardi et aliorum subsequentium regum libertates et liberas consuetudines. (Annales Waverleienses, apud Hist. Anglic. Script. Gale, ii. 180.)
[1 ] 1. That the church of England shall be free, and enjoy her right entire, and her liberties inviolable; and we will have them so observed, that it may appear from hence, that the freedom of elections, which was reckoned chief and indispensable to the English church, and which we granted and confirmed by our charter, and obtained the confirmation of, from pope Innocent III., before the discord between us and our barons, was granted of mere free will, which charter we shall observe, and we do will it to be faithfully observed by our heirs for ever. 2. We also grant to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and for our heirs for ever, all the underwritten liberties, to have and to hold, them and their heirs, of us and our heirs: If any of our earls, or barons, or others, who hold of us in chief by military service, shall die, and at the time of his death his heir shall be of full age, and owes a relief, he shall have his inheritance by the ancient relief; that is to say, the heir or heirs of an earl, for a whole earl’s barony, by a hundred pounds; the heir or heirs of a baron, for a whole barony, by a hundred pounds; the heir or heirs of a knight, for a whole knight’s fee, by a hundred shillings at most; and whoever oweth less shall give less, according to the ancient custom of fees. 3. But if the heir of any such shall be under age, and shall be in ward, when he comes of age, he shall have his inheritance without relief and without fine. 4. The warden of the land of such heir who shall be under age, shall not take of the land of such heir other than reasonable issues, reasonable customs, and reasonable services, and that without destruction and waste of the tenants or effects; and if we shall commit the guardianship of those lands to the sheriff, or any other who is answerable to us for the issues of the land, and if he shall make destruction and waste upon the ward lands, we will compel him to give satisfaction, and the land shall be committed to two lawful and discreet tenants of that fee, who shall be answerable for the issues to us, or to him to whom we shall assign them: and if we shall sell or give to any one the wardship of any such lands, and if he make destruction or waste upon them, he shall lose the wardship itself, which shall be committed to two lawful and discreet tenants of that fee, who shall in like manner be answerable to us as aforesaid. 5. But the warden, so long as he shall have the wardship of the land, shall keep up the houses, parks, warrens, ponds, mills, and other things pertaining to the land, out of the issues of the same land; and shall restore to the heir, when he comes of full age, his whole land, stocked with ploughs and carriages, according as the time of wainage shall require, and the issues of the land can reasonably bear. 6. Heirs shall be married without disparagement, so as that before matrimony shall be contracted, those who are nearest in blood to the heir, shall be made acquainted with it. 7. A widow, after the death of her husband, shall forthwith and without difficulty have her marriage and inheritance; nor shall she give any thing for her dower, or her marriage, or her inheritance, which her husband and she held at the day of his death; and she may remain in the mansion house of her husband forty days after his death, within which term her dower shall be assigned. 8. No widow shall be distrained to marry herself, so long as she has a mind to live without a husband; but yet she shall give security that she will not marry without our assent, if she hold of us; or without the consent of the lord of whom she holds, if she hold of another. 9. Neither we nor our bailiffs shall seize any land or rent for any debt, so long as there shall be chattels of the debtor upon the premises sufficient to pay the debt; nor shall the sureties of the debtor be distrained so long as the principal debtor has sufficient for the payment of the debt. 10. And if the principal debtor shall fail in the payment of the debt, not having wherewithal to pay it, then the sureties shall answer the debt; and if they will, they shall have the lands and rents of the debtor, until they shall be satisfied for the debt which they paid for him, unless the principal debtor can show himself acquitted thereof against the said sureties. 11. If any one have borrowed anything of the Jews, more or less, and die before the debt be satisfied, there shall be no interest paid for that debt, so long as the heir is under age, of whomsoever he may hold; and if the debt falls into our hands, we will only take the chattels mentioned in the charter of instrument. And if any one shall die indebted to the Jews, his wife shall have her dower and pay nothing of that debt; and if the deceased left children under age, they shall have necessaries provided for them, according to the tenement or real estate of the deceased; and out of the residue the debt shall be paid, saving however the service of the lords. 