Test bank for McGraw-Hill’s Taxation of Individuals and Business Entities 2016 Edition 7th

Test bank for McGraw-Hill’s Taxation of Individuals

and Business Entities 2016 Edition 7th Edition
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McGraw-Hill’s Taxation is designed to provide a unique, innovative, and engaging
learning experience for students studying taxation. The breadth of the topical
coverage, the storyline approach to presenting the material, the emphasis on
the tax and nontax consequences of multiple parties involved in transactions, and
the integration of financial and tax accounting topics make this book ideal for the
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About the Author
Brian Spilker (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 1993) is the Robert Call/Deloitte
Professor in the School of Accountancy at Brigham Young University. He teaches
taxation in the graduate and undergraduate programs at Brigham Young
University. He received both BS (Summa Cum Laude) and MAcc (tax emphasis)
degrees from Brigham Young University before working as a tax consultant for
Arthur Young & Co. (now Ernst & Young). After his professional work experience,
Brian earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1996, he was selected
as one of two nationwide recipients of the Price Waterhouse Fellowship in Tax
Award. In 1998, he was a winner of the American Taxation Association and Arthur
Andersen Teaching Innovation Award for his work in the classroom; he has also
been awarded for his use of technology in the classroom at Brigham Young
University. Brian researches issues relating to tax information search and
professional tax judgment. His research has been published in journals such as
The Accounting Review, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,
Journal of the American Taxation Association, Behavioral Research in Accounting,
Journal of Accounting Education, Journal of Corporate Taxation, and Journal of
Accountancy.

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Ben Ayers (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 1996) holds the Earl Davis Chair in
Taxation and is the dean of the Terry College of Business at the University of
Georgia. He received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and an MTA
and BS from the University of Alabama. Prior to entering the PhD program at the
University of Texas, Ben was a tax manager at KPMG in Tampa, Florida, and a
contract manager with Complete Health, Inc., in Birmingham, Alabama.<br>
Ben teaches tax planning and research courses in the undergraduate and
graduate programs at the University of Georgia. He is the recipient of 11 teaching
awards at the school, college, and university levels, including the Richard B.
Russell Undergraduate Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor for University
of Georgia junior faculty members. His
research interests include the effects of taxation on firm structure, mergers and
acquisitions, and capital markets and the effects of accounting information on
security returns. He has published articles in journals such as the Accounting
Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Contemporary
Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Law and
Economics, Journal of the American Taxation Association, and National Tax
Journal. Ben was the 1997 recipient of the American Accounting Association’s
Competitive Manuscript Award and the 2003 and 2008 recipient of the American
Taxation Association’s Outstanding Manuscript Award.
• ISBN-10 : 1259334872
• ISBN-13 : 978-1259334870
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 ENGLAND and FRANCE
1152-1327
Henry II. was born in 1133; and if we may believe the
testimony of Roger Hoveden, who was one of his chaplains, Youth and
education of
and a very conscientious compiler of histories, he was Henry.
recognized by Henry I. as his successor directly after his
birth. When his grandfather died he was two years old. His father and
mother made, as we have seen, a very ill-concerted effort to secure the
succession, and it was not until the boy was eight years old that the struggle
for the crown really began. In 1141 he was brought to England; then no
doubt he learned a dutiful hatred of Stephen, and was trained in the use of
arms; but whether he received his training under his father in France or
under his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, in England, or under his great uncle,
David of Scotland, we are not told. Only we know that, when he was
sixteen, he was knighted at Carlisle by King David; that, like a wise boy, he
determined to secure his French dominions before he attempted the
recovery of England; that he succeeded to Normandy and Anjou in 1151,
when he was eighteen; married his wife, the Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine
who had been divorced from Lewis VII., and secured her inheritance, when
he was nineteen; that he came again to England and forced Stephen to
submit to terms when he was twenty; and that at the age of twenty-one he
succeeded him on the throne in pursuance of those terms. These dates are
sufficient to prove that, although Henry might have got considerable
experience in arms as a boy and young man, he could scarcely have had yet
the education of a lawgiver. Somewhat of politics he might have learnt, but
he had not had time or opportunity to learn a regular theory of policy, or to
create a method of government which, when the time for action came, he
might put into execution. The extraordinary power which he showed when
the time for action really arrived was in part a gift of genius; partly too it
arose from his wisdom in choosing experienced advisers, and partly it was
an effect of his following the broad lines of his grandfather’s administrative
reforms.
