position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of the twelfth, building up by patience and policy and craft a dominion alien to the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to be swept away in the end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and activity blinded him.  But whether by the anti-national temper of his general system or by the administrative reforms of his English rule his policy did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.

[Sidenote:  The Great Scutage]

He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by the Church.  His first work was to repair the evils which England had endured till his accession by the restoration of the system of Henry the First; and it was with the aid and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders were driven from the realm, the new castles demolished in spite of the opposition of the baronage, the King’s Court and Exchequer restored.  Age and infirmity however warned the Primate to retire from the post of minister, and his power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands of Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential adviser and was now made Chancellor.  Thomas won the personal favour of the king.  The two young men had, in Theobald’s words, “but one heart and mind”; Henry jested in the Chancellor’s hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in rough horse-play as they rode through the streets.  He loaded his favourite with riches and honours, but there is no ground for thinking that Thomas in any degree influenced his system of rule.  Henry’s policy seems for good or evil to have been throughout his own.  His work of reorganization went steadily on amidst troubles at home and abroad.  Welsh outbreaks forced him in 1157 to lead an army over the border; and a crushing repulse showed that he was less skilful as a general than as a statesman.  The next year saw him drawn across the Channel, where he was already master of a third of the present France.  Anjou, Maine, and Touraine he had inherited from his father, Normandy from his mother, he governed Britanny through his brother, while the seven provinces of the South, Poitou, Saintonge, La Marche, Perigord, the Limousin, the Angoumois, and Gascony, belonged to his wife.  As Duchess of Aquitaine Eleanor had claims on Toulouse, and these Henry prepared in 1159 to enforce by arms.  But the campaign was turned to the profit of his reforms.  He had already begun the work of bringing the baronage within the grasp of the law by sending judges from the Exchequer year after year to exact the royal dues and administer the king’s justice even in castle and manor.  He now attacked its military influence.  Each man who held lands of a certain value was bound to furnish a knight for his lord’s service; and the barons thus held a body of trained soldiers at their disposal.  When Henry called his chief lords to serve in the war