CHAP. XII.

Sweden.

Spain.

which the constant aggressions of France might seem to have reversed.

No reliance can be placed on the author who tells us that Sweden was granted by Frederick I to Waldemar the Dane; the fact is improbable, and we do not hear that such pretensions were ever put forth before or after. Norway,

h

too, seems to have been left untouched - the Emperors had no fleets-and Iceland, which had remained undiscovered till long after the days of Charles the Great, was down to the year 1262 the only absolutely free Republic in the world. It is a curious illustration of mediaeval habits of thought that the envoys of the king of Norway, when seeking to persuade the Icelandic people to accept his supremacy, argued that monarchy was the form of government divinely ordained, and existed in every part of the European continent.

Nor does it appear that authority was ever exercised by any Emperor, after the first Carolingians, in Spain. Nevertheless the choice of Alfonso X by some of the German electors, in A.D. 1258, seems to imply that the Spanish kings were members of the Empire. And when, A.D. 1053, Ferdinand the Great of Castile had, in the pride of his victories over the Moors, assumed the title of 'Hispaniae Imperator,' the remonstrance of Henry III declared. the rights of Rome over the Western provinces indelible, and the Spaniard, though protesting his independence, was forced to resign the usurped dignity.1

& Albertus Stadensis, M. G. H., Script. xi. p. 345, s. a. 1163.

h The Scots of Ireland, however, would seem to have occasionally visited it; and some few Irish hermits were found there by the first Norwegian colonists who landed in A.D. 874.

i There is an allusion to this in the poems of the Cid. Arthur Duck, De Usu et Authoritate Iuris Civilis, quotes the view of some among the older jurists, that Spain having been, so far as the Romans were concerned, a res

k

No act of sovereignty is recorded to have been done CHAP. XII. by any of the Emperors in England, though as heirs of England. Rome they might be thought to have better rights over it than over Poland or Denmark. There was, however, a vague notion that the English, like other kingdoms, must depend on the Empire: a notion which appears in Conrad III's letter to John of Constantinople; and which was countenanced by the submissive tone in which Frederick I was addressed by the Plantagenet Henry II. English independence was still more compromised in the next reign, when Richard I, according to Hoveden, 'by the advice of his mother Eleanor stripped himself of the kingdom of England, and delivered it over to the Emperor as Lord of the World.' But as Richard was at the same time invested with the kingdom of Arles by Henry VI, his homage may have been for that fief only; and it was probably in that capacity that he voted (by his eight deputies), as a prince of the Empire, at the election of Frederick II. The case finds a parallel in the claims of England over the Scottish king, doubtful, to say the least, as regards the domestic realm of the latter, certain as

derelicta, recovered by the Spaniards themselves from the Moors, and thus acquired by occupatio, ought not to be subject to the Emperors.

j One of the greatest of English kings appears performing an act of cour tesy to the Emperor which was probably construed into an acknowledgement of his own inferior position. Describing the Roman coronation of the Emperor Conrad II, Wippo (c. 16), M. G. H., Script. xi. p. 265, tells us, 'His ita peractis in duorum regum praesentia Ruodolfi regis Burgundiae et Chnutonis regis Anglorum divino officio finito imperator duorum regum medius ad cubiculum suum honorifice ductus est.'

* Letter in Otto Fris. i. c. 23 (M. G. H., Script. xx. p. 363): 'Francia et Hispania, Anglia Dania ceteraque regna cum debita reverentia et obsequio nos frequentant.'

1 Letter in Rahewin, iii. c. 7 (M. G. H., Script. xx. p. 419), says, 'Regnum nostrum vobis exponimus. Vobis imperandi cedat auctoritas, nobis

non deerit voluntas obsequendi.'

m

CHAP. XII. regards Cumbria, which he had long held from the Southern crown. But Germany had no Edward I. Henry VI is said at his death to have released Richard from his submission" (this too may be compared with Richard's release to the Scottish king William the Lion), and Edward II declared the kingdom of England to be wholly free from all subjection to the Empire. Yet the notion survived: the Emperor Lewis the Bavarian, when he named Edward III his vicar in the great war between France and England, demanded, though in vain, that the English monarch I should kiss his feet, and the election of Edward as Emperor after the death of Lewis carried with it an implication that England was still in a certain sense a part of the Empire. The Emperor Sigismund, visiting Henry V at London, at the time of the meeting of the council of Constance, was met by the Duke of Gloucester, who, riding into the water to the ship where the Emperor sat, required

