Amongst those who took the Cross during the Second Crusade had been Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor. They were an ill-matched pair, the King of mediocre ability, weak, peace-loving, and pious; Eleanor, like all the House of Aquitaine, to which she belonged, imperious, fierce-willed, and without scruples where she loved or hated. Restless excitement had prompted her journey to Palestine; and Louis was impelled by the scandal to which her conduct there gave rise, and also by his annoyance that they had no son, to divorce her soon after they returned home.

The foolishness of this step from a political point of view can be gauged by studying a map of France in the middle of the twelfth century, and remembering that, though king of the whole country in name, Louis as feudal overlord could depend on little but the revenues and forces to be raised from his own estates. These lay in a small block round Paris, while away to the north, east, and south were the provinces of tenants-in-chief three or four times as extensive in area as those of the royal House of Capet. By marrying Eleanor, Countess of Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine, Louis had become direct ruler of the middle and south-west of France as well as of his own crown demesnes, but when he divorced his wife he at once forfeited her possessions.

Worse from his point of view was to follow; for Eleanor made immediate use of her freedom to marry Henry, Count of Anjou, a man fourteen years her junior, but the most important tenant-in-chief of the King of France and therefore, if he chose, not unlikely to prove that king’s most dangerous enemy. This Henry, besides being Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, was also Duke of Normandy and King of England, for he was a grandson of Henry I, and had in 1154 succeeded the feeble Stephen, of the anarchy of whose reign we gave a slight description in another chapter.16

Before dealing with the results of Henry’s marriage with the heiress of Aquitaine it is well to note his work as King of England, for this was destined to be the greatest and most lasting of all the many tasks he undertook. In character Henry was the exact opposite of Stephen. Where the other had wavered he pressed forward, utterly determined to be master of his own land. One by one he besieged the rebel barons, and levelled with the ground the castles they had built in order to torture and oppress their neighbours. He also took from them the crown lands which Stephen had recklessly given away in the effort to buy popularity and support. When he found that many of these nobles had usurped the chief offices of state he replaced them as quickly as he could by men of humble rank and of his own choosing. In this way he appointed a Londoner, Thomas Becket, whom he had first created Chancellor, to be Archbishop of Canterbury; but the impetuous choice proved one of his few mistakes.

Henry was so self-confident himself that he was apt to underrate the abilities of those with whom life brought him in contact and to believe that every other will must necessarily bow to his own. It is certain that he found it difficult to pause and listen to reason, for his restless energy was ever spurring him on to fresh ambitions, and he could not bear to waste time, as he thought, in listening to criticisms on what he had already decided. Chroniclers describe how he would fidget impatiently or draw pictures during Mass, commending the priest who read fastest, while he would devote odd moments of his day to patching his old clothes for want of something more interesting to do.

Henry II was so able that haste in his case did not mean that his work was slipshod. He had plenty of foresight, and did not content himself with destroying those of his subjects who were unruly. He knew that he must win the support of the English people if he hoped to build up his estates in France, and this, though destined to bear no lasting fruit, was ever his chief ambition. Henry II was one of the greatest of English kings, but he had been brought up in France and remained more of an Angevin than an Englishman at heart.

Instead of driving his barons into sulky isolation Henry summoned them frequently to his Magnum Concilium, or ‘Great Council’, and asked their advice. When they objected to serving with their followers in France as often as he wished, he arranged a compromise that was greatly to his advantage. This was the institution of ‘Scutage’, or ‘Shield-money’, a tax paid by the barons in order to escape military service abroad. With the funds that ‘scutage’ supplied Henry could hire mercenary troops, while the feudal barons lost a military training-ground.

Besides consulting his ‘Great Council’, destined to develop into our national parliament, Henry strengthened the Curia Regis, or ‘King’s Court’, that his grandfather, Henry I, had established to deal with questions of justice and finance. The barons in the time of Stephen had tried to make their own feudal courts entirely independent of royal authority; but Henry, besides establishing a central Court of Justice to which any subject who thought himself wronged might appeal for a new trial, greatly improved and extended the system of ‘Itinerant Justices’ whose circuits through the country to hold ‘Pleas of the Crown’ had been instituted by Henry I.

