hall at Westminster. His courtiers imitated his example in their respective provinces, and princely structures were raised in every direction. He had also conceived the design of rearing an immense palace, to which Westminster Hall should be merely the vestibule.

Henry I. (Beauclerc), A. D. 1100-1135.

3. HENRY I., surnamed Beauclerc on account of his learning, rode off to Winchester immediately after the king's death, and seized upon the royal treasures. These he employed in gaining partisans. He became popular chiefly by recalling Anselm, Lanfranc's successor in the archbishopric of Canterbury, who had been compelled to leave England. Anselm was instrumental in promoting Henry's union with Maud or Matilda, daughter of Malcolm, king of Scotland, and a descendant of Alfred the Great, through her mother Margaret, the sister of Edgar Atheling. This politic marriage, which united the Saxon and the Norman dynasties, rendered the king so powerful in England, that he had no longer cause to fear his elder brother Robert, who was in Palestine at the time of his father's death, and returned to England at the head of his barons.

A.D.

Their differences, however, were terminated without 1101. bloodshed, Robert consenting to renounce his claim to the throne of England, and Henry promising to surrender all his fortresses in Normandy, and to pay an annual pension of three thousand marks, besides granting a general amnesty to the Anglo-Norman lords who had joined Robert's ariny.

But Robert had scarcely returned to Normandy, before Henry proceeded against the barons who had favoured his brother's cause, and whom he had promised to pardon. They resisted, and the result of a sort of civil war against them was, that one by one nearly all the great nobles, the sons of those who had conquered England, were outlawed, and their estates and honours given to Henry's favourites. The peace concluded between the king and his brother was not of long duration; and in 1105 and 1106, Henry invaded Normandy under the pretence of delivering its inhabitants from the tyranny of their duke, defeated him at Tenchebray, and having taken him prisoner, shut him up

in one of his castles, where he was cruelly deprived of his eyesight, and lived thirty years. After the victory of Tenchebray, Henry became master of all Normandy, which he annexed to the English crown.

4. It is impossible for pen to describe the atrocious manners of the times, and the excesses to which the thirst for revenge carried the powerful lords of this period. Henry, who had great cause to fear the violence of the men whom he had injured, never slept unarmed, and was continually changing his bed-chamber; but such precautions did not prevent him from being tormented by horrible visions that rarely allowed him to enjoy sound repose. Many odious traits in his character might be pointed out, but one alone will suffice to show how foreign to him was every sentiment of humanity. He had given the hand of Juliana, one of his natural daughters, to Eustace, count of Breteuil, who solicited the gift of an important fortress. A warrior named Harenc was then governor of the place, and Henry, who doubted the count's fidelity, promised that it should be surrendered to him at the conclusion of the war with France, and as a pledge of Harenc's good faith, placed the son of that warrior in Eustace's hands, requiring in return, by way of security, the count's two daughters that Juliana had borne him. This arrangement did not long please the Count of Breteuil. The barbarian caused

Harenc's son to be brought before him, and having torn out both his eyes, sent him back in this condition to his father. We may easily imagine the grief and rage of the warrior when his mutilated son appeared before him. He flew to Henry, demanded justice, and claimed the count's two daughters, that he might retaliate on them their father's atrocity. The count took flight as soon as he heard that Henry intended to deliver his person into Harenc's hands, and the king did not hesitate for one moment to sacrifice his two grandchildren. Harenc, insensible alike to their innocence and their youth, tore out their eyes and cut off their noses in the king's presence, and some writers assert that Henry himself was the executioner. The unhappy Juliana withdrew to the city of Breteuil, to which Henry laid siege. When abandoned by the garrison, she desired to speak to the monster who called himself her father, and

as he approached, discharged an arrow at him, but which did not reach the mark, and she was compelled to surrender at discretion. Henry, more cruel than ever, had no compassion for the afflicted mother; but causing all the gates of the castle to be shut, he ordered her to leave it immediately under pain of death, and forbade any one to aid her in the attempt. She was therefore compelled to drop half-naked from the rampart into the moat that surrounded the castle; and it being the winter season, she sunk through the ice up to the waist in water and mire, and with difficulty reached the other side.