Henry II. was a very great sovereign in many ways: he was
an admirable soldier, most careful in forming plans, Character of
wonderfully rapid in the execution of them; he was at once Henry II.
cautious and adventurous, sparing of human life and
moderate in the use of victory. Yet he was far from being a
mild or gentle enemy; and he was economical of human life His family
policy.
rather because of its cost in money than from any
pitifulness. If he spared an enemy it was only when he had
entirely disabled him from doing harm, or when he was fully assured of his
power to turn him into a friend. His foes accused him of
being treacherous, but his treachery mainly consisted in His great
letting them deceive themselves. Thus he was no hero of position
probity, and his craft may have gone farther in the direction in Christendom.
of cunning than was approved by the rough diplomacy of his
time. He is said to have had a maxim, that it is easier to repent of words
than of deeds, and therefore wiser to break your word than to fulfil an
inconvenient obligation; but it cannot be said that the facts of history show
him to have acted upon this shameless avowal, captious and unscrupulous
as his policy more than once appears. He had no doubt a difficult part to
play. His dominions brought him into close contact with all the great
sovereigns of Europe. He had considerable ambitions—for himself, to hold
fast all that he had acquired by inheritance and marriage; for his sons to
obtain by marriage or other settlement provinces which, united to their
hereditary provision, might make them either a family of allied sovereigns
or an imperial federation under himself, and in each form the mightiest
house in Christendom. Such a network of design was spread before him
from the first. As the head of the house of Anjou the kings and princes of
Palestine regarded him as their family representative, the grandson of King
Fulk, and the man created for the re-conquest of the East. To him in their
utmost need they sent the offer of their crown, the keys of the Holy
Sepulchre and of the Tower of David. As the head of the Normans he was
looked up to by the Sicilian king as the presumptive successor, and had the
strange fortune and self-restraint to decline the offer of a second crown. The
Italians thought him a likely competitor for the empire when they saw him
negotiating for his son John a marriage with the heiress of Savoy, which
would give him the command of the passes of the Alps; Spain saw in him
the leader of a new crusade against the Moors when he sought for his son
Richard a bribe in the Princess of Aragon, whose portion would give him
the passes of the Pyrenees. Frederick Barbarossa might well feel suspicious
when he heard that English gold was given to build the walls of Milan, and
when he remembered that Henry the Lion, the great Duke of Saxony and
Bavaria, the head of the Welfic house, his cousin and friend, whom with
heavy heart he had sacrificed to the necessities of state, was also son-in-law
of the king of the English. So wide a system of foreign alliances and
designs helped to make Henry both cautious and crafty.
Nearer home his ability was tasked by Lewis VII., whose
whole policy consisted in a habit of pious falsehood, who Lewis VII.
really acted upon the principle which Henry ironically
formulated, and who by either cowardice or faithlessness made himself far
more dangerous than by his strength.
Henry was a kind and loving father, but his political game
led him to sacrifice the real interest of his children to the Henry’s
design for their advancement. They soon found out that he mismanageme
used them like chess-men, and could not see the love which nt of his
prompted his design. To his people he was a politic ruler, a children.
great reformer and discipliner; not a hero or patriot, but a
far-seeing king who recognized that the well-being of the nation was the
surest foundation of his own power. As a lawgiver or financier, or supreme
judge, he made his hand felt everywhere; and at the beginning of his reign,
when the need of the reforms was forcibly impressed on the minds of his
subjects by their recent misery, his reforms were welcomed; he was popular
and beloved. By and by, when he had educated a new generation, and when
the dark cloud of sin and sorrow and ingratitude settled down upon him,
they forgot what he had done in his early days; but they never forgot how
great a king he was. We may not say that he was a good man; but his
temptations were very great, and he was sinned against very much by his
wife and children. It is only in a secondary sense that he was a good king,
for he loved his power first and his people only second; but he was good so
far as selfish wisdom and deep insight into what is good for them could
make him. In his early years he gave promise of something more than this,
and some share of the blame that attends his later short-comings must rest
with those who scrupled at nothing that might humiliate and disappoint
him.
In appearance, we are told, Henry was a tall, stout man, with a short neck,
and projecting but very expressive eyes; he was a careless dresser, a great
hunter, a man of business rather than a model of chivalry; capable of great
exertion, moderate in meat and drink, and anything but extravagant in
personal as opposed to official expenditure. He was a builder of halls and
castles, not very much of churches; but that may easily be accounted for.
We are glad to have him pictured for us even with this scanty amount of
detail, for he is well worth the trouble of an attempt at least to realize his
outward presentment. Every one knows Henry VIII. by sight; it might be as
well if we had as definite an impression of Henry II.
We have observed, in sketching the close of the last reign,
the existence of certain terms by which Henry and Stephen, Plan of
after or in preparation for the peace of November 1153, reform.
agreed that the country should be governed. Those terms are
not preserved in any formal document, but they occur in two or three of the
historians of the time, in a somewhat poetical garb, disguised in language
adapted partly from the prophecies of Merlin, king Arthur’s seer, which
were in vogue at the time, and partly from the words of Holy Scripture; and
yet, from the clue they furnish to the reforms actually carried out by Henry,
they seem to be based upon certain real articles of agreement.
By these terms the administration of justice was to be
restored, sheriffs to be appointed to the counties, and a Term of
careful examination into their honesty and justice to be pacification.
instituted; the castles which had been built since the death of
Henry I. were to be destroyed; the coinage was to be renewed, a uniform
silver currency of lawful weight; the mercenaries who had flooded the
kingdom under Stephen were to be sent back to their own countries; the
estates which had been usurped were to go to their lawful owners; all
property alienated from the crown was to be resumed, especially the
pensions on the Exchequer with which Stephen endowed his newly-created
earls; the royal demesnes were to be re-stocked, the flocks to return to the
hills, the husbandman to the plough, the merchant to his wares; the swords
were to be turned into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks.