This interference he found was resented not only by the feudal courts but also by the Sheriffs of the County Courts, the Norman form of the old ‘shire-moots’, a popular institution of Anglo-Saxon times. Of late years the latter courts had more and more fallen under the domination of neighbouring landowners, and in order to free them Henry held an ‘Inquest’ into the doings of the Sheriffs, and deposed many of the great nobles who had usurped these offices, replacing them by men of lesser rank who would look to him for favour and advice.

Other sovereigns in Europe adopted somewhat similar means of exalting royal authority; but England was fortunate in possessing such popular institutions as the ‘moots’ or ‘meetings’ of the shire and ‘hundred’, through which Henry could establish his justice, instead of merely through crown officials who would have no personal interest in local conditions.

By the Assize of Clarendon it was decreed that twelve men from each hundred and four from each township should decide in criminal cases who amongst the accused were sufficiently implicated to be justly sentenced by the royal judges. Local representatives also were employed on other occasions during Henry’s reign in assisting his judges in assessing taxes and in deciding how many weapons and of what sort the ordinary freeman might fittingly carry to the safety of his neighbours and of himself. In civil cases, as when the ownership of land or personal property was in dispute, twelve ‘lawful men’ of the neighbourhood, or in certain cases twelve Knights of the Shire, were to be elected to help the Sheriff arrive at a just decision. In this system of ‘recognition’, as it was called, lay the germ of our modern jury.

It is probable that the knights and representatives of the hundreds and townships grumbled continually at the trouble and expense to which the King’s legislation put them; for neither they nor Henry II himself would realize that they were receiving a splendid education in the A B C of self-government that must be the foundation of any true democracy. Yet a few generations later, when Henry’s weak grandson and namesake Henry III misruled England, the Knights of the Shire were already accepted as men of public experience, and their representatives summoned to a parliament to defend the liberties of England.

Henry II used popular institutions and crown officials as levers against the independence of his baronage, but the chief struggle of his reign in England was not with the barons so much as with the Church. Thomas Becket as Chancellor had been Henry’s right hand in attacking feudal privileges: he had warned his master that as a leading Churchman his love might turn to hate, his help to opposition. The King refused to believe him, thrust the burden of the archbishopric of Canterbury on his unwilling shoulders, and then found to his surprise and rage that he had secured the election of a very Hildebrand, who held so high a conception of the dignity of the Church that it clashed with royal demands at every turn.

One of the chief subjects of dispute was the claim of the Church to reserve for her jurisdiction all cases that affected ‘clerks’, that is, not only priests, but men employed in the service of the Church, such as acolytes or choristers. The King insisted that clerks convicted in ecclesiastical courts of serious crimes should be handed over to the royal courts for secular punishment. His argument was that if a clerk had committed a murder the ecclesiastical judge was not allowed by Canon law to deliver a death-sentence, and so could do no more than ‘unfrock’ the guilty man and fine or imprison him. Thus a clerk could live to commit two murders where a layman would by command of the royal judges be hung at the first offence.

Becket, on his side, would not swerve from his opinion that it was sacrilege for royal officials to lay hands on a priest or clerk whether ‘criminous’ or not; and when Henry embodied his suggestions of royal supremacy in a decree called the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Archbishop publicly refused to sign his agreement to them. Threats and insults were heaped upon him by angry courtiers, and one of his attendants, terrified by the scene, exclaimed, ‘Oh, my master, this is a fearful day!’ ‘The Day of Judgement will be yet more fearful,’ answered the undaunted Becket, and in the face of his fearlessness no one at the moment dared to lay hands on him.

Shortly afterwards Becket fled abroad, hoping to win the support of Rome, but the Pope to whom he appealed did not wish to quarrel with the King of England, and used his influence to patch up an agreement that was far too vague to have any binding strength. Thomas Becket returned to Canterbury, but exile had not modified his opinions, and he had hardly landed before he once more appeared in open opposition to Henry’s wishes, excommunicating those bishops who had dared to act during his absence without his leave. The rest of the story is well known—the ungovernable rage of the Angevin king at an obstinacy as great as his own, his rash cry, ‘Is my house so full of fools and dastards that none will avenge me on this upstart clerk?’ and then his remorse on learning of the four knights who had taken him at his word and murdered the Archbishop as he knelt, still undaunted, on the altar steps of Canterbury Cathedral.

So great was the horror and indignation of Europe, even of those who were devoted to Henry’s cause, that the King was driven to strip and scourge himself before the tomb of Thomas the Martyr, as a public act of penance, and all question of the supremacy of the state over the Church was for the time dropped.

