litary hut and food only for himself: "And I believe, if I dare to say
so, that he took delight in our distresses," groans the poor secretary as
he pictures the knights wandering by twos and threes in the thickets,
separated in the darkness from their followers, and drawing their swords
one against another in furious strife for the possession of some shelter
for which pigs would scarcely have quarrelled. "Oh, Lord God Almighty,"
he ends, "turn and convert the heart of the king from this pestilent
habit, that he may know himself to be but man, and that he may show a
royal mercy and human compassion to those who are driven after him not
by ambition but by necessity."

But at whatever inconvenience to his courtiers Henry carried out his
own purposes, and kept pace with the enormous mass of business that came
to him. In all his hurried journeys we see busy royal clerks scribbling
away at each halt charters, grants, letters patent and letters close, the
king too fighting, riding, dictating, signing, sometimes dating his
letters from three places on the same day. A travelling king such as this
was well known to all his people. He was no constitutional fiction, but a
living man; his character, his look and presence, his oaths and jests,
his wrath, all were noted and talked over; the chroniclers who followed
his court with their gossip and their graver news spread the knowledge of
his doings. A new sense of law and justice grew up under a sovereign who
himself journeyed through the length and breadth of the land, subduing
the unruly, hearing pleas, revising unjust sentences, drawing up charters
with his own hand, setting the machinery of government to work from end
to end of England. More than this, the king himself had learned to know
his people. He had seen for himself the castles of the barons, the huts
of the peasants, the little villages in the clearings; he had seen the
sheriff sitting in the shire court, the lord of the manor doing justice
in his "hall-moot," the bishop and archdeacon dispensing the law in the
church courts. By his sudden journeys, his unexpected movements and rapid
change of plans, he arrived at the very moment and the very place where
no one looked for him; nothing was safe from his eye and ear; no false
sheriff or rebellious lord could be sure when his terrible master might
be at his doors. Foreigner as the king was, there was soon no Englishman
who knew the affairs of his kingdom so well. His penetrati