19. Henry had no time just then to attend to this business himself, but he gave the Irishman leave to seek help among his subjects, and gave any of his subjects who chose to help him full permission to do so. Dermot accordingly came back to England, and by and bye found helpers, the principal of 1169. whom was the Earl of Pembroke, generally called Earl Richard Strongbow. He and some other English Strongbow. and Welsh noblemen and gentlemen, the cousins of our friend the archdeacon among them, went over to Ireland with their men. Though they were all of Norman descent, on the father's side at least, that name was quite dropped now, and Gerald always calls them the English. He himself is generally called Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald the Welshman. 20. After some hard fighting and much cruelty they conquered their opponents. One instance will show how hardhearted many of the English or Anglo-Normans still were. After taking the town of Waterford, they had in their hands seventy prisoners, the principal men of the town. There was a discussion among the leaders what should be done with these men. One of them, named Raymond, wished to be merciful to them, and allow them to be ransomed; but another, making a fierce speech demanding their death, his comrades approved of it, and the wretched prisoners had their bones broken, and were then thrown into the sea and drowned. What should we say if an English general treated his prisoners in such a way now? 21. After these fights and successes, Richard Strongbow married Dermot's daughter Eva, and when, not long after, Dermot died, Strongbow, in right of his wife, became King of Leinster. But this was rather too much for Henry II., who wished to be king himself, and accordingly Strongbow thought it prudent to give up the kingship to his master; Henry allowing him, in return, to keep very large possessions for himself. 22. Whilst all this was going on, and the English gaining more and more of the mastery, the clergy of Ireland held an assembly, in which they all agreed that their troubles were a punishment sent on the Irish by God for their sins, and, above all, for the wicked trade in slaves which they had so long carried on with the English, and it was therefore decreed that all the English slaves in the country should be set at liberty. This, I believe, is the very last time that we hear of the slave-trade in England. 23. Henry at last found time to come over to Ireland himself, and nearly all the kings and chiefs of the country, especially Roderic of Connaught, who was the head of all, 1171. submitted to him as their over-lord, and did him Submission homage. This was about Christmas time, and many of the Irish princes. of the Irish princes came to Dublin to visit the king, "and were much astonished at the sumptuousness of his entertainments, and the splendour of his household." It is said. that a very large hall was built on purpose for the king to hold his court. It reminds us of the ancient Britons (relations of the Irish) to hear that this hall was built, "after the fashion of the country," of white wicker-work, peeled osiers, for we all remember the " palaces" of the Britons, and their first little Christian church at Glastonbury. Wicker-work dwellings seem to have been a specialty of the Celtic races; we shall hear of them again among other branches of that family. The English settlers. 24. King Henry received and feasted the Irish chieftains, and Gerald says that at these feasts they learnt to eat cranes, "which before they loathed." He stayed in Ireland a few months, and, as he had done in England, restored peace and order. With the help of the clergy he also made many laws for improving the habits of the people. But after he went away things soon became as bad as ever, and the English noblemen who remained behind grew almost as savage and wild as the natives. They established themselves chiefly along the eastern and southern coast, and the part where they lived was afterwards called "The Pale;" they and the native Irish hated each other bitterly for a time, though afterwards the English allied themselves to their wild neighbours, and became, as was said, "more Irish than the Irish." We cannot see that any lasting good came of the conquest of Ireland, such as it was, except that Henry added another lordship to his titles. N LECTURE XIX.-CHURCH AND STATE. Ecclesiastical courts. Disputes between Church and State. Investitures. 1. WE must now turn our attention to the great disputes which had been going on so long between the king and the Church. As was noticed before, we never found Disputes. anything of this sort before the Norman Conquest. In those old times the king, the earls, and the thanes agreed perfectly well with the archbishops and bishops. No one had ever thought of any distinction between Church and State. Very little was heard of the Pope, except when an archbishop had to go to Rome for his pall, as a sort of token that he was the head or principal bishop, and that the Church of England owned his supremacy. 2. But things were much changed now, and we have very often to hear of great disputes and fierce quarrels between the king and the Church. We must not imagine that this was because there was any difference in their religious opinions. In the Protestant Reformation, several centuries later, there were such differences; and Protestant countries like ours now refuse to accept many things which the Roman Church teaches: we do not pray to the Virgin Mary and the saints, we have a different belief about the sacrament, and many other things. At the time we are speaking of this was not so. The king, the lords, and all the people believed just the same as the Pope and the clergy, and the disputes were not about doctrines and creeds, but were all about power and mastery. 