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Title: William the Conqueror
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<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h1>William the Conqueror</h1>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<p>Contents</p>
<p>Introduction<br />The Early Years of William<br />William’s
First Visit to England<br />The Reign of William in Normandy<br />Harold’s
Oat to William<br />The Negotiations of Duke William<br />William’s
Invasion of England<br />The Conquest of England<br />The Settlement
of England<br />The Revolts against William<br />The Last Years of William</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER I—INTRODUCTION</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The history of England, like the land and its people, has been specially
insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences from without.
No land has owed more than England to the personal action of men not
of native birth. Britain was truly called another world, in opposition
to the world of the European mainland, the world of Rome. In every
age the history of Britain is the history of an island, of an island
great enough to form a world of itself. In speaking of Celts or
Teutons in Britain, we are speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons,
but of Celts and Teutons parted from their kinsfolk on the mainland,
and brought under the common influences of an island world. The
land has seen several settlements from outside, but the settlers have
always been brought under the spell of their insular position.
Whenever settlement has not meant displacement, the new comers have
been assimilated by the existing people of the land. When it has
meant displacement, they have still become islanders, marked off from
those whom they left behind by characteristics which were the direct
result of settlement in an island world.</p>
<p>The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England,
has been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated from
without. But each of those elements has done somewhat to modify
the mass into which it was absorbed. The English land and nation
are not as they might have been if they had never in later times absorbed
the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the German Palatine. Still less
are they as they might have been, if they had not in earlier times absorbed
the greater elements of the Dane and the Norman. Both were assimilated;
but both modified the character and destiny of the people into whose
substance they were absorbed. The conquerors from Normandy were
silently and peacefully lost in the greater mass of the English people;
still we can never be as if the Norman had never come among us.
We ever bear about us the signs of his presence. Our colonists
have carried those signs with them into distant lands, to remind men
that settlers in America and Australia came from a land which the Norman
once entered as a conqueror. But that those signs of his presence
hold the place which they do hold in our mixed political being, that,
badges of conquest as they are, no one feels them to be badges of conquest—all
this comes of the fact that, if the Norman came as a conqueror, he came
as a conqueror of a special, perhaps almost of an unique kind.
The Norman Conquest of England has, in its nature and in its results,
no exact parallel in history. And that it has no exact parallel
in history is largely owing to the character and position of the man
who wrought it. That the history of England for the last eight
hundred years has been what it has been has largely come of the personal
character of a single man. That we are what we are to this day
largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when our national
destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single man, and that
that man was William, surnamed at different stages of his life and memory,
the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great.</p>
<p>With perfect fitness then does William the Norman, William the Norman
Conqueror of England, take his place in a series of English statesmen.
That so it should be is characteristic of English history. Our
history has been largely wrought for us by men who have come in from
without, sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as the opposite of conquerors;
but in whatever character they came, they had to put on the character
of Englishmen, and to make their work an English work. From whatever
land they came, on whatever mission they came, as statesmen they were
English. William, the greatest of his class, is still but a member
of a class. Along with him we must reckon a crowd of kings, bishops,
and high officials in many ages of our history. Theodore of Tarsus
and Cnut of Denmark, Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta, Randolf
Flambard and Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Anjou and Simon of Montfort,
are all written on a list of which William is but the foremost.
The largest number come in William’s own generation and in the
generations just before and after it. But the breed of England’s
adopted children and rulers never died out. The name of William
the Deliverer stands, if not beside that of his namesake the Conqueror,
yet surely alongside of the lawgiver from Anjou. And we count
among the later worthies of England not a few men sprung from other
lands, who did and are doing their work among us, and who, as statesmen
at least, must count as English. As we look along the whole line,
even among the conquering kings and their immediate instruments, their
work never takes the shape of the rooting up of the earlier institutions
of the land. Those institutions are modified, sometimes silently
by the mere growth of events, sometimes formally and of set purpose.
Old institutions get new names; new institutions are set up alongside
of them. But the old ones are never swept away; they sometimes
die out; they are never abolished. This comes largely of the absorbing
and assimilating power of the island world. But it comes no less
of personal character and personal circumstances, and pre-eminently
of the personal character of the Norman Conqueror and of the circumstances
in which he found himself.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Our special business now is with the personal acts and character
of William, and above all with his acts and character as an English
statesman. But the English reign of William followed on his earlier
Norman reign, and its character was largely the result of his earlier
Norman reign. A man of the highest natural gifts, he had gone
through such a schooling from his childhood upwards as falls to the
lot of few princes. Before he undertook the conquest of England,
he had in some sort to work the conquest of Normandy. Of the ordinary
work of a sovereign in a warlike age, the defence of his own land, the
annexation of other lands, William had his full share. With the
land of his overlord he had dealings of the most opposite kinds.
He had to call in the help of the French king to put down rebellion
in the Norman duchy, and he had to drive back more than one invasion
of the French king at the head of an united Norman people. He
added Domfront and Maine to his dominions, and the conquest of Maine,
the work as much of statesmanship as of warfare, was the rehearsal of
the conquest of England. There, under circumstances strangely
like those of England, he learned his trade as conqueror, he learned
to practise on a narrower field the same arts which he afterwards practised
on a wider. But after all, William’s own duchy was his special
school; it was his life in his own duchy which specially helped to make
him what he was. Surrounded by trials and difficulties almost
from his cradle, he early learned the art of enduring trials and overcoming
difficulties; he learned how to deal with men; he learned when to smite
and when to spare; and it is not a little to his honour that, in the
long course of such a reign as his, he almost always showed himself
far more ready to spare than to smite.</p>
<p>Before then we can look at William as an English statesman, we must
first look on him in the land in which he learned the art of statesmanship.
We must see how one who started with all the disadvantages which are
implied in his earlier surname of the Bastard came to win and to deserve
his later surnames of the Conqueror and the Great.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER II—THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM—A.D. 1028-1051</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>If William’s early reign in Normandy was his time of schooling
for his later reign in England, his school was a stern one, and his
schooling began early. His nominal reign began at the age of seven
years, and his personal influence on events began long before he had
reached the usual years of discretion. And the events of his minority
might well harden him, while they could not corrupt him in the way in
which so many princes have been corrupted. His whole position,
political and personal, could not fail to have its effect in forming
the man. He was Duke of the Normans, sixth in succession from
Rolf, the founder of the Norman state. At the time of his accession,
rather more than a hundred and ten years had passed since plunderers,
occasionally settlers, from Scandinavia, had changed into acknowledged
members of the Western or Karolingian kingdom. The Northmen, changed,
name and thing, into <i>Normans</i>, were now in all things members
of the Christian and French-speaking world. But French as the
Normans of William’s day had become, their relation to the kings
and people of France was not a friendly one. At the time of the
settlement of Rolf, the western kingdom of the Franks had not yet finally
passed to the <i>Duces Francorum</i> at Paris; Rolf became the man of
the Karolingian king at Laon. France and Normandy were two great
duchies, each owning a precarious supremacy in the king of the West-Franks.
On the one hand, Normandy had been called into being by a frightful
dismemberment of the French duchy, from which the original Norman settlement
had been cut off. France had lost in Rouen one of her greatest
cities, and she was cut off from the sea and from the lower course of
her own river. On the other hand, the French and the Norman dukes
had found their interest in a close alliance; Norman support had done
much to transfer the crown from Laon to Paris, and to make the <i>Dux
Francorum</i> and the <i>Rex Francorum</i> the same person. It
was the adoption of the French speech and manners by the Normans, and
their steady alliance with the French dukes, which finally determined
that the ruling element in Gaul should be Romance and not Teutonic,
and that, of its Romance elements, it should be French and not Aquitanian.
If the creation of Normandy had done much to weaken France as a duchy,
it had done not a little towards the making of France as a kingdom.
Laon and its crown, the undefined influence that went with the crown,
the prospect of future advance to the south, had been bought by the
loss of Rouen and of the mouth of the Seine.</p>
<p>There was much therefore at the time of William’s accession
to keep the French kings and the Norman dukes on friendly terms.
The old alliance had been strengthened by recent good offices.
The reigning king, Henry the First, owed his crown to the help of William’s
father Robert. On the other hand, the original ground of the alliance,
mutual support against the Karolingian king, had passed away.
A King of the French reigning at Paris was more likely to remember what
the Normans had cost him as duke than what they had done for him as
king. And the alliance was only an alliance of princes.
The mutual dislike between the people of the two countries was strong.
The Normans had learned French ways, but French and Normans had not
become countrymen. And, as the fame of Normandy grew, jealousy
was doubtless mingled with dislike. William, in short, inherited
a very doubtful and dangerous state of relations towards the king who
was at once his chief neighbour and his overlord.</p>
<p>More doubtful and dangerous still were the relations which the young
duke inherited towards the people of his own duchy and the kinsfolk
of his own house. William was not as yet the Great or the Conqueror,
but he was the Bastard from the beginning. There was then no generally
received doctrine as to the succession to kingdoms and duchies.
Everywhere a single kingly or princely house supplied, as a rule, candidates
for the succession. Everywhere, even where the elective doctrine
was strong, a full-grown son was always likely to succeed his father.
The growth of feudal notions too had greatly strengthened the hereditary
principle. Still no rule had anywhere been laid down for cases
where the late prince had not left a full-grown son. The question
as to legitimate birth was equally unsettled. Irregular unions
of all kinds, though condemned by the Church, were tolerated in practice,
and were nowhere more common than among the Norman dukes. In truth
the feeling of the kingliness of the stock, the doctrine that the king
should be the son of a king, is better satisfied by the succession of
the late king’s bastard son than by sending for some distant kinsman,
claiming perhaps only through females. Still bastardy, if it was
often convenient to forget it, could always be turned against a man.
