In order finally to secure the defence of the country, and to have a force on which he could depend for the maintenance of peace and order, he armed the whole free population, or ordered them to provide arms, according to a fixed scale, proportioned to their substance. Thus he restored the ancient Anglo-Saxon militia system, and supplied the requisite counterbalance to the military power of the great feudatories, which, notwithstanding the temptation to avoid service by payment of scutage, they were still able and too willing to maintain. In all these measures we may trace one main object, the strengthening of the royal power, and one main means or directing principle, the doing so by increasing the safety and security of the people. Whatever was done to help the people served to reduce the power of the great feudal baronage; to disarm their forces, to abolish their jurisdictions, to diminish their chances of tyranny. Now all this could not but make Henry very much disliked by the great nobles. The people of course were slow to see the benefit of the reforms, but the barons were quick enough at detecting the measures taken to humiliate and reduce them; so, before Henry gained the affection of the people, he had to encounter the hostility of the barons. [Sidenote: Coronation of the heir, 1170. ] [Sidenote: Foreign custom of designating the successor to the crown. ] This hostility had been growing for a long time, awaiting the opportunity of breaking out into open revolt. Such an opportunity the shock which followed the death of Becket gave it; and the very same measure taken by Henry, which in its results caused the death of Becket, gave a head and a direction, nominally at least, to the outbreak. This measure was the coronation of the boy Henry in 1170. The idea of having the heir-apparent crowned in his father’s life-time was not familiar to the English or Normans; the royal succession still retained so much of the elective character that it would perhaps have been regarded as an unconstitutional measure, thus violently and without option to determine the succession irrevocably before the vacancy occurred. Much of the interest of the reigns of William Rufus and Henry I. turns upon this question. William the Conqueror and William Rufus both left the succession undetermined; hence arose the rebellions of the reign of the Red King and the early struggles of Henry I. The measures by which he had done everything in his power to secure and settle it had ended in the anarchy under Stephen. But in France and Germany this experiment, now tried for securing the hereditary succession, was familiar; almost every one of the kings who followed Hugh Capet had had his son crowned in his life-time; and in Germany since the very beginning of the Karolingian empire such cases had been frequent. Frederick Barbarossa at this very moment was working for the succession of his own son; and the introduction of a second or