of the Conqueror, so the power of the Church increased through its more complete subordination to the Papacy. The Conqueror, however, had no intention of admitting the interference of the Pope in the English Church or State to a greater extent than he himself might judge to be expedient. He was, indeed, under great obligations to the Papacy, and was at all times regarded as a favoured son of the Church. But he resolutely Circ. 1076. refused to admit the haughty pretensions of Hildebrand, who in the prosecution of his scheme of Ecclesiastical Feudalism, in which all kings of the earth were to hold their kingdoms as fiefs of the Holy See, called upon William to do fealty for the crown of England. Under the pre-Norman kings the Church and the State had been practically identical, alike subject to the supreme power of the Witan, by whom kings, earls, and bishops were elected and deposed, and laws spiritual and temporal were enacted. The bishop and the ealdorman sat side by side at the gemot of the shire or hundred, deciding all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil. One of the most important acts of Separation William's reign was the separation of the Ecclesiastical from of spiritual the Civil jurisdiction of the courts of law. He directed that poral courts. from henceforth no bishop or archdeacon should hold pleas of ecclesiastical matters in the shire or hundred court; but that all such pleas should be determined according to the Canon and Ecclesiastical laws before the bishop, at the place which he should appoint for the purpose. All sheriffs and other lay persons were prohibited from interfering in spiritual causes.o But in making this change William took care to preserve the ancient supremacy of the State, by laying down his three famous canons of the Royal Supremacy, viz.:

from tem

(1) That no Pope should be acknowledged, or Papal letters William's received, in England, without the king's consent.

three canons of the Royal

(2) That the decrees of national Synods should not be binding Supremacy. without the king's confirmation.

(3) That the king's barons and officers should not be excommunicated, or constrained by any penalty of ecclesiastical rigour, without his permission.3

1 Fidelitatem facere nolui, nec volo; quia nec ego promisi, nec antecessores meos antecessoribus tuis id fecisse comperio.-Epp. Lanfr. ed. Giles, No. 10. Montalembert, in the concluding and posthumous volume of his Monks of the West (vii. 27), oddly enough refers to this incident as a refusal by Hildebrand of the homage of William I.

2 See the Ordinance of William in Ancient Laws and Institutes, ed. Thorpe, p. 213, and Select Chart., 81.

3 Eadmer, Hist. Nov., i. p. 6; Select Chart., 79. "A further usage, which was claimed by Henry I. as a precedent, was the prohibition of the exercise of legatine power in England, or even of the legates landing on the soil of the Kingdom without royal licence." Of these rules, Bishop Stubbs remarks: There is something Karolingian in their simplicity, and possibly they may have been suggested by the germinating Gallicanism

Judicial organisation.

Curia Regis.

Justiciar appointed.

William's riches.

A further check on the dignitaries of the Church consisted in the tenure of their estates; which from having been held by allodial title, or in frankalmoign (free alms), were for the most part converted into baronies to be held of the king by military service.

The Judicial organisation of the Kingdom at the end of William's reign was but slightly altered from what it had been under Edward the Confessor. The spiritual courts had now, as we have seen, exclusive jurisdiction in spiritual matters; but for civil matters the ordinary courts were still those of the shire, the hundred, or the borough, together with the hall-moots, now become the manorial courts-baron of the king or other lord. In the court of the shire all the freeholders of the shire,1 in the court baron all the free tenants of the manor,2 continued, as of old, to act as judges, and doubtless gave judgment in accordance with their ancient local customs; but in the shire and hundred courts the Norman sheriff, or vice-comes, now presided with a power and authority far less limited than the power and authority of any of his English predecessors.

The supreme court of the Kingdom was the Curia Regis, at once the Council of the king and the Witenagemot of the nation, with whose counsel and consent the king discharged both legislative and judicial functions. The immense amount of business to be transacted, the frequent absence of the king in Normandy, and his ignorance of the English language, caused the appointment of a new officer of the highest dignity, the Justiciar, who represented the king in all matters, acted as Regent in his absence, and at all times administered the legal and financial business of the country. The office of Chancellor, who, as official keeper of the royal seal, first appears under Edward the Confessor (the first of our kings who had a seal), was continued; but he was subordinate to the Justiciar, heading the king's clerks or chaplains, who performed the duties of secretaries.

William was reputed to be the most opulent prince in Christendom. His daily income is circumstantially stated by Ordericus

of the day. They are, however, of great prospective importance, and form the basis of that ancient customary law on which throughout the middle ages the English Church relied in her struggles with the papacy."-Const. Hist., i. 311.

"

1 See the accounts of the suits between the Bishop of Rochester and Pichot, the sheriff on behalf of the king. Text, Roffens. 150; between Bishop Wulstan and Abbot Walter of Veshand [Evesham], judicante et testificante omni vice-comitatu." Heming, Chartulari, p. 77; and between Archbishop Lanfranc and Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, Text. Roff. (Hickes), p. 32.

2 Coke, Fourth Inst., 46, 268; Co. Litt., 58; Spence, Eq. Juris., i. 100. In Domesday mention is made of one lord lending another some free tenants to make up his court, propter placita sua tenenda.