5. Henry's son, William, inherited none of his mother Matilda's kindly feelings towards the English, and is reported to have said publicly, that if ever he ascended the throne, he would yoke the Saxons like oxen to the plough. At the age of eighteen, he was married to the daughter of the Count of Anjou; and after the nuptial festivities, Henry and his court prepared for their return to England. On reaching Barfleur, the port at which they were to embark, a mariner named Fitzstephen, whose father had steered the vessel in which William the Conqueror sailed for the invasion of England, begged that he might enjoy the like honour of conveying the king to his insular dominions, and offered him the use of the "White Ship," manned by fifty skilful seamen. Henry had already chosen a vessel for himself, but agreed to intrust to his care the prince with his retinue and companions. The king set sail in the afternoon, and on the following morning reached England; but William did not leave the harbour till night had set in, having spent the intervening hours in feasting and dancing on the deck with his companions. At last the White Ship left her moorings, and the crew, excited by a liberal allowance of wine, rowed lustily by the bright light of the moon to overtake the king, when suddenly the vessel struck upon a rock, and in a short time sank to the bottom. Of more than three hundred persons who were on board, nearly a half belonged to the noblest families of England and Normandy, and the only one who escaped was a poor butcher of Rouen, who clung to a piece of the wreck, and was picked up next morning by some fishermen.

In this awful catastrophe, that brought mourning to so

many Norman families, the oppressed Saxons imagined that they could trace the retributive justice of God. The bereaved monarch was never again seen to smile after receiving the fatal news, although he survived the event fifteen years, and continued to pursue his ambitious projects with undiminished ardour.

During the last years of his life, in which he suffered much unhappiness from domestic broils, Henry lived on the continent, and he was preparing for his return to England to suppress a revolt in Wales, when he was seized with a violent fever at Lions-la-Forêt in Normandy, which A. D. carried him off in a few days, in the sixty-seventh 1135. year of his age and the thirty-sixth of his reign.

Henry Beauclerc, himself a scholar, as his name imports, was a liberal patron of learning and the fine arts. He attracted several poets to his court, who were also favoured by his two queens; but the progress made in science and literature during his reign was chiefly owing to the encouragement bestowed on youths in the ecclesiastical schools. The Latin and Greek authors began to be more generally studied, their manuscripts were sought for, and from their works scholars derived their little knowledge of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, as well as some imperfect notions of mathematics, astronomy, music, and medicine. These five branches of science formed, respectively, the trivium and quadrivium of the schools of this period.

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6. THE CHURCH.-A short time after Henry's accession, a serious difference arose between him and the clergy, when he called upon Anselm to do homage for his archbishopric of Canterbury. This the prelate refused, on the ground that a recent council had threatened excommunication against every layman who should grant investiture any ecclesiastical benefice, and every priest who should receive it from such a source. This dispute, after much double-dealing on the part of Pope Pascal II., was terminated by an arrangement, that the king should abstain from investiture with ring and crozier, and that the dignitaries of the church should do homage for the temporalities of their sees. In 1108, a council was held in London to enforce the rule of clerical celibacy; and it was enacted that all married priests should immediately put away their

wives, and not permit them to live in any lands belonging to the church, nor see or converse with them except in the presence of witnesses. They were further to undergo several penances, and were suspended from saying mass during a certain period, as a punishment for having married. All refractory priests were to be deposed and excommunicated, their goods to be confiscated, and their wives, as adulteresses, made slaves to their respective bishops.

ARTS AND MANUFACTURES.-About the year 1110, Henry established a colony of Flemings in Pembrokeshire, which proved a source of great commercial wealth to the country by the introduction of a mercantile spirit and the art of manufacturing woollen cloths. They had previously settled in the vicinity of Carlisle, where they did not consort amicably with the natives; and as they were equally ready at the plough and the sword, Henry appears to have removed them into Wales, that they might act as a check upon the troublesome and warlike mountaineers.

The Norman architecture, which had been introduced about the time of the Conquest, made considerable progress in England during the reign of Henry. It is known by the arches being round instead of pointed, as they were in the later style called Gothic architecture: indeed, it has been supposed that the Norman architecture was merely a rude adaptation of the Roman. Specimens of it may be seen in the cathedrals of Canterbury and Durham, in Christ's church and St Peter's, Oxford, in the chapel of the White Tower of London, in Dunfermline abbey and Leuchars church in Fifeshire, and in the cathedral of St Magnus in Orkney.

Stephen, A. D. 1135-1154.

7. After the melancholy death of Prince William, Henry's only surviving legitimate child was Maud or Matilda, who became the spouse of Henry V., emperor of Germany. Being left a widow in 1124, she returned to her father, by whom she was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, in 1127. In a general assembly of nobility and clergy held at Windsor Castle in 1126, she had been declared nearest heir to the throne, all swearing to maintain her succession; and when, in 1133, she was