These sentences give us a clue to Henry’s reforms; that is,
they show us clearly the evils that first called for his Meaning of
attention. The kingdom, divided in two under Stephen, had these terms.
been in constant war; the barons on one side had entered on
the lands of the barons on the other; Stephen had confiscated the estates of
Matilda’s friends in the East of England, Matilda had retaliated or
authorized reprisals in the West. All this must be set right. The crown had
been the greatest loser, and the impoverishment of the crown involved the
oppression of the people. Henry gained the crown by a national act; he must
then resume not only the wasteful grants of Stephen but those of his mother
also, and, in his character of king, know neither friends nor foes amongst
his own people. So the Exchequer, the board which managed the royal
revenue, must be placed on its old footing, and under its old managers. With
the Exchequer would revive the ancient office of the sheriffs, to whom both
the collection of revenue, the administration of justice in the shires, and the
maintenance of the military force was entrusted. Thus local security would
restore and revive trade and commerce. And when the local administration
of the sheriff was revived, no doubt the feudal usurpations of the lords of
castles and manors must end. The fortified houses must be pulled down; no
more should the petty tyrants tax and judge their men, fight their battles like
independent princes, and coin their money as so many kings. The great
P should be restored, of which the king was guardian and keeper. In
fact, the golden age was to return. Nor was it to be delayed until Henry
came to the crown; it was to be Stephen’s last and expiatory task to bring
about these happy results. Stephen, as we saw, wanted either the will or the
power to accomplish it.
Stephen died on October 25, 1154. Henry was in France at
the time, and was not able, owing to the weather, to reach Arrival of
England before December 8. During this time the Henry as
management of affairs rested with Archbishop Theobald of successor
to Stephen,
Canterbury, and in some measure perhaps with his secretary, 1154.
Thomas Becket, who had been so busy negotiating the
succession of Henry. Although it was the theory that during
the vacancy of the throne all law and police were suspended, Henry’s
and no one could be punished for offences committed in a advisers.
general abeyance of justice, the country remained quiet
during these six weeks. Perhaps the rogues were cowed by Bishop
the apprehension of a strong king coming, perhaps the of Winchester.
religious obedience inculcated by the archbishop was really
maintained; perhaps the same bad weather that kept Henry
in Normandy kept thieves and robbers within doors. Nor The
was there any political rising during the interregnum. Empress.
Stephen’s children were not thought of, at least on this side
of the Channel, as rivals to Henry. The Bishop of Theobald
Winchester had learnt moderation, that might in him well and Becket.
pass for wisdom; he might well feel that his position was a
hazardous one, to be maintained only by caution; and he had no reason, nor
excuse for seeking a reason, for evading the compact which he had had a
chief hand in making. It shows, however, his importance that as soon as
Henry landed, which he did near Southampton, he hastened to Winchester,
and there visited his powerful kinsman, who, as we learn, was now busily
employed in collecting statues and sculpture from southern Europe, and
with whom he made a friendship which, although once or twice seriously
endangered, was never actually broken. Amongst the other leaders who
likewise had learned wisdom we must count the Empress Matilda, who,
strange to say, appears to us no more as the arrogant, self-willed virago, but
as a sage politician and a wise, modest, pious old lady, living at Rouen, and
ruling Normandy in the name of her son with prudent counsel. Not a word
is said now of her succeeding to the throne or even resigning her rights to
Henry; all that was regarded as arranged by the settlement made with
Stephen. Henry succeeded without a competitor. Stephen’s minister,
Richard de Lucy, became his minister. Theobald continued to be, as his
office made him, the great constitutional adviser; and to reconcile personal
convenience with constitutional precedent, he presented his secretary to the
king as his future Chancellor. Thomas Becket thus entered on his high and
fatal office.
All this done, Henry appeared at Westminster on the 19th of
December, and was there crowned with the ceremonies Coronation.
observed at his grandfather’s coronation, now more than
half a century past, and bound himself by the same ancient Banishment
and solemn promises which Ethelred had made to Dunstan, of
and which the Conqueror, Henry I., and Stephen had mercenaries.
renewed. Nor, when crowned, did he lose a moment: he
issued a charter, as Stephen had done, at his coronation, confirming his
grandfather’s laws. The same week he held a great court and council at
Bermondsey. At once he re-established the Exchequer, recalling to the head
of it Bishop Nigel of Ely, whom Stephen had displaced in 1140, and setting
at work at once with the business of the revenue. From this court at
Bermondsey went forth the decree that the Flemish and other foreign
mercenaries should leave the kingdom at once, and that the castles built
under Stephen should be thrown down. The mercenaries fled forthwith.
Their presence was perhaps the most offensive of all insults to the national
pride, and the late reign had taught Normans and Englishmen that they had
now a common nationality in suffering, if not in conquest. By this article of
the agreement Henry faithfully stood. Although he fought all his foreign
wars with mercenaries, he never but once—and that in the greatest
emergency, and to repel foreign mercenaries brought against him by the
rebellious earls in 1174—introduced any such force into England. Even
Richard employed in the kingdom no more foreigners than formed his
ordinary surroundings, and it is not until John’s reign that we find the
country again oppressed and insulted by hired foreign soldiery.
