Volume 1 — CHAPTER I. THE ENGLAND OF HENRY I. 1100–1135. (continued 3)

What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual developement was, to borrow a phrase from the Peterborough Chronicler, “the good peace” that Henry, like his father, “made in this land.”[231] The foundations of the political and administrative system by which that peace was preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid in the three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray—the brightest period of Henry’s prosperity, and the only time in his life when he himself could enjoy, on both sides of the sea, the tranquillity which he fought to secure. In England, indeed, from the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh border. Even in Wales, however, the settlement of the Flemings and the appointment of a “Saxon” bishop to the see of St. David’s[232] were doing their work; and though in Henry’s later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes and people twice provoked him to march into their country, the danger from them was never great enough to mar the general security of the realm. From Scotland there was still less to fear; its three successive kings, Eadgar, Alexander and David, were the brothers of the good queen Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in Henry’s dominions beyond the sea, the state of things was very different. In the duchy of Normandy the year 1110 saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the beginning of a train of complications in which England seemed at the moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles between the king and the barons, but which in the end exercised an important influence on the course of her after history by bringing her into contact with the power of Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby this came to pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history to travel awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our own land and make our way into the depths of Gaul; we must go back from the broad daylight of the twelfth century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of the house of Anjou.