THE PERSONALITY OF HENRY II
Like his fellow Norman, King Roger of Sicily, Henry Plantagenet had great personal qualities to match the great challenge of his time, including qualities especially adapted to the development of a strong system of royal law.
37Though Henry was only twenty-one years old when he became King of England, he had already had a highly successful political and military career. His father was Geoffrey, Count of Anjou; his mother was the Empress Matilda, granddaughter of William the Conqueror and daughter of Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy. At his father's early death in 1151, Henry succeeded to Anjou and Maine and, through his mother, to Normandy. The next year he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, divorced wife of King Louis VII of France, and thereby acquired not only Aquitaine but also Poitou. In 1153 he invaded England and compelled his cousin Stephen to adopt him as his heir. In 1154 Stephen conveniently died and left Henry the English throne.
Henry II was a man of enormous energy. He was known for his physical exploits. The contemporaneous chronicler Walter Map wrote that "he was always on the move, travelling in unbearably long stages... a great connoisseur of hounds and hawks, and most greedy of that vain sport: perpetually wakeful and at work. When troubled by erotic dreams he would curse his body which neither toil nor abstinence
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could avail to tame or reduce. From that time we used to ascribe his exertions, not to fickleness, but to fear of growing too fat." 38 He was also hungry for political power, both abroad and at home. He led his feudal armies throughout England and Normandy and into Ireland and parts of France, dow n to the Pyrenees, continually acquiring new vassals, razing castles illegally held, collecting revenue s due him as supreme feudal lord.
It is not known how he came by his great interest in law, but there are many accounts indicating that he was more than a layman in legal matters.
It is told that he arose early every morning to review current cases with his clerks; that he was ready to intervene in the cases heard by his justices and was quite capable of giving his vice-chancellor a lesson in conveyancing; that he circuited his kingdom at a wearing pace to hear cases in the provinces. Map reports that Henry told the following story: "Once after I had heard a concise and just judgment given against a rich man in favour of a poor one, I said to Lord Ranulf [ Glanvill], the Justiciar: 'Although the poor man's judgment might have been put off by many quirks, he had obtained it by a happy and quick decision.' 'Certainly,' said Ranulf, 'we decide causes here much quicker than your bishops do in their churches.' 'True,' said I, 'but if your king were as far off from you as the pope is from the bishops, I think you would be quite as slow as they.'" 39Henry was by no means so popular with everyone as he was with Map. The introduction of a system of royal law into England was in part a means of enriching royal coffers as well as royal power at the expense not only of barons and ecclesiastics but also of the general population. Henry's detractor, Radulfus Niger, said that the king let no year pass without molesting the country with new laws. One of his least popular acts was the revived enforcement of the harsh forest laws, which was attributed to his desire to protect his own sporting pleasure.
Finally, there is the question of Henry's conception of his role as a lawmaker. No doubt he did not consider that he was innovating but rather that he was protecting the heritage of the past against new challenges. Yet, like Pope Gregory VII a century earlier, Henry knew that in preserving the past he was altering it fundamentally. Many legal devices that previously had been exceptional or occasional became normal and regular. Preexisting legal institutions were revalued and rearranged to make a new ensemble. As a distinguished English legal historian has put it, there was a "leap forward." The wheel was set in motion "which generated the English common law." 40 However different Henry II's conception of history may have been from conceptions that prevail today, he undoubtedly knew that what he was doing was important and, indeed, epoch-making.
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