1234-1264.] EXACTIONS OF THE KING AND THE POPE. 361 the guide "for us and our land," had taken his affairs into his own hands, he undertook an expedition into Wales, from which he quickly returned. The next year, he collected an army for the invasion of France; but suddenly quarrelled with his minister, De Burgh, and dispersed his troops. In 1230, he received homage in Poitou and Gascony. From that time, foreigners became his favourites. His quarrel with his able but unscrupulous justiciary, De Burgh, now assumed a formidable character; and, after a violent contest, the minister lost his power. The king's chief minister is now Peter de Roches, the bishop of Winchester; and he and his foreign adherents are hateful to the English nobles, and the nation is again on the point of civil war. In 1234, De Roches and the Poitevins are dismissed. Henry then enters into the trade of kingship upon his own account. With him, the royal office was indeed a trade. History presents him in scarcely any other light than that of an extortioner or a beggar. Mathew Paris, who has been accused of collecting and preserving every malicious and scandalous anecdote that could gratify his censorious disposition," might not be entirely relied upon for this prominent feature of Henry's character and times, but the records of the Exchequer abundantly show, that, for forty years, "there were no contrivances for obtaining money so mean or unjust that he disdained to practise them." But it was not only the king who was pressing upon the capital of the English nation. The pope had a more than equal share of the spoil. Henry consented to the pontiff plundering the church, till he found that large revenues could not be abstracted from the kingdom without lessening his own resources. As long as he had a due share, the king encouraged the plunderer. The monks said "When the wolf and the shepherd confederate, it bodes ill for the flock." Which was the wolf, and which the shepherd ? VOL. I. *Lingard, History, vol. iii. p. 216. Svo. BB 362 LIBELS-ROYAL DIGNITY. [1234-1264. Though the age of Henry III. was not an age of printing, it was an age when straws thrown up showed which way the wind blew. There were songs and squibs in those days, which were current in the citizen's hall and the monk's refectory. Some of these have come down to us in Latin rhymes, in Anglo-Norman, and in almost intelligible English. The songs of this period evidently point to a condition of comparative prosperity, for they abound with denunciations against the money-getters. In one of these, the theme is universal bribery.* It is a Latin poem, with a cento of quotations. In the Anglo-Norman "Song of the Church," "Li rois ne l'apostolle ne pensent altrement, Mès coment au clers tolent lur or e lur argent." + In another Latin song of the same age, we are told, in macaronic rhyme, that "the poor man, who possesses little, must be spoiled of his property to enrich the wealthy." In one of these wicked Anglo-Norman libels, the king is laughed at, with an evident knowledge of character, in a way that shows there is nothing new in the irreverence of wit for high station. His sapient majesty is made to say, "I will take Paris, that is quite certain; I will set fire to the river which is called Seine; I will burn the mills, and it will be a terrible thing if they have no bread to eat all the week." The sober chroniclers come and show us that the libellers are not untrue historians. We have no record that Henry punished the satirical ballad-makers; but, in the third year of the reign of his son, a statute was passed against "devisors of tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord, hath many times arisen between the king and his people, or great men of this realm." The monk of St. Alban's, who, no doubt, picked up many stray stories and odd scraps of news from "devisors of tales," and read his laborious chronicle for the enter tainment of his brethren, was fortunate in having been before the statute of 1275 in its publication. The monk of St Alban's does not say soft things of the government he lived under. In 1236, Henry married Eleanor, the daughter of the Count of Provence. The nuptial festivities were of extraordinary splendour. The citizens of London, especially, came forth with all the pomp of their municipal luxury, in mantles worked in gold, and carrying gold and silver cups as they rode in troops on their newly-caparisoned horses. In 1239, the queen bore a son, Edward; and then the streets were illuminated, whilst bands of dancers made the night joyful with drum and tambourine. But Henry, according to Mathew Paris, was not satisfied with barren rejoicings. He sent out messengers to ask for presents, into city and into country. They came back. If well loaded the king smiled. If the gift were small, it was rejected with contempt. "God gave us the child," said a Norman, “but the king sells him to us." In 1251, he went about seeking hospitality of "abbots, friars, clerks, and men of low degree, staying with them, and asking for gifts." The chronicler, two years before this, has recorded that Henry shamelessly transgressed the bounds of royal dignity, by exacting New Year's gifts from * "Contra avaros." Political Songs, published by Camden Society, p. 27. +Ibid. page 43. "The king and the people think of nothing else but how they may take from the clergy their gold and their silver." Ibid., p. 67. 