12. No scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom, unless by the common council of our kingdom; except for ransoming our person, making our eldest son a knight, and once for marrying our eldest daughter; and for these there shall be paid a reasonable aid. 13. In like manner it shall be concerning the aids of the city of London; and the city of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs, as well by land as by water: furthermore we will and grant, that all other cities and boroughs, and towns and ports, shall have all their liberties and free customs; and for holding the common council of the kingdom concerning the assessment of their aids, except in the three cases aforesaid. 14. And for the assessing of scutages, we shall cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and great barons of the realm, singly by our letters. And furthermore we shall cause to be summoned in general by our sheriffs and bailiffs, all others who hold of us in chief, at a certain day, that is to say, forty days before their meeting at least, and to a certain place; and in all letters of such summons we will declare the cause of such summons. And summons being thus made, the business of the day shall proceed on the day appointed, according to the advice of such as shall be present, although all that were summoned come not. 15. We will not for the future grant to any one, that he may take aid of his own free tenants; unless to ransom his body, and to make his eldest son a knight, and once to marry his eldest daughter; and for this there shall be only paid a reasonable aid. 16. No man shall be distrained to perform more service for a knight’s fee, or other free tenement, than is due from thence. 17. Common pleas shall not follow our court, but shall be holden in some certain place. 18. Trials upon the writs of novel disseisin, and of mort d’ancester, and of durrein presentment, shall not be taken but in their proper counties, and after this manner: we, or if we should be out of the realm, our chief justiciary, shall send two justiciaries through every county four times a year, who, with four knights, chosen out of every shire by the people, shall hold the said assizes, in the county, on the day, and at the place appointed. 19. And if any matters cannot be determined on the day appointed for holding the assizes in each county, so many of the knights and freeholders as have been at the assizes aforesaid, shall be appointed to decide them, as is necessary, according as there is more or less business. 20. A freeman shall not be amerced for a small fault, but according to the degree of the fault; and for a great crime according to the heinousness of it, saving to him his contenement; and after the same manner a merchant, saving to him his merchandize. And a villein (farmer) shall be amerced after the same manner, saving to him his wainage, if he falls under our mercy; and none of the aforesaid amerciaments shall be assessed but by the oath of honest men in the neighbourhood. 21. Earls and barons shall not be amerced, but by their peers, and according to the degree of the offence. 22. No ecclesiastical person shall be amerced for his lay tenement, but according to the proportion of the others aforesaid, and not according to the value of his ecclesiastical benefice. 23. Neither a town nor any tenant shall be distrained to make bridges over rivers, unless that anciently and of right they are bound to do it. 24. No sheriff, constable, coroner, or other our bailiffs, shall hold pleas of the crown. 25. All counties, hundreds, wapentakes, and tythings shall stand at the old ferm, without any increase; except in our demesne manors. 26. If any one holding of us a lay fee die, and the sheriff, or our bailiffs, show our letters patent of summons concerning the debt due to us from the deceased, it shall be lawful for the sheriff or our bailiff to attach and register the chattels of the deceased, found upon his lay-fee, to the value of the debt, by the view of lawful men, so as nothing be removed until our whole debt be paid; and the rest shall be left to the executors who are to fulfil the will of the deceased, and if there be nothing due from him to us, all the chattels shall remain to the deceased, saving to his wife and children their reasonable shares. 27. If any freeman shall die intestate, his chattels shall be distributed by the hands of his nearest relations and friends, by view of the church; saving to every one his debts which the deceased owed to him. 28. No constable or bailiff of ours shall take corn or other chattels of any man, unless he presently give him money for it, or hath respite of payment by the good-will of the seller. 29. No constable shall distrain any knight to give money for castle guard, if he himself will do it in his person, or by another able man, in case he cannot do it through any reasonable cause. And if we lead him or send him into the army, he shall be free from such guard for the time he shall be in the army by our command. 