The demolition of the castles, which one contemporary
writer reckons at three hundred and seventy-five, another a Destruction of
little later at eleven hundred and fifteen, was a still greater castles.
boon; for these, had they been suffered to stand, would not
only have fitted England to be a constant scene of civil war, but have
continued to afford to their owners a shadow of claim for the exercise of
those feudal jurisdictions which on the Continent made every baron a petty
despot. Castles were unfortunately not entirely destroyed at this time; the
older strongholds, which had been built under Henry, were untouched, and
gave trouble enough in the one civil war that marks the reign; but the legal
misuse of them was abolished, and they ceased to be centres of feudal
lawlessness.
Another measure which must have been taken at the
coronation, when all the recognised earls did their homage Fate of the
and paid their ceremonial services, seems to have been the new earls.
degrading or cashiering of the supposititious earls created by
Stephen and Matilda. Some of these may have obtained recognition by
getting new grants; but those who lost endowment and dignity at once, like
William of Ypres, the leader of the Flemish mercenaries, could make no
terms. They sank to the rank from which they had been so incautiously
raised.
The resumption of royal estates, and the restoration of the
dispossessed on each side, was probably a much more Resumption of
difficult business than the humiliation of the earls. Doubtless lands.
the enemies of Henry’s mother would bear their reverses
silently, to avoid entire ruin; or only those would think of
continuing in opposition who had no hope but in terms Resistanceof William
which might be granted to pertinacious resistance; but of Aumâle.
Matilda’s supporters might well think it hard that they
should be called upon to resign their hard-won gains. Still, Henry was a
national king; the resumption of domain was not an Angevin
conquest; it was a national restoration of the state of affairs Surrender
as it stood before the beginning of the national quarrel. As a of
matter of fact only two or three of the nobles made any the malcontents.
resistance. William of Aumâle, the Lord of Holderness, who
had commanded at the Battle of the Standard, and who played the part of a
petty king in Yorkshire, objected to surrender his great castle at
Scarborough. He, of course, had been on Stephen’s side, and was, indeed, a
member of the House of Champagne—the son of that Count Stephen who
had been brought forward by the Norman earls as competitor with William
Rufus. Of Matilda’s old friends, Hugh Mortimer, the lord of Wigmore, and
Roger of Hereford, the son of Miles the Constable, declined to submit. The
King of Scots too, Malcolm IV., grandson of King David and half-cousin of
Henry, although the Northern counties had been held in trust for Henry,
wished to retain them for himself. In January, 1155, however, Henry
marched northwards and brought the Count of Aumâle to his feet. In March
he was at London holding council for the restoration of peace and the
confirmation of the ancient laws. He declared that neither friend nor foe
should be spared. Roger of Hereford immediately surrendered. Hugh of
Mortimer still held out, and did not submit until Henry had called out the
national force for the capture of Bridgenorth. On exactly the same ground it
was that Henry I., had won his victory over Robert of Belesme, when in
1102 he laid the axe to the tree of feudal misrule, and his subjects, rejoicing
at the overthrow of the oppressor, hailed him as now for the first time a
king. This was accomplished in July. And this was a permanent
pacification; it was nearly twenty years before anything like rebellion
reared its head.
The history of the first year of Henry’s reign is not,
however, filled up thus. He restored the administration of Restoration
justice, and sent itinerant members of his judicial court to of judicature.
enforce the law which had been so long in abeyance. He
himself learned the law as an apt scholar. Even at
Frequent
Bridgenorth he found time to hear suits brought before him councils.
as supreme judge; at Nottingham, whilst he was on his way
from Scarborough, he threatened William Peverell with a
charge of having poisoned the Earl of Chester. The very Proposal to
threat caused Peverell to take refuge in a monastery. He held conquer
council after council, taking advice from his elders, and Ireland.
making friends everywhere. In one assembly held at
Wallingford after Easter he obtained the recognition of his little son
William, who afterwards died, as his successor. In another, held at
Winchester, at Michaelmas, he proposed that the conquest of Ireland should
be attempted and a kingdom founded there for his brother William. The
empress objected to this, and it was given up, at least during her life,
although the English Pope, Adrian IV., by his famous Bull Laudabiliter,
issued about this time, was already anxious to give the papal authorization
to a scheme that would complete the symmetrical conformation of Western
Christendom. A national expedition, Henry may have thought, would do
more than anything else to consolidate the national unity which was
growing rapidly into more than a name. But clearly the time was not come
for England, shorn of her Northern provinces, and with the Welsh
unsubdued, to attempt foreign conquest; and Henry had other states besides
England to take thought for.
The whole of the next year he had to spend in Normandy
and Anjou, and, when he returned in 1157, he found Hugh Bigot
abundant work ready for his hands in his still undetermined humbled,
relations with Wales and Scotland. His first visit was to the 1157.
