THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS

When the average reader turns to the "Canterbury Tales," which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as mediæval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and what were the pilgrims doing on the road to Canterbury?

Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that society is thus seen in the act of moving; and why was he so important? If we want to know what really happened to England in this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy, brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always[Pg 75] stood: the idea in the Roman Law of something impersonal and omnipresent. Henry II. really produced this impression of being a police force in person.

Many priests expounded and embellished the Roman Law, and many priests[Pg 76] supported Henry II.

St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. He wrangled with the King about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether "criminous clerks" should be punished by the State or the Church. His word sent four feudal murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a traitor and who created a saint.

He was the kind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong. In the reign of John and his son it was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized the power; but there did begin to appear a case for their seizing it.

Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step away from despotism. If we hold that double truth firmly, we have something like a key to the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracy not only gained but often deserved the name of liberty. And the history of the English can be most briefly summarized by taking the French motto of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," and noting that the English have sincerely loved the first and lost the other two.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 794