30. No sheriff or bailiff of ours, or any other, shall take horses or carts of any freeman for carriage, but by the good-will of the said freeman. 31. Neither shall we nor our bailiffs take any man’s timber for our castles, or other uses; unless by the consent of the owner of the timber. 32. We will retain the lands of those convicted of felony only one year and a day, and then they shall be delivered to the lord of the fee. 33. All wears for the time to come, shall be put down in the rivers of Thames and Medway, and throughout all England, except upon the sea coast. 34. The writ which is called præcipe, for the future, shall not be made out to any one of any tenement, whereby a freeman may lose his court. 35. There shall be one measure of wine and one of ale, through our whole realm; and one measure of corn, that is to say, the London quarter; and one breadth of dyed cloth and russets, and haberjeets, that is to say, two ells within the lists; as to weights, they shall be as the measures. 36. From henceforward nothing shall be given or taken, for a writ of inquisition of life or limb, but it shall be granted gratis, and not denied. 37. If any one hold of us by fee-farm, or by socage, or by burgage, and hold lands of any other by military service, we will not have the wardship of the heir or land, which is of another man’s fee, by reason of what he holds of us by fee-farm, socage, or burgage; nor will we have the wardship of the fee-farm, socage, or burgage, unless the fee-farm was bound to perform military service. We will not have the wardship of an heir, not of any land which he holds of another by military service, by reason of any petty serjeantry he holds of us, as by the service of giving us knives, arrows, and the like. 38. No bailiff, for the future, shall put any man to his law upon his single word, without credible witnesses to prove it. 39. No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or banished, or any ways destroyed, nor will we pass upon him, or commit him to prison, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. 40. We will sell to no man, we will deny to no man, right or justice. 41. All merchants shall have safe and secure conduct, to go out of, and to come into England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as by water, for buying and selling by the ancient and allowed customs, without any evil tolls; except in time of war, or when they are of any nation at war with us. And if there be found any such in our land, in the beginning of the war, they shall be attached, without damage to their bodies or goods, until it be known unto us, or our chief justiciary, how our merchants are treated in the nation at war with us; and if ours be safe there, the others shall be safe in our dominions. 42. It shall be lawful for the time to come, for any one to go out of our kingdom, and return safely and securely, by land or by water, saving his allegiance to us; unless in time of war, by some short space, for the common benefit of the realm, except prisoners and outlaws, according to the law of the land, and people in war with us, and merchants who shall be in such condition as is above mentioned. 43. If any man hold of any escheat, as of the honour of Wallingford, Nottingham, Boulogne, Lancaster, or of other escheats which are in our hands, and are baronies, and die, his heir shall give no other relief, and perform no other service to us, than he would to the baron, if the barony were in possession of the baron; we will hold it after the same manner as the baron held it. 44. Those men who dwell without the forest, from henceforth shall not come before our justiciaries of the forest, upon common summons, but such as are impleaded, or are pledges for any that were attached for something concerning the forest. 45. We will not make any justiciaries, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs, but such as are knowing in the law of the realm, and are disposed duly to observe it. 46. All barons who are founders of abbeys, and have charter of the kings of England for the advowson, or are entitled to it by ancient tenure, may have the custody of them, when vacant, as they ought to have. 47. All woods that have been taken into the forests in our time, shall forthwith be laid out again, unless they were our demesne woods; and the same shall be done with the rivers that have been taken or fenced in by us during our reign. 48. All evil customs concerning forests, warrens, foresters and warreners, sheriffs and their officers, rivers and their keepers, shall forthwith be inquired into in each county, by twelve knights sworn of the same shire, chosen by creditable persons of the same county, and upon oath; and within forty days after the said inquest, be utterly abolished, so as never to be restored: so as we are first acquainted therewith, or our justiciary, if we should not be in England. 49. We will immediately give up all hostages and writings, delivered unto us by our English subjects, as securities for their keeping the peace, and yielding us faithful service. 