Eastern counties, and there he combined business with
pleasure. William of Warenne, Count of Boulogne and Earl Second
of Surrey, the son of Stephen, had received a considerable coronation.
estate in Norfolk, including the castle of Norwich; and Hugh
Bigot, the earl of the county of Norfolk, the same Hugh who had sworn that
Henry I., disinherited the empress, was very reluctant to accept the strong
rule of the new king. Whether Hugh was now acting on behalf of Stephen’s
family or in opposition to them is not clear. It was his attitude that drew the
king into that country. He was made to surrender his castles; and William of
Warenne likewise surrendered his special provision, on the understanding
that he was to receive his hereditary estates. Henry added solemnity to this
visit by holding a solemn court and wearing his crown in state on Whit-
Sunday, at St. Edmund’s, the second recorded coronation-day of the reign.
This ceremony was a revival of the great courts held by the Conqueror and
his sons on the great festivals, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, at
Gloucester, Westminster, and Winchester, the three chief cities of the South.
At such gatherings all the great men attended, both witan and warriors,
clerk and lay. The king heard the complaints of his subjects, and decided
their suits with the advice of his wise men; the feudal services, by which the
great estates were held, were solemnly rendered; a special peace was set,
the breakers of which within the purlieus of the court were liable to special
penalties; and during the gathering, whilst the people were amused and
humored by the show, the king and his really trusted advisers contrived the
despatch of business. The ceremony of coronation, which gave the name to
these courts, was not, as is sometimes supposed, a repetition of the formal
rite of initiation by which the king at his accession received the
authorization of God through the hands of the bishops; the character so
impressed was regarded as indelible, and hence the only way of disposing
of a bad king was to kill him. That rite, the solemn consecration and
unction, was incapable of being repeated. The crown was, however, on
these occasions placed on the king’s head in his chamber by the archbishop
of Canterbury, with special prayers, and the court went in procession to
mass, where the king made his offering, and afterwards the barons did their
services, as at the real coronation. These courts had been given up by
Stephen, as the historian Henry of Huntingdon notes with an expressive
lamentation, in the year 1140, when the clergy ceased to attend them; and
he had made only one unlucky attempt, the Lincoln coronation, in 1147, to
revive them. Henry, however, renewed the custom on this occasion, and
twice after this we find it observed. At the Christmas of this year he was
crowned at Lincoln, but not, like Stephen, in the cathedral, for he feared the
omen; and at Easter 1158 he was crowned at Worcester. After that he never
actually wore the crown again, although he did occasionally hold these
formal courts, in order to receive the honorary services by which his
courtiers held their estates. This coronation, then, at St. Edmund’s was, as
usual, turned to purposes of business. The king was ready for a Welsh war;
measures were taken for providing men and money.
At another council, held in July, at Northampton, the
expedition started. This was Henry’s first Welsh war, and it First Welsh
was no great success. The army advanced into North Wales; war.
at Consilt, near Flint, an awkward pass, they were resisted
by the Welsh. There Henry of Essex, the Constable, let fall the royal
standard, as he declared, by accident. The army, thinking that the king was
killed or the battle lost, fell into confusion, and the day was claimed by the
Welsh as a victory. That it was merely a misfortune of little importance is
proved by the fact that Henry continued his march to Rhuddlan. The
ostensible pretext of the expedition being to arrange a quarrel between
Owen Gwynneth and his brother Cadwalader, there was no overt attempt at
conquest. The king returned from Wales into Nottinghamshire to meet the
young Malcolm IV., who seems at this time to have finally surrendered his
hold on the Northern counties. At Christmas Henry was at Lincoln.
In 1158 he wore his crown, as we have seen, at Easter, at
Worcester; in the summer he went into Cumberland, no Long visit
doubt to set the machinery of government at work there in to France,
due order after the change of rulers; and at Carlisle on 1158-1163.
Midsummer-day he conferred knighthood on William of
Warenne. In August he went to France, whence he did not return until
January, 1163. This brings us to the point of time at which the struggle with
Becket begins, to which, with its attendant circumstances, we may devote
another chapter.
We may, therefore, now take up the thread of the foreign
transactions at the beginning of the reign and bring it down Foreign
to the same point. The geographical extent of Henry’s possessions
dominions furnishes the leading clue to this part of his of Henry.
history. They embraced, speaking roughly and roundly,
Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Guienne, Poictou, and His relations
Gascony. But this statement has to be accepted with some with his
very important limitations. In the first place, each of these vassals.
states, and each bundle of them, had come to him in a
different way—some from his father, some from his mother, some by his
wife—and each bundle had been got together by those from whom he
received it in similar ways. The result of that was that in each state or
bundle of states there was a distant relation between the lord and his vassals
—a constitution, we might call it, by which various rights and privileges
and a varying legal system or customs subsisted. What was law in
Normandy was not customary in Anjou; and the barons of Poictou had, or
claimed, customs which must, if they could have enforced them, have
produced utter anarchy. Here was a constant and abundant source of
administrative difficulties, the adjustment of which was one of the causes of
Henry’s long absence from England. But a second incidental result was,
that, as many of these estates came into the common inheritance on very
deficient title, conquest in one case, chicanery in another, there were a
number of claimants in each, claimants who by prescriptive right might
have lost all chance of recovering their lands, but whose very existence
gave trouble. In Anjou, for instance, Henry had to contend against his own
brother Geoffrey, to whom their father had left certain cities, and who might
have a claim to the whole county. In Normandy the heirs of Stephen
claimed the county of Mortain; in Maine, Saintonge, and other Southern
provinces, there were the remnants of older dynasties, always ready to give
trouble.