One of the many pilgrims who in the next few years visited the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury in the hope of a miracle was Louis VII of France, and the miracle that he so earnestly desired was the recovery of his son and heir, Philip Augustus, from a fever that threatened his life. With many misgivings the old king crossed the Channel to the land of a ruler with whom he had been at almost constant war since Eleanor of Aquitaine’s remarriage; but his faith in the vision of the Martyr that had prompted his journey was rewarded. Henry received him with ‘great rejoicing and honour’ after the manner of a loyal vassal, and when the French king returned home he found his son convalescent.

The sequel to this journey, however, was the sudden paralysis and lingering death of Louis himself, and the coronation of the boy prince in whom France was to find so great a ruler. When the bells of Paris had rung out the joyous tidings of his birth one hot August evening fourteen years before, a young British student had put his head out of his lodging window and demanded the news. ‘A boy,’ answered the citizens, ‘has been given to us this night who by God’s grace shall be the hammer of your king, and who beyond a doubt shall diminish the power and lands of him and his subjects.’ One-half of the reign of Philip Augustus, le Dieu-donnÉ, or ‘God-given’, was the fulfilment of this prophecy. At first sight it would seem as though Henry II of England entered the lists against his overlord the Champion of France with overwhelming odds in his favour. Ruler of a territory stretching from Scotland, his dependency, to the Pyrenees, he added to his lands and wealth the brain of a statesman and the experience of long years of war and intrigue. What could a mere boy, fenced round even in his capital of Paris by turbulent barons, hope to achieve against such strength?

Yet the weapons of destruction lay ready to his hand, in the very household of the Angevin ruler himself. Legend records that the blood of some Demon ancestress ran in the veins of the Dukes of Aquitaine, endowing them with a ferocity and falseness strange even to mediaeval minds; and the sons whom Eleanor bore to her second husband were true to this bad strain if to nothing else. ‘Dost thou not know’, wrote one of them to his father who had reproached him for plotting against his authority, ‘that it is our proper nature that none of us should love the other, but that ever brother should strive with brother and son against father? I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our hereditary right and seek to rob us of our nature.’

Louis VII, in order to weaken Henry II, had encouraged this spirit of treachery, and even provided a refuge for Becket during his exile: his policy was continued by Philip Augustus, who kept open house at Paris for the rebellious family of his tenant-in-chief whenever misfortune drove them to fly before their father’s wrath or ambition brought them to hatch some new conspiracy.

Could Henry have once established the same firm grip he had obtained in England over his French possessions, he might have triumphed in the struggle with both sons and overlord; but in Poitou and Aquitaine he was merely regarded as Eleanor’s consort, and the people looked to his heirs as rulers, especially to Richard his mother’s favourite. Yet never had they suffered a reign of greater licence and oppression than under the reckless and selfish Lion-Heart.

After much secret plotting and open rebellion, Henry succeeded in imprisoning Eleanor, who had encouraged her sons to defy their father, but with Richard supported by Philip Augustus and the strength of southern France he was forced to come to terms towards the end of his reign. Though only fifty-six, he was already failing in health, and the news that his own province of Maine was fast falling to his enemies had broken his courage. Cursing the son who had betrayed him, he sullenly renewed the oath of homage he owed to Philip, and promised to Richard the wealth and independence he had demanded. The compact signed he rode away, heavy with fever, to his castle of Chinon, and there, indifferent to life, sank into a state of stupor. News was brought him that his youngest son John, for whom he had carved out a principality in Ireland, had been a secret member of the League that had just brought him to his knees. ‘Is it true,’ he asked, roused for the minute, ‘that John, my heart ... has deserted me?’ Reading the answer in the downcast faces of his attendants, he turned his face to the wall. ‘Now let things go as they will ... I care no more for myself or the world.’ Thus the old king died.

In 1189 Richard the False succeeded his father, and by his prowess in Palestine became Richard ‘Coeur-de-Lion’. How he quarrelled with Philip II we have seen in the last chapter, and that Philip, after the siege of Acre, returned home in disgust at the other’s overbearing personality.