50. We will entirely remove from our bailiwicks the relations of Gerard de Atheyes, so that for the future they shall have no bailiwick in England: we will also remove Engelard de Cygony, Andrew Peter, and Gyon, from the chancery; Gyon de Cygony, Geoffrey de Martyn and his brothers; Philip Mark, and his brothers, and his nephew, Geoffrey, and their whole retinue. 51. As soon as peace is restored, we will send out of the kingdom all foreign soldiers, cross-bowmen, and stipendiaries, who are come with horses and arms to the prejudice of our people. 52. If any one has been dispossessed or deprived by us, without the legal judgment of his peers, of his lands, castles, liberties, or right, we will forthwith restore them to him; and if any dispute arise upon this head, let the matter be decided by the five-and twenty barons hereafter mentioned, for the preservation of the peace. As for all those things of which any person has, without the legal judgment of his peers, been dispossessed or deprived, either by king Henry, our father, or our brother, king Richard, and which we have in our hands, or are possessed by others, and we are bound to warrant and make good, we shall have a respite till the term usually allowed the croises; excepting those things about which there is a plea depending, or whereof an inquest hath been made, by our order, before we undertook the crusade, but when we return from our pilgrimage, or if we do not perform it, we will immediately cause full justice to be administered therein. 53. The same respite we shall have (and in the same manner about administering justice, de-afforesting the forests, or letting them continue) for disafforesting the forests, which Henry, our father, and our brother Richard, have afforested; and for the wardship of the lands which are in another’s fee, in the same manner as we have hitherto enjoyed those wardships, by reason of a fee held of us by knight’s service; and for the abbeys founded in any other fee than our own, in which the lord of the fee says he has a right; and when we return from our pilgrimage, or if we should not perform it, we will immediately do full justice to all the complainants in this behalf. 54. No man shall be taken or imprisoned upon the appeal of a woman, for the death of any other person than her husband. 55. All unjust and illegal fines made with us, and all amerciaments imposed unjustly and contrary to the law of the land, shall be entirely forgiven, or else be left to the decision of the five-and-twenty barons hereafter mentioned for the preservation of the peace, or of the major part of them, together with the aforesaid Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, if he can be present, and others whom he shall think fit to take along with him; and if he cannot be present, the business shall notwithstanding go on without him; but so that if one or more of the aforesaid five-and-twenty barons be plaintiffs in the same cause, they shall be set aside as to what concerns this particular affair, and others be chosen in their room, out of the said five-and-twenty, and sworn by the rest to decide the matter. 56. If we have disseised or dispossessed the Welsh, of any lands, liberties, or other things, without the legal judgment of their peers, either in England or in Wales, they shall be immediately restored to them; and if any dispute arise upon this head, the matter shall be determined in the marche by the judgment of their peers; for tenements in England according to the law of England, for tenements in Wales according to the law of Wales, for tenements of the marche according to the law of the marche; the same shall the Welsh do to us and our subjects. 57. As for all those things of which a Welshman hath, without the legal judgment of his peers, been disseised or deprived of by king Henry, our father, or our brother king Richard, and which we either have in our hands, or others are possessed of, and we are obliged to warrant it, we shall have a respite till the time generally allowed the croises; excepting those things about which a suit is depending, or whereof an inquest has been made by our order, before we undertook the crusade: but when we return, or if we stay at home without performing our pilgrimage, we will immediately do them full justice, according to the laws of the Welsh and of the parts before mentioned. 58. We will without delay dismiss the son of Llewellin, and all the Welsh hostages, and release them from the engagements they have entered into with us for the preservation of the peace. 59. We shalltreat with Alexander, king of Scots, concerning the restoring his sisters and hostages, and his right and liberties, in the same form and manner as we shall do to the rest of our barons of England; unless by the charters which we have from his father, William, late king of Scots, it ought to be otherwise; and this shall be left to the determination of his peers in our court. 