But further than this, the feudal law, as it was then
recognized in France, gave the king, in his manifold His relation
capacities as king, duke, and count, certain rights and certain to the King
obligations that are puzzling now, and must have been of France.
actually bewildering then. Henry, as Duke of Normandy,
inherited the relation, entered into by his ancestor Duke Richard the
Fearless, of vassal to the Duke of the Franks; but the Duke of the Franks
had now become King of France. It was a serious question how the duties
of vassalage were to be defined. As Duke of Normandy also he had a right
to the feudal superiority of Brittany. Yet it was no easy thing to say how
Brittany could be made to act in case of a quarrel between king and duke.
The tie which bound him as Count of Anjou was different from that which
bound him as Duke of Normandy to the same King of France. As Count of
Poictiers he was feudally bound to the Duke of Aquitaine, but he was
himself duke of Aquitaine, unless he chose to regard his wife as duchess
and himself as count, in which case he would be liable to do feudal service
to his wife only, and she would be responsible for the service to the King of
France; a very curious relation for a lady who had been married to both. We
do not, however, find, that this contrivance was employed by Henry
himself, although it was used by John. And this same point of difficulty
arose everywhere. The feudal rights of Aquitaine—the right, that is, to
demand homage and service—extended far beyond the limits of the
sovereign authority of the dukes, and it was always an object to turn a claim
of overlordship into an actual exercise of sovereign authority. The tie
between the great county of Toulouse and the duchy of Aquitaine was
complicated both by legal difficulty and by questions of descent. The rights
over Auvergne, claimed by both the king and the duke, were so complex as
to be the matter of continual arbitration, and at last were left to settle
themselves.
And to these must be added, in the third place, local and
personal questions; local, such as arose from uncertain Questions of
boundaries, the line which separated Normandy from boundary.
France, the Norman from the French Vexin, being perhaps
the chief; personal, arising from the enmity between Eleanor
Personal
and her first husband, from the attitude of the house of questions.
Champagne, from which Louis VII. had selected his third
wife, and which had the wrongs of Stephen to avenge. The
Count of Flanders also was a pertinacious enemy of Henry.
Under these circumstances it is not difficult to see that
Henry’s policy, however ambitious he might be, was peace; Henry’s
at all events, peace long enough to consolidate his true policy.
dominions and crush antagonism in detail. And this must
account for the fact that, with the exception of the war of
Toulouse, in which Louis VII. took part, not as a principal His French
wars.
but as an ally of the count, there was no overt war between
Eleanor’s two husbands until it was produced by an entirely
new quarrel. It could not be expected that there should be any love or
friendship, but there was peace. Henry’s policy was peace; Lewis was
averse to war, having neither skill nor resources. All Henry’s French
campaigns, then, during this period were occasioned by the circumstances
which have been thus stated. The object of the war of 1156 was, sad to say,
the subjugation of Geoffrey of Nantes, the king’s own brother, who
submitted to him, after he had taken his castles one by one, in the July of
that year, and who died two years after. The business of 1158 was to secure
the territories that Geoffrey had left without heirs, and, that done, to prepare
for the enforcement of Eleanor’s claims on Toulouse.
The war of Toulouse, with its preparations and results,
occupied the greater part of 1159, although the campaign War of
itself was short. Henry had assembled his full court of Toulouse,
vassals. William of Warenne, the son of Stephen, and 1159.
Malcolm, King of Scots, followed him as his liegemen
rather than as allies. Becket, as his Chancellor, came with an equipment not
inferior to that of any of his earls and counts. Altogether it was a very
splendid and expensive affair. The king marched to Toulouse; but at
Toulouse was his enemy, his friend, his lord, his wife’s first husband. Henry
could not proceed to extremes against the man whom in his youthful
sincerity he still recognized as his feudal lord, and whose personal
humiliation would have degraded the idea of royalty, of which he was
himself so proud. So he left Becket to continue the siege and returned
westward. The French were attempting a diversion on the Norman frontier.
Toulouse, therefore, was not taken. Towards the end of the year a truce was
made with Lewis, and early in 1160 the truce was turned into an alliance.
But the alliance brought with it the seeds of new and more fatal divisions.
We have noted the way in which Henry used his children as
his tools or as the counters of his game. He began with them Henry’s
very young. His eldest child, William, to whom we have sons and
seen homage done immediately after the coronation, died daughters.
very soon after, and Henry, who was born in February, 1155,
and had received conditional homage when he was two months old, now
became the heir apparent. The next child was a daughter, Matilda, born in
1156; in 1157 Richard was born, at either Oxford or Woodstock; Geoffrey,
the next brother, came in 1158; then Eleanor, in 1162; Johanna, in 1165; and
last of all John, in 1167. On Henry’s attempts to provide for these children
hangs nearly all the interest of his foreign wars; and the marriages of the
daughters form a key to the history of the foreign policy of England and her
alliances for many ages.
