two Henries. Born on the Welsh border, a student at Paris, a favourite
with the king, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and ambassador, his genius
was as various as it was prolific. He is as much at his ease in sweeping
together the chitchat of the time in his "Courtly Trifles" as in creating
the character of Sir Galahad. But he only rose to his fullest strength
when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform and
embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his
"Bishop Goliath." The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their
struggle with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and
confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after picture strips the
veil from the corruption of the mediaeval Church, its indolence, its
thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole body of the clergy from
Pope to hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain; what
escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what escapes the
archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by the dean, while a host of minor
officials prowl hungrily around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd
of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars,
abbots "purple as their wines," monks feeding and chattering together
like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light of
purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the
Goliath who sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead
this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook.

[Illustration: Ireland just before the English Invasion (v1-map-5t.jpg)]

[Sidenote: Invasion of Ireland]

It would be in the highest degree unjust to treat such invectives as
sober history, or to judge the Church of the twelfth century by the
taunts of Walter de Map. What writings such as his bring home to us is
the upgrowth of a new literary class, not only standing apart from the
Church but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will, and breaking
down the unquestioning reverence with which men had till now regarded it
by their sarcasm and abuse. The tone of intellectual contempt which
begins with Walter de Map goes deepening on till it culminates in Chaucer
and passes into the open revolt of the Lollard. But even in these early
days we can hardly doubt that it gave Henry strength in his contest with
the Church. So little indeed did he suffer from the murder of Archbishop
Thomas that the years which fo