| Copyright | ||
|
Home England under Foreign Kings England under Foreign Kings; Part 10 |
England under Foreign Kings; Part 10A body so cumbrous as this Magnum Concilium would obviously be rarely summoned. As a rule business fell into the hands of the "ordinary" Council - the Curia Regis. At the head of it was the king, and in it sat the great officials, the Justiciar, who acted as regent in the king's absence, the Chancellor, who was his secretary, the Chamberlain at the head of his household, the Marshal and the Constable, who looked after his soldiers. Yet it is a peculiarly confusing body, for it engages in so many duties under so many names. It was a council of state; it was a law court (From this side of its activity has descended our Court of King's Bench and the term Kings Counsel (K.C.)); it collected and accounted for the revenue (And was then called the Court of Exchequer. The term "Court" shows how finance and justice were entangled). It has been aptly called a royal "court-of-all-work".The explanation of this many-sidedness is found by looking at the office of king. In the earliest form the king was head of his tribe in everything. He ruled his people, and led them in war; he was their judge and lawgiver. David, and the kings of the Iliad, are of this type. As the tribe grew by degrees into the nation, the king called in a council to help him, and this council naturally came to wield most of the powers that were the king's. Again, in course of time the work which proved too much for one man proved too much for one Council, and we get a multitude of councils and officials, each restricted to one branch; one manages justice, another revenue; a third makes laws; others attend to the army and to the navy. All are really subdivisions of the old royal authority. The king remains as the nominal head: his powers have been split up. We see this process at work in Henry I's reign, but not in it alone. It pervades English history; it is indeed a branch of history by itself: it is constitutional history. Henry had shut his brother in prison and had seen his nephew slain; he had tamed his Norman barons; he had made friends with the English; his name was feared over the length and breadth of the land; he had punished ill-doers with such sternness, that he had gained the nickname of the "Lion of Justice"; yet with all this, his last days were filled with anxiety. His son had perished in a shipwreck off the Channel Islands. A daughter, Maud, was his only heir. Henry tried to secure her succession to the throne; he had made his barons swear fealty to her. But it needed little penetration to see that they would not be likely to keep their oaths, for the idea of a woman on the throne was then strange - nay almost absurd. And whether they rejected her or served her, it would be an ill day for England when the strong hand was removed and the barons were able each to do what was right in his own eyes. |
Chronology |
| copyright by uus-ununseptium.info |