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IMPORTANCE OF THE TOWNS.

2. The division of the supreme power produced yet another result. When the towns had acquired greater wealth and importance, when there had been formed, beyond the circle of the king's immediate vassals, a nation capable of taking part in political life, and which the government found it necessary to treat with consideration, this nation naturally adjoined itself to the great council of the king, which had never ceased to exist. In order to gain itself a place in the central government, it had no need abruptly to create new institutions; a place was already prepared to receive it, and although its entrance into the national council ere long changed its nature and forms, it at least was not under the necessity of asserting and re-animating its existence. There was a fact capable of receiving extension, and of admitting into its bosom new facts, together with new rights. The British Parliament, to say truth, dates only from the formation of the House of Commons; but without the presence and importance of the council of Barons, the House of Commons would, perhaps, never have been formed.

Thus, on the one hand, the permanence of the idea that the sovereignty ought to be limited, and, on the other, the actual division of the central power, were the germs of representative government in England. Until the end of the thirteenth century we met with no other of its characteristics; and the English nation, until that period, was not perhaps actually more free and happy than any of the peoples of the Continent. But the principle of the right of resistance to oppression was already a legal principle in England; and the idea of the supremacy which holds dominion over all others, of the supremacy of the law, was already connected, in the mind of the people and of the jurisconsults themselves, not with any particular person, or with any particular actual power, but with the name of the law itself. Already the law was said to be superior to all other powers; sovereignty had thus, in principle at least, left that material world in which it could not fix itself without engendering tyranny, to place itself in that moral world, in which actual powers ought constantly to seek it. Many favourable circumstances were doubtless necessary to fecundate these principles of liberty in England. But when the sentiment of right lives in the souls of men, when the

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citizen meets with no power in his country which he is bound to consider as infallible and absolutely sovereign, liberty can never fail to spring up. It has developed itself in England less universally, less equally, and less reasonably, we venture to believe, than we are permitted to hope will be the case at the present day in our own country; but, in fine, it was born, and increased in growth in that country more than in any other; and the history of its progress, the study of the institutions which served as its guarantees, and of the system of government to which its destinies seem henceforward to link themselves, is at once a great sight and a necessary work for us. We shall enter upon it with impartiality, for we can do so without envy.

270

EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

LECTURE II.

Sketch of the History of England, from William the Conqueror to John Lackland (1066-1199).-William the Conqueror (1066-1087). William Rufus (1087-1100).-Henry I. (1100-1135).-Stephen (1135-1154).-Henry II. (1154-1189).-Constitutions of Clarendon. Richard Coeur de Lion (1189-1199).

BEFORE entering upon the history of representative government in England, I think it necessary, in the first place, to remind you of the facts which served, as it were, as its cradle-of the movements of the different nations which successively occupied England-the conquest of the Normans-the state of the country at the period of this conquest, about the middle of the eleventh century-and the principal events which succeeded it. A knowledge of facts must always precede the study of institutions.

The Britons,-Gauls or Celts in origin,-were the first inhabitants of Great Britain. Julius Cæsar subjugated them, and the Roman dominion substituted a false and enervating civilization in the place of their barbarian energy. On being abandoned by Rome, when that city abdicated piecemeal the empire of the world, the Britons were unable to defend themselves, and summoned the Saxons to their assistance. The latter, finding them already conquered, from their allies became ere long their masters, and exterminated or drove back into the mountains of Wales, the people whom the Romans had subdued. After a long series of incursions, the Danes established themselves in the north of England, during the ninth century, and in the latter part of the eleventh century, the Normans conquered the whole country.

Towards the middle of the eleventh century, and before the Norman conquest, great enmity still subsisted between the Saxons and the Danes, whereas between the Danes and Normans the recollections of a common origin were still fresh and vivid. Edward the Confessor had been brought

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up at the Court of Normandy, and the Normans were held in great favour by him. He had appointed several of them to great offices in his realm. The primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Norman; and Norman was spoken at the Court of Edward. All these circumstances seemed to prepare the way for the invasion of England by the Normans.

The internal state of England was equally favourable to it. The Saxon aristocracy had risen in proportion as the royal power had declined; but the power of the great landholders was a divided power, and their dissensions opened a door for foreign interference. Harold, the brother-in-law of king Edward, who had died without issue, had just usurped the crown; so that William had not even to oppose a legitimate monarch. "Whether the English make Harold or another their duke or king, I grant it," said William on the death of Edward; but he, nevertheless, assumed to be heir of the kingdom, by virtue of a will of the deceased monarch, and came to assert his right at the head of an army of 40,000 men. On the 14th of October, 1065, Harold lost both the crown and his life at the battle of Hastings. The primate then offered the crown of England to William, who accepted it after some show of hesitation, and was crowned on the 6th of December. He at first treated his Saxon subjects with mildness, but ordered the construction of a number of fortresses, and gave large grants of lands to his Norman comrades. During a journey which he made into Normandy, in the month of March, 1067, the Saxons revolted against the tyranny of the Normans. William suppressed the revolt, and continued for some time still faithful to his policy of conciliation. But rebellions continued to arise, and William now had recourse to rigorous measures. By repeated confiscations he ensured the sovereign establishment of the Normans, and of the feudal system. The Saxons were excluded from all great public employments, and particularly from the bishoprics. William covered England with forts, substituted the Norman language for the Anglo-Saxon, and made it the language of law-a privilege which subsisted until the reign of Edward III. He enacted very severe laws of police, among others the law of curfew, so greatly detested

272

REIGN OF WILLIAM RUFUS.

by the Saxons, but which already existed in Normandy; and finally, he laid waste the county of Yorkshire, the stronghold of the Saxon insurgents.

The Pope had given his approval to William's enterprise, and had excommunicated Harold. Nevertheless, William boldly repulsed the pretensions of Gregory VII, and forbade his subjects to recognize any one as Pope, until he had done so himself. The canons of every council were to be submitted to him for his sanction or rejection. No bull or letter of the Pope might be published without the permission of the king. He protected his ministers and barons against excommunication. He subjected the clergy to feudal military service. And finally, during his reign, the ecclesiastical and civil courts, which had previously been commingled in the county courts, were separated.

After the death of William, in 1087, his States were divided among his three sons, Robert, William, and Henry. William Rufus succeeded to the throne of England, and Robert to the dukedom of Normandy. William's reign is remarkable only for acts of tyranny, for the extension of the royal forests, and for odious exactions; he would not appoint bishops to any of the vacant episcopal sees, but appropriated their revenues to his own use, considering them as fiefs whose possessors were dead.

William Rufus was almost constantly at war with his brother Robert. He ended by buying Normandy of him, or, to speak more correctly, he received it in pledge for thirteen thousand silver marks which he lent to Robert when about to join the Crusaders. In the year 1100, he made a similar bargain with William, Count of Poitou and Duke of Guienne. The Norman barons bitterly regretted that Robert was not King of England, as well as Duke of Normandy. They rebelled several times against William; and various facts indicate that the Saxon nation gained something by these revolts, and was rather better treated, in consequence, by its Norman monarch. But the relations of the two peoples were still extremely hostile when William Rufus was killed while hunting, on the 2nd of August, 1100.

Henry I. usurped the crown of England from his brother Robert, to whom it rightfully belonged; and the Norman barons, who preferred Robert, offered only a feeble resist