The succession of a bastard was never likely to be quite undisputed
or his reign to be quite undisturbed.</p>
<p>Now William succeeded to his duchy under the double disadvantage
of being at once bastard and minor. He was born at Falaise in
1027 or 1028, being the son of Robert, afterwards duke, but then only
Count of Hiesmois, by Herleva, commonly called Arletta, the daughter
of Fulbert the tanner. There was no pretence of marriage between
his parents; yet his father, when he designed William to succeed him,
might have made him legitimate, as some of his predecessors had been
made, by a marriage with his mother. In 1028 Robert succeeded
his brother Richard in the duchy. In 1034 or 1035 he determined
to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He called on his barons to swear
allegiance to his bastard of seven years old as his successor in case
he never came back. Their wise counsel to stay at home, to look
after his dominions and to raise up lawful heirs, was unheeded.
Robert carried his point. The succession of young William was
accepted by the Norman nobles, and was confirmed by the overlord Henry
King of the French. The arrangement soon took effect. Robert
died on his way back before the year 1035 was out, and his son began,
in name at least, his reign of fifty-two years over the Norman duchy.</p>
<p>The succession of one who was at once bastard and minor could happen
only when no one else had a distinctly better claim William could never
have held his ground for a moment against a brother of his father of
full age and undoubted legitimacy. But among the living descendants
of former dukes some were themselves of doubtful legitimacy, some were
shut out by their profession as churchmen, some claimed only through
females. Robert had indeed two half-brothers, but they were young
and their legitimacy was disputed; he had an uncle, Robert Archbishop
of Rouen, who had been legitimated by the later marriage of his parents.
The rival who in the end gave William most trouble was his cousin Guy
of Burgundy, son of a daughter of his grandfather Richard the Good.
Though William’s succession was not liked, no one of these candidates
was generally preferred to him. He therefore succeeded; but the
first twelve years of his reign were spent in the revolts and conspiracies
of unruly nobles, who hated the young duke as the one representative
of law and order, and who were not eager to set any one in his place
who might be better able to enforce them.</p>
<p>Nobility, so variously defined in different lands, in Normandy took
in two classes of men. All were noble who had any kindred or affinity,
legitimate or otherwise, with the ducal house. The natural children
of Richard the Fearless were legitimated by his marriage with their
mother Gunnor, and many of the great houses of Normandy sprang from
her brothers and sisters. The mother of William received no such
exaltation as this. Besides her son, she had borne to Robert a
daughter Adelaide, and, after Robert’s death, she married a Norman
knight named Herlwin of Conteville. To him, besides a daughter,
she bore two sons, Ode and Robert. They rose to high posts in
Church and State, and played an important part in their half-brother’s
history. Besides men whose nobility was of this kind, there were
also Norman houses whose privileges were older than the amours or marriages
of any duke, houses whose greatness was as old as the settlement of
Rolf, as old that is as the ducal power itself. The great men
of both these classes were alike hard to control. A Norman baron
of this age was well employed when he was merely rebelling against his
prince or waging private war against a fellow baron. What specially
marks the time is the frequency of treacherous murders wrought by men
of the highest rank, often on harmless neighbours or unsuspecting guests.
But victims were also found among those guardians of the young duke
whose faithful discharge of their duties shows that the Norman nobility
was not wholly corrupt. One indeed was a foreign prince, Alan
Count of the Bretons, a grandson of Richard the Fearless through a daughter.
Two others, the seneschal Osbern and Gilbert Count of Eu, were irregular
kinsmen of the duke. All these were murdered, the Breton count
by poison. Such a childhood as this made William play the man
while he was still a child. The helpless boy had to seek for support
of some kind. He got together the chief men of his duchy, and
took a new guardian by their advice. But it marks the state of
things that the new guardian was one of the murderers of those whom
he succeeded. This was Ralph of Wacey, son of William’s
great-uncle, Archbishop Robert. Murderer as he was, he seems to
have discharged his duty faithfully. There are men who are careless
of general moral obligations, but who will strictly carry out any charge
which appeals to personal honour. Anyhow Ralph’s guardianship
brought with it a certain amount of calm. But men, high in the
young duke’s favour, were still plotting against him, and they
presently began to plot, not only against their prince but against their
country. The disaffected nobles of Normandy sought for a helper
against young William in his lord King Henry of Paris.</p>
<p>The art of diplomacy had never altogether slumbered since much earlier
times. The king who owed his crown to William’s father,
and who could have no ground of offence against William himself, easily
found good pretexts for meddling in Norman affairs. It was not
unnatural in the King of the French to wish to win back a sea-board
which had been given up more than a hundred years before to an alien
power, even though that power had, for much more than half of that time,
acted more than a friendly part towards France. It was not unnatural
that the French people should cherish a strong national dislike to the
Normans and a strong wish that Rouen should again be a French city.
But such motives were not openly avowed then any more than now.
The alleged ground was quite different. The counts of Chartres
were troublesome neighbours to the duchy, and the castle of Tillières
had been built as a defence against them. An advance of the King’s
dominions had made Tillières a neighbour of France, and, as a
neighbour, it was said to be a standing menace. The King of the
French, acting in concert with the disaffected party in Normandy, was
a dangerous enemy, and the young Duke and his counsellors determined
to give up Tillières. Now comes the first distinct exercise
of William’s personal will. We are without exact dates,
but the time can be hardly later than 1040, when William was from twelve
to thirteen years old. At his special request, the defender of
Tillières, Gilbert Crispin, who at first held out against French
and Normans alike, gave up the castle to Henry. The castle was
burned; the King promised not to repair it for four years. Yet
he is said to have entered Normandy, to have laid waste William’s
native district of Hiesmois, to have supplied a French garrison to a
Norman rebel named Thurstan, who held the castle of Falaise against
the Duke, and to have ended by restoring Tillières as a menace
against Normandy. And now the boy whose destiny had made him so
early a leader of men had to bear his first arms against the fortress
which looked down on his birth-place. Thurstan surrendered and
went into banishment. William could set down his own Falaise as
the first of a long list of towns and castles which he knew how to win
without shedding of blood.</p>
<p>When we next see William’s distinct personal action, he is
still young, but no longer a child or even a boy. At nineteen
or thereabouts he is a wise and valiant man, and his valour and wisdom
are tried to the uttermost. A few years of comparative quiet were
chiefly occupied, as a quiet time in those days commonly was, with ecclesiastical
affairs. One of these specially illustrates the state of things
with which William had to deal. In 1042, when the Duke was about
fourteen, Normandy adopted the Truce of God in its later shape.
It no longer attempted to establish universal peace; it satisfied itself
with forbidding, under the strongest ecclesiastical censures, all private
war and violence of any kind on certain days of the week. Legislation
of this kind has two sides. It was an immediate gain if peace
was really enforced for four days in the week; but that which was not
forbidden on the other three could no longer be denounced as in itself
evil. We are told that in no land was the Truce more strictly
observed than in Normandy. But we may be sure that, when William
was in the fulness of his power, the stern weight of the ducal arm was
exerted to enforce peace on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as on Thursdays
and Fridays.</p>
<p>It was in the year 1047 that William’s authority was most dangerously
threatened and that he was first called on to show in all their fulness
the powers that were in him. He who was to be conqueror of Maine
and conqueror of England was first to be conqueror of his own duchy.
The revolt of a large part of the country, contrasted with the firm
loyalty of another part, throws a most instructive light on the internal
state of the duchy. There was, as there still is, a line of severance
between the districts which formed the first grant to Rolf and those
which were afterwards added. In these last a lingering remnant
of old Teutonic life had been called into fresh strength by new settlements
from Scandinavia. At the beginning of the reign of Richard the
Fearless, Rouen, the French-speaking city, is emphatically contrasted
with Bayeux, the once Saxon city and land, now the headquarters of the
Danish speech. At that stage the Danish party was distinctly a
heathen party. We are not told whether Danish was still spoken
so late as the time of William’s youth. We can hardly believe
that the Scandinavian gods still kept any avowed worshippers.
But the geographical limits of the revolt exactly fall in with the boundary
which had once divided French and Danish speech, Christian and heathen
worship. There was a wide difference in feeling on the two sides
of the Dive. The older Norman settlements, now thoroughly French
in tongue and manners, stuck faithfully to the Duke; the lands to the
west rose against him. Rouen and Evreux were firmly loyal to William;
Saxon Bayeux and Danish Coutances were the headquarters of his enemies.</p>
<p>When the geographical division took this shape, we are surprised
at the candidate for the duchy who was put forward by the rebels.
William was a Norman born and bred; his rival was in every sense a Frenchman.
This was William’s cousin Guy of Burgundy, whose connexion with
the ducal house was only by the spindle-side. But his descent
was of uncontested legitimacy, which gave him an excuse for claiming
the duchy in opposition to the bastard grandson of the tanner.
By William he had been enriched with great possessions, among which
was the island fortress of Brionne in the Risle. The real object
of the revolt was the partition of the duchy. William was to be
dispossessed; Guy was to be duke in the lands east of Dive; the great
lords of Western Normandy were to be left independent. To this
end the lords of the Bessin and the Côtentin revolted, their leader
being Neal, Viscount of Saint-Sauveur in the Côtentin. We
are told that the mass of the people everywhere wished well to their
duke; in the common sovereign lay their only chance of protection against
their immediate lords. But the lords had armed force of the land
at their bidding. They first tried to slay or seize the Duke himself,
who chanced to be in the midst of them at Valognes. He escaped;
we hear a stirring tale of his headlong ride from Valognes to Falaise.
Safe among his own people, he planned his course of action. He
first sought help of the man who could give him most help, but who had
most wronged him. He went into France; he saw King Henry at Poissy,
and the King engaged to bring a French force to William’s help
under his own command.</p>
<p>This time Henry kept his promise. The dismemberment of Normandy
might have been profitable to France by weakening the power which had
become so special an object of French jealousy; but with a king the
common interest of princes against rebellious barons came first.