60. All the aforesaid customs and liberties, which we have granted to be holden in our kingdom, as much as it belongs to us, towards our people of our kingdom, as well clergy as laity, shall observe, as far as they are concerned, towards their dependents. 61. And whereas, for the honour of God and the amendment of our kingdom, and for quieting the discord that has arisen between us and our barons, we have granted all these things aforesaid; willing to render them firm and lasting (for ever), we do give and grant our subjects the underwritten security, namely, that the barons may choose five-and-twenty barons of the kingdom, whom they think convenient; who shall take care with all their might, to hold and observe, and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties we have granted them, and by this our present charter confirmed; so that if we, our justiciary, our bailiffs, or any of our officers, shall in any circumstance fail in the performance of them, towards any person, or shall break through any of these articles of peace and security, and the offence be notified to four barons chosen out of the five-and-twenty before mentioned, the said four barons shall repair to us, or our justiciary, if we are out of the realm, and laying open the grievance, shall petition to have it redressed without delay: and if it be not redressed by us, or if we should chance to be out of the realm, if it should not be redressed by our justiciary, within forty days, reckoning from the time it has been notified to us, or to our justiciary, (if we should be out of the realm,) the four barons aforesaid shall lay the cause before the rest of the five-and-twenty barons; and the said five-and-twenty barons, together with the community of the whole kingdom, shall distrain and distress us all the ways possible, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, and in other manner they can, till the grievance is redressed according to their pleasure; saving harmless our own person, and the person of our queen and children; and when it is redressed, they shall obey us as before. And any person whatsoever in the kingdom, may swear that he will obey the orders of the five-and-twenty barons aforesaid, in the execution of the premises; and that he will distress us, jointly with them, to the utmost utmost his power; and we give public and free liberty to any one that shall please to swear to them, and never shall hinder any person from taking the same oath. 62. As for all those of our subjects who will not, of their own accord, swear to join the five-and-twenty barons in distraining and distressing us, we will issue orders to make them take the same oath as aforesaid. And if any one of the five-and-twenty barons die, or goes out of the kingdom, or is hindered any other way from carrying the things aforesaid into execution, the rest of the said five-and-twenty barons may choose another in his room, at their discretion, who shall be sworn in like manner as the rest. In all things that are committed to the execution of these five-and-twenty barons, if, when they are all assembled together, they should happen to disagree about any matter, and some of them, when summoned, will not, or cannot, come, whatever is agreed upon, or enjoined, by the major part of those that are present, shall be reputed as firm and valid as if all the five-and-twenty had given their consent; and the aforesaid five-and-twenty shall swear, that all the premises they shall faithfully observe, and cause with all their power to be observed. And we will not, by ourselves, or by any other, procure any thing whereby any of these concessions and liberties may be revoked or lessened; and if any such thing be obtained, let it be null and void; neither shall we ever make use of it, either by our selves or any other. And all the ill-will, anger, and malice, that hath arisen between us and our subjects, of the clergy and laity, from the first breaking out of the dissension between us, we do fully remit and forgive: moreover all trespasses occasioned by the said dissension, from Easter in the 15th year of our reign, till the restoration of peace and tranquillity, we hereby entirely remit to all, both clergy and laity, and as far as in us lies, do fully forgive. We have, moreover, granted them our letters patent testimonial of Stephen, lord archbishop of Canterbury, Henry, land archbishop of Dublin, and the bishops aforesaid, as also of master Pandulph for the security and concessions aforesaid. 63. Wherefore we will and firmly enjoin, that the church of England be free, and that all the men in our kingdom have and hold all the aforesaid liberties, rights, and concessions, truly and peaceably, freely and quietly, fully and wholly to themselves and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and places, for ever, as is aforesaid. It is also sworn, as well on our part as on the part of the barons, that all the things aforesaid shall faithfully and sincerely be observed. Given under our hand, in the presence of the witnesses above-named, and many others, in the meadow called Runingmede between Windsor and Staines, the 15th day of June, in the 17th year of our reign.