Philip Augustus does not cut the same heroic figure on the battle-field as his rival: indeed there was no match in Europe for the ‘Devil of Aquitaine’, who knew not the word fear, and the glamour of whose feats of arms has outlasted seven centuries. It is in kingship that Philip stands pre-eminent in his own age, ready to do battle at the right moment, but still more ready to serve France by patient statecraft. While Richard remained in Palestine, Philip plotted with the ever-treacherous John for their mutual advantage at the absent king’s expense; but their enmity remained secret until the joyful news arrived that the royal crusader had been captured in disguise on his way home by the very Leopold of Austria whose banner he had once contemptuously cast into a ditch.

Now the Duke of Austria’s overlord was the Emperor Henry VI, whose claims to Sicily Richard had often derided; and the Lion-Heart, passing from the dungeon of the vassal to that of the overlord, did not escape until his subjects had paid a huge ransom and he himself had promised to hold England as a fief of the Empire. ‘Beware, the Devil is loose’, wrote Philip to John, when he heard that their united efforts to bribe Henry VI into keeping his prisoner permanently had failed.

The next few years saw a prolonged struggle between the French armies that had invaded Normandy and the forces of Richard, who, burning for revenge, proved as terrible a rival to Philip in the north of France as he had been in the East; and the duel continued until a poisoned arrow pierced the Lion-Heart’s shoulder, causing his death. ‘God visited the land of France,’ wrote a chronicler, ‘for King Richard was no more.’

From this moment Philip Augustus began to realize his most cherished ambitions, slowly at first, but, thanks to the ‘worst of the English kings’, with ever-increasing rapidity. John, who had succeeded Richard, was neither statesman nor soldier. To meaningless outbursts of Angevin rage he added the treachery and cruelty of the House of Aquitaine and a sluggish disregard of dignity and ordinary decency peculiarly his own. Soon all his subjects were banded together against him in fear, hatred, and scorn: the Church, on whose privileges he trampled; the barons, whose wives and daughters were unsafe at his court, and whose lands he ravaged and confiscated; the people, whom his mercenaries tortured and oppressed. How he quarrelled with the Chapter of Canterbury over its choice of an archbishop, defied Pope Innocent III, and then, brought to his knees by an interdict, did homage to the Holy See for his possessions; these things, and the signing of Magna Charta, the English Charter of Popular Liberties, at Runymede, are tales well known in English history.

What is important to emphasize here in a European history is the contrast of the unpopularity that John had gained for himself amongst all classes of his own subjects at the very moment that Philip Augustus seemed, in French eyes, to be indeed their ‘God-given’ king.

While John feasted at Rouen messengers brought word that Philip was conquering Normandy. ‘Let him alone! Some day I will win back all he has taken.’ So answered the sluggard, but when he at last raised his standard it was already too late. The English barons would have followed ‘Coeur-de-Lion’ on the road to Paris: they were reluctant to take sword out of scabbard for John: the very Angevins and Normans were beginning to realize that they had more in common with their French conquerors than with any king across the Channel. Aquitaine, it is true, looked sourly on Philip’s progress, but the reason was not that she loved England, but that she feared the domination of Paris, and made it a systematic part of her policy for years to support the ruler who lived farthest away, and would therefore be likely to interfere the least in her internal affairs.

In 1214 John made his most formidable effort, dispatching an army to Flanders to unite with that of the powerful Flemish Count Ferrand, one of Philip’s tenants-in-chief, and with the Emperor Otto IV, in a combined attack on the northern French frontier. At Bouvines the armies met, Philip Augustus, in command of his forces, riding with a joyful face ‘no less than if he had been bidden to a wedding’.

The battle, when it opened, found him wherever the fight was hottest, wielding his sword, encouraging, rallying, until by nightfall he remained victor of the field, with the Count of Flanders and many another of his chief enemies, including the English commander, prisoners at his mercy.

Philip carried Count Ferrand behind him in chains on his triumphal march to Paris, while all the churches along the way rang their bells, and the crowds poured forth to cheer their king and sing Te Deums.

‘The Battle of Bouvines was perhaps the most important engagement ever fought on French soil.’ So wrote a modern historian before the war of 1914.

In the days of Louis VII the Kings of France had stood dwarfed amid Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and Counts of Flanders and Anjou. Now the son of Louis had defeated an emperor, thrown one rebellious tenant-in-chief into a dungeon, and from another, the Angevin John, gained as the reward of his victory all the long-coveted provinces north of the Loire. Even the crown treasury, once so poor, was replete for the time with the revenues of the confiscated Norman and Angevin estates of English barons, who had been forbidden by their sovereign to do homage any more to a French overlord.