Vitalis to have been £1061 10s. 1 d., a sum which seems incredible, when tested by the relative value of money then and now. Little trust can be placed in the numerical statements of early chroniclers; but there is no doubt that the Conqueror's revenue was exceptionally large, whilst his expenditure was relatively small. His armies were furnished free of cost by his military tenants, and by the old constitutional fyrd or national militia. When he thought fit to employ mercenaries, their cost was defrayed by a Danegeld levied on the whole cultivated land of the Kingdom, and by billeting the troops at free quarters throughout the country.1

As King of the English, feudal superior of his tenants-in-chief, His great and personal lord of all his subjects, William exercised a power power. far greater than that which any of his predecessors had ever wielded. Though the formal changes which he had made in our constitution and laws were few in number his government was practically despotic, and his administration harsh. His tyranny, Harshness of says Hallam, "displayed less of passion or insolence than of his rule. that indifference about human suffering, which distinguishes a cold and far-sighted statesman." It was in this spirit that to resist a threatened invasion from Denmark he caused the whole 1069. country between the Tyne and the Humber to be laid waste, so that for some years afterwards there was not an inhabited village and hardly an inhabitant left.3

12

The reign of the Conqueror was on the whole beneficial to the nation, which required welding together and organising by means of a strong central government; and he himself was both a wise and, from his own standpoint, a just king. But his stern nature and the hardness of his rule made him an object of fear to all ranks of his subjects. In the picturesque language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler: "He was a very stark man and very savage; so that no man durst do anything against his will. He had earls in his bonds who had done against his will; bishops he set off their bishoprics, abbots off their abbotries, and thegns in prison, and at last he did not spare his own brother Odo." "Truly in his time men had mickle suffering and very many hardships. Castles he caused to be wrought and poor men to be oppressed. He was so very stark. He took from his subjects many marks of gold and many hundred pounds of silver and that he took, some by right and some by mickle might, for very

1 This was three times the rate of the old Danegeld, which, after having been abolished by Edward the Confessor, was now revived in an aggravated form and continued as a permanent, though only occasional, source of revenue. Cf. Freeman, Norm. Conq., iv. 685; Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. 302. 2 Middle Ages, ii. [302].

3 Will. Malmesb., Gesta Regum, 1. iii. s. 249.

4 Gregory VII. in his Epistles (Ep. vii. 33), calls William gemma principum"; and extols his love of justice. [Ep. iv. 18.]

little need." "He let his lands to fine as dear as he could: then came some other and bade more than the first had given, and the king let it to him who had bade more. Then came a third and bid yet more, and the king let it into the hands of the man who bade the most. Nor did he reck how sinfully his reeves got money of poor men, or how many unlawful things they did. As man spake more of right law, so man did more unlaw. His rich men moaned and his poor men murmured; but he was so hard that he recked not the hatred of them all."1

1 Anglo-Saxon Chron., pp. 189–191.

[Cf. Digby, Hist. Law of Real Property, 1884; and Lappenberg, Geschichte von England (1837), vol. ii. p. 160, who, after a comparison drawn between William I. and Cnut, makes the following remark: That which distinguishes William I. from all similar characters is the security which he brought to all his acquisitions; though the means to which he resorted ever procured him fresh enemies among his nobles as among his people. The rigour with which he proceeded against his barons and relations could have no other effect but to make him no less detested by them than by those whom he subjected." (Transl. by Ed.)-ED.]

1087-1100.

THE Constitutional importance of the reign of WILLIAM RUFUS WILLIAM consists mainly: (1) in the systematic elaboration by Ranulf RUFUS Flambard of the theory of the incidents of feudal tenure, and its rigid application in practice, as a fiscal expedient, to ecclesiastical and lay tenants alike; and (2) in the continued struggle between the Royal and feudal powers, which caused the king to throw himself upon the support of the native English, and led to the ultimate breaking up of the baronage of the Conquest. A despot of the worst sort, William devoted himself almost entirely to his pleasures, and after the death of Archbishop Lanfranc, his ablest adviser, left nearly all the work of government to his Justiciar. This great official was not, as in the Conqueror's days, a powerful baron, but a humble and clever Court chaplain, of congenial and compliant tastes, Ranulf Flam- Ranulf bard,' by whom the Church, the feudal vassals, and the people, were all subjected to systematic oppression and extortion. As Justiciar, he controlled and directed the whole fiscal and judicial business of the Kingdom; and in order to supply the prodigality of the master who had raised him to this exalted position, he directed his ingenuity, like Empson and Dudley four centuries later to turning the feudal rights of the king and the procedure of the Courts of justice into instruments of pecuniary extortion. The feudal incidents of relief, wardship, and marriage, which, under the Conqueror, had been based on true feudal principles, and, for the most part, reasonably exacted, were now systematically organised as a method of arbitrarily taxing the tenantsin-chief, under colour of exacting a legal due. The system of

1 Ranulf is by some said to have come over to England prior to the Conquest, being supposed to be the Ranulf who occurs in Domesday, i. 51, as a small landowner in Hampshire, T. R. E. He was afterwards, perhaps, in the service of Maurice, Bishop of London; and then Chaplain to William Rufus, who, after a time, made him Chief Justiciar. (Ord. Vital., x. 18: Ang. Sac. i. 706.) [Vide Lappenberg, Norman Kings, p. 226; Ord. Vital., 786 c.; Will. of Malmesbury, iv. 314.—ED.]

Flambard.