m Consilio Alianor matris suae, deposuit se de regno Angliae et tradidit illud imperatori (Henrico VIto) sicut universorum domino, et investivit eum inde per pilleum suum, sed imperator, sicut prolocutum est, statim reddidit ei in conspectu magnatum Alemanniae et Angliae, regnum Angliae praedictum tenendum de ipso pro quinque millibus librarum sterlingorum singulis annis de tributo solvendis, et investivit eum inde imperator per duplicem crucem de auro. Sed idem imperator in morte sua de omnibus his et aliis conventionibus quietum clamavit ipsum Ricardum regem Angliae et heredes suos.'Hoveden, Chronicon, ad ann. 1193, ed. Stubbs, Rolls Series, vol. iii. pp. 202-203. The alleged instances of homage by the Scots to the Saxon and early Norman kings are almost all complicated in some such way. The Scottish kings had once held also the earldom of Huntingdon from the English crown, and some have supposed (but on no sufficient grounds) that homage was also done by them for Lothian.

n Hoveden, ut supra.

6

Regnum Angliae ab omni subiectione imperiali esse liberrimum.'
Selden, Titles of Honour, part i. chap. ii.

P Edward refused upon the ground that he was ‘rex inunctus.
Sigismund had shortly before given great offence in France by dubbing

knights.

him, at the sword's point, to declare that he did not come CHAP. XII. purposing to infringe on the king's authority in the realm of England. One curious pretension of the imperial crown called forth many protests. It was declared by civilians and canonists that no notary public could have any standing, or attach any legality to the documents he drew or attested, unless he had received his diploma either from the Emperor or from the Pope. A strenuous denial of a doctrine so injurious was issued by the parliament of Scotland under James III."

No Roman soldier ever trod the soil of Ireland, nor Ireland. did any mediaeval emperor ever exercise any authority there. But even in Ireland the influence of the imperial idea was felt. In that isle, before the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century, a chieftain or magnate whose wealth consisted in cattle, was accustomed to give them out among his dependants to be pastured; and thus the expression to receive stock' from any one came to denote the holding of a subordinate or vassal position, similar to that of the feudal tenant who receives land as a beneficium from his lord. Now the Brehon law, after shewing how the inferior princes may receive stock from the King of Erin the Ard Righ or supreme king of the whole island (who, however, even when he existed, had little more than a titular authority) — goes on to say, 'When the King of Erin is without opposition (i.e. when he holds Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, the three chief ports which

Sigismund answered, 'Nihil se contra superioritatem regis praetexere.' Some have doubted the story.

Selden, Titles of Honour, part i. chap. ii: 'Our Souverain Lord hes full jurisdiction and Free Empire within his Realme, that his Hienesse may make Notares and Tabelliones quahis instruments sall have full faith in all contracts and causes within the Realme.' Nevertheless, notaries in Scotland, as elsewhere, continued for a long time to style themselves 'Ego M. auctoritate imperiali (or papali) notarius.'

CHAP. XII. were often in the hands of Norsemen or Danes), he receives stock from the King of the Romans,' i.e. the Emperor. And one commentator (probably a cleric) adds that sometimes it is the Successor of Patrick (i.e. the Archbishop of Armagh) who gives stock to the King of Erin, thereby setting the Primate of Ireland in the position above the Emperor which the theory of high Papalists in continental Europe assigned to the Pope.

Naples.

Venice.

The kingdom of Naples and Sicily, although of course claimed as a part of the Empire, was under the Norman dynasty (A.D. 1060-1189) not merely independent, but the most dangerous enemy of the German power in Italy. Henry VI, the son and successor of Barbarossa, obtained possession of it by marrying Constance the heiress of the Norman kings. But both he and Frederick II treated it as a separate patrimonial state, instead of incorporating it with their more northerly dominions. After the death of Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufen, it passed away to an Angevin, then to an Aragonese dynasty, continuing under both to maintain itself independent of the Empire, nor ever again, except under the Emperor Charles V, held by the occupant of the Germanic throne.

One spot in Italy there was whose singular felicity of situation enabled her through long centuries of obscurity and weakness, slowly ripening into strength, to maintain her freedom unstained by any submission to the Frankish and German Emperors. Venice glories in deducing her origin from the fugitives who escaped from Aquileia when that city was destroyed by Attila: it is at least probable that her population received no sensible admixture of

* See Senchus, Mor. ii. 225. My attention was called to this by Sir H. S. Maine: cf. his Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, p. 165. Ireland was the latest of Western Catholic countries to recognize the supremacy of the Chair of Peter; she did not do so till after the Anglo-Norman conquest.