iety is
thus seen in the act of moving; and why was he so important? If there be
a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic
history, instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obvious
and open gate by which to approach the figure which disputed England
with the first Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more of
his popularity even than his policy. And unquestionably thousands of
ploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and yeomen, as in the motley crowd of
Chaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thomas when they had never even
heard of Becket.

It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as the feudal
tangle that it was, till a prince from Anjou repeated the unifying
effort of the Conqueror. It is found equally easy to write of the Red
King's hunting instead of his building, which has lasted longer, and
which he probably loved much more. It is easy to catalogue the questions
he disputed with Anselm--leaving out the question Anselm cared most
about, and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as, "Why was God a
man?" All this is as simple as saying that a king died of eating
lampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn nowadays, unless
it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapers
seldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England in
this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of
St. Thomas of Canterbury.

Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy,
brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always
stood: the idea in the Roman Law of something impersonal and
omnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a small French
detective story; when Justice opens a handbag or Justice runs after a
cab. Henry II. really produced this impression of being a police force
in person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the
bird and the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood,
however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justice
cheap and obvious as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only in
popular phrases about the King's English or the King's highway. But
though it tended to be egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to be
humanitarian. In modern France, as in ancient Rome, the other name of
Justice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especially is always a
Revolutionist--and never an Anarchist. Now this effor