King of the North Wind, page 15
Towards the end of Henry’s reign, the Jewish financier Aaron of Lincoln was the richest man in the country. In 1165, Henry repaid a loan to Aaron. When Aaron died, Henry seized his entire estate, purportedly worth as much as £100,000; it was his legal right, although one he rarely exercised. Aaron’s fortune was too large to resist. He sent Aaron’s treasure to France, but it sank on the way, in February 1187. Aaron’s debtors, however, who numbered William the Lion of Scotland, and the archbishop of Canterbury, still owed £15,000. The amount was so enormous that a separate branch of the Exchequer was established to collect the debt – the Scaccarium Aaronis, or Aaron’s Exchequer.148
The Jews, denounced by Gospel writers as the murderers of Jesus, occupied a nebulous and often dangerous place in Christian society. The entire Jewish population was guilty for evermore, in the medieval Christian mind, of the crime of deicide. They were destined to be outcasts in Europe.
Church law, taking a Jewish law from Leviticus – ‘Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you’ – prohibited Christians from practising usury.149 Usury tended to be the only occupation open to Jews, who were usually barred from other trades and professions. Christian kings often used the Jews as their moneylenders. But many of the host population resented the debts they owed to the Jews, often resulting in violence and death. The first Norman kings understood how vital Jewish economic activity was to the swift flow of finance; to ensure its continuity, they sought to protect the Jews. Henry did too.
Most of England’s Jews came from Rouen following a massacre there in 1096 by knights embarking on the First Crusade. William the Bastard witnessed at first hand the financial boost Jewish communities could give to the wealth of the Crown, and he welcomed them as the country’s bankers and merchant class. William Rufus liked them far more than his Christian contemporaries were happy with, and Henry I issued the communities with a charter of protection.150 Jews settled in all the major towns of England – London, Winchester, York, Cambridge, Oxford, Norwich and Bristol. In London they lived in Jewry Street, and Old Jewry. The one surviving pipe roll for the reign of Henry I notes Jewish economic activity.
Prior to Henry’s accession, however, the Jews had endured England’s first blood libel, the vicious slander that the Jews killed a Christian child to use its blood for their Passover bread – and its consequences. An English invention of the time – this dark myth still persists in some corners of the world today – it is no accident that the blood libel took place under Stephen’s weak rule. It happened at Norwich on the night before Easter in 1144. A twelve-year-old boy, William, was found dead, and the story spread – with no proof or evidence – that the Jews were responsible. Although the local sheriff did his best to protect the Jewish community, a knight who was in debt, murdered his Jewish creditor (by law, a Jew’s death cancelled out his borrower’s debts).151
Two years later, in 1146, Bernard of Clairvaux thought the Jewish community in England in possible peril. During the First Crusade, in 1096, crusading pilgrims had murdered Jews as they passed through Europe on their way to Jerusalem. Over 5,000 people from the communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Regensburg, Metz, Prague and other cities lost their lives. Priests and burghers were, for the most part, powerless to save them in the face of an army of zealots. Bernard feared a similar bloodbath as he preached the Second Crusade, and he warned crusaders against harming the Jews of England, France and Germany. Bernard’s outcry meant that hundreds, rather than thousands, perished in Germany and central Europe. The Jews of England were left unharmed.
The golden age for English Jewry came with Henry’s accession. He not only extended his grandfather’s charter of protection, but allowed the Jews autonomy to govern themselves by Talmudic law. The chroniclers were unhappy with the favour they believed Henry showed to the Jews. William of Newburgh blustered, ‘By an absurd arrangement they were happy and renowned far more than the Christians, and, swelling very impudently against Christ through their good fortune, did much injury to the Christians.’152 This was a wild caricature, but it showed that Henry’s policy was not a popular one.