[1 ] Matth. Paris, i. 383.
[1 ] Matth. Paris, i. 383.
[1 ] Script. rer. Anglic.—Matthew Paris, i. 288.
[1 ] “1. We will that all forests, which king Henry our grandfather afforested, shall be viewed by good and lawful men; and if he have made forest of any other wood more than of his own demesne, whereby the owner of the wood hath hurt, forthwith it shall be disafforested; and if he have made forest of his own wood, then it shall remain forest; saving the common of herbage, and of other things in the same forests, to them which before were accustomed to have the same. 2. Men that dwell out of the forest, from henceforth shall not come before the justicers of our forest by common summons, unless they be impleaded there, or be sureties for some others that were attached for the forest. 3. All woods which have been made forest by king Richard our uncle, or by king John our father, until our first coronation, shall be forthwith disafforested, unless it be our demesne wood. 4. All archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, and other our freeholders, which have their woods in forests, shall have their woods as they had them at the first coronation of king Henry our grandfather, so that they shall be quit for ever of all purprestures, wastes, and asserts, made in those woods after that time, until the beginning of the second year of our coronation; and those that from henceforth do make purpresture without our licence, or waste or assert in the same, shall answer unto us for the same wastes, purprestures, and asserts. 5. Our rangers shall go through the forest to make range, as it hath been accustomed at the time of the first coronation of king Henry our grandfather, and not otherwise. 6. The inquiry or view for lawing of dogs within our forest shall be made from henceforth when the range is made, that is to say, from three year to three year; and then it shall be done by the view and testimony of lawful men, and not otherwise; and he whose dog is not lawed, and so found, shall pay for his amerciament iii.s. And from henceforth no ox shall be taken for lawing of dogs; and such lawing shall be done by the assise commonly used, that is to say, that three claws of the fore foot shall be cut off by the skin. But from henceforth such lawing of dogs shall not be, but in places where it hath been accustomed from the time of the first coronation of the foresaid king Henry our grandfather. 7. No forester or bedel from henceforth shall make scotal, or gather garb, or oats, or any corn, lamb, or pig, nor shall make any gathering, but by the view [and oath] of the twelve rangers, when they shall make their range. So many foresters shall be assigned to the keeping of the forests, as reasonably shall seem sufficient for the keeping of the same. 8. No swanimote from henceforth shall be kept within this our realm, but thrice in the year, videlicet, the beginning of fifteen days afore Michaelmas, when that our gest-takers, or walkers of our woods come together to take agestment in our demesne woods, and about the feast of St. Martin, when that our gest-takers shall receive our pawnage: and to these two swanimotes shall come together our foresters, vierders, gest-takers, and none other, by distress. And the third swanimote shall be kept in the beginning of fifteen days before the feast of St. John Baptist, when that our gest-takers do meet to hunt our deer; and at this swanimote shall meet our foresters, vierders, and none other, by distress. Moreover, every forty days through the year our foresters and vierders shall meet to see the attachments of the forest, as well for greenhue, as for hunting, by the presentments of the same foresters, and before them attached. And the said swanimote shall not be kept but within the counties in which they have used to be kept. 9. Every freeman may agist his own wood within our forest at his pleasure, and shall take his pawnage. Also we do grant that every freeman may drive his swine freely without impediment through our demesne woods, to agist them in their own woods, or else where they will. And if the swine of any freeman lie one night within our forest, there shall be no occasion taken thereof whereby he may lose any thing of his own. 10. No man from henceforth shall lose either life or member for killing our deer: but if any man be taken, and convict for taking of our venison, he shall make a grievous fine, if he have anything whereof; and if he have nothing to lose, he shall be imprisoned a year and a day: and after the year and a day expired, if he can find sufficient sureties, he shall be delivered; and if not, he shall abjure the realm of England. 