Philip Augustus had shown himself Philip ‘the Conqueror’; but he was something far greater—a king who, like Henry II of England, could build as well as destroy. During his reign the menace of the old feudal baronage was swept away, and the government received its permanent stamp as a servant of the monarchy.

In his dealing with the French Church Philip followed the traditions of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, yet gratifying as were his numerous gifts to monasteries and convents, they were dovetailed into a scheme of combining the liberal patron with the firm master. That good relations between the king and clergy resulted was largely due to Philip’s policy of replacing bishops belonging to powerful families by men of humble origin accustomed to subservience. Also he would usually support the lesser clergy in their frequent quarrels with their ecclesiastical superiors, thus weakening the leaders while he won the affection of the rank and file.

Like John he came into collision with the iron will of Pope Innocent III, but on a purely moral question, his refusal to live with the Danish princess Ingeborg, to whom he had taken a violent and unaccountable dislike on his wedding-day. The bride was a girl of eighteen; she could speak no French, her husband’s bishops were afraid to uphold her cause whatever their secret opinions, but in appealing to the Pope for help she gained an unyielding champion.

In other chapters we shall see Innocent III as a politician and a persecutor of heretics: here he stands as the moral leader of Europe; and no estimate of his character and work would be fair that neglected this aspect. It was to Innocent’s political advantage to please the French king, whose help he needed to chastise the English John and to support a crusade against an outburst of heresy in Languedoc. Moreover, he had no armies to compel a king who accused his wife of witchcraft to recognize her as queen. Yet Innocent believed that Philip was in the wrong; and when the French king persuaded his bishops to divorce him and then promptly married again, papal letters proceeded to denounce the divorce as a farce and the new marriage as illegal.

‘Recall your lawful wife,’ wrote Innocent, ‘and then we will hear all that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this no power shall move us to right or left until justice be done.’ This letter was followed by threats of excommunication, and after some months by an interdict that reduced Philip to a promise of submission in return for a full inquiry into his case. The promise so grudgingly given remained but a promise, and it was not until 1213, nearly twenty years since he had so cruelly repudiated Ingeborg, that, driven by continual papal pressure and the critical state of his fortunes, Philip openly acknowledged the Danish princess as his wife and queen.

We have seen something of Philip’s dealings with his greater tenants-in-chief; but such achievements as the conquest of Normandy and Anjou and the victory of Bouvines were but the fruits of years of diplomacy, during which the royal power had permeated the land, like ether the atmosphere, almost unnoticed. In lending a sympathetic ear to the complaints of Richard and his brothers against their father, Philip was merely carrying out the policy we have noticed in his treatment of the Church.

‘He never began a new campaign without forming alliances that might support him at each step’, says Philip’s modern biographer; and these allies were often the sub-tenants of large feudal estates to whom in the days of peace he had given his support against the claims of their feudal overlords. Sometimes he had merely used his influence as a mediator, at others he had granted privileges to the tenants, or else he had called the case in dispute before his own royal court for judgement. By one means or another, at any rate, he had made the lesser tenants feel that he was their friend, so that when he went out to battle they would flock eagerly to his banner, sometimes in defiance of their overlord.

One danger to the crown lay, not in the actual feudal baronage, but in the prÉvÔts, officials appointed by the king with power to exact taxes, administer the laws, and judge offenders in his name in the provinces. When the monarchy was weak these prÉvÔts, from lack of control, developed into petty tyrants, and it was fortunate for Philip that their encroachments were resented by both nobles and clergy, so that a system of reform that reduced them again to a subordinate position was everywhere welcomed.

Gradually a link was established between local administration and the king’s council, namely, officials called in the north of France baillis, in the south sÉnÉchals, whose duty was to keep a watch over the prÉvÔt and to depose or report him if necessary. The prÉvÔt was still to collect the royal revenues as of old, but the bailli would take care that he did not cheat the king, and would forward the money that he received to the central government: he would also hold assizes and from time to time visit Paris, where he would give an account of local conditions and how he had dealt with them.

In these reforms, as in those of Henry II of England, a process that was gradually changing the face of Europe can be seen at work, first the crumbling of feudal machinery too clumsy to keep pace with the needs and demands of dawning civilization, and next its replacement by an official class, educated in the intricacies of finance, justice, and administration, and dependent not on the baronage but on the monarchy for its inspiration and success.