Jewish communities were established in new economic centres of activity: Exeter, Bedford, Devizes, Ipswich, Canterbury, and elsewhere.153 The Jews’ international connections meant that scholars from Germany and Spain came to England too. The wandering Spanish scholar Abraham Ibn Ezra visited London in 1158 and northern France. It is possible, in the light of Henry’s interest in Arabic learning, that this Jewish poet, scientist and biblical scholar met with the king. Conditions under Henry’s rule were so favourable that Jews from other parts of Europe came to settle in England. In 1168, Frederick Barbarossa complained that so many members of his most lucrative community were leaving Germany to settle in England.154
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Henry used his vast wealth in the service of power; in England the pipe rolls provide us with the expenditure of Henry’s ambitious building programme. The direction for new building came from Henry himself, noting the state of his castles, palaces, bridges, kitchens, hospitals and other structures, and the requirements for new ones as he continued the ceaseless round of his empire. During Henry’s reign, there was no Master of the King’s Works – the action was performed by the king himself.155 The similarity of Henry’s buildings suggests that he used many of the same craftsmen across his dominions.
He used his money to build, whether a magnificent kitchen at Fontevraud, a leper hospital at Caen, the refurbishment of the cathedral where he married Eleanor at Poitiers, or his showcase castle, Dover. Henry, embarrassed that Dover in the late 1170s did not adequately reflect his great wealth, spent nearly £7,000 refurbishing it. The modern historian John Gillingham has argued that Henry used Dover for entertaining guests after he was caught unawares by Louis’ sudden visit in 1179.156 The works were started in 1180 and completed by Richard in 1191.157
Henry’s castles were ‘the bones of the kingdom’, according to William of Newburgh. Whoever held them, held the country. They were fundamental to the security of Henry’s lands, and he spent a huge amount on their erection and maintenance. He made them virtually impregnable, at a cost of over £20,000 during the course of his reign.158 When he was threatened, as in the Great Revolt of 1173–4, he spent more on castles.159 These, coupled with his innovative siege engines and other groundbreaking machines of war, built for him by his skilled engineers, meant that in siege warfare Henry was virtually unbeatable.160
Henry refurbished those castles he chose to keep, and built new ones throughout his dominions; in Normandy, at Gisors; at Ancenis, between Anger and Nantes; and in England at Orford (with its intriguing polygonal design), Nottingham, Scarborough and Newcastle. In 1176, Henry ‘took every castle in England into his hand, and removing the castellans of the earls and barons, put in his own custodians; he did not even spare his intimate counsellor, Richard de Lucy, the justiciar of England but took from him his castle of Ongar’.161 From 1176, Henry was at the height of his power; it was from this period that he began to style himself ‘Henry, by the grace of God, king of the English, duke of the Normans, duke of the Aquitanians, and count of the Angevins’.
Henry spent nearly as much on his favourite houses, among them Clarendon (the house he declared ‘which I delight in above any other’) and Woodstock, as he did on his castles. There was a garden outside his bedchamber at Arundel, dovecots at Nottingham, a fish pond, with wine continuously making its way towards his residences. Henry enjoyed luxury.162
He was also interested in hospitals and leper colonies. In his funding of leper colonies, Henry possibly had in mind his cousin, Baldwin ‘the leper king’ of Jerusalem.163 Baldwin, when he was a child, contracted leprosy, an extremely painful and debilitating condition which affects the skin and nerve endings. It was Baldwin’s tutor, William of Tyre, who first noticed the disease. When he was play-fighting with his friends, he seemed to feel no pain. William wrote that Baldwin ‘endured it all patiently, as if he felt nothing … At first I supposed it proceeded from his endurance, but I discovered that he did not feel pinching or even biting in the least … we recognised in the process of time, these were the premonitory symptoms of a most serious and incurable disease.’164 This contagious condition was prevalent throughout Europe and it terrified people, despite the fact that it affected only roughly one in 200.165