11. Whatsoever archbishop, bishop, earl or baron, coming to us at our commandment, passing by our forest, it shall be lawful for him to take and kill one or two of our deer, by view of our forester, if he be present; or else he shall cause one to blow an horn for him, that he seem not to steal our deer; and likewise they shall do returning from us, as it is afore said. 12. Every freeman from henceforth, without danger, shall make in his own wood, or in his land, or in his water, which he hath within our forest, mills, springs, pools, marl-pits, dikes, or earable ground, without inclosing that earable ground, so that it be not to the annoyance of any of his neighbours. 13. Every freeman shall have within his own woods, ayries of hawks, sparrow-hawks, faulcons, eagles, and herons; and shall have also the honey that is found within his woods. 14. No forester from henceforth, which is not forester in fee, paying to us ferm for his bailiwick, shall take any chimmage or toll within his bailiwick; but a forester in fee, paving us ferm for his bailiwick, shall take chimmage; that is to say, for carriage by cart the half year, ii.d. and for another half year, ii.d.; for an horse that beareth loads, every half year, an halfpenny; and by another half year, half a penny and but of those only that come as merchants through his bailiwick by licence to buy bushes, timber, bark, coal, and to sell it again at their pleasure; but for none other carriage by cart chimmage shall be taken; nor chimmage shall not be taken, but in such places, only where it hath been used to be. Those which bear upon their backs brushment, bark, or coal to sell, though it be their living, shall pay no chimmage to our foresters, except they take it within our demesne woods. 15. All that be outlawed for the forest only, since the time of king Henry our grandfather, until our first coronation, shall come to our peace without let, and shall find to us sureties, that from henceforth they shall not trespass unto us within our forest. 16. No constable, castellan, or any other, shall hold plea of forest, neither for greenhue nor hunting; but every forester in fee shall make attachments for pleas of forest as well for greenhue as hunting, and shall present them to the vierders of the provinces; and when they be enrolled and enclosed under the seals of the vierders, they shall be presented to our chief justicers of our forest, when they shall come into those parts to hold the pleas of the forest, and before them they shall be determined. And these liberties of the forest we have granted to all men, saving to archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, and to other persons, as well spiritual as temporal, templars, hospitallers, their liberties and free customs, as well within the forest as without, and in warrens and other places, which they have had. All these liberties and customs, we, &c. as it followeth in the end of the Great Charter. And we do confirm and ratifie these gifts, &c. as in the end of the Great Charter specified, &c.
[1 ] Matt. Paris, ii. 911.
[1 ] See Guizot, Essais sur l’histoire de France, p. 422.
[2 ] Annales Monasterii Burtoniensis, apud rer. Anglic. Script. (Gale), p. 413.
[3 ] Matth. Paris., continuatio, ii. 992.
[1 ] Matt. Paris, p. 989.
[2 ] The burthen of the song runs thus:—
[3 ] Matth. Paris.
[4 ] Quod non minus occubuit Simon pro justa ratione legitimarum possessionum Angliæ, quam Thomas pro legitima ratione ecclesiarum Angliæ olim occubuerat. (Chron. de Mailros, apud rer. Anglic. Script. Gale, i. 238.)
[1 ] Propter justissimam causam indigenarum Angliæ quam manu susceperat defendendam, adire tumulum ejus. (Ib.)
[2 ] Sed numqued...Deus dereliquit Simon emsine miraculis? Non; et id circo deducamus miracula divinitus per ipsum facta. (Ib. p. 232.)
[3 ] Memoirs of the Society of An iquaries of London, xiii. 248.
[4 ] The Lord’s Prayer, in the reign of Henry II., did not contain a single Norman word.