Henry came with a French army, and fought well for his ally on the field
of Val-ès-dunes. Now came the Conqueror’s first battle,
a tourney of horsemen on an open table-land just within the land of
the rebels between Caen and Mezidon. The young duke fought well
and manfully; but the Norman writers allow that it was French help that
gained him the victory. Yet one of the many anecdotes of the battle
points to a source of strength which was always ready to tell for any
lord against rebellious vassals. One of the leaders of the revolt,
Ralph of Tesson, struck with remorse and stirred by the prayers of his
knights, joined the Duke just before the battle. He had sworn
to smite William wherever he found him, and he fulfilled his oath by
giving the Duke a harmless blow with his glove. How far an oath
to do an unlawful act is binding is a question which came up again at
another stage of William’s life.</p>
<p>The victory at Val-ès-dunes was decisive, and the French King,
whose help had done so much to win it, left William to follow it up.
He met with but little resistance except at the stronghold of Brionne.
Guy himself vanishes from Norman history. William had now conquered
his own duchy, and conquered it by foreign help. For the rest
of his Norman reign he had often to strive with enemies at home, but
he had never to put down such a rebellion again as that of the lords
of western Normandy. That western Normandy, the truest Normandy,
had to yield to the more thoroughly Romanized lands to the east.
The difference between them never again takes a political shape.
William was now lord of all Normandy, and able to put down all later
disturbers of the peace. His real reign now begins; from the age
of nineteen or twenty, his acts are his own. According to his
abiding practice, he showed himself a merciful conqueror. Through
his whole reign he shows a distinct unwillingness to take human life
except in fair fighting on the battle-field. No blood was shed
after the victory of Val-ès-dunes; one rebel died in bonds; the
others underwent no harder punishment than payment of fines, giving
of hostages, and destruction of their castles. These castles were
not as yet the vast and elaborate structures which arose in after days.
A single strong square tower, or even a defence of wood on a steep mound
surrounded by a ditch, was enough to make its owner dangerous.
The possession of these strongholds made every baron able at once to
defy his prince and to make himself a scourge to his neighbours.
Every season of anarchy is marked by the building of castles; every
return of order brings with it their overthrow as a necessary condition
of peace.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Thus, in his lonely and troubled childhood, William had been schooled
for the rule of men. He had now, in the rule of a smaller dominion,
in warfare and conquest on a smaller scale, to be schooled for the conquest
and the rule of a greater dominion. William had the gifts of a
born ruler, and he was in no way disposed to abuse them. We know
his rule in Normandy only through the language of panegyric; but the
facts speak for themselves. He made Normandy peaceful and flourishing,
more peaceful and flourishing perhaps than any other state of the European
mainland. He is set before us as in everything a wise and beneficent
ruler, the protector of the poor and helpless, the patron of commerce
and of all that might profit his dominions. For defensive wars,
for wars waged as the faithful man of his overlord, we cannot blame
him. But his main duty lay at home. He still had revolts
to put down, and he put them down. But to put them down was the
first of good works. He had to keep the peace of the land, to
put some cheek on the unruly wills of those turbulent barons on whom
only an arm like his could put any cheek. He had, in the language
of his day, to do justice, to visit wrong with sure and speedy punishment,
whoever was the wrong-doer. If a ruler did this first of duties
well, much was easily forgiven him in other ways. But William
had as yet little to be forgiven. Throughout life he steadily
practised some unusual virtues. His strict attention to religion
was always marked. And his religion was not that mere lavish bounty
to the Church which was consistent with any amount of cruelty or license.
William’s religion really influenced his life, public and private.
He set an unusual example of a princely household governed according
to the rules of morality, and he dealt with ecclesiastical matters in
the spirit of a true reformer. He did not, like so many princes
of his age, make ecclesiastical preferments a source of corrupt gain,
but promoted good men from all quarters. His own education is
not likely to have received much attention; it is not clear whether
he had mastered the rarer art of writing or the more usual one of reading;
but both his promotion of learned churchmen and the care given to the
education of some of his children show that he at least valued the best
attainments of his time. Had William’s whole life been spent
in the duties of a Norman duke, ruling his duchy wisely, defending it
manfully, the world might never have known him for one of its foremost
men, but his life on that narrower field would have been useful and
honourable almost without a drawback. It was the fatal temptation
of princes, the temptation to territorial aggrandizement, which enabled
him fully to show the powers that were in him, but which at the same
time led to his moral degradation. The defender of his own land
became the invader of other lands, and the invader could not fail often
to sink into the oppressor. Each step in his career as Conqueror
was a step downwards. Maine was a neighbouring land, a land of
the same speech, a land which, if the feelings of the time could have
allowed a willing union, would certainly have lost nothing by an union
with Normandy. England, a land apart, a land of speech, laws,
and feelings, utterly unlike those of any part of Gaul, was in another
case. There the Conqueror was driven to be the oppressor.
Wrong, as ever, was punished by leading to further wrong.</p>
<p>With the two fields, nearer and more distant, narrower and wider,
on which William was to appear as Conqueror he has as yet nothing to
do. It is vain to guess at what moment the thought of the English
succession may have entered his mind or that of his advisers.
When William began his real reign after Val-ès-dunes, Norman
influence was high in England. Edward the Confessor had spent
his youth among his Norman kinsfolk; he loved Norman ways and the company
of Normans and other men of French speech. Strangers from the
favoured lands held endless posts in Church and State; above all, Robert
of Jumièges, first Bishop of London and then Archbishop of Canterbury,
was the King’s special favourite and adviser. These men
may have suggested the thought of William’s succession very early.
On the other hand, at this time it was by no means clear that Edward
might not leave a son of his own. He had been only a few years
married, and his alleged vow of chastity is very doubtful. William’s
claim was of the flimsiest kind. By English custom the king was
chosen out of a single kingly house, and only those who were descended
from kings in the male line were counted as members of that house.
William was not descended, even in the female line, from any English
king; his whole kindred with Edward was that Edward’s mother Emma,
a daughter of Richard the Fearless, was William’s great-aunt.
Such a kindred, to say nothing of William’s bastardy, could give
no right to the crown according to any doctrine of succession that ever
was heard of. It could at most point him out as a candidate for
adoption, in case the reigning king should be disposed and allowed to
choose his successor. William or his advisers may have begun to
weigh this chance very early; but all that is really certain is that
William was a friend and favourite of his elder kinsman, and that events
finally brought his succession to the English crown within the range
of things that might be.</p>
<p>But, before this, William was to show himself as a warrior beyond
the bounds of his own duchy, and to take seizin, as it were, of his
great continental conquest. William’s first war out of Normandy
was waged in common with King Henry against Geoffrey Martel Count of
Anjou, and waged on the side of Maine. William undoubtedly owed
a debt of gratitude to his overlord for good help given at Val-ès-dunes,
and excuses were never lacking for a quarrel between Anjou and Normandy.
Both powers asserted rights over the intermediate land of Maine.
In 1048 we find William giving help to Henry in a war with Anjou, and
we hear wonderful but vague tales of his exploits. The really
instructive part of the story deals with two border fortresses on the
march of Normandy and Maine. Alençon lay on the Norman
side of the Sarthe; but it was disloyal to Normandy. Brionne was
still holding out for Guy of Burgundy. The town was a lordship
of the house of Bellême, a house renowned for power and wickedness,
and which, as holding great possessions alike of Normandy and of France,
ranked rather with princes than with ordinary nobles. The story
went that William Talvas, lord of Bellême, one of the fiercest
of his race, had cursed William in his cradle, as one by whom he and
his should be brought to shame. Such a tale set forth the noblest
side of William’s character, as the man who did something to put
down such enemies of mankind as he who cursed him. The possessions
of William Talvas passed through his daughter Mabel to Roger of Montgomery,
a man who plays a great part in William’s history; but it is the
disloyalty of the burghers, not of their lord, of which we hear just
now. They willingly admitted an Angevin garrison. William
in return laid siege to Domfront on the Varenne, a strong castle which
was then an outpost of Maine against Normandy. A long skirmishing
warfare, in which William won for himself a name by deeds of personal
prowess, went on during the autumn and winter (1048-49). One tale
specially illustrates more than one point in the feelings of the time.
The two princes, William and Geoffrey, give a mutual challenge; each
gives the other notice of the garb and shield that he will wear that
he may not be mistaken. The spirit of knight-errantry was coming
in, and we see that William himself in his younger days was touched
by it. But we see also that coat-armour was as yet unknown.
Geoffrey and his host, so the Normans say, shrink from the challenge
and decamp in the night, leaving the way open for a sudden march upon
Alençon. The disloyal burghers received the duke with mockery
of his birth. They hung out skins, and shouted, “Hides for
the Tanner.” Personal insult is always hard for princes
to bear, and the wrath of William was stirred up to a pitch which made
him for once depart from his usual moderation towards conquered enemies.
He swore that the men who had jeered at him should be dealt with like
a tree whose branches are cut off with the pollarding-knife. The
town was taken by assault, and William kept his oath. The castle
held out; the hands and feet of thirty-two pollarded burghers of Alençon
were thrown over its walls, and the threat implied drove the garrison
to surrender on promise of safety for life and limb. The defenders
of Domfront, struck with fear, surrendered also, and kept their arms
as well as their lives and limbs. William had thus won back his
own rebellious town, and had enlarged his borders by his first conquest.
He went farther south, and fortified another castle at Ambrières;
but Ambrières was only a temporary conquest. Domfront has
ever since been counted as part of Normandy. But, as ecclesiastical
divisions commonly preserve the secular divisions of an earlier time,
Domfront remained down to the great French Revolution in the spiritual
jurisdiction of the bishops of Le Mans.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>William had now shown himself in Maine as conqueror, and he was before
long to show himself in England, though not yet as conqueror.