1234-1264.] PURVEYANCE-JUSTICE SOLD. 363 the citizens of London. "Lend me a hundred pounds," said the king to the abbot of Ramsay; and the abbot replied, "I have sometimes given, but never lend," and so went to the money-lenders, and borrowed it, "that he might satisfy the wants of this beggar-king." But not unfrequently, as we learn from a remonstrance of parliament in 1248, the king rose above the meanness of the beggar to do the more legitimate work of the robber. "He seized by force on whatever was used in the way of meat and drink— especially wine, and even clothes-against the will of those who sold these things." Mathew Paris does not explain the nature of these seizures; but we imagine they were made under the old despotic system of purveyance, although that was expressly regulated in the Great Charter. The chronicler adds, " even on the sea coast he tyrannises and oppresses to such a degree, that he does not allow the herrings and other fish to be disposed of at the will of the poor fishermen." But these exactions were more contemptible than destructive to the good order of the realm. This weak king, whose grandfather, however despotic, had worthily laboured to make the sources of justice pure, was himself the great fountain of corruption. His justiciaries went forth on their regular circuits, not for the punishment of offenders, but to compound for offences. In 1240, "under the pretence of administering justice, they collected an immense sum of money for the use of the king, who squandered away everything." He sent forth inquisitors of the forests, who not only ruined all those who had encroached upon the forest borders, but also impoverished many, even those of noble birth, "for a single small beast, a fawn, or hare, although straying in an out-of-the-way place." The Jews, according to the custom of the age, were lawful plunder; and Henry, as regarded them, did not depart from the pious usage of his father. But he did more than any of his predecessors in the spoil of the Israelites. He sold them, as he would a farm, to his brother Richard. The city of London, in the middle of the 13th century, was a great commercial port, carring on trade with the ports of the Channel, with Flanders and Germany, and with some parts of Italy. The merchants of Almaine, as they were called in the charter of the 44th of Henry III., had their hall in London, afterwards known as the Steel-yard. They were large importers of grain, flax and hemp, of pitch, of steel. Tin was imported, in 1241, from Germany at a lower rate than the tin of Cornwall. London was 364 THE LONDONERS OPPRESSED. [1234-1264. flourishing. Her merchants were rich. Henry sometimes begged from them and sometimes trafficked with them. The confirmation of the city's charter generally followed an aid; but that form cost nothing, and was proportionably agreeable to the king. The bargaining for an exchange of some real article of value for a money payment was a very unpleasant affair to him. The Londoners, in 1248, bought his jewels, when Henry thus expressed himself: "I know that if the treasure of Augustus were for sale, these ill-bred Londoners would suck it all up. They call themselves barons, indeed. They possess a surfeit of riches. That city is an inexhaustible well." And so he constantly dipped his bucket into the well. He had always some petty revenge in store for fancied injuries. He asked the abbots of all the Cistercians for a year's value of their wool; for on the downs around their solitary abbeys the nibbling flocks were their principal riches. The monks averred that such a demand would be their ruin, and refused the payment. The king had the prerogative of regulating commerce, and he forbade the Cistercians to export their wool. The fleeces remained in the Cistercians' lofts, but the wines of Germany were not in their cellars, and the broadcloths of Flanders were not in their wardrobes. The exchange of England's great staple commodity for the commodities which other lands produced cheaper and better, was stopped for the unhappy monks. Henry had a device for the punishment of the Londoners, to be obtained by an abuse of his royal prerogative of interference with trade. The fairs of England, in the days when regular commercial communication between producers and consumers was imperfectly established, were of immense importance to the inhabitants of remote districts. They were specially provided for in the charters of large towns; and to these marts came, once a year, or more frequently, traders and customers from all parts. At the fairs, the religious houses laid in their stores of wax for their altars and of malt for their