3. The principal matters of dispute were two. The first really came to the question whether the bishops and archbishops were subjects of the king or of the Pope. This had The king and begun to be a matter of contention even between the bishops. Henry I. and Anselm, but as they were both moderate and reasonable, they did not come to an open quarrel. The king demanded that they should do homage to him like the other great lords, and that he should have the power of giving them a ring and a staff, which were the signs of their office, as the old kings of England had always done. But the Pope had now begun to claim this power for himself or his legate, and to say that the king had no right at all to the homage of the spiritual lords. 4. The other matter in dispute was, that there were now two sets of courts of law: one for lay-people, and one for clergymen. This plan had been brought in by William the Conqueror, but it was found to work very badly. Henry tical courts. II. determined that if a clergyman committed a crime The ecclesias he should be tried by the judge, and punished as any other man would be. The clergy would not hear of this; neither they nor their bishops would submit to be under the temporal power, as it was called. 5. By this time the law of the celibacy of the clergy, that the clergy should have no wives, was quite established. This law, as we know, had been introduced by Dunstan about 200 years before. But the contest had gone on even up to the time of Henry I., who was inclined to take the part of the married clergy. The Chronicle' tell us of a great council which was held in London, A.D. 1129, which began on Monday and ended on Friday, consisting of bishops, abbots, and other churchmen. "When it came forth, it was all about archdeacons' wives, and priests' wives, that they should leave them by St. Andrew's mass; and he who would not do that should forego his church, and his house, and his home. This ordained the Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the suffragan bishops who were then in England; and the king gave them all leave to go home, and so they went home; and all the decrees stood for nought; all held their wives by the king's leave, as they did before." But this did not last much longer; and now the clergy were all unmarried, or if any of them had wives it was quite in secret, and the wives were insultingly called "concubines." 6. Thus they were like a separate nation in the midst of the nation. If the archbishops and the bishops were all under the Pope, and not under the king, and the clergy were all under the bishops' courts, and not under the king's judges, and none of them had any wives and families to make them feel like other people, they seemed quite distinct from all the rest of the nation. Henry could not stand this. He loved power and mastery; but he also saw clearly that it could not be for the real good and honour of the country to have two masters, the king and the Pope. The celibacy of the clergy he left untouched, but on the other two points he was determined. 7. Before going farther into the history of this strife, it is well to notice that in the end, and after a fight of many hundred years, the English nation has decided that the king (or the civil power) was in the right. All the great principles that Henry I. and Henry II. strove for are now the law of the land; and we all, or nearly all, feel that it is well for both clergy and people that it should be so. But seven or eight hundred years ago matters were in a very different condition from what they are now, and at that time the people almost always sided with the clergy and the Church against the king and the State. Let us try and see why. 8. Even with all the pride of the popes, and sometimes of the higher clergy, even though many of the lower clergy were very different from what they should have been, still on The Church the whole the churchmen were more merciful, more and the just, and less cruel than the laymen. We have heard people. much of the tyranny and barbarity of the barons and soldiers. The clergy, in their different ways, did what they could to check and over-awe the tyrants, and to protect the helpless and poor. We saw that it was greatly through the exertions of the bishops that the peace was made at last between Stephen and Matilda. The popes, too, often used the authority they had won, in restraining the unjust and ambitious designs of quarrelsome princes and kings. 9. Another way in which the Church was a safeguard and a refuge in those days of fighting and plundering, was by what was called the right of sanctuary. If a person were Sanctuary. being pursued by his enemies, and in danger of being seized and killed, he might take shelter in a church or churchyard or other sacred place, and no one would dare to touch him. To hurt or kill any one in a church was considered an almost impossible and unpardonable crime; and no doubt many a poor creature's life was saved in that way from the ruffians, who would know neither pity nor fear in any other place. It had been one of the worst outrages in the days of Stephen that "they spared neither church nor churchyard." 10. Again, in those ecclesiastical courts which Henry wished to put down, they not only tried offending priests, but managed to lay claim to a good many other people too. instance, if any one could write in those ignorant Discipline. For |