CHAP. justice was administered under him*, and the measures of his civil government were planned and executed. † II. Chancellors But I must now proceed to give the names of William's of the Con- Chancellors, with such scanty notices of their history as can be furnished from the imperfect materials which are preserved queror. MAURICE. Made and resigns Great Seal. to us. In 1067, the year after the battle of Hastings, when he had obtained the submission of a considerable part of England, although it was not till long after that he reduced the northern and western counties to his rule, he appointed as his first Chancellor, MAURICE, a Norman ecclesiastic, who had accompanied him as his chaplain when he sailed from St. Vallery for the coast of England. We know little with certainty of the acts of this functionary beyond his perusing and sealing a charter by which the Conqueror, after the example of the Confessor, granted large possessions to the abbot and monks of Westminster. ‡ In the usual course of promotion, Maurice, being Chancellor, was made Bishop of London. Here we find him highly celebrated for his exertions to rebuild St. Paul's. The year before his consecration the greatest part of the City of London, built of wood, had been consumed by fire, and the Cathedral where it now stands, on the site of an ancient temple of Diana, had been almost entirely destroyed. But A very ample report of the cause célèbre between Odo, as Earl of Kent, and Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, at Penenden Heath, before Chief Justiciary Godfrey, has come down to us, but no notice of any other judicial proceeding in this reign can be traced. In classic antiquity lawgivers were honoured not less than conquerors, and all the most celebrated laws of Rome bore the names of their authors; but in our own history (horresco referens) oblivion seems to await all those who devote themselves to legal reform. We do not know with any certainty who framed the Statutes of Westminster in the time of Edward I., the Statute of Fines, the Statute of Uses, the Statute of Wills, or the Statute of Frauds, although they ought to have been commemorated for conferring lasting benefit on their country. "Sed omnes illacrimabiles Urguentur, ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro." The Grenville Act for the trial of controverted elections was the first which conferred any éclat on the name of its author, and Fox's Libel Act is almost the only other down to our own times. The charter is thus attested, " Ego, Mauritius Cancellarius, favendo legi et sigillavi." 4 Inst. 78. by his pious exhortations, assisted by a royal grant, it rose from its ashes with new magnificence. * Maurice enjoyed the dignity of Chancellor on his first appointment but for a short space of time, as it seems to have been the policy of William never to allow his great seal to remain long in the same hands. Spelman represents him as having been again Chancellor in 1077†, and there can be no doubt that he continued a person of considerable influence during the whole of this and the succeeding reign. CHAP. II. Conduct of cellor Maurice on the William Ex-chan death of We have, however, no distinct account of the part which he again took in public affairs till Rufus was accidentally killed by Sir Walter Tyrrell while hunting in the New Forest. Henry, the king's younger brother, who was of the party, in violation of the superior claims of Rufus. Robert, then absent in Normandy, hastened to London to A. D. 1100. claim the vacant throne. In those days anointment by a prelate was supposed to give a divine right to kings, and the commencement of a reign was calculated from the day of the coronation, not from the death of the predecessor. The privilege of crowning the Kings of England has always been considered to belong to the Archbishop of Canterbury as Primate, but Anselm from his quarrel with the late King was now in exile. Henry in this extremity applied to Maurice, the Ex-chancellor, and overcame his scruples respecting the law of primogeniture by a share of the royal treasure, which he had secured to himself as he passed through Winchester, and by which history records his usurpation was accomplished. On the third day from the tragical end of Rufus, Maurice placed the crown on the head of the new sovereign in the abbey of Westminster. The Great Seal was now again within his reach, but he preferred the quiet use of his riches, and the hope eagerly cherished, though never realised, of succeeding to the primacy. He died in 1107, still Bishop of London, having seen a rapid succession of eight or nine Chancellors after his own resignation or dismissal. The Conqueror's second Chancellor was OSMOND. Dugdale OSMOND. CHAP. His charac ter. His literary works. ARFASTUS. and Spelman leave the year of his appointment uncertain, and we might never have been informed of his having filled this office, had it not been that in 1078 he was promoted to the bishopric of Sarum, and we find some account of him in the annals of that see. He was, of course, a Norman, for now, and long after, no Saxon was promoted to any office, civil, military, or ecclesiastical. Having come over with William, and fought for him in the field, he was first made Earl of Dorset, and now being girt with a sword, while he held the Great Seal in one hand, a crosier was put into the other.