He made his way to Sens, where Pope Alexander III held his court in exile, and flung himself at the feet of the pontiff. In the course of a long address, in which he denounced the arrogance and impiety of the king in attempting to destroy the powers of the Church, he adverted to his own role as archbishop. ‘Though I accepted this burden unwillingly nevertheless it was human will and not divine will that induced me to do so.’ He was blaming Henry. ‘What wonder, then, it has brought me into such straits?’ Weeping, he took the ring of office from his finger. ‘I resign into your hands, Father, the archbishopric of Canterbury.’ Some of the cardinals present hoped that the pope would put the ring in his pocket; they did not want to be at odds with the king of England. But Alexander III returned the ring. ‘Receive anew at our hands,’ he told Becket, ‘the cure of the episcopal office.’
Henry, cheated of his prey, reacted with predictable fury. Unable to touch Becket, he reached for his men in Canterbury. Their lands were seized and their relatives were laid ‘under safe pledges’; they were evicted from their houses and made hostage to the royal will. The first act of the drama was over.
Henry II did not speak English, employing only French or Latin. That is perhaps appropriate for a sovereign who spent only one third of his reign in England; the rest of the time was passed in Normandy or in other parts of France. He was born at Le Mans and died at Chinon; both towns were part of his original patrimony, and he was most deeply attached to the land of his father. He wore the short coat of Anjou rather than the long robe of Normandy. The Angevin Empire was in essence a private fief. Henry had no ‘foreign policy’ except the pursuit of his own interest and advantage. In this he was not unlike every other sovereign of the period.
It is a tribute to the skills of his administrators that England remained without turbulence in the long periods of his absence in France; it is yet another manifestation of the deep strength of the governance of the country. The key lay in efficient management or, rather, in efficient exploitation. Various taxes and impositions were variously raised; but these scutages and tallages and carucages are now the domain of the lexicographer rather than the economist. It is sufficient to say that the king’s power was not in doubt. In 1170 he dismissed all of the twenty-three sheriffs of the kingdom, made them submit to an inquest, and reappointed only six of them. That could not have happened in the reign of Stephen.
In fact the prosperity of the country, insofar as it can be estimated, increased during Henry’s reign. By the end of the twelfth century 150 fairs, as well as 350 markets, took place throughout the country. The first windmill was constructed in Yorkshire in 1185. The first church spires, now so familiar a feature of the English landscape, were rising in the limestone belt of Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. The use of horses, rather than oxen, quickened the pace of agricultural activity. English wool and tin were much in demand.
The English village was also thriving. It was, as we have seen, a very ancient construct, but it was also susceptible to change. By the eleventh century the essential structure was that of church and manor house, with a row of small dwellings for the dependent population who worked on the manor farm in exchange for land of their own. Around the village lay the open fields. In the twelfth century, however, new villages were planned and laid out by the lords of great estates. New labour was introduced onto the land; markets and trading areas were created. The houses of the labourers were often planned around a small rectangular green, where livestock might graze; each dwelling had its own garden.
The records of the manorial courts of the twelfth century are filled with the daily life of the village. A shoemaker, Philip Noseles, is arrested because of his persistent habit of eavesdropping on the conversations of neighbours; a woman named Matilda is taken to court for breaking down hedges; Andrew Noteman dragged the daughter of Roger the thatcher out of her cottage by her ears; Matilda Crane has the habit of stealing chickens and is to be barred from the village; a couple accused of fornication were told that they must marry if they repeated the offence.
The origins of many villages lie in prehistory, and their life was deeply imbued with custom and the tenacious observance of tradition. In one document a young man is described as being ‘of the blood of the village’, emphasizing the presence of distinct kinship ties. Collective rituals also persisted for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Until quite recent times, in the village of Polperro in Cornwall, it was customary to wheel a ‘mock mayor’ down to the sea and there dip him into the water. At the village of Holne, in Devonshire, a ram was tied to a great stone pillar in the middle of a field where its throat was cut by a band of young men.
The villagers sowed wheat and rye, barley and oats; they reared horses and pigs and cattle; they brewed ale. Some of the freeholders fell into debt, and were forced to sell land; some of them exchanged lands. Village officials were elected every year, either by the lord or the villagers themselves, to take care of such duties as the collection of fines. A common shepherd was employed for the flocks of all the families. It was a stratified but highly cohesive society that depended upon communal agreement in all the principal areas of agricultural life. It was also a society partly established upon mutual help. Yet how much of the material wealth of the nation reached the lowest classes of farmers and labourers cannot be known. History has always ignored the poor.
The number of new towns was growing very rapidly, in the same period, as the economic life of the country quickened; in the forty years between 1191 and 1230 some forty-nine new towns were planted. These were generally planned by a great lord who wished to create a market for the surrounding countryside. He then collected rents and taxes, making money far in excess of the amount to be gained from land devoted to agriculture. The bishop of Lincoln, for example, laid out a street of shops and houses beside a small village; he then diverted the principal road towards it. So was created the market town of Thame in Oxfordshire. Leeds was conjured into being in 1207 when the lord of the manor of Leeds, comprising a small village, planned thirty building plots on either side of a new street just beside a crossing of the river Aire. These were profitable investments, and a measure of their success can be found in the fact that after 900 years they still flourish. Somewhere beneath the modern foundations lie the bake-houses, the latrines, the taverns and the prisons of the early thirteenth century.
Many of these new towns were built by the command or recommendation of the king, and were known as royal boroughs. The same imperative of profit applied. Thus in 1155 the king decreed that at Scarborough ‘they shall pay me yearly for each house whose gable is turned towards the street fourpence, and for those houses whose sides are turned towards the street, sixpence’.
The older towns, with their foundations in the first century and perhaps even before, continued to expand. They were becoming more self-aware. Their walls were strengthened and dignified; Hull, for example, built the first surrounding wall made entirely out of brick. The association of the leading townspeople, with the mayor as their chief officer, became known as communia or communa. In 1191 the system of mayor and aldermen was established in London. The leaders of the towns began to resent external interference; the aldermen of London, for example, were quite capable of defying the royal court at Westminster.
The leaders of the towns built walls and gates, with main streets leading directly to the market area. The same trades, such as shoemaking and bread-baking, had a tendency to congregate together. Certain towns were already identified by their principal commodity, so that we hear of the russet cloths of Colchester and the soap of Coventry. The Knights Templar established a town in Buckinghamshire which they named as Baghdad, hoping to create in imitation a great market there; it is now known more prosaically as Baldock. ‘Fairs’ were instituted at Boston and Bishop’s Lynn, Winchester and St Ives. In the larger towns, an entire street might be devoted to a single trade. The population was growing along with everything else. By the late twelfth century London numbered 80,000, while Norwich and Coventry each harboured 20,000 inhabitants.