The provincial administration was set in working order.  New sheriffs took up again the administration of the shires, and judges from the King’s Court travelled, as they had done in the time of Henry I., through the land.  The worst fears of the baronage were justified.  They were disabled by one blow after another.  Their political humiliation was complete.  The heirs of the great lords who had followed the Conqueror, and who with their vast estates in Normandy and in England had inherited the arrogant pretensions of their fathers, found themselves of little account in the national councils.  The mercenary forces were no longer at their disposal.  The sources of wealth which they had found in plunder and in private coinage were cut off.  Their rights of jurisdiction were curtailed.  A final blow was struck at their military power by the adoption of scutage.  In the Welsh campaign of 1157 Henry opened his military reforms by introducing a system new to England in the formation of his army.  Every two knights bound to service were ordered to furnish in their place one knight who should remain with the king’s army as long as he required.  It was the first step towards getting rid of the cumbrous machinery of the feudal array, and securing an efficient and manageable force which should be absolutely at the king’s control.  In the war of Toulouse in 1159 the problem was for the first time raised as to the obligation of feudal vassals to foreign service, and Henry gladly seized the opportunity to carry out his plan yet more fully.  The chief vassals who were unwilling to join the army were allowed to pay a fixed tax or “scutage” instead of giving their personal service.  Henry, the chroniclers tell us, careful of his people’s prosperity, was anxious not to annoy the knights throughout the country, nor the men of the rising towns, nor the body of yeomen, by dragging them to foreign war against their will; at the same time he himself profited greatly by the change.  The new system broke up the old feudal array, and set the king at the head of something like a standing army paid by the taxes of the barons.

Henry had, indeed, won a signal victory over feudalism.  But feudalism had no roots on English soil; it was forced to borrow Brabancons, and to work by means alien to the whole feudal tradition and system, and Henry had easily overthrown the baronage by the help of the Church.  But in the process the ecclesiastical party had learned to know its strength, and the king had to meet a more formidable resistance to his will when, instead of a lawless baronage, he was confronted by the Church with its mighty organization, always vigilant and menacing.  The clergy had from the first looked with a very jealous eye on his projects.  A sharp quarrel as to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts had early arisen between Henry and Archbishop Theobald, but the matter had been compromised for a time.  Thomas had taken office pledged to defend ecclesiastical interests, and he was so far true to