mandy offer herself and her dukedom to Theobald of Blois. May it not have been Norman hatred and dread of the Angevin that flung open the gates of London to Theobald's brother, Earl Stephen?

But the reception of Stephen was not merely the result of this hereditary hatred, this national aversion, -it was the effect also of the great religious impulse which England was now sharing with the whole of the Western world. The Angevin counts stood almost alone in bidding it defiance. To the stories,

indeed, of Giraldus in his old age we are bound to give no greater credence than to a Royalist lampoon upon the Puritans, or a Jacobite libel on the House of Hanover. But the tenor of their history is everywhere the same. A lurid grandeur of evil, a cynical defiance of religious opinion, hung alike round Fulc Nerra, or Fulc Rechin, or Geoffry Plantagenet. The priest-murder of Henry-Fitz-Empress, the brutal sarcasms of Richard, the embassy of John to the Moslems of Spain, were but the continuance of a series of outrages on the religious feelings of the age which had begun long ere the lords of Anjou had become kings of England. One foul sacrilege of Geoffry Plantagenet, his brutal outrage on the Bishop of Le Mans, was still fresh in the memories of all. From outrages such as these Stephen was free. Rough soldier as he was, he was devout as devotion was understood then, a benefactor of churches, a founder of religious houses. In a word, he partook of the very spirit to which Geoffry and the Angevins stood so darkly opposed; he shared the great revival of religion which was nowhere

more conspicuous, nowhere more important than in England.

Pious, learned, and energetic as the bishops and abbots of William's appointment had been, they were not Englishmen. Till Beket's time, no Englishman occupied the throne of Canterbury; till Jocelyn, no Englishman occupied the see of Wells. In language, in manner, in sympathy, the higher clergy were completely severed from the lower priesthood and the people, and the whole influence of the Church, constitutional as well as religious, was for the moment paralysed. Lanfranc, indeed, exercised a great personal power over William, but Anselm stood alone against Rufus, and no voice of ecclesiastical freedom broke the simoniac silence of the thirty years of Henry I. But in the latter days of Henry, and throughout the reign of Stephen, the people left thus without shepherds were stirred by the first of those great religious movements which England was destined afterwards to experience in the Preaching of the Friars, the Lollardism of Wycliffe, the Reformation, the Great Rebellion, and the mission-work of the Wesleys. Everywhere in town and country men banded themselves together for prayer, hermits flocked to the woods, noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians as they spread over the moors and forests of the North. A new spirit of enthusiastic devotion woke the slumber of the older orders, and penetrated alike to the home of the noble Walter d'Espec at Rievaulx, or of the trader Gilbert Beket in Cheapside. It is easy to be blinded in revolutionary times, such as those of Stephen, by

T

the superficial aspects of the day; but, amidst the wars of the Succession, and the clash of arms, the real thought of England was busy with deeper things. We see the force of the movement in the new class of ecclesiastics that it forces on the stage. The worldliness that had been no scandal in Roger of Salisbury becomes a scandal in Henry of Winchester. The new men, Thurstan, and Ailred, and Theobald, and John of Salisbury -even Thomas himself-derive whatever weight they possess from sheer holiness of life or aim. Nor did the Revival affect merely the immediate course of affairs; it left its stamp on the very fabric of the English Constitution. The paralysis of the Church ceased as the new impulse bound together the prelacy and the people; and its action, as it started into a power strong enough to save England from anarchy, has been felt in our history ever since. The compact between king and people had become a part of constitutional law in the charters of William and Henry, but its legitimate consequence, in the responsibility of the Crown for the execution of the pact, was first drawn out by the ecclesiastical councils of Stephen's reign. From their depositions of Stephen and Matilda flowed the depositions of Edward, of Richard, and of James. Incoherent as their expression of it may at first sight appear, they did express the right of a nation to good government, till the dim, confused feeling took shape in the resolute efforts by which Theobald became at last the restorer of peace and freedom. To the Church-Beket had a plain right to say it afterwards with whatever proud

consciousness of having been Theobald's right hand— to the Church Henry owed his crown, and England her deliverance.

London took even more than its share in the great Revival. The city was proud of its religion, of its thirteen greater conventual, and more than a hundred lesser parochial, churches. "I don't think," says the Londoner, Fitz-Stephen, "there is a city in the world that has more praiseworthy customs in the frequenting church, respecting services, keeping feast-days, giving alms, betrothing, marrying, burying religiously." The new impulse was, in fact, changing the very aspect of the city. In its midst Bishop Richard was busy with the vast cathedral which Bishop Maurice had begun; barges came up the river with stone from Caen for the great arches that moved the popular wonder, while street and lane were being levelled to make space for the famous churchyard of St. Paul's. Rahere, the king's minstrel, was raising St. Bartholomew's, beside Smithfield. Alfune had just built St. Giles's at Cripplegate. The old English Crichtenguild had surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site for the new Priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale of this last house paints better than a thousand disquisitions the temper of the citizens at this time. Prior Norman, its founder, had built cloister and church, had bought books and vestments in so liberal a fashion that at last no money remained to buy bread. The canons were at their last gasp, when many of the city folk looking into the refectory as they paced round the cloister in their usual Sunday procession, saw the

tables laid out, but not a single loaf on them. "Here is a fine set out," they exclaimed, "but where is the bread to come from?-hic est pulcher apparatus sed panis unde veniet." The women present vowed at once to bring each a loaf every Sunday, and soon there was bread enough and to spare for the priory and its guests. Thenceforth the house grew, unvexed by mishaps, though a fire once swept eastward to its very walls-it was the fire which, starting from the house of Gilbert Beket, involved London in ruin and himself in poverty.*

Among the women that brought bread to the canons may very possibly have been the mother of Beket. In religion, as in other matters, the little home reflects faithfully the tone of the colony of which it formed a part. However dimly Gilbert Beket passes before us—a civic dignitary, well to do till the great firehis wife, Rohese, stands out distinctly as the type of the devout woman of her day, prayerful, not unaccustomed to visions, a pilgrim now and then to that Canterbury whose sanctity was so soon to be quickened into new life by the blood of her son; above all, diligent in almsgiving. The prettiest story in all that stormy life of St. Thomas is that birthday scene at home, where year by year the mother weighs her boy against money, clothes, provisions, and gives them to

the poor.

This religious enthusiasm, and the dread (well

Hearne has given the chronicle of this house in an Appendix to his William of Newborough.