Henry, superstitious and perhaps as a bid to ward off the disease, built leper hospitals, also called ‘lazar houses’ after Lazarus in Luke’s Gospel who lay down ‘covered with sores’. He built them at Fontevraud, Angers, Caen, Bayeux, and Rouen.166 He also built churches, abbeys, bridges, kitchens, palaces, parks and hunting lodges throughout his empire, in England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Maine, Touraine and Anjou. He even built a dyke thirty miles long on the Loire plain between Tours and Saumur to prevent it from flooding.167
There was little that did not interest Henry, both in its detail, and as a show of wealth and power. Henry was fascinated by architectural innovation and design: the unique, octagonal Byzantine-Romanesque-style kitchen, or smokehouse, at Fontevraud Abbey near Chinon, with its painstaking craftsmanship, was built under his direction and patronage. Monastic kitchens were usually square or rectangular, but the building at Fontevraud reflected Henry’s interest in construction design, and similar kitchens were built throughout his lands, at Canterbury, Marmoutier and Caen.168
In the 1170s, as a part of the penance he owed the pope for his role in Becket’s murder, he built abbeys, magnificent structures to promote God’s glory – and naturally the man who paid for them. During the 1170s and 1180s, Henry founded an abbey at Waltham, a charterhouse at Witham in Somerset, and a nunnery at Amesbury. And notwithstanding his detractors, beginning with Gerald of Wales, who lamented the paucity of Henry’s expenditure on these buildings, he in fact spent huge sums of money.169
Inside they were a riot of colour, not only in the stained-glass windows, but on the gorgeously painted walls, often illustrated with scenes from the Bible and the lives of the saints. Similarly Fontevraud Abbey, one of the major recipients of both Henry’s and Eleanor’s patronage, was not the serene, pale and cavernous space we see today. Instead interior walls abounded, and we can see from the remains of the fresco of Henry’s grandson, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, that the walls would have been covered in brilliant hues of reds and yellows.
VII
In 1163, Henry came back to England after an absence of four years.
When he returned, he was horrified at the lack of punishment for clerks charged and convicted of crimes, theoretically under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. William of Newburgh wrote that Henry learned that while he had been away, men in clerical orders had committed a hundred murders; there were also many lesser crimes of violence, assault, and robbery.170 Henry, when he investigated, found that heinous crimes, such as the sexual assault of a girl and the murder of her father by a clerk in Worcestershire, had gone virtually unpunished.171 The church courts preferred to mete out acts of penance to punish those convicted of violent crimes; with little retribution, misdemeanours ran high.
Henry called a council at Westminster in October, where he attempted to remedy the problem. He ‘demanded that clerks seized or convicted of great crimes should be deprived of the protection of the church and handed over to his officers, adding that they would be more prone to do evil unless after incurring a spiritual penalty they were subjected to physical punishment’.172
This desire to bring the crimes of villainous clerks to his own courts would eventually lead to a rupture of such drama that it would almost ruin him; but, in the early 1160s, Henry could not know that. His investigation did, however, bring the law to the king’s attention – and from 1163, Henry began to reform the legal system he had inherited.
It is doubtful that he set out with a great programme for change, but by the end of his reign, Henry’s reforms had transformed England’s legal and judicial landscape. Over a period of twenty years, the changes he wrought would form the foundations upon which the English legal system as we know it today would be built. Henry is ‘the one king of England who has most claim to be regarded as the founder of the English Common Law’.173 His innovations to the practice, procedure and system of justice have arguably done more to establish and embed the rule of law in England than any other monarch before or since.