If our chronology is to be trusted, he had still in this interval to
complete his conquest of his own duchy by securing the surrender of
Brionne; and two other events, both characteristic, one of them memorable,
fill up the same time. William now banished a kinsman of his own
name, who held the great county of Mortain, <i>Moretoliam</i> or <i>Moretonium</i>,
in the diocese of Avranches, which must be carefully distinguished from
Mortagne-en-Perche, <i>Mauritania</i> or <i>Moretonia</i> in the diocese
of Seez. This act, of somewhat doubtful justice, is noteworthy
on two grounds. First, the accuser of the banished count was one
who was then a poor serving-knight of his own, but who became the forefather
of a house which plays a great part in English history, Robert surnamed
the Bigod. Secondly, the vacant county was granted by William
to his own half-brother Robert. He had already in 1048 bestowed
the bishopric of Bayeux on his other half-brother Odo, who cannot at
that time have been more than twelve years old. He must therefore
have held the see for a good while without consecration, and at no time
of his fifty years’ holding of it did he show any very episcopal
merits. This was the last case in William’s reign of an
old abuse by which the chief church preferments in Normandy had been
turned into means of providing for members, often unworthy members,
of the ducal family; and it is the only one for which William can have
been personally responsible. Both his brothers were thus placed
very early in life among the chief men of Normandy, as they were in
later years to be placed among the chief men of England. But William’s
affection for his brothers, amiable as it may have been personally,
was assuredly not among the brighter parts of his character as a sovereign.</p>
<p>The other chief event of this time also concerns the domestic side
of William’s life. The long story of his marriage now begins.
The date is fixed by one of the decrees of the council of Rheims held
in 1049 by Pope Leo the Ninth, in which Baldwin Count of Flanders is
forbidden to give his daughter to William the Norman. This implies
that the marriage was already thought of, and further that it was looked
on as uncanonical. The bride whom William sought, Matilda daughter
of Baldwin the Fifth, was connected with him by some tie of kindred
or affinity which made a marriage between them unlawful by the rules
of the Church. But no genealogist has yet been able to find out
exactly what the canonical hindrance was. It is hard to trace
the descent of William and Matilda up to any common forefather.
But the light which the story throws on William’s character is
the same in any case. Whether he was seeking a wife or a kingdom,
he would have his will, but he could wait for it. In William’s
doubtful position, a marriage with the daughter of the Count of Flanders
would be useful to him in many ways; and Matilda won her husband’s
abiding love and trust. Strange tales are told of William’s
wooing. Tales are told also of Matilda’s earlier love for
the Englishman Brihtric, who is said to have found favour in her eyes
when he came as envoy from England to her father’s court.
All that is certain is that the marriage had been thought of and had
been forbidden before the next important event in William’s life
that we have to record.</p>
<p>Was William’s Flemish marriage in any way connected with his
hopes of succession to the English crown? Had there been any available
bride for him in England, it might have been for his interest to seek
for her there. But it should be noticed, though no ancient writer
points out the fact, that Matilda was actually descended from Alfred
in the female line; so that William’s children, though not William
himself, had some few drops of English blood in their veins. William
or his advisers, in weighing every chance which might help his interests
in the direction of England, may have reckoned this piece of rather
ancient genealogy among the advantages of a Flemish alliance.
But it is far more certain that, between the forbidding of the marriage
and the marriage itself, a direct hope of succession to the English
crown had been opened to the Norman duke.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER III—WILLIAM’S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND—A.D.
1051-1052</h2>
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<p>While William was strengthening himself in Normandy, Norman influence
in England had risen to its full height. The king was surrounded
by foreign favourites. The only foreign earl was his nephew Ralph
of Mentes, the son of his sister Godgifu. But three chief bishoprics
were held by Normans, Robert of Canterbury, William of London, and Ulf
of Dorchester. William bears a good character, and won the esteem
of Englishmen; but the unlearned Ulf is emphatically said to have done
“nought bishoplike.” Smaller preferments in Church
and State, estates in all parts of the kingdom, were lavishly granted
to strangers. They built castles, and otherwise gave offence to
English feeling. Archbishop Robert, above all, was ever plotting
against Godwine, Earl of the West-Saxons, the head of the national party.
At last, in the autumn of 1051, the national indignation burst forth.
The immediate occasion was a visit paid to the King by Count Eustace
of Boulogne, who had just married the widowed Countess Godgifu.
The violent dealings of his followers towards the burghers of Dover
led to resistance on their part, and to a long series of marches and
negotiations, which ended in the banishment of Godwine and his son,
and the parting of his daughter Edith, the King’s wife, from her
husband. From October 1051 to September 1052, the Normans had
their own way in England. And during that time King Edward received
a visitor of greater fame than his brother-in-law from Boulogne in the
person of his cousin from Rouen.</p>
<p>Of his visit we only read that “William Earl came from beyond
sea with mickle company of Frenchmen, and the king him received, and
as many of his comrades as to him seemed good, and let him go again.”
Another account adds that William received great gifts from the King.
But William himself in several documents speaks of Edward as his lord;
he must therefore at some time have done to Edward an act of homage,
and there is no time but this at which we can conceive such an act being
done. Now for what was the homage paid? Homage was often
paid on very trifling occasions, and strange conflicts of allegiance
often followed. No such conflict was likely to arise if the Duke
of the Normans, already the man of the King of the French for his duchy,
became the man of the King of the English on any other ground.
Betwixt England and France there was as yet no enmity or rivalry.
England and France became enemies afterwards because the King of the
English and the Duke of the Normans were one person. And this
visit, this homage, was the first step towards making the King of the
English and the Duke of the Normans the same person. The claim
William had to the English crown rested mainly on an alleged promise
of the succession made by Edward. This claim is not likely to
have been a mere shameless falsehood. That Edward did make some
promise to William—as that Harold, at a later stage, did take
some oath to William—seems fully proved by the fact that, while
such Norman statements as could be denied were emphatically denied by
the English writers, on these two points the most patriotic Englishmen,
the strongest partisans of Harold, keep a marked silence. We may
be sure therefore that some promise was made; for that promise a time
must be found, and no time seems possible except this time of William’s
visit to Edward. The date rests on no direct authority, but it
answers every requirement. Those who spoke of the promise as being
made earlier, when William and Edward were boys together in Normandy,
forgot that Edward was many years older than William. The only
possible moment earlier than the visit was when Edward was elected king
in 1042. Before that time he could hardly have thought of disposing
of a kingdom which was not his, and at that time he might have looked
forward to leaving sons to succeed him. Still less could the promise
have been made later than the visit. From 1053 to the end of his
life Edward was under English influences, which led him first to send
for his nephew Edward from Hungary as his successor, and in the end
to make a recommendation in favour of Harold. But in 1051-52 Edward,
whether under a vow or not, may well have given up the hope of children;
he was surrounded by Norman influences; and, for the only time in the
last twenty-four years of their joint lives, he and William met face
to face. The only difficulty is one to which no contemporary writer
makes any reference. If Edward wished to dispose of his crown
in favour of one of his French-speaking kinsmen, he had a nearer kinsman
of whom he might more naturally have thought. His own nephew Ralph
was living in England and holding an English earldom. He had the
advantage over both William and his own older brother Walter of Mantes,
in not being a reigning prince elsewhere. We can only say that
there is evidence that Edward did think of William, that there is no
evidence that he ever thought of Ralph. And, except the tie of
nearer kindred, everything would suggest William rather than Ralph.
The personal comparison is almost grotesque; and Edward’s early
associations and the strongest influences around him, were not vaguely
French but specially Norman. Archbishop Robert would plead for
his own native sovereign only. In short, we may be as nearly sure
as we can be of any fact for which there is no direct authority, that
Edward’s promise to William was made at the time of William’s
visit to England, and that William’s homage to Edward was done
in the character of a destined successor to the English crown.</p>
<p>William then came to England a mere duke and went back to Normandy
a king expectant. But the value of his hopes, to the value of
the promise made to him, are quite another matter. Most likely
they were rated on both sides far above their real value. King
and duke may both have believed that they were making a settlement which
the English nation was bound to respect. If so, Edward at least
was undeceived within a few months.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The notion of a king disposing of his crown by his own act belongs
to the same range of ideas as the law of strict hereditary succession.
It implies that kingship is a possession and not an office. Neither
the heathen nor the Christian English had ever admitted that doctrine;
but it was fast growing on the continent. Our forefathers had
always combined respect for the kingly house with some measure of choice
among the members of that house. Edward himself was not the lawful
heir according to the notions of a modern lawyer; for he was chosen
while the son of his elder brother was living. Every English king
held his crown by the gift of the great assembly of the nation, though
the choice of the nation was usually limited to the descendants of former
kings, and though the full-grown son of the late king was seldom opposed.
Christianity had strengthened the election principle. The king
lost his old sanctity as the son of Woden; he gained a new sanctity
as the Lord’s anointed. But kingship thereby became more
distinctly an office, a great post, like a bishopric, to which its holder
had to be lawfully chosen and admitted by solemn rites. But of
that office he could be lawfully deprived, nor could he hand it on to
a successor either according to his own will or according to any strict
law of succession. The wishes of the late king, like the wishes
of the late bishop, went for something with the electors. But
that was all. All that Edward could really do for his kinsmen
was to promise to make, when the time came, a recommendation to the
Witan in his favour. The Witan might then deal as they thought
good with a recommendation so unusual as to choose to the kingship of
England a man who was neither a native nor a conqueror of England nor
the descendant of any English king.</p>
<p>When the time came, Edward did make a recommendation to the Witan,
but it was not in favour of William. The English influences under
which he was brought during his last fourteen years taught him better
what the law of England was and what was the duty of an English king.
But at the time of William’s visit Edward may well have believed
that he could by his own act settle his crown on his Norman kinsman
as his undoubted successor in case he died without a son. And
it may be that Edward was bound by a vow not to leave a son. And
if Edward so thought, William naturally thought so yet more; he would
sincerely believe himself to be the lawful heir of the crown of England,
the sole lawful successor, except in one contingency which was perhaps
impossible and certainly unlikely.</p>
<p>The memorials of these times, so full on some points, are meagre
on others. Of those writers who mention the bequest or promise
none mention it at any time when it is supposed to have happened; they
mention it at some later time when it began to be of practical importance.
