To them he was a

remarkable thing about him. great king, who owned wider dominions than ever a king of England had ruled before. The greater part of Wales owed him obedience; and one of Henry's barons named Strongbow had crossed into Ireland, and had made most of the Irish chieftains submit to him, so that Henry ruled over the Pale, the district round Dublin, and was in name king of the rest of Ireland too. Then he was successful in his wars against the Scots. His soldiers had captured the Scottish king, William the Lion, at Alnwick, and Henry did not allow him to go till he had done homage for his dominions; that was intended to show that the Scotch king held his kingdom as a grant from Henry. Thus Henry might claim to be lord also over Scotland. But beyond all this he ruled over more of France than the French king himself; he was master of the whole of the west coast of France, from the English Channel to the Pyrenees.

We noticed the marriage of Henry I. with a Saxon princess as a sign that Saxons and Normans were beginning to think of themselves, not as two separate races, but one people. In Henry II.'s reign the union became more complete. The two languages were mingling into one. From the mixture of NormanFrench and the Saxon speech we get our own tongue. It is curious to think that, just at this time when the races were uniting to form England, our kings were growing more and more foreign, and more and more occupied with affairs outside England.

This seems all the more strange, because Henry's son, Richard I., is often taken as the type of a Briton. Richard I., His very name-the "Lion-heart"—makes 1189-1199. us think of the British Lion. His strength, his daring against odds, his rough good-nature, his

love of adventure, all are marks of what we are proud of in Britons to-day. And yet this typical king is, in a way, more of a foreigner than any other king who has ruled over us. Out of his reign of ten years he only spent seven months in England. Yet, even if Englishmen did not see much of their king, he showed the world outside what an English king could do, and he made the name of our nation renowned among all the best warriors of Europe.

As soon as he came to the throne he made up his mind to join the great army of Crusaders that had set out to deliver the Holy City, Jerusalem, from Richard's the Saracens. To get money to pay his men Crusade. he let off William the Lion from the duty of giving the homage which Henry II. had won. We shall see by and by how important this became. But for the present Richard was ready to sell anything. He even said in joke: "I would have sold London itself if I could have found a rich enough buyer".

When Richard reached the Holy Land he found the Crusaders doing very badly. They were trying to take Acre, but were making no headway with the siege. With Richard once on the spot all was changed. The Lion-heart soon showed that he deserved his name. He was always foremost in the attack, risking his life like a common soldier, but fighting with ten times the vigour. In three weeks Acre was taken. Duke Leopold of Austria planted his banner on the walls of it as if he had taken it himself. Richard was not the man to allow the glory to be stolen from him. He ordered the German banner to be cast into a ditch, and put his own in its place. But this act offended Leopold very much, and Richard had to pay for it later.

In the meantime, however, all the Crusaders fol

lowed him as the best leader, and he defeated the Saracen hosts in two great battles. Yet he never captured Jerusalem, because the French king went home with his men, and left Richard with too small an army to do anything. He got within sight of the Holy City, but he could not bear to look at it. "My eyes", he cried, "shall never behold it, if my arm may not reconquer it." With that he turned back.

Then, hearing that his brother John was plotting to take the throne of England from him, he started Richard's homewards. His ship, however, was Captivity. wrecked, and, he was cast ashore in the domain of the very Duke of Austria whose flag he had insulted at Acre. Leopold kept him in prison for a time, and then sold him to the Emperor, Henry VI., and he too kept him captive. It was said that his prison was discovered by a minstrel named Blondel, who passed outside singing a song of Richard's own, and Richard answered by singing the song again.

After some delay the king was ransomed, and returned to England. There he found that John had been asserting that he was dead, and was trying to make himself king in his place. But everyone hated John, who was mean and cunning and cruel; and they were delighted to welcome Richard again. Richard was too good-natured to punish John. He despised him too much to be afraid of him.

Richard's death was much like his life. No sooner was he home than he began a war with the King of France, who was trying to get for himself the districts in France which belonged to the English crown. At last, while besieging the castle of Chaluz, Richard was struck by an arrow in the neck. The archer who shot it was brought before the dying king. Richard bade his officers send him away unharmed. It is sad

to think that they did not obey the orders, but had the unlucky man flayed alive.

Richard was succeeded by his brother John, who was a very different kind of man. He could John, not keep his possessions in France, as Richard 1199-1216. had done, by dint of hard fighting. He was too lazy and careless. Besides, he was so treacherous that all disliked him, and few cared to fight for him. He captured and put to death his boy nephew Arthur, a deed which made everyone shrink from Loss of French him. So Philip the French king had Possessions. little difficulty in reconquering all John's land in France except a small piece in the south, and thus John's nickname of "Lackland", given him by his father years before, doubly fitted him.

John's failure to keep his French possessions had great results in the history of our kingdom. So long as our kings were rulers over half of France as well as over England, they were inclined to pay little attention to English affairs; yet when these dominions oversea were lost, the king had to become an English king in reality as well as in name, and do what his subjects wanted. We shall see in the next chapter that the people of England made John, who was the worst king England has ever known, give them something which has been of more importance than anything else in the whole of our history.

VIII. MAGNA CARTA; AND THE MAKINGS OF PARLIAMENT.

John, now forced to stay at home in England, soon succeeded in disgusting everyone by his behaviour. First of all he wanted to appoint a friend