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.The young king of Scotland was there as thevassal of the king of England and was knighted by his lord.Allies were secured of the lords to the east and south, espe-cially the assistance of Raymond Berenger who was Count ofBarcelona and husband of the queen of Aragon, and who hadextensive claims and interests in the valley of the Rhone.Hisdaughter was to be married to Henry s son Richard, who hadbeen born a few months before.Negotiations and interviewswith the king of France led to no result, and at the last momentLouis threw himself into Toulouse and prepared to stand asiege with the Count, Raymond V, whose rights he now lookedat from an entirely different point of view.This act of the kingled to a result which he probably did not anticipate.Appar-ently the feudal spirit of Henry could not reconcile itself to adirect attack on the person of his suzerain.He withdrew THE OF TOULOUSEfrom the siege, and the expedition resulted only in the CHAP.of some of the minor towns of the county.HereThomas the chancellor appears again in his worldly character.He had led to the a body of knights said to have been700 in number, the finest and best-equipped contingent inthe field.Henry s chivalry in refusing to fight his suzerainseemed to him the height of folly, and he protested loudlyagainst it.This chivalry indeed did not prevent the vassalfrom attacking some his lord s castles in the north, but noimportant results were gained, and peace was soon made be-tween them.Far more important in permanent consequences than thecampaign itself were the means which the king took to raisethe money to pay for it.It was at this time, so far as ourpresent evidence goes and unless a precedent had been madein a small way in a scutage of for the campaign in Wales,I Ithat the principle of scutage was extended from ecclesiasticalto tenants in chief.Robert of Torigny, Abbot oftells us that Henry, having regard to the lengthand difficulty of the way, and not wishing to vex the countryknights and the mass of burgesses and rustics, took from eachknight s fee in Normandy sixty shillings Angevin (fifteenEnglish), and from all other persons in Normandy and inEngland and in all his other lands what he thought best, andled into the field with him the chief barons with a few of theirmen and a great number of paid knights.Our knowledge of the treasury accounts of this period isnot sufficient to enable us to explain every detail of this taxa-tion, but it is sufficient to enable us to say that the statementof the abbot is in general accurate.The tax on the Englishknight s fee was heavier than that on the Norman paymentdoes not seem to have been actually required from all personsoutside the strict feudal bond, nor within it for that matterand the exact relationship between payment and service inthe field.we cannot determine.Two things, however, ofinterest in the history of taxation in relation both to earlierand later times seem clear.In the first place a new form ofland-tax had been discovered of special application to thefeudal community, capable of transforming a limited andsomewhat uncertain personal service into a far more THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRYCHAP.factory money payment, capable also of considerableXIIsion and, in the hands of an absolute king, of an arbitrarydevelopment which apparently some forms of feudal financehad already undergone.This was something new, -that is,it was as new as anything ever is in constitutional history.Itwas the application of an old process to a new use.In thesecond place large sums of money were raised, in a purelyarbitrary way, it would seem, both as to persons paying andsums paid, from members of the non-feudal community andalso from some tenants in chief who at the same time paidscutage.These payments appear to have rested on thefeudal principle of the gracious or voluntary aid and tohave been called though the people of that timewere in general more accurate in the distinctions they madebetween things than in the use of the terms applied to them.There was nothing new about this form of taxation.Glimpseswhich we get here and there of feudalism in operation leadus to suspect that, in small matters and with much irregularityof application to persons, it was in not infrequent use.Theseparticular payments, pressing as they did heavily on the Churchand exciting its vigorous objection, carry us back with someinterest to the beginning of troubles between Anselm and theRed King over a point of the same kind.In theory and in strict law these gifts were voluntary,both as to whether they should be made at all and as totheir amount, but under a sovereign so strong as Henry II orWilliam Rufus, the king must be satisfied.Church writerscomplained, with much if not entire justice, that this tax wascontrary to ancient custom and due liberty, and they accusedThomas the chancellor of suggesting it.As a matter of factthis tax was less important in the history of taxation than theextension of the principle of scutage which accompanied it.The contribution which it made to the future was not somuch in the form of the tax as in the precedent of arbitrarytaxation, established in an important instance of taxation atthe will of the king.This precedent carried over andapplied to scutage in its new form becomes in the reignof Henry s son one of the chief causes of revolutionarychanges, and thus constitutes the scutage of Toulouse of I I if we include under that term the double taxation of THE STEPHENthe year, one of the great steps forward of the reign of CHAP.XIIHenry.At the close of the Toulouse campaign an incident of someinterest occurred in the death of Stephen s son William andthe ending of the male line of Stephen s succession.His Nor-man county of Mortain was at once taken in hand by Henryas an escheated fief, and was not filled again until it wasgiven years afterwards to his youngest son
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