* Of Osmond's conduct in his office of Chancellor few particulars are transmitted to us; but he is said to have been much in the confidence of the Conqueror, who consulted him about all the most arduous and secret affairs of state, as well as confiding to him the superintendence of the administration of justice. William of Malmesbury is his chief panegyrist, celebrating his chastity, his disinterestedness, his deep learning, and above all, his love of sacred music, representing as the only shade on his character his great severity to penitents, which was caused by his own immaculate life. After his elevation to the episcopal dignity, he devoted himself entirely to his sacerdotal duties. He is the first Chancellor I have to mention as an author. His principal work was "A History of the Life and Miracles of Alden, a Saxon Saint, the first Bishop of Sherborne." He likewise composed the service "secundum usum Sarum," which remained in great repute, and was followed in the West of England till the Reformation.† From the testing clause of a charter granted by the Conqueror to the Dean and Canons of St. Martin's, in the city of London, bearing date in the year 1073, we know that the great seal was then held by ARFASTUS, Bishop of Helmstadt, in Germany. As he never was preferred to an English * Such a combination long continued very common, and the Reformation even did not recognise the separation which now prevails between sacred and secular employments. James I. had a bishop for Lord Keeper of the Great Seal; Charles I. had a bishop for his Lord Treasurer; Queen Anne, with the loud approbation of Swift and the High Church party, had a bishop for her Lord Privy Seal and one of her ambassadors to negotiate the treaty of Utrecht. † De Gestis Pontificum, lib. i. II. bishopric, we have no means of accurately tracing his history, CHAP. or explaining the fact of a German Bishop being an English Chancellor: we can only conjecture that he was one of the crowd of ecclesiastical adventurers who ranged themselves under the standard which the Pope had blessed when William proclaimed his grand enterprise.* Of his successor we know little but the name, there being BALDrick. no description added to it to tell us from what country he sprang, or what other office he ever filled; but a charter granted at this time by the Conqueror to the monks of St. Florentius of Andover is witnessed and authenticated by BALDRICK as King's Chancellor. He was no doubt King's Chaplain, but does not seem to have reached any higher ecclesiastical dignity. Although the custody of the great seal was in those days considered a certain step to a bishopric, premature death or loss of power had disappointed the hopes of this aspirant.‡ Next came HERMAN, with whose origin and history we HERMAN. are well acquainted. He was a Norman by birth, and before the coming in of William he had been promoted to the bishopric of Sherborne. It is a curious consideration, that in the reign of the Confessor there was the most familiar intercourse between England and Normandy; the French language was spoken at his Court §, and many Normans were employed by him. Of these Herman was one of the most favoured, and he is supposed to have assisted in the artifices which his native prince resorted to for the purpose of being designated heir to the crown of England, in derogation of the rights of the true representative of the line of Cerdic, and of the claims of Harold, who aspired to be the founder of a new Saxon * See Spelman, Gloss. 109., where he is stated to have been twice Chancellor. + Inspex. Pat. Ed. 2. p. 2. MS. Lold. Chron. Ser. 1. It is said that the poetical name for a belt or girdle was taken from this Chancellor, who is supposed to have worn one of uncommon magnificence. "Athwart his breast a BALDRICK brave he ware That shined like twinkling stars with stones most precious rare." "A radiant BALDRICK o'er his shoulders tied SPENSER. POPE. But this probably arose from the difficulty of finding any other etymology for the word. See Thiery's History of the Norman Conquest. II. CHAP. dynasty. Immediately after the battle of Hastings he sent in his adhesion to William, and he steadily supported him in the protracted struggle which took place before the Norman yoke was imposed upon the whole of England. For reasons not explained to us, he wished to remove his episcopal see from Sherborne to Old Sarum, which has been so often talked of as a decayed borough, but which William of Malmesbury describes as being at this time such a wretched place, that " a miserable commerce was carried on there in water." He was gratified in this whim, and his services were farther rewarded with the custody of the great seal. WELSON. W. GIF- He was succeeded by WILLIAM WELSON, who being appointed Bishop of Thetford soon gave up the office of Chancellor, and retired to the discharge of his spiritual duties. † The Conqueror's last Chancellor was WILLIAM Giffard, Chancellor who, though promoted to the rich See of Winchester, eagerly under three retained the great seal. He was a very dexterous man, who reigns. could accommodate himself to the various tastes of persons and times. Though once deprived of office by an unexpected turn of affairs, and for a considerable interval baffled in his schemes for recovering it, he at last contrived to be reinstated; and he was Chancellor under three successive sovereigns. His charac ter. He was not incapable of giving good advice, and of taking the liberal side when it suited his interest. Although he had heartily concurred in the oppression of the Saxons in the early part of William's reign, and had declared that they were to be considered aliens in their native land, and had assisted in the measures for upsetting English law and extirpating the English language, yet, when the two great Earls, Morcar and Edwin, appeared still formidable, and discontent among the natives had become so deep and general as to threaten a dangerous revolt, the Chancellor joined with several other prelates in praying that the conquered people might be emancipated from some of the galling disabilities which had been inflicted upon them, and he induced the Conqueror to restore a few of the laws of the Confessor, which, though |