The chief nobles of France in early mediaeval times had regarded such titles as ‘Mayor of the Palace’, ‘Seneschal’, ‘Chamberlain’, ‘Butler’, &c., as bestowing both hereditary glory and also political power. With the passing of years some of the titles vanished, while under Philip Augustus and his grandson Louis IX those that remained passed to ‘new’ men of humbler rank, who bore them merely while they retained the office, or else, shorn of any political power, continued as honours of the court and ballroom. In effect the royal household, once a kind of general servant ‘doing a bit of everything inadequately’ as in the days of Charlemagne, had now developed into two distinct bodies, each with their separate sphere of work: the great nobles surrounding their sovereign with the dignity and ceremonial in which the Middle Ages rejoiced, the trained officials advising him and carrying out his will.

In his attitude to the large towns, except on his own crown lands where like other landowners he hesitated to encourage independence, Philip II showed himself sympathetic to the attempts of citizens to throw off the yoke of neighbouring barons, bishops, and abbots. Many of the towns had formed ‘communes’, that is, corporations something like a modern trade union, but these, though destined to play a large part in French history, were as yet only in their infancy. They had their origin sometimes in a revolutionary outburst against oppression, but often in a real effort on the part of leading townsmen to organize the civil life on profitable lines by means of ‘guilds’, or associations of merchants and traders with special privileges and laws. Some of the privileges at which these city corporations aimed were the right to collect their own taxes, to hold their own law-courts for deciding purely local disputes, and to protect their trade against fraud, tyranny, and competition from outside. It all sounds natural enough to modern ears, but it awoke profound indignation in a French writer of the twelfth century.

‘The word “commune”, he says, ‘is new and detestable, for this is what it implies; that those who owe taxes shall pay the rent that is due to their lord but once in the year only, and if they commit a crime against him they shall find pardon when they have made amends according to a fixed tariff of justice.’

Except within his own demesnes Phillip II readily granted charters confirming the ‘communes’ in their coveted rights, and he also founded ‘new’ towns under royal protection, offering there upon certain conditions a refuge to escaped serfs able to pay the necessary taxes.

In Paris itself his reign marks a new era, when, instead of a town famed according to a chronicler of the day chiefly for its pestiferous smells, there were laid the foundations of one of the most luxurious cities of Europe. The cleansing and paving of the filthy streets, the building of fortifications, of markets, and of churches, and above all of that glory of Gothic architecture, NÔtre Dame de la Victoire, founded to celebrate the triumph of Bouvines: such were some of the works planned or undertaken in the capital during this reign. Over the young University of Paris the King also stretched out a protecting hand, defending the students from the hostility of the townsfolk by the command that they should be admitted to the privileges enjoyed by priests. For this practical sympathy he and his successors were well repaid in the growth of an educated public opinion ready to exalt its patron the crown by tongue and pen.

Philip Augustus died in July 1223. Great among the many great figures of his day, French chroniclers have yet left no distinct impression of his personality. It would almost seem as if the will, the foresight, and the patience that have won him fame in the eyes of posterity, built up a baffling barrier between his character and those who actually saw him. Men recognized him as a king to be admired and feared, ‘august’ in his conquests, terrible in his wrath if any dared cross his will, but his reserve, his indifference to court gaiety, his rigid attitude of dislike to those who used oaths or blasphemy, they found wholly unsympathetic and strange. Of the great work he had done for France they were too close to judge fairly, and would have understood him better had he been rash and heedless of design like the Lion-Heart. For a real appreciation of Philip Augustus we must turn to his modern biographer.

‘He had found France a small realm hedged in by mighty rivals. When he began his reign but a very small portion of the French-speaking people owned his sway. As suzerain his power was derided. Even as immediate lord he was defied and set at nought. But when he died the whole face of France was changed. The King of the Franks was undisputedly the king of by far the greater part of the land, and the internal strength of his government had advanced as rapidly and as securely as the external power.’

Such was the change in France itself, but we can estimate also to-day, what no contemporary of Philip Augustus could have realized, the effect of that change on Europe, when France from a collection of feudal fiefs stood forth at last a nation in the modern sense, ready to take her place as a leader amongst her more backward neighbours.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.