Henry was not content to entrust the job of reform to others; he involved himself in every aspect, no matter how small. He was said to have stayed up at night pondering judicial language, ‘perpetually wakeful and at work’.174 The author of the Chronicle of Battle Abbey wrote of Henry’s involvement in the intimate detail of legal draftsmanship when the monks petitioned the king to have one of their founding charters renewed. Henry, in consultation with his barons, agreed and, in renewing the charter, ‘himself dictated another [phrase] never before employed’.175
Walter Map, who was a royal justice as well as a clerk and a chronicler, wrote that Henry was the ‘subtle inventor of uncustomary and hidden judicial process’, and that he had ‘discretion in the making of laws and the ordering of all his government, and was a clever deviser of decisions in unusual and dark cases’.176 Map noted how close Henry could be to the everyday workings of justice:
I had heard a concise and just judgement given against a rich man in favour of a poor one, I said to Lord Ranulf, the chief justiciar: ‘Although the poor man’s judgement might have been put off by many quirks, you arrived at it by a happy and quick decision.’ ‘Certainly,’ said Ranulf, ‘we decide causes here much quicker than your bishops do in their churches.’ ‘True,’ said I, ‘but if your king were as far off from you as the pope is from the bishops, I think you would be quite as slow as they.’177
Henry called several assizes (meetings between himself and his barons which issued binding decrees) between 1166 and 1184. They numbered the assize of Clarendon, of 1166, which dealt with criminal law; the assize of Northampton, of 1176, which increased the powers of Henry’s justices; and the assize of the forest of 1184, which ensured that forest offences were brought within the law. Previously punishment for a forest offence was at the caprice of the king. Roger of Howden – a forest judge as well as a chronicler and diplomat – attended these meetings, and he wrote down the details of Henry’s instructions to his judges. Howden’s text makes it clear that the orders came directly from Henry: ‘This is the assize which King Henry ordered.’178
Why did Henry choose to direct his considerable energies into the cause of legal reform? Change was obviously needed: crime was rife and, a decade into his reign, Henry had still not addressed the chaos of those dispossessed of land and property during the civil war. He was alarmed at the power of the ecclesiastical courts. And revenue – never far from his thoughts – from a streamlined legal system would unquestionably be plentiful.
It is likely, however, that for Henry this was more than just a matter of public order and income. It was about the obligations of a prince to dispense justice. Henry, who modelled much of his kingship on that of his grandfather, would have recalled the promise in Henry I’s coronation charter of 1100 to ‘rule justly’. The grandson would honour this pledge.
Henry’s reforms inevitably produced winners and losers, and it is an achievement that his more contentious changes did not spark violent dissent. This owes much to his decision not to graft a form of Roman Law onto the existing system. Instead, he built on what he found when he conquered England, choosing to work with customary law and practice, and improving it little by little. This rooted him to the times of his Anglo-Saxon ancestors – Edward the Confessor, Alfred the Great, and Æthelberht, a deviser of laws dating back to the seventh century. By enriching English law and an English system of justice, Henry presented himself as the rightful heir not only to his grandfather, but to the hero-kings of Anglo-Saxon England.
Well educated, Henry would also have had the Noahide laws in mind. Before God made his covenant with Abraham, Talmudic legend has it that he gave seven laws to the children of Noah; these were universal laws to be followed by all humanity. Six of the Noahide laws are negative – do not deny God, do not blaspheme, do not murder, do not engage in incestuous, homosexual or adulterous relationships, do not steal, and do not eat a live animal. But the seventh is a positive command: to establish courts and a legal system to ensure the obedience of these laws. Henry’s furtherance of the rule of law placed him firmly in the tradition of the judges, prophets and kings of the Bible. In improving the rule of law, he would be seen as a strong and wise king, meting out justice to his people.
Henry’s great innovations fall into four areas, each distinctive and yet all interconnected: the role and authority of judges; the organisation of justice; the conduct of cases; and changes to the laws of land and property.
At the beginning of his reign, the number of judges, or justices, were few, and their authority was highly circumscribed. ‘The king’s justice’ still had literal connotations, and it might involve Henry himself issuing writs and judgements, as he did in the case of one Hugh de Neville over a disputed property matter:
I command and order that you shall without delay and justly reseise the monks of St Andrew’s Northampton, of their land of Newton and of their men, and justly give back to them their chattels which you have taken thence. And unless you do it my justice of Lincolnshire shall do it. And let me hear no further complaint thereof for want of right. Witness the chancellor. At Northampton.179