The game may be considered to begin with Richard, who at
the age of a year was betrothed to the daughter of Raymond His projects
of Barcelona and Queen Petronilla of Aragon. This was of marriage
done, it appears, to bind the count and queen either to help for them.
or to stand neutral in the war of Toulouse. The betrothal
came to nothing. Henry, the elder brother, was the next Marriage of
victim. The peace of 1160 assigned him, at the age of five, Henry and
as husband to the little lady Margaret of France, Lewis’s Margaret.
daughter by his second wife, Constance of Castile. This
marriage was not only to seal the peace but to secure to Henry a good
frontier between Normandy and France. The castles of Gisors and Neafle,
and the county of the Vexin, which lay between Normandy and Paris, were
to be Margaret’s portion, not to be surrendered until the marriage could be
formally celebrated, and until then to remain in the custody of the Templars.
Henry, however, did not stick at trifles. The little Margaret had been put into
his hands to learn English or Norman ways. He had the marriage celebrated
between the two children, and then prevailed on the Templars to surrender
the castles. Lewis never forgave that, and the Vexin quarrel remained an
open sore during the rest of the reign; for after the death of the younger
Henry his rights were transferred to Richard by another unhappy marriage
contract with another of Lewis’s daughters. Practically the question was
settled by the betrayal of Gisors to Philip, by Gilbert of Vacœuil, whilst
Richard was in Palestine; but the struggle continued until John finally lost
not only the Vexin but Normandy itself and all else that he had to lose. For
the present, however, the outbreak of war, to which Henry’s sharp practice
led, was only a brief one. Henry was successful, and peace was concluded
in August, 1161. The year 1162 he spent in Normandy, holding councils and
organizing the administration of the duchy, as he had done that of the
kingdom in his first year.
During the whole of this long absence from England the
country was governed by Richard de Lucy and Earl Robert England
of Leicester, as the king’s chief justices or justiciars; the during the
little Henry taking his father’s place on occasions of king’s absence.
ceremony, when he happened to be in England. The
historians of these years tell us little or nothing of what was going on. There
were no wars or revolts; abbots and bishops died and their successors were
appointed; notably the good Archbishop Theobald, to whom Henry owed so
much, died in 1161, and Becket succeeded him.
From other sources we learn that Henry’s legal reforms were
in full operation. He had restored the machinery of the Progress of
Exchequer, and with it the method of raising revenue which reforms.
had been arranged in his grandfather’s time. That revenue
arose, firstly, from the ferm or rent of the counties; that is,
Nature of
the sum paid by the sheriffs as royal stewards; by way of the revenue.
composition for the rents of royal lands in the shire, and the
ordinary proceeds of the fines and other payments made in
the ancient shiremoot or county court; secondly, from the Administration
Danegeld, a tax of two shillings on the hide of land, of
justice.
originally levied as tribute to the Danes under Ethelred, but
continued, like the Income Tax, as a convenient ordinary resource; thirdly,
from the feudal revenue, arising from the profits of marriages, wardships,
transfers of land, successions, and the like, and from the aids demanded by
the king from the several barons or communities that owed him feudal
support. To these we may add a fourth source, the proceeds of courts of
justice, held by the king’s officers to determine causes for which the ancient
popular courts were not thought competent; such as began with suits
between the king’s immediate dependents, and by degrees extended to all
the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the country. Judicature and finance
were thus bound very closely together; the sheriffs were not only tax-
gatherers but executors of the law, and every improvement in the law was
made to increase the income of the Exchequer. To this we must attribute the
means taken by Henry to administer justice in the counties, sending some of
the chief members of his judicial staff, year after year, through the country,
forcing their way into the estates and castles of the most despotic nobles,
and spreading the feeling of security together with the sense of loyalty, and
the conviction that ready justice was well worth the money that it seemed to
cost. Besides the revival of the provincial judicature in this shape Henry,
from the beginning of the reign, added form and organization to the
proceedings of his supreme court of justice, which comes into prominence
later on.
Next to these his most important measure was the institution
or expansion of what is called Scutage. According to the Scutage.
ancient English law every freeman was bound to serve in
arms for the defence of his country. That principle Henry only meddled
with so far as to direct and improve it. But, according to the feudal custom,
quite irrespective of this, every man who held land to the amount of twenty
pounds’ worth of annual value was obliged to perform or furnish the
military service of a knight to his immediate lord. This kept the barons
always at the head of bodies of trained knights, who might be regarded as
ultimately a part of the king’s army, but in case of a rebellion would
probably fight for their immediate lord. Henry, by allowing his vassals to
commute their military service for a money payment, went a long way to
disarm this very untrustworthy body; and with the money so raised he hired
stipendiaries, with whom he fought his Continental wars. He began to act
on this principle in the first year of his reign, when he made the bishops,
notwithstanding strong objections from Archbishop Theobald, pay scutage
for their lands held by knight-service. But in 1159 he extended the plan very
widely, and took money instead of service from the whole of his dominions,
compelling his chief lords to serve in person, but hiring, with the scutages
of the inferior tenants, a splendid army of mercenaries, with which he
fought the war of Toulouse.