No English writer speaks of William’s claim till the time when
he was about practically to assert it; no Norman writer speaks of it
till he tells the tale of Harold’s visit and oath to William.
We therefore cannot say how far the promise was known either in England
or on the continent. But it could not be kept altogether hid,
even if either party wished it to be hid. English statesmen must
have known of it, and must have guided their policy accordingly, whether
it was generally known in the country or not. William’s
position, both in his own duchy and among neighbouring princes, would
be greatly improved if he could be looked upon as a future king.
As heir to the crown of England, he may have more earnestly wooed the
descendant of former wearers of the crown; and Matilda and her father
may have looked more favourably on a suitor to whom the crown of England
was promised. On the other hand, the existence of such a foreign
claimant made it more needful than ever for Englishmen to be ready with
an English successor, in the royal house or out of it, the moment the
reigning king should pass away.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>It was only for a short time that William could have had any reasonable
hope of a peaceful succession. The time of Norman influence in
England was short. The revolution of September 1052 brought Godwine
back, and placed the rule of England again in English hands. Many
Normans were banished, above all Archbishop Robert and Bishop Ulf.
The death of Godwine the next year placed the chief power in the hands
of his son Harold. This change undoubtedly made Edward more disposed
to the national cause. Of Godwine, the man to whom he owed his
crown, he was clearly in awe; to Godwine’s sons he was personally
attached. We know not how Edward was led to look on his promise
to William as void. That he was so led is quite plain. He
sent for his nephew the Ætheling Edward from Hungary, clearly
as his intended successor. When the Ætheling died in 1057,
leaving a son under age, men seem to have gradually come to look to
Harold as the probable successor. He clearly held a special position
above that of an ordinary earl; but there is no need to suppose any
formal act in his favour till the time of the King’s death, January
5, 1066. On his deathbed Edward did all that he legally could
do on behalf of Harold by recommending him to the Witan for election
as the next king. That he then either made a new or renewed an
old nomination in favour of William is a fable which is set aside by
the witness of the contemporary English writers. William’s
claim rested wholly on that earlier nomination which could hardly have
been made at any other time than his visit to England.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>We have now to follow William back to Normandy, for the remaining
years of his purely ducal reign. The expectant king had doubtless
thoughts and hopes which he had not had before. But we can guess
at them only: they are not recorded.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER IV—THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY—A.D. 1052-1063</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>If William came back from England looking forward to a future crown,
the thought might even then flash across his mind that he was not likely
to win that crown without fighting for it. As yet his business
was still to fight for the duchy of Normandy. But he had now to
fight, not to win his duchy, but only to keep it. For five years
he had to strive both against rebellious subjects and against invading
enemies, among whom King Henry of Paris is again the foremost.
Whatever motives had led the French king to help William at Val-ès-dunes
had now passed away. He had fallen back on his former state of
abiding enmity towards Normandy and her duke. But this short period
definitely fixed the position of Normandy and her duke in Gaul and in
Europe. At its beginning William is still the Bastard of Falaise,
who may or may not be able to keep himself in the ducal chair, his right
to which is still disputed. At the end of it, if he is not yet
the Conqueror and the Great, he has shown all the gifts that were needed
to win him either name. He is the greatest vassal of the French
crown, a vassal more powerful than the overlord whose invasions of his
duchy he has had to drive back.</p>
<p>These invasions of Normandy by the King of the French and his allies
fall into two periods. At first Henry appears in Normandy as the
supporter of Normans in open revolt against their duke. But revolts
are personal and local; there is no rebellion like that which was crushed
at Val-ès-dunes, spreading over a large part of the duchy.
In the second period, the invaders have no such starting-point.
There are still traitors; there are still rebels; but all that they
can do is to join the invaders after they have entered the land.
William is still only making his way to the universal good will of his
duchy: but he is fast making it.</p>
<p>There is, first of all, an obscure tale of a revolt of an unfixed
date, but which must have happened between 1048 and 1053. The
rebel, William Busac of the house of Eu, is said to have defended the
castle of Eu against the duke and to have gone into banishment in France.
But the year that followed William’s visit to England saw the
far more memorable revolt of William Count of Arques. He had drawn
the Duke’s suspicions on him, and he had to receive a ducal garrison
in his great fortress by Dieppe. But the garrison betrayed the
castle to its own master. Open revolt and havoc followed, in which
Count William was supported by the king and by several other princes.
Among them was Ingelram Count of Ponthieu, husband of the duke’s
sister Adelaide. Another enemy was Guy Count of Gascony, afterwards
Duke William the Eighth of Aquitaine. What quarrel a prince in
the furthest corner of Gaul could have with the Duke of the Normans
does not appear; but neither Count William nor his allies could withstand
the loyal Normans and their prince. Count Ingelram was killed;
the other princes withdrew to devise greater efforts against Normandy.
Count William lost his castle and part of his estates, and left the
duchy of his free will. The Duke’s politic forbearance at
last won him the general good will of his subjects. We hear of
no more open revolts till that of William’s own son many years
after. But the assaults of foreign enemies, helped sometimes by
Norman traitors, begin again the next year on a greater scale.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>William the ruler and warrior had now a short breathing-space.
He had doubtless come back from England more bent than ever on his marriage
with Matilda of Flanders. Notwithstanding the decree of a Pope
and a Council entitled to special respect, the marriage was celebrated,
not very long after William’s return to Normandy, in the year
of the revolt of William of Arques. In the course of the year
1053 Count Baldwin brought his daughter to the Norman frontier at Eu,
and there she became the bride of William. We know not what emboldened
William to risk so daring a step at this particular time, or what led
Baldwin to consent to it. If it was suggested by the imprisonment
of Pope Leo by William’s countrymen in Italy, in the hope that
a consent to the marriage would be wrung out of the captive pontiff,
that hope was disappointed. The marriage raised much opposition
in Normandy. It was denounced by Archbishop Malger of Rouen, the
brother of the dispossessed Count of Arques. His character certainly
added no weight to his censures; but the same act in a saint would have
been set down as a sign of holy boldness. Presently, whether for
his faults or for his merits, Malger was deposed in a synod of the Norman
Church, and William found him a worthier successor in the learned and
holy Maurilius. But a greater man than Malger also opposed the
marriage, and the controversy thus introduces us to one who fills a
place second only to that of William himself in the Norman and English
history of the time.</p>
<p>This was Lanfranc of Pavia, the lawyer, the scholar, the model monk,
the ecclesiastical statesman, who, as prior of the newly founded abbey
of Bec, was already one of the innermost counsellors of the Duke.
As duke and king, as prior, abbot, and archbishop, William and Lanfranc
ruled side by side, each helping the work of the other till the end
of their joint lives. Once only, at this time, was their friendship
broken for a moment. Lanfranc spoke against the marriage, and
ventured to rebuke the Duke himself. William’s wrath was
kindled; he ordered Lanfranc into banishment and took a baser revenge
by laying waste part of the lands of the abbey. But the quarrel
was soon made up. Lanfranc presently left Normandy, not as a banished
man, but as the envoy of its sovereign, commissioned to work for the
confirmation of the marriage at the papal court. He worked, and
his work was crowned with success, but not with speedy success.
It was not till six years after the marriage, not till the year 1059,
that Lanfranc obtained the wished for confirmation, not from Leo, but
from his remote successor Nicolas the Second. The sin of those
who had contracted the unlawful union was purged by various good works,
among which the foundation of the two stately abbeys of Caen was conspicuous.</p>
<p>This story illustrates many points in the character of William and
of his time. His will is not to be thwarted, whether in a matter
of marriage or of any other. But he does not hurry matters; he
waits for a favourable opportunity. Something, we know not what,
must have made the year 1053 more favourable than the year 1049.
We mark also William’s relations to the Church. He is at
no time disposed to submit quietly to the bidding of the spiritual power,
when it interferes with his rights or even when it crosses his will.
Yet he is really anxious for ecclesiastical reform; he promotes men
like Maurilius and Lanfranc; perhaps he is not displeased when the exercise
of ecclesiastical discipline, in the case of Malger, frees him from
a troublesome censor. But the worse side of him also comes out.
William could forgive rebels, but he could not bear the personal rebuke
even of his friend. Under this feeling he punishes a whole body
of men for the offence of one. To lay waste the lands of Bec for
the rebuke of Lanfranc was like an ordinary prince of the time; it was
unlike William, if he had not been stirred up by a censure which touched
his wife as well as himself. But above all, the bargain between
William and Lanfranc is characteristic of the man and the age.
Lanfranc goes to Rome to support a marriage which he had censured in
Normandy. But there is no formal inconsistency, no forsaking of
any principle. Lanfranc holds an uncanonical marriage to be a
sin, and he denounces it. He does not withdraw his judgement as
to its sinfulness. He simply uses his influence with a power that
can forgive the sin to get it forgiven.</p>
<p>While William’s marriage was debated at Rome, he had to fight
hard in Normandy. His warfare and his negotiations ended about
the same time, and the two things may have had their bearing on one
another. William had now to undergo a new form of trial.
The King of the French had never put forth his full strength when he
was simply backing Norman rebels. William had now, in two successive
invasions, to withstand the whole power of the King, and of as many
of his vassals as the King could bring to his standard. In the
first invasion, in 1054, the Norman writers speak rhetorically of warriors
from Burgundy, Auvergne, and Gascony; but it is hard to see any troops
from a greater distance than Bourges. The princes who followed
Henry seem to have been only the nearer vassals of the Crown.
Chief among them are Theobald Count of Chartres, of a house of old hostile
to Normandy, and Guy the new Count of Ponthieu, to be often heard of
again. If not Geoffrey of Anjou himself, his subjects from Tours
were also there. Normandy was to be invaded on two sides, on both
banks of the Seine. The King and his allies sought to wrest from
William the western part of Normandy, the older and the more thoroughly
French part. No attack seems to have been designed on the Bessin
or the Côtentin. William was to be allowed to keep those
parts of his duchy, against which he had to fight when the King was
his ally at Val-ès-dunes.</p>
<p>The two armies entered Normandy; that which was to act on the left
of the Seine was led by the King, the other by his brother Odo.
