before the sight of a Frenchman in the land would
have roused every peasant to arms from Avranches to
Dieppe. But town after town surrendered at the
mere summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly
over before Normandy settled down into the most loyal
of the provinces of France. Much of this was
due to the wise liberality with which Philip met the
claims of the towns to independence and self-government,
as well as to the overpowering force and military
ability with which the conquest was effected.
But the utter absence of opposition sprang from a
deeper cause. To the Norman his transfer from
John to Philip was a mere passing from one foreign
master to another, and foreigner for foreigner Philip
was the less alien of the two. Between France
and Normandy there had been as many years of friendship
as of strife; between Norman and Angevin lay a century
of bitterest hate. Moreover, the subjection to
France was the realization in fact of a dependence
which had always existed in theory; Philip entered
Rouen as the overlord of its dukes; while the submission
to the house of Anjou had been the most humiliating
of all submissions, the submission to an equal.
In 1204 Philip turned on the south with as startling
a success. Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed
with little resistance into his hands, and the death
of Eleanor was followed by the submission of the bulk
of Aquitaine. Little was left save the country
south of the Garonne; and from the lordship of a vast
empire that stretched from the Tyne to the Pyrenees
John saw himself reduced at a blow to the realm of
England.
Book III
the charter
1204-1307
A Chronicle drawn up at the monastery of Barnwell
near Cambridge, and which has been embodied in the
“Memoriale” of Walter of Coventry, gives
us a contemporary account of the period from 1201 to
1225. We possess another contemporary annalist
for the same period in Roger of Wendover, the first
of the published chroniclers of St. Albans, whose work
extends to 1235. Though full of detail Roger
is inaccurate, and he has strong royal and ecclesiastical
sympathies; but his chronicle was subsequently revised
in a more patriotic sense by another monk of the same
abbey, Matthew Paris, and continued in the “Greater
Chronicle” of the latter.
Matthew has left a parallel but shorter account of
the time in his “Historia Anglorum” (from
the Conquest to 1253). He is the last of the
great chroniclers of his house; for the chronicles
of Rishanger, his successor at St. Albans, and of
the obscurer annalists who worked on at that Abbey
till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and
lifeless jottings of events which become more and
more local as time goes on. The annals of the
abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton, which have
been published in the “Annales Monastici”
of the Rolls series, add important details for the
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