[Sidenote:  Henry’s rule]

With the victory of Tenchebray Henry was free to enter on that work of administration which was to make his reign memorable in our history.  Successful as his wars had been he was in heart no warrior but a statesman, and his greatness showed itself less in the field than in the council chamber.  His outer bearing like his inner temper stood in marked contrast to that of his father.  Well read, accomplished, easy and fluent of speech, the lord of a harem of mistresses, the centre of a gay court where poet and jongleur found a home, Henry remained cool, self-possessed, clear-sighted, hard, methodical, loveless himself, and neither seeking nor desiring his people’s love, but wringing from them their gratitude and regard by sheer dint of good government.  His work of order was necessarily a costly work; and the steady pressure of his taxation, a pressure made the harder by local famines and plagues during his reign, has left traces of the grumbling it roused in the pages of the English Chronicle.  But even the Chronicler is forced to own amidst his grumblings that Henry “was a good man, and great was the awe of him.”  He had little of his father’s creative genius, of that far-reaching originality by which the Conqueror stamped himself and his will on the very fabric of our history.  But he had the passion for order, the love of justice, the faculty of organization, the power of steady and unwavering rule, which was needed to complete the Conqueror’s work.  His aim was peace, and the title of the Peace-loving King which was given him at his death showed with what a steadiness and constancy he carried out his aim.  In Normandy indeed his work was ever and anon undone by outbreaks of its baronage, outbreaks sternly repressed only that the work might be patiently and calmly taken up again where it had been broken off.  But in England his will was carried out with a perfect success.  For more than a quarter of a century the land had rest.  Without, the Scots were held in friendship, the Welsh were bridled by a steady and well-planned scheme of gradual conquest.  Within, the licence of the baronage was held sternly down, and justice secured for all.  “He governed with a strong hand,” says Orderic, but the strong hand was the hand of a king, not of a tyrant.  “Great was the awe of him,” writes the annalist of Peterborough.  “No man durst ill-do to another in his days.  Peace he made for man and beast.”  Pitiless as were the blows he aimed at the nobles who withstood him, they were blows which his English subjects felt to be struck in their cause.  “While he mastered by policy the foremost counts and lords and the boldest tyrants, he ever cherished and protected peaceful men and men of religion and men of the middle class.”  What impressed observers most was the unswerving, changeless temper of his rule.  The stern justice, the terrible punishments he inflicted on all who broke his laws, were parts of a fixed system which differed