Against the King William made ready to act himself; eastern Normandy
was left to its own loyal nobles. But all Normandy was now loyal;
the men of the Saxon and Danish lands were as ready to fight for their
duke against the King as they had been to fight against King and Duke
together. But William avoided pitched battles; indeed pitched
battles are rare in the continental warfare of the time. War consists
largely in surprises, and still more in the attack and defence of fortified
places. The plan of William’s present campaign was wholly
defensive; provisions and cattle were to be carried out of the French
line of march; the Duke on his side, the other Norman leaders on the
other side, were to watch the enemy and attack them at any favourable
moment. The commanders east of the Seine, Count Robert of Eu,
Hugh of Gournay, William Crispin, and Walter Giffard, found their opportunity
when the French had entered the unfortified town of Mortemer and had
given themselves up to revelry. Fire and sword did the work.
The whole French army was slain, scattered, or taken prisoners.
Ode escaped; Guy of Ponthieu was taken. The Duke’s success
was still easier. The tale runs that the news from Mortemer, suddenly
announced to the King’s army in the dead of the night, struck
them with panic, and led to a hasty retreat out of the land.</p>
<p>This campaign is truly Norman; it is wholly unlike the simple warfare
of England. A traitorous Englishman did nothing or helped the
enemy; a patriotic Englishman gave battle to the enemy the first time
he had a chance. But no English commander of the eleventh century
was likely to lay so subtle a plan as this, and, if he had laid such
a plan, he would hardly have found an English army able to carry it
out. Harold, who refused to lay waste a rood of English ground,
would hardly have looked quietly on while many roods of English ground
were wasted by the enemy. With all the valour of the Normans,
what before all things distinguished them from other nations was their
craft. William could indeed fight a pitched battle when a pitched
battle served his purpose; but he could control himself, he could control
his followers, even to the point of enduring to look quietly on the
havoc of their own land till the right moment. He who could do
this was indeed practising for his calling as Conqueror. And if
the details of the story, details specially characteristic, are to be
believed, William showed something also of that grim pleasantry which
was another marked feature in the Norman character. The startling
message which struck the French army with panic was deliberately sent
with that end. The messenger sent climbs a tree or a rock, and,
with a voice as from another world, bids the French awake; they are
sleeping too long; let them go and bury their friends who are lying
dead at Mortemer. These touches bring home to us the character
of the man and the people with whom our forefathers had presently to
deal. William was the greatest of his race, but he was essentially
of his race; he was Norman to the backbone.</p>
<p>Of the French army one division had been surprised and cut to pieces,
the other had left Normandy without striking a blow. The war was
not yet quite over; the French still kept Tillières; William
accordingly fortified the stronghold of Breteuil as a cheek upon it.
And he entrusted the command to a man who will soon be memorable, his
personal friend William, son of his old guardian Osbern. King
Henry was now glad to conclude a peace on somewhat remarkable terms.
William had the king’s leave to take what he could from Count
Geoffrey of Anjou. He now annexed Cenomannian—that is just
now Angevin—territory at more points than one, but chiefly on
the line of his earlier advances to Domfront and Ambrières.
Ambrières had perhaps been lost; for William now sent Geoffrey
a challenge to come on the fortieth day. He came on the fortieth
day, and found Ambrières strongly fortified and occupied by a
Norman garrison. With Geoffrey came the Breton prince Ode, and
William or Peter Duke of Aquitaine. They besieged the castle;
but Norman accounts add that they all fled on William’s approach
to relieve it.</p>
<p>Three years of peace now followed, but in 1058 King Henry, this time
in partnership with Geoffrey of Anjou, ventured another invasion of
Normandy. He might say that he had never been fairly beaten in
his former campaign, but that he had been simply cheated out of the
land by Norman wiles. This time he had a second experience of
Norman wiles and of Norman strength too. King and Count entered
the land and ravaged far and wide. William, as before, allowed
the enemy to waste the land. He watched and followed them till
he found a favourable moment for attack. The people in general
zealously helped the Duke’s schemes, but some traitors of rank
were still leagued with the Count of Anjou. While William bided
his time, the invaders burned Caen. This place, so famous in Norman
history, was not one of the ancient cities of the land. It was
now merely growing into importance, and it was as yet undefended by
walls or castle. But when the ravagers turned eastward, William
found the opportunity that he had waited for. As the French were
crossing the ford of Varaville on the Dive, near the mouth of that river,
he came suddenly on them, and slaughtered a large part of the army under
the eyes of the king who had already crossed. The remnant marched
out of Normandy.</p>
<p>Henry now made peace, and restored Tillières. Not long
after, in 1060, the King died, leaving his young son Philip, who had
been already crowned, as his successor, under the guardianship of William’s
father-in-law Baldwin. Geoffrey of Anjou and William of Aquitaine
also died, and the Angevin power was weakened by the division of Geoffrey’s
dominions between his nephews. William’s position was greatly
strengthened, now that France, under the new regent, had become friendly,
while Anjou was no longer able to do mischief. William had now
nothing to fear from his neighbours, and the way was soon opened for
his great continental conquest. But what effect had these events
on William’s views on England? About the time of the second
French invasion of Normandy Earl Harold became beyond doubt the first
man in England, and for the first time a chance of the royal succession
was opened to him. In 1057, the year before Varaville, the Ætheling
Edward, the King’s selected successor, died soon after his coming
to England; in the same year died the King’s nephew Earl Ralph
and Leofric Earl of the Mercians, the only Englishmen whose influence
could at all compare with that of Harold. Harold’s succession
now became possible; it became even likely, if Edward should die while
Edgar the son of the Ætheling was still under age. William
had no shadow of excuse for interfering, but he doubtless was watching
the internal affairs of England. Harold was certainly watching
the affairs of Gaul. About this time, most likely in the year
1058, he made a pilgrimage to Rome, and on his way back he looked diligently
into the state of things among the various vassals of the French crown.
His exact purpose is veiled in ambiguous language; but we can hardly
doubt that his object was to contract alliances with the continental
enemies of Normandy. Such views looked to the distant future,
as William had as yet been guilty of no unfriendly act towards England.
But it was well to come to an understanding with King Henry, Count Geoffrey,
and Duke William of Aquitaine, in case a time should come when their
interests and those of England would be the same. But the deaths
of all those princes must have put an end to all hopes of common action
between England and any Gaulish power. The Emperor Henry also,
the firm ally of England, was dead. It was now clear that, if
England should ever have to withstand a Norman attack, she would have
to withstand it wholly by her own strength, or with such help as she
might find among the kindred powers of the North.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>William’s great continental conquest is drawing nigh; but between
the campaign of Varaville and the campaign of Le Mans came the tardy
papal confirmation of William’s marriage. The Duke and Duchess,
now at last man and wife in the eye of the Church, began to carry out
the works of penance which were allotted to them. The abbeys of
Caen, William’s Saint Stephen’s, Matilda’s Holy Trinity,
now began to arise. Yet, at this moment of reparation, one or
two facts seem to place William’s government of his duchy in a
less favourable light than usual. The last French invasion was
followed by confiscations and banishments among the chief men of Normandy.
Roger of Montgomery and his wife Mabel, who certainly was capable of
any deed of blood or treachery, are charged with acting as false accusers.
We see also that, as late as the day of Varaville, there were Norman
traitors. Robert of Escalfoy had taken the Angevin side, and had
defended his castle against the Duke. He died in a strange way,
after snatching an apple from the hand of his own wife. His nephew
Arnold remained in rebellion three years, and was simply required to
go to the wars in Apulia. It is hard to believe that the Duke
had poisoned the apple, if poisoned it was; but finding treason still
at work among his nobles, he may have too hastily listened to charges
against men who had done him good service, and who were to do him good
service again.</p>
<p>Five years after the combat at Varaville, William really began to
deserve, though not as yet to receive, the name of Conqueror.
For he now did a work second only to the conquest of England.
He won the city of Le Mans and the whole land of Maine. Between
the tale of Maine and the tale of England there is much of direct likeness.
Both lands were won against the will of their inhabitants; but both
conquests were made with an elaborate show of legal right. William’s
earlier conquests in Maine had been won, not from any count of Maine,
but from Geoffrey of Anjou, who had occupied the country to the prejudice
of two successive counts, Hugh and Herbert. He had further imprisoned
the Bishop of Le Mans, Gervase of the house of Bellême, though
the King of the French had at his request granted to the Count of Anjou
for life royal rights over the bishopric of Le Mans. The bishops
of Le Mans, who thus, unlike the bishops of Normandy, held their temporalities
of the distant king and not of the local count, held a very independent
position. The citizens of Le Mans too had large privileges and
a high spirit to defend them; the city was in a marked way the head
of the district. Thus it commonly carried with it the action of
the whole country. In Maine there were three rival powers, the
prince, the Church, and the people. The position of the counts
was further weakened by the claims to their homage made by the princes
on either side of them in Normandy and Anjou; the position of the Bishop,
vassal, till Gervase’s late act, of the King only, was really
a higher one. Geoffrey had been received at Le Mans with the good
will of the citizens, and both Bishop and Count sought shelter with
William. Gervase was removed from the strife by promotion to the
highest place in the French kingdom, the archbishopric of Rheims.
The young Count Herbert, driven from his county, commended himself to
William. He became his man; he agreed to hold his dominions of
him, and to marry one of his daughters. If he died childless,
his father-in-law was to take the fief into his own hands. But
to unite the old and new dynasties, Herbert’s youngest sister
Margaret was to marry William’s eldest son Robert. If female
descent went for anything, it is not clear why Herbert passed by the
rights of his two elder sisters, Gersendis, wife of Azo Marquess of
Liguria, and Paula, wife of John of La Flèche on the borders
of Maine and Anjou. And sons both of Gersendis and of Paula did
actually reign at Le Mans, while no child either of Herbert or of Margaret
ever came into being.</p>
<p>If Herbert ever actually got possession of his country, his possession
of it was short. He died in 1063 before either of the contemplated
marriages had been carried out. William therefore stood towards
Maine as he expected to stand with regard to England. The sovereign
of each country had made a formal settlement of his dominions in his
favour. It was to be seen whether those who were most immediately
concerned would accept that settlement. Was the rule either of
Maine or of England to be handed over in this way, like a mere property,
without the people who were to be ruled speaking their minds on the
matter? What the people of England said to this question in 1066
we shall hear presently; what the people of Maine said in 1063 we hear
now. We know not why they had submitted to the Angevin count;
they had now no mind to merge their country in the dominions of the
Norman duke. The Bishop was neutral; but the nobles and the citizens
of Le Mans were of one mind in refusing William’s demand to be
received as count by virtue of the agreement with Herbert. They
chose rulers for themselves. Passing by Gersendis and Paula and
their sons, they sent for Herbert’s aunt Biota and her husband
Walter Count of Mantes. Strangely enough, Walter, son of Godgifu
daughter of Æthelred, was a possible, though not a likely, candidate
for the rule of England as well as of Maine. The people of Maine
are not likely to have thought of this bit of genealogy. But it
was doubtless present to the minds alike of William and of Harold.</p>
<p>William thus, for the first but not for the last time, claimed the
rule of a people who had no mind to have him as their ruler. Yet,
morally worthless as were his claims over Maine, in the merely technical
way of looking at things, he had more to say than most princes have
who annex the lands of their neighbours. He had a perfectly good
right by the terms of the agreement with Herbert. And it might
be argued by any who admitted the Norman claim to the homage of Maine,
that on the failure of male heirs the country reverted to the overlord.
Yet female succession was now coming in. Anjou had passed to the
sons of Geoffrey’s sister; it had not fallen back to the French
king. There was thus a twofold answer to William’s claim,
that Herbert could not grant away even the rights of his sisters, still
less the rights of his people. Still it was characteristic of
William that he had a case that might be plausibly argued. The
people of Maine had fallen back on the old Teutonic right. They
had chosen a prince connected with the old stock, but who was not the
next heir according to any rule of succession. Walter was hardly
worthy of such an exceptional honour; he showed no more energy in Maine
than his brother Ralph had shown in England. The city was defended
by Geoffrey, lord of Mayenne, a valiant man who fills a large place
in the local history. But no valour or skill could withstand William’s
plan of warfare. He invaded Maine in much the same sort in which
he had defended Normandy. He gave out that he wished to win Maine
without shedding man’s blood. He fought no battles; he did
not attack the city, which he left to be the last spot that should be
devoured. He harried the open country, he occupied the smaller
posts, till the citizens were driven, against Geoffrey’s will,
to surrender. William entered Le Mans; he was received, we are
told, with joy. When men make the best of a bad bargain, they
sometimes persuade themselves that they are really pleased. William,
as ever, shed no blood; he harmed none of the men who had become his
subjects; but Le Mans was to be bridled; its citizens needed a castle
and a Norman garrison to keep them in their new allegiance. Walter
and Biota surrendered their claims on Maine and became William’s
guests at Falaise. Meanwhile Geoffrey of Mayenne refused to submit,
and withstood the new Count of Maine in his stronghold. William
laid siege to Mayenne, and took it by the favoured Norman argument of
fire. All Maine was now in the hands of the Conqueror.</p>
<p>William had now made a greater conquest than any Norman duke had
made before him. He had won a county and a noble city, and he
had won them, in the ideas of his own age, with honour. Are we
to believe that he sullied his conquest by putting his late competitors,
his present guests, to death by poison? They died conveniently
for him, and they died in his own house. Such a death was strange;
but strange things do happen. William gradually came to shrink
from no crime for which he could find a technical defence; but no advocate
could have said anything on behalf of the poisoning of Walter and Biota.
Another member of the house of Maine, Margaret the betrothed of his
son Robert, died about the same time; and her at least William had every
motive to keep alive. One who was more dangerous than Walter,
if he suffered anything, only suffered banishment. Of Geoffrey
of Mayenne we hear no more till William had again to fight for the possession
of Maine.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>William had thus, in the year 1063, reached the height of his power
and fame as a continental prince. In a conquest on Gaulish soil
he had rehearsed the greater conquest which he was before long to make
beyond sea. Three years, eventful in England, outwardly uneventful
in Normandy, still part us from William’s second visit to our
shores. But in the course of these three years one event must
have happened, which, without a blow being struck or a treaty being
signed, did more for his hopes than any battle or any treaty.
At some unrecorded time, but at a time which must come within these
years, Harold Earl of the West-Saxons became the guest and the man of
William Duke of the Normans.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER V—HAROLD’S OATH TO WILLIAM—A.D. 1064?</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The lord of Normandy and Maine could now stop and reckon his chances
of becoming lord of England also. While our authorities enable
us to put together a fairly full account of both Norman and English
events, they throw no light on the way in which men in either land looked
at events in the other. Yet we might give much to know what William
and Harold at this time thought of one another. Nothing had as
yet happened to make the two great rivals either national or personal
enemies. England and Normandy were at peace, and the great duke
and the great earl had most likely had no personal dealings with one
another. They were rivals in the sense that each looked forward
to succeed to the English crown whenever the reigning king should die.
But neither had as yet put forward his claim in any shape that the other
could look on as any formal wrong to himself. If William and Harold
had ever met, it could have been only during Harold’s journey
in Gaul. Whatever negotiations Harold made during that journey
were negotiations unfriendly to William; still he may, in the course
of that journey, have visited Normandy as well as France or Anjou.
It is hard to avoid the thought that the tale of Harold’s visit
to William, of his oath to William, arose out of something that happened
on Harold’s way back from his Roman pilgrimage. To that
journey we can give an approximate date. Of any other journey
we have no date and no certain detail. We can say only that the
fact that no English writer makes any mention of any such visit, of
any such oath, is, under the circumstances, the strongest proof that
the story of the visit and the oath has some kind of foundation.
Yet if we grant thus much, the story reads on the whole as if it happened
a few years later than the English earl’s return from Rome.</p>
<p>It is therefore most likely that Harold did pay a second visit to
Gaul, whether a first or a second visit to Normandy, at some time nearer
to Edward’s death than the year 1058. The English writers
are silent; the Norman writers give no date or impossible dates; they
connect the visit with a war in Britanny; but that war is without a
date. We are driven to choose the year which is least rich in
events in the English annals. Harold could not have paid a visit
of several months to Normandy either in 1063 or in 1065. Of those
years the first was the year of Harold’s great war in Wales, when
he found how the Britons might be overcome by their own arms, when he
broke the power of Gruffydd, and granted the Welsh kingdom to princes
who became the men of Earl Harold as well as of King Edward. Harold’s
visit to Normandy is said to have taken place in the summer and autumn
mouths; but the summer and autumn of 1065 were taken up by the building
and destruction of Harold’s hunting-seat in Wales and by the greater
events of the revolt and pacification of Northumberland. But the
year 1064 is a blank in the English annals till the last days of December,
and no action of Harold’s in that year is recorded. It is
therefore the only possible year among those just before Edward’s
death. Harold’s visit and oath to William may very well
have taken place in that year; but that is all.</p>
<p>We know as little for certain as to the circumstances of the visit
or the nature of the oath. We can say only that Harold did something
which enabled William to charge him with perjury and breach of the duty
of a vassal. It is inconceivable in itself, and unlike the formal
scrupulousness of William’s character, to fancy that he made his
appeal to all Christendom without any ground at all. The Norman
writers contradict one another so thoroughly in every detail of the
story that we can look on no part of it as trustworthy. Yet such
a story can hardly have grown up so near to the alleged time without
some kernel of truth in it. And herein comes the strong corroborative
witness that the English writers, denying every other charge against
Harold, pass this one by without notice. We can hardly doubt that
Harold swore some oath to William which he did not keep. More
than this it would be rash to say except as an avowed guess.</p>
<p>As our nearest approach to fixing the date is to take that year which
is not impossible, so, to fix the occasion of the visit, we can only
take that one among the Norman versions which is also not impossible.
All the main versions represent Harold as wrecked on the coast of Ponthieu,
as imprisoned, according to the barbarous law of wreck, by Count Guy,
and as delivered by the intervention of William. If any part of
the story is true, this is. But as to the circumstances which
led to the shipwreck there is no agreement. Harold assuredly was
not sent to announce to William a devise of the crown in his favour
made with the consent of the Witan of England and confirmed by the oaths
of Stigand, Godwine, Siward, and Leofric. Stigand became Archbishop
in September 1052: Godwine died at Easter 1053. The devise must
therefore have taken place, and Harold’s journey must have taken
place, within those few most unlikely months, the very time when Norman
influence was overthrown. Another version makes Harold go, against
the King’s warnings, to bring back his brother Wulfnoth and his
nephew Hakon, who had been given as hostages on the return of Godwine,
and had been entrusted by the King to the keeping of Duke William.
This version is one degree less absurd; but no such hostages are known
to have been given, and if they were, the patriotic party, in the full
swing of triumph, would hardly have allowed them to be sent to Normandy.
A third version makes Harold’s presence the result of mere accident.
He is sailing to Wales or Flanders, or simply taking his pleasure in
the Channel, when he is cast by a storm on the coast of Ponthieu.
Of these three accounts we may choose the third as the only one that
is possible. It is also one out of which the others may have grown,
while it is hard to see how the third could have arisen out of either
of the others. Harold then, we may suppose, fell accidentally
into the clutches of Guy, and was rescued from them, at some cost in
ransom and in grants of land, by Guy’s overlord Duke William.</p>
<p>The whole story is eminently characteristic of William. He
would be honestly indignant at Guy’s base treatment of Harold,
and he would feel it his part as Guy’s overlord to redress the
wrong. But he would also be alive to the advantage of getting
his rival into his power on so honourable a pretext. Simply to
establish a claim to gratitude on the part of Harold would be something.
But he might easily do more, and, according to all accounts, he did
more. Harold, we are told, as the Duke’s friend and guest,
returns the obligation under which the Duke has laid him by joining
him in one or more expeditions against the Bretons. The man who
had just smitten the Bret-Welsh of the island might well be asked to
fight, and might well be ready to fight, against the Bret-Welsh of the
mainland. The services of Harold won him high honour; he was admitted
into the ranks of Norman knighthood, and engaged to marry one of William’s
daughters. Now, at any time to which we can fix Harold’s
visit, all William’s daughters must have been mere children.
Harold, on the other hand, seems to have been a little older than William.
Yet there is nothing unlikely in the engagement, and it is the one point
in which all the different versions, contradicting each other on every
other point, agree without exception. Whatever else Harold promises,
he promises this, and in some versions he does not promise anything
else.</p>
<p>Here then we surely have the kernel of truth round which a mass of
fable, varying in different reports, has gathered. On no other
point is there any agreement. The place is unfixed; half a dozen
Norman towns and castles are made the scene of the oath. The form
of the oath is unfixed; in some accounts it is the ordinary oath of
homage; in others it is an oath of fearful solemnity, taken on the holiest
relics. In one well-known account, Harold is even made to swear
on hidden relics, not knowing on what he is swearing. Here is
matter for much thought. To hold that one form of oath or promise
is more binding than another upsets all true confidence between man
and man. The notion of the specially binding nature of the oath
by relies assumes that, in case of breach of the oath, every holy person
to whose relies despite has been done will become the personal enemy
of the perjurer. But the last story of all is the most instructive.
William’s formal, and more than formal, religion abhorred a false
oath, in himself or in another man. But, so long as he keeps himself
personally clear from the guilt, he does not scruple to put another
man under special temptation, and, while believing in the power of the
holy relics, he does not scruple to abuse them to a purpose of fraud.
Surely, if Harold did break his oath, the wrath of the saints would
fall more justly on William. Whether the tale be true or false,
it equally illustrates the feelings of the time, and assuredly its truth
or falsehood concerns the character of William far more than that of
Harold.</p>
<p>What it was that Harold swore, whether in this specially solemn fashion
or in any other, is left equally uncertain. In any case he engages
to marry a daughter of William—as to which daughter the statements
are endless—and in most versions he engages to do something more.
He becomes the man of William, much as William had become the man of
Edward. He promises to give his sister in marriage to an unnamed
Norman baron. Moreover he promises to secure the kingdom of England
for William at Edward’s death. Perhaps he is himself to
hold the kingdom or part of it under William; in any case William is
to be the overlord; in the more usual story, William is to be himself
the immediate king, with Harold as his highest and most favoured subject.
Meanwhile Harold is to act in William’s interest, to receive a
Norman garrison in Dover castle, and to build other castles at other
points. But no two stories agree, and not a few know nothing of
anything beyond the promise of marriage.</p>
<p>Now if William really required Harold to swear to all these things,
it must have been simply in order to have an occasion against him.
If Harold really swore to all of them, it must have been simply because
he felt that he was practically in William’s power, without any
serious intention of keeping the oath. If Harold took any such
oath, he undoubtedly broke it; but we may safely say that any guilt
on his part lay wholly in taking the oath, not in breaking it.
For he swore to do what he could not do, and what it would have been
a crime to do, if he could. If the King himself could not dispose
of the crown, still less could the most powerful subject. Harold
could at most promise William his “vote and interest,” whenever
the election came. But no one can believe that even Harold’s
influence could have obtained the crown for William. His influence
lay in his being the embodiment of the national feeling; for him to
appear as the supporter of William would have been to lose the crown
for himself without gaining it for William. Others in England
and in Scandinavia would have been glad of it. And the engagements
to surrender Dover castle and the like were simply engagements on the
part of an English earl to play the traitor against England. If
William really called on Harold to swear to all this, he did so, not
with any hope that the oath would be kept, but simply to put his competitor
as far as possible in the wrong. But most likely Harold swore
only to something much simpler. Next to the universal agreement
about the marriage comes the very general agreement that Harold became
William’s man. In these two statements we have probably
the whole truth. In those days men took the obligation of homage
upon themselves very easily. Homage was no degradation, even in
the highest; a man often did homage to any one from whom he had received
any great benefit, and Harold had received a very great benefit from
William. Nor did homage to a new lord imply treason to the old
one. Harold, delivered by William from Guy’s dungeon, would
be eager to do for William any act of friendship. The homage would
be little more than binding himself in the strongest form so to do.
The relation of homage could be made to mean anything or nothing, as
might be convenient. The man might often understand it in one
sense and the lord in another. If Harold became the man of William,
he would look on the act as little more than an expression of good will
and gratitude towards his benefactor, his future father-in-law, his
commander in the Breton war. He would not look on it as forbidding
him to accept the English crown if it were offered to him. Harold,
the man of Duke William, might become a king, if he could, just as William,
the man of King Philip, might become a king, if he could. As things
went in those days, both the homage and the promise of marriage were
capable of being looked on very lightly.</p>
<p>But it was not in the temper or in the circumstances of William to
put any such easy meaning on either promise. The oath might, if
needful, be construed very strictly, and William was disposed to construe
it very strictly. Harold had not promised William a crown, which
was not his to promise; but he had promised to do that which might be
held to forbid him to take a crown which William held to be his own.
If the man owed his lord any duty at all, it was surely his duty not
to thwart his lord’s wishes in such a matter. If therefore,
when the vacancy of the throne came, Harold took the crown himself,
or even failed to promote William’s claim to it, William might
argue that he had not rightly discharged the duty of a man to his lord.
He could make an appeal to the world against the new king, as a perjured
man, who had failed to help his lord in the matter where his lord most
needed his help. And, if the oath really had been taken on relics
of special holiness, he could further appeal to the religious feelings
of the time against the man who had done despite to the saints.
If he should be driven to claim the crown by arms, he could give the
war the character of a crusade. All this in the end William did,
and all this, we may be sure, he looked forward to doing, when he caused
Harold to become his man. The mere obligation of homage would,
in the skilful hands of William and Lanfranc, be quite enough to work
on men’s minds, as William wished to work on them. To Harold
meanwhile and to those in England who heard the story, the engagement
would not seem to carry any of these consequences. The mere homage
then, which Harold could hardly refuse, would answer William’s
purpose nearly as well as any of these fuller obligations which Harold
would surely have refused. And when a man older than William engaged
to marry William’s child-daughter, we must bear in mind the lightness
with which such promises were made. William could not seriously
expect that this engagement would be kept, if anything should lead Harold
to another marriage. The promise was meant simply to add another
count to the charges against Harold when the time should come.
Yet on this point it is not clear that the oath was broken. Harold
undoubtedly married Ealdgyth, daughter of Ælfgar and widow of
Gruffydd, and not any daughter of William. But in one version
Harold is made to say that the daughter of William whom he had engaged
to marry was dead. And that one of William’s daughters did
die very early there seems little doubt.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Whatever William did Lanfranc no doubt at least helped to plan.
The Norman duke was subtle, but the Italian churchman was subtler still.
In this long series of schemes and negotiations which led to the conquest
of England, we are dealing with two of the greatest recorded masters
of statecraft. We may call their policy dishonest and immoral,
and so it was. But it was hardly more dishonest and immoral than
most of the diplomacy of later times. William’s object was,
without any formal breach of faith on his own part, to entrap Harold
into an engagement which might be understood in different senses, and
which, in the sense which William chose to put upon it, Harold was sure
to break. Two men, themselves of virtuous life, a rigid churchman
and a layman of unusual religious strictness, do not scruple to throw
temptation in the way of a fellow man in the hope that he will yield
to that temptation. They exact a promise, because the promise
is likely to be broken, and because its breach would suit their purposes.
Through all William’s policy a strong regard for formal right
as he chose to understand formal right, is not only found in company
with much practical wrong, but is made the direct instrument of carrying
out that wrong. Never was trap more cunningly laid than that in
which William now entangled Harold. Never was greater wrong done
without the breach of any formal precept of right. William and
Lanfranc broke no oath themselves, and that was enough for them.
But it was no sin in their eyes to beguile another into engagements
which he would understand in one way and they in another; they even,
as their admirers tell the story, beguile him into engagements at once
unlawful and impossible, because their interests would be promoted by
his breach of those engagements. William, in short, under the
spiritual guidance of Lanfranc, made Harold swear because he himself
would gain by being able to denounce Harold as perjured.</p>
<p>The moral question need not be further discussed; but we should greatly
like to know how far the fact of Harold’s oath, whatever its nature,
was known in England? On this point we have no trustworthy authority.
The English writers say nothing about the whole matter; to the Norman
writers this point was of no interest. No one mentions this point,
except Harold’s romantic biographer at the beginning of the thirteenth
century. His statements are of no value, except as showing how
long Harold’s memory was cherished. According to him, Harold
formally laid the matter before the Witan, and they unanimously voted
that the oath—more, in his version, than a mere oath of homage—was
not binding. It is not likely that such a vote was ever formally
passed, but its terms would only express what every Englishman would
feel. The oath, whatever its terms, had given William a great
advantage; but every Englishman would argue both that the oath, whatever
its terms, could not hinder the English nation from offering Harold
the crown, and that it could not bind Harold to refuse the crown if
it should be so offered.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER VI—THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM—JANUARY-OCTOBER
1066</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>If the time that has been suggested was the real time of Harold’s
oath to William, its fulfilment became a practical question in little
more than a year. How the year 1065 passed in Normandy we have
no record; in England its later months saw the revolt of Northumberland
against Harold’s brother Tostig, and the reconciliation which
Harold made between the revolters and the king to the damage of his
brother’s interests. Then came Edward’s sickness,
of which he died on January 5, 1066. He had on his deathbed recommended
Harold to the assembled Witan as his successor in the kingdