Cormafier Bandolito Directory 04
Page 07

It has already been suggested that the reigns of Richard and John form a period of transition to a new age. That period closes and the new age opens with the granting of the Great Charter and the attempted revolution which followed. The reign of John was the culmination of a long tendency in English history, most rapid since the accession of his father, towards the establishment of an absolutism in which the rights of all classes would disappear and the arbitrary will of the king be supreme. The story of his reign should reveal how very near that result was of accomplishment. A monarchy had been forming in the last three reigns, and very rapidly in the reign of John, capable of crushing any ordinary opposition, disregarding public opinion and traditional rights, possessing in the new judicial system, if regarded as an organ of the king's will alone, an engine of centralization, punishment, and extortion, of irresistible force, and developing rapidly in financial matters complete independence of all controlling principles. Though the barons were acting rather from personal and selfish motives, freedom for all classes depended on the speedy checking of this steady drift of two generations. The reigns of Richard and John may be called transitional because it is in them that the barons came to see clearly the principles on which successful resistance could be founded and the absolutist tendency checked. The embodiment of these principles in permanent form in the Great Charter to be accepted by the sovereign and enforced in practice, introduces an age, the age of constitutional growth, new in the history of England, and in the form and importance of its results new in the history of the world.

William, called of Poitiers, though a Norman, chaplain of William I and Archdeacon of Lisieux, wrote a biography of the king, Gesta Willelmi Duels Normannorum et Regis Anglice (in Migne's Patrologia Latina,149), of much value for the period immediately following the Conquest. It has been thought that he was not present at the battle of Hastings, but the account of William's movements between the battle and his coronation contains several indications of first--hand knowledge, matters of detail likely to be noted by an eye--witness; and though he was a strong partisan and panegyrist of the king, his statements of what happened may generally be accepted. His comments and opinions, however, must be used with the greatest caution. His work originally ended in 1071, but the last part is now wanting, and it ends abruptly in the spring of 1067. The entire book was used, however, by Orderic Vitalis as one of the chief sources of his narrative, and in that form we probably have all the main facts it contained.

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