[1 ] Rustici Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nanseam (Script. rer. Anglic.)
[2 ] Matth. Paris.
[1 ] Rymer, Fœdera, iii. pars ii. p. 7.
[2 ]Ib. p. 156.
[3 ] Froissart, ii. cap. lxxiv. p. 133.
[4 ] At sessions ther was be lord and sire...(Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.)
[5 ] Froissart, ii. cap. lxxiv. p. 133.
[1 ] Quidam liber homo bondo. (Domesday Book, passim.)
[2 ] Madox, Formulare Anglicanum, passim.
[3 ] See vol. i. p. 162, and Appendix, No. IX.
[1 ] Froissart ii. cap. lxxiv—lxxix.
[2 ] Congregationes et conventicula illicita. (Rymer, iii., pars iii. p. 123.)
[3 ] Froissart, loc. sup. cit.
[4 ] H. Knyghton, ut sup. lib. v. col. 2633.
[1 ]Ib. col. 2367-8.
[2 ]Ib. col. 2364.
[3 ] Froissart, ii. lxxiv. p. 133.
[1 ] Knyghton, loc. sup. cit.
[2 ] Froissart, loc. sup. cit.
[1 ]Ib. cap. lxxvi, p. 137.
[2 ] Thom. Walsingham, Hist. Angl.; Camden, Anglica, &c. p. 248.
[3 ] Froissart, loc. sup. cit.
[1 ] Froissart, ut sup.
[2 ]Ib.—Proclamari fecerunt, sub œpæna decollationis, ne quis præsumeret aliquid vel aliqua ibidem reperta ad proprios usus servanda contingere. (Walsingham, ut sup. p. 249.)
[1 ] Froissart, ubi sup. p. 138.
[2 ]Ib. ii. cap. lxxvii. p. 139.
[1 ] Rymer, Fædera, iii. 124.
[1 ] In aquis et stagnis, piscariis et boscis et forestis feras capere, in campis lepores fugare...(Knyghton, ut sup. col. 2636, 7.)
[3 ] Other writers give the name Ralph Standish.
[4 ] Froissart, ut sup. p. 142.
[5 ] Walsingham, ut sup. p. 253.
[1 ] Froissart, ut sup. p. 142, 143.
[2 ] Walsingham, p. 254.
[1 ] Froissart, loc. sup. cit.
[2 ] Henric. Knyghton, col. 2637.
[1 ] Rymer, iii. pars iii. p. 124.
[2 ] Knyghton, col. 2643, 2644.
[1 ] Knyghton, col. 2643, 44.
[2 ] See Hallam’s Europe in the Middle Ages.
[3 ] It was written in Latin, and was entitled Vox clamantis.
[1 ] Froissart, ii. cap. clxxxviii. See Turner’s H. of the Anglo-Normans, vol. ii.
[2 ] Walsingham.
[3 ] Rymer, passim.
[1 ] Chron. Saxonicum, (Gibson) passim.
[1 ] Hallam, Europe in the Middle Ages.
[2 ] Rymer, Charta Edwardi III.
[1 ] Radulph. Hygden, Polychron., apud Rer. Anglic. Script., (Gale) 210.
[1 ] We find an instance of this in the prologue to a political poem written in the reign of Edward II., where the French and English verses follow each other and rhyme together, thus:
[2 ] Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
[3 ] Ranulph. Hygden, loc. sup. cit.
[1 ] See Rymer, Fædera. Dugdale, Monast. Anglic. Comines, Memoires.
[1 ] Comines, Mem., p. 97.
[2 ] Anno regnorum Henrici regis Angliæ et Franciæ octavi a conquestu octavo. (Madox, Formulare Anglicanum, p. 235.) The old acts of parliament in French give both the year of Christ and the year of the conquest: L’an d’el incarnacion, 1233, del conquest de Engleterre centisme sexante setime.