Stray Studies from England and Italy Part 8

THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.

To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is best known as the church of the University, and the church of St.

Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford appears a mere a.s.semblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in large measure in academical hands. As a munic.i.p.ality it seems to exist only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police.

The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body which reigned supreme within its walls.

Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous borough, and reduced it to a cl.u.s.ter of lodging-houses. It found it among the first of English munic.i.p.alities, and it so utterly crushed its freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation.

Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor, Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older authority of the Mayor.

The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the most interesting in our munic.i.p.al annals, and it is one which has left its mark not on the town only but on the very const.i.tution and character of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then, when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank of English munic.i.p.alities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of aelfred. But though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a political importance under aethelred and c.n.u.t strikingly a.n.a.logous to that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence.

But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fas.h.i.+on as the Freeman's Common Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.

Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better ill.u.s.trates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and acc.u.mulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons of St. George.

But Oxford does more than ill.u.s.trate this outburst of industrial effort; it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the Church itself was powerless against the synagogue that rose in haughty rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out by historical fact. In England at least the att.i.tude of the Jew is almost to the end an att.i.tude of proud and even insolent defiance. His extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a subject.

At Oxford the att.i.tude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St.

Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of "Deus-c.u.m-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the saint pa.s.sed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with "Deus-c.u.m-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and s.n.a.t.c.hing the crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown s.h.i.+elded the Jewry from any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.

With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older world of material research. A medical school which we find established there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew brought with him something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we owe the n.o.blest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew.

His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and ecclesiastical erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular pa.s.sion, very probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall, Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls.

The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great fortresses which, pa.s.sing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly, had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac.

Oxfords.h.i.+re was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fas.h.i.+on, enforcing order, heaping up riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the older religious houses of the neighbourhood. It was only by ruthless exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames, broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George, frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress lay the Bailly, a s.p.a.ce cleared by the merciless policy of the castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its extent.

The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and aethelwold on their plunderer, the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of n.o.bles gathered round a throne whereon sate a lady pa.s.sing fair. Before her knelt two brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground, piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face, and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the rest.i.tution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell, the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle.

Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland.

"Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre, and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter, and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St.

Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer to Christchurch.

The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising of its burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount"; but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud pa.s.sed un.o.bserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford.

With the surrender which followed the military history of Oxford ceases till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great a.s.semblies held at Oxford under c.n.u.t, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third began the regular progress of const.i.tutional liberty. The position of the town, on the border between the England that remained to the West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their northern a.s.sailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about.

The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of aethelred the Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of c.n.u.t to Denmark left an opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English monarchy avenged the treason. But c.n.u.t was of n.o.bler stuff than aethelred, and his conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil, and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous a.s.sembly which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties.

Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which, frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our const.i.tutional system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government.

From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The "bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the original a.s.sociation, that is, of its princ.i.p.al traders for purposes of mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead"

so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to G.o.dstow, and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pa.s.s as far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay a toll of a hundred herrings on its pa.s.sage during Lent. But the union soon took a const.i.tutional form. The earliest charter of the capital which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his grandson we find a similar date a.s.signed to the liberties of Oxford. The customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This ident.i.ty of munic.i.p.al privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom; what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right."

The judicial usages, the munic.i.p.al rights of each city were a.s.similated by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty."

In no two cities has munic.i.p.al freedom experienced a more different fate than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the town. The wealthy merchant who pa.s.sed the group of s.h.i.+vering students huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of c.u.mnor and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole s.p.a.ce within its walls altogether subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town, lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the spirit of munic.i.p.al liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.

It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic philosophy, of the renewal of cla.s.sical learning, was also the age of a great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhone and the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival of individual, human life in the industrial ma.s.ses of the feudal world that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet towns.h.i.+ps of Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no foreign Caesar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's peace s.h.i.+elded them from that terrible oppression of the mediaeval baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life or death. The peculiarity of munic.i.p.al life in fact in England is that instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In towns.h.i.+p or manor alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice, commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to furnish in time of war. The progress of munic.i.p.al freedom, like that of national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few great statesmen, than by the st.u.r.dy revolts that wrested liberty from the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of the Caesars in the plain of the Po.

Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common a.s.sembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided, the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close a.s.sociation of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal a.s.sociation, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had already pa.s.sed through the earlier steps of this emanc.i.p.ation before the conquest of the Norman. Her citizens a.s.sembled in their Portmannimote, their free self-ruling a.s.sembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that of London. Their dues to the Crown are a.s.sessed in Domesday at a fixed sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of munic.i.p.al independence was reached when the Charter of John subst.i.tuted a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown.

It is hard in dry const.i.tutional details such as these to realize the quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford.

Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the "penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers from the castle rode clas.h.i.+ng through the narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough time, and frays were common enough,--now the sack of a Jew's house, now burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which humbled the munic.i.p.al freedom of Oxford to the dust.

THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.

For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is always something refres.h.i.+ng in the companions.h.i.+p of a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is, besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne.

There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south.

There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical interest ranges equally over so long a s.p.a.ce of time. The river which was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendee there is a continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M.

Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers.

To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a stroll through Anjou.

There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English sh.o.r.es; Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the shadowy resurrection under King Rene. Her soil is covered with monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of their vaulting, their ma.s.sive pillars, their capitals breaking into the exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.

To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the Counts. The physiognomy of the place--if we may venture to use the term--has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the n.o.blest of its abbeys has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets, its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St.

Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.

But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to the archaeologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low ranges of _coteaux_ which approaching it nearly on the west leave room along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut through by white roads and long poplar-rows--meadows which in reality represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad flats, rich in gra.s.s and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersets.h.i.+re. It is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St.

Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal ma.s.s of its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little more than the s.p.a.ce on the height above the river afterwards occupied by the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it, b.u.t.tressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St.

Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture--above all a Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds turned into the public gardens of the town, its church s.p.a.cious and beautiful with a n.o.ble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain.

Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well cared for in the gardens of the Museum.

But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund.

Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our judicature, our munic.i.p.al liberty, our political const.i.tution, the first three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou, the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons.

The countless robber-holds of the Angevin n.o.blesse must have done much towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest, their jealousy of the Church.

Of the monuments of the Counts which ill.u.s.trate our own history, the n.o.blest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the original Eveche in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of the town--on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.

The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is a relief, as we have said--a relief which one can only get here--to see the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new mercantile cla.s.s which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster.

But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of their administrative system, was a pure antic.i.p.ation of modern feeling.

There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house beside with its three aisles and n.o.ble sweep of wide arches is clearly of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely archaeological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few buildings of a really high cla.s.s are now left to ruin and desecration as they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of the objects of interest which it contains.

The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river, at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St.

Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal ma.s.s which seems to dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou, their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.

It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and n.o.ble, deep in gra.s.s and maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias, Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs, and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our Angevin Kings.

It is only in one or two points amidst the great ma.s.s of stately buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.

No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out in one colossal ma.s.s from the western hill-slope; and in its very solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its n.o.ble apse, its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were practising the music of a ma.s.s in the eastern portion of the church, which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins.

"From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been submitted--and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archaeology--it is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait.

Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coa.r.s.e full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glas...o...b..ry kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archaeologist; but these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of the Kings.

CAPRI.