By thus disarming the feudal potentates, and forcing his judges into their
courts, he completed the process by which he intended to humiliate them.
Feudalism in England, after the reign of Henry II., never reared its head so
high as to be again formidable.
Other results incidentally followed from the special
measures by which this great end was secured; the more Increase of
thorough amalgamation of the still unfused nationalities of national
Norman and Englishman followed from a state of things in unity.
which both were equal before the law, and the distinctions or
privileges of blood were no longer recognized among free men. The
diminution of military power in the hands of the territorial lords left the
maintenance of peace and the defence of the country to be undertaken, as it
had been of old, by the community of free Englishmen, locally trained, and
armed according to their substance. This created or revived a strong warlike
spirit for all national objects, without inspiring the passion for military
exploit or glory, which is the bane of what is called a military nation. On the
national character, thus in a state of formation, the idea that law is and
ought to be supreme was now firmly impressed; and although the further
development of the governmental system furnished employment for
Henry’s later years, and was never neglected, even in the busiest and
unhappiest period of his reign, it may be fairly said that the foundation was
laid in the comparative peace and industry of these early years. At the age
of thirty Henry had been nearly nine years a king, and had already done a
work for which England can never cease to be grateful.
 CHAPTER IV.
HENRY II. AND THOMAS BECKET.
The English Church—Schools of Clergy—Rise of Becket—
Quarrel with the King—Exile—Death.
The history of the Church of England is during many ages
the chief part of the history of the nation; throughout it is a The English
very large part of the history of the people. Their ways of Church.
thinking, their system of morals, their intellectual growth,
their intercourse with the world outside, cannot be understood but by an
examination of the vicissitudes of their religious history; and it plays a
scarcely less important part in the development of their political institutions.
Christianity in England, looked at by the eye of history, means not only the
knowledge of God and His salvation by Christ Jesus; it carries with it,
besides, all that is implied in civilization, national growth and national
unity.
When the English, under the seven or eight struggling and
quarrelling dynasties whose battles form for centuries all the Under the
recorded life of the island, were seven or eight distinct Heptarchy.
nationalities,—some of them tribally connected, some of
them using allied systems of law, but otherwise having scarcely anything in
common beyond dialects of a common growing language,—altogether
without any common organization or the desire of forming one,—the
conversion in the seventh century taught them to regard themselves as one
people. They were formed by St. Gregory and Archbishop Theodore into an
organized Christian Church, the several dioceses of which represented the
several kingdoms or provinces of their divided state.
Thus arranged in one or, later on, in two ecclesiastical
provinces, the wise men of the several tribes learned to act National
in concert; the tribes themselves, casting aside their tribal unity first
realized.
superstitions for a common worship, found how few real
obstacles there were to prevent them from acting as one
people; and from the date of the conversion the tendency of the kingdoms
was to unite rather than to break up. Although this process was slow—for it
went on for four centuries, and was scarcely completed when the Norman
Conquest forced the mass of varied national elements into cohesion—it was
a uniform tendency, contrasted with, and counteracting numerous and
varying tendencies towards separation. The Church built up the unity of the
State, and in so doing it built up the unity of the nation.
And one result of this was to make the Church extremely
powerful in the state. There was but one archbishop of Great power
Canterbury when there were seven kings; that archbishop’s of the
word was listened to with respect and obeyed in all the clergy.
seven kingdoms, in any one of which the command of a
strange king would have been received with contempt. The archbishop was
exceedingly powerful, both in Kent, his peculiar diocese, and by his
alliances with the states and churches of the Continent; and the diocesan
bishops were each, in his own district, a match for their kings, because they
knew that in any struggle they could depend on the friendship of all their
fellows outside their special kingdom, much more than the peccant king
could depend on the assistance of his fellow-kings. They could meet in one
council, whilst the several kings could only collect their own
Witenagemots; they were, in fact, the rulers of the Church of England,
whilst the kings were only kings of Kent, Mercia and Wessex. And when
the kingdoms became one under the descendants of Egbert the prelates
retained the same power.
Never, perhaps, in any country were Church and State more
closely united than they were in Anglo-Saxon times in Alliance of
England; for they were united, with careful recognition of Church and
their distinct functions, not, as in Spain and some other State.
lands, confounding what should have been kept distinct, or
making the prelates great temporal lords, or the national deliberations mere
ecclesiastical councils. The prelates, the bishops and abbots, formed, as
wise men, qualified by their spiritual office to be counsellors, a very large
proportion of the Witenagemot, the ruling council of the kingdom; in every
county the bishop sat in the courts with the sheriff, to declare the Divine
law, as the sheriff did the secular law. The clergy were, for all moral
offences, under the same rules as the laity, save that it was the bishop who