repeated blows which he levelled at their military and judicial power.  The king’s withdrawal of the office of sheriff from the great nobles of the shire to entrust it to the lawyers and courtiers who already furnished the staff of the royal judges quickened the resentment of the baronage into revolt.  His wife Eleanor, now parted from Henry by a bitter hate, spurred her eldest son, whose coronation had given him the title of king, to demand possession of the English realm.  On his father’s refusal the boy sought refuge with Lewis of France, and his flight was the signal for a vast rising.  France, Flanders, and Scotland joined in league against Henry; his younger sons, Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Aquitaine, while the Earl of Leicester sailed from Flanders with an army of mercenaries to stir up England to revolt.  The Earl’s descent ended in a crushing defeat near St. Edmundsbury at the hands of the king’s justiciars; but no sooner had the French king entered Normandy and invested Rouen than the revolt of the baronage burst into flame.  The Scots crossed the border, Roger Mowbray rose in Yorkshire, Ferrars, Earl of Derby, in the midland shires, Hugh Bigod in the eastern counties, while a Flemish fleet prepared to support the insurrection by a descent upon the coast.  The murder of Archbishop Thomas still hung round Henry’s neck, and his first act in hurrying to England to meet these perils in 1174 was to prostrate himself before the shrine of the new martyr and to submit to a public scourging in expiation of his sin.  But the penance was hardly wrought when all danger was dispelled by a series of triumphs.  The King of Scotland, William the Lion, surprised by the English under cover of a mist, fell into the hands of Henry’s minister, Ranulf de Glanvill, and at the retreat of the Scots the English rebels hastened to lay down their arms.  With the army of mercenaries which he had brought over sea Henry was able to return to Normandy, to raise the siege of Rouen, and to reduce his sons to submission.

[Sidenote:  Later reforms]

Through the next ten years Henry’s power was at its height.  The French king was cowed.  The Scotch king bought his release in 1175 by owning Henry’s suzerainty.  The Scotch barons did homage, and English garrisons manned the strongest of the Scotch castles.  In England itself church and baronage were alike at the king’s mercy.  Eleanor was imprisoned; and the younger Henry, though always troublesome, remained powerless to do harm.  The king availed himself of this rest from outer foes to push forward his judicial and administrative organization.  At the outset of his reign he had restored the King’s Court and the occasional circuits of its justices; but the revolt was hardly over when in 1176 the Assize of Northampton rendered this institution permanent and regular by dividing the kingdom into six districts, to each of which three itinerant judges were assigned.  The circuits thus marked out correspond roughly with