King of England, one Count of Poitou, one Lord of Britanny, one was named King of Ireland. His eldest daughter, wife of the Duke of Saxony, was mother of a future emperor, th

e envoys of the Emperors both of the East and of the West, of the Kings of Castile and

s and of wills. He preserved an unlimited control over the choice of bishops. In an election to the see of St. David's the canons had neglected to give the king notice before the nomination of the bishop. He at once ordered them to be deprived of their lands and revenues. "As they have deprived me," he said, "of all share in the election, they shall have neither part nor lot in this promotion." The monks, stricken with well-founded terror, followed the king from place to place to implore his mercy and to save their livings; with abject repentance they declared they would accept whomsoever the king liked, wherever and whenever he chose. Finally Henry sent them a monk unknown to the chapter, who had been elected in his chamber, at his bedside, in the presence of his paid servants, and according to his orders, "after the fashion of an English tyrant," and who had then and there raised his tremulous and fearful song of thanksgiving. Towards the close of his reign there was again a dispute as to the election of an Archbishop of Canterbury. The monks, under Prior Alban, were determined that the election should lie with them. The king was resolved to secure the due influence of the bishops, on whom he could depend. "The Prior wanted to be a second Pope in England," he complained to the Count of Flanders, to which his affable visitor replied that he w

gy as instruments of his policy. His efforts to draw the Scotch Church into a like obedience were unceasing. In Ireland he worked hard for the same object. On the death of an Archbishop of Dublin, the Irish clergy were summoned to Evesham, and there bidden in the king's court, after the English fashion, to choose an Englishman, Cumin, as their archbishop. The claims of the papacy were watched with the most jealous care. No legate dared to land in England save at the king's express will. A legate in Ireland who seemed to "play the Roman over them" was curtly told by

h he would have no part or lot in it, and kept his own dominions open as a refuge for the wandering outcasts; but this may well have been by the counsel of the wise churchmen about him. To the last he looked on the clergy as his best advisers and supporters. He never demanded tribute from churches or monasteries, a monkish historian tells us, as other princes were wont to do on plea of necessity; with religious care he preserved them from unjust burthens and public exactions. By frequent acts of devotion he sought to win the favour of Heaven or to rouse the religious sympathies of England on his behalf. In April 1177 he met at Canterbury his old enemy, the Archbishop of Reims, and laid on the shrine of St. Thomas a charter of privileges for the convent. On the 1st of May he visited the shrine of St. Eadmund, and the next day that of St. Aetheldreda at Ely. The bones of a saint stolen from Bodmin were

disappeared out of Henry's life. The king had bitter enemies at court, and they busied themselves in spreading abroad dark tales; more friendly critics could only plead that he was "not as bad as his grandfather." After the rebellion of 1174 he openly avowed his connection with Rosamond Clifford, which seems to have begun some time before. Eleanor was then in prison, and tales of the maze, the silken clue, the dagger, and the bowl, were the growth of later cent

on one who lived so near to God that even in sleep his lips still moved in prayer. Such a man as Hugh could succeed where Thomas of Canterbury had failed. He excommunicated without notice to the king a chief forester who had interfered with the liberties of the Lincoln clergy, and bluntly refused to make amends by appointing a royal officer to a prebend in his cathedral, saying that "benefices were for clergy and not for courtiers." A general storm of abuse and calumny broke out against him at the palace. Henry angrily summoned him to his presence. The bishop was received by the king in an open space under the trees, where he sat with all the courtiers ranged in a close circle. Hugh drew near and saluted, but there was no answer. Upon this the bishop put his hand lightly on the noble who sat next to the king, and made place for himself by Henry's side. Still the silence was unbroken, the king speechless as a furious man choked with his anger. Looking up at last, he asked a servant for needle and thread, and began to sew up a torn bandage which was tied round a wounded finger. The lively Frenchman observed him patiently; at last he turned to the king, "How like you are now," he said, "to your cousins of Falaise!" The king's quick wit caught the extravagant impertinence, and in an ecstasy of delight he rolled on the ground with laughter, while a perplexed merriment ran round the circle of courtiers who scarce knew what the joke might be. At last the king found his voice. "Do you hear the insolence of this barbarian? I myself will explain." And he reminded them of his ancestress, the peasant girl Arlotta of Falaise, where the citizens were famous for their working in skins. "And now, good man," he said, turning to the bishop in a broad good-humour, "how is it that without consulting us you have laid our forester under anathema, and made of no account the poor little request we made, and sent not even a message of explanation or excuse?"-"Ah," said Hugh, "I knew in what a rage you and your courtiers were!" and he then proceeded boldly to declare what were his rights and duties as a bishop of the Church of God. Henry gave way on every point. The forester had to make open satisfaction and was publicly flogged, an

Germany such a reform did not take place for centuries. But in England judges and lawyers were already busied in building up the scientific study of English law. Richard Fitz-Neal, son of Bishop Nigel of Ely and great-nephew of Roger of Salisbury, and himself Treasurer of the Exchequer and Bishop of London, began in 1178 the Dialogus de Scaccario, an elaborate account of the whole system of administration. Glanville, the king's justiciar, drew up probably the oldest version which we ha

llectual activity. A series of chronicles appeared in a few years, which are unparalleled in Europe at the time. At the head of the court historians stood the treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the Dialogus, who in 1172 began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical, political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time-a work which some scholars say is included in the Gesta Henrici II that was once connected with the name of Benedict of Peterborough. The king's clerk and justiciar, Roger of Hoveden, must have been collecting materials for the famous Chronicle which he began very soon after Henry's death, when he gathered up and completed the work of the Durham historians. Gervase of Tilbury, marshal of the kingdom of Arles, well known in every great town of Italy and Sicily, afterwards the writer of Otia Imperialia for the Emperor Otto IV., wrote a book of anecdotes, now lost, for the younger King Henry. Gerald of Wales, a busy courtier, and later a chaplain of the king, was the brillian

ve the purposes of literary artifice or of frank conceit. The independent temper which had been stirred by the fight with the Church was illustrated in his Speculum Ecclesiae, a bitter satire on the monks and on the Roman Curia. A yet more terrible scorn of the crime and vice which disgraced the Church inspired the Apocalypse and the Confession of Bishop Goliath, the work of Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, king's chaplain ever since the days when Becket was chancellor, justiciar, ambassador, poet, scholar, theologian, satirist. The greater part of the legends of the Saint Graal that sprang out of the work of Robert de Boron were

mpare with John of Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the __Polycraticus_ (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the time. It begins by recounting the follies of the court, passes on to the discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of Chartres and Paris London could boast of the historian Ralph of Diceto, always ready with a quotation from the classics amid the court news and politics of his day. Monasteries rivaled one another in their collection of books and in drawing up of chronicles. If their brethren were more famed for piety than for literary arts, they would borrow some noted man of learning, or even a practised scribe, who would for the occasion write under a famous nam

ut d'Engleterre, and was one of the sources of the first important English poem, Layamon's Brut. Later on, in honour of Henry, Wace told in the Roman de Rou the story of his Norman ancestors, and the poem, especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas-poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutel