Henry the Second

								

William the Conqueror, using his double position as conqueror and king,
had established a royal authority unknown in any other feudal country
William Rufus, poorer than his father when the hoard captured at
Winchester and the plunder of the Conquest were spent, and urged alike
by his necessities and his greed, laid the foundation of an organized
system of finance. Henry I., after his overthrow of the baronage, found
his absolute power only limited by the fact that there was no machinery
sufficient to put in exercise his boundless personal power; and for its
support he built up his wonderful administrative system. There no longer
existed any constitutional check on the royal authority. The Great
Council still survived as the relic and heir both of the English
Witenagemot and the Norman Feudal Court. But in matters of State its
"counsel" was scarcely asked or given; its "consent" was yielded as a
mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation interrupted the formal
and pompous display of final submission to the royal will. The Church
under its Norman bishops, foreign officials trained in the King's
chapel, was no longer a united national force, as it had been in the
time of the Saxon kings. The mass of the people was of no account in
politics. The trading class scarcely as yet existed. The villeins tied
to the soil of the manor on which they had been born, and shut out from
all courts save those of their lord; inhabitants of the little hamlets
that lay along the river-courses in clearings among dense woods,
suspicious of strangers, isolated by an intense jealousy of all that lay
beyond their own boundaries or by traditional feuds, had no part in the
political life of the nation.
But the central government had proved in the long run too weak to
check the growth of feudal tendencies. The land was studded with
fortresses--the homes of lords who exercised criminal jurisdiction
without appeal, and who had their private prisons and private gallows.
Their manor courts, whether they were feudal courts established by the
new nobility of the Conquest, or whether they represented ancient
franchises in which Norman lords succeeded to the jurisdiction of
earlier English rulers, were more and more turned into mere feudal
courts. In the Shire courts themselves the English sheriff who used to
preside over the court was replaced by a Norman "vicecomes," who
practically did as he chose, or as he was used to do in Normandy, in
questions of procedure, proof, and judgment. The old English hundred
courts, where the peasants' petty crimes had once been judged by the
freemen of the district, had now in most cases become part of the fief
of the lord, whose newly-built castle towered over the wretched hovels
of his tenants, and the peasants came for justice to the baron's court,
and paid their fees to the baron's treasury. The right of private
coinage added to his wealth, as the multitude of retainers bound to