breweries; and the nobles sent their purveyors to look out for brass vessels and pottery, for fine drapery and costly silks. But the fairs were, at the same time, a great source of oppression to the regular traders of the towns, for during their continuance the shops were shut, and all other trade was suspended. Henry, in 1248, resolved to establish a fair at Westminster. The bishop of Winchester derived a large revenue from his fair on Saint Giles' Hill, near that city; for while it lasted, during sixteen days, all other traffic was suspended for seven miles round, and all merchandise coming to the fair paid toll to the bishop. The example was a tempting one; and so Henry proclaimed, at the feast of Saint Edward, in October, that a fair should be held at Westminster for a fortnight; that all fairs throughout the land should be suspended for that period; and that all traffic in London should be given over for these fourteen days, that the Westminster fair might be better supplied with merchandise. The bishop of Ely had his own fair at this season; and he stoutly remonstrated with the king: but to no purpose. And so, on the 13th of October, the day of the Saxon king and Confessor, for whose equal laws the people had been clamouring for two centuries, the king, holding his office under a charter of liberties, stops the traffic of a great city abundantly supplied with all commodities, and compels * * See Warton's "History of English Poetry," Vol. ii., p. 115. Park's edition. 1234-1264.] DISAFFECTION OF THE LONDONERS. $65 its merchants to bring their wares to the muddy precincts of the royal palace. The great abbey church was now rising into its present beauty, upon the ruins of the Saxon building. Round the hall of Rufus, by the margin of the river and the fields of the west, was a large encampment; and under tents was exposed the precious merchandise of London, brought thither from the comfortable shops where each craft had its separate station. It was a time of rain and wind. The tents were soaked through; the goods rotted; the shivering traders crouched in the swampy soil; and, says Matthew Paris, "those who were accustomed to sit down to their meals, in the midst of their families by the fireside, knew not how to endure this state of want and discomfort." From his exactions and caprices, there grew up a deadly hatred between the Londoners and their king. The temper of the citizens began to look alarming. So, in 1250, he assembled them and their families in Westminster Hall, and "humbly, and as if with rising tears, entreated that each and all of the citizens would with mouth and heart forgive him for his anger, malevolence, and rancour towards them." His real or pretended contrition was, probably, as damaging to him as the remembrance of his fines, his unpaid loans, and,-worst of all his offences,-his decrees for pulling down the posts and chains of the city, whenever he feared a riot and a barricade. Riots there frequently were between the retainers of the court and the sturdy apprentices of the craftsmen. In the Lent of 1253, the young men of the city were playing at the manly game of the quintain, a contrivance for training horsemen in the use of the lance, by placing a board revolving on a pivot fixed on a high post, of which Stow says,-"I have seen a quintain set upon Cornhill, by the Leaden Hall, where the attendants on the lords of merry disports have run, and made great pastime; for he that hit not the broad end of the quintain was of all men laughed to scorn, and he that hit it full, if he ride not the faster, had a sound blow in his neck with a bag full of sand hung on the other end."* In the Lent of 1253 came the king's pages and attendants from Westminster to the civic sports; and they insulted the young horsemen, "calling them rustics, and scurvy and soapy wretches," and then entered the lists to oppose them. The Londoners grew furious, and hurled the courtiers from their horses, and sent them back in great grief to the king at Westminster. The city had to pay a thousand marks for the outrage. Certainly these citizens were too much inclined to take the law into their own hands. Queen Eleanor was exceedingly distasteful to them. She was, no doubt, a woman of extraordinary energy, and stimulated her weak husband to many of those violations of the charter which, in his hands, became the most wretched meannesses. The queen had a perpetual quarrel with the citizens about the claim that all vessels navigating the Thames should unlade at Queenhithe, and there pay to her heavy dues. During Henry's absence in Gascony, in 1253, she was Lady Keeper of the Great Seal; and, with that power, vigorously enforced her dues, and committed the two sheriffs to prison for their resistance to the payment of what she termed " queengold." She had wounded the citizens in the tenderest place; and thus, in 1264, in passing through London Bridge in her barge, she was assailed with cries of "Drown the witch!" and was pelted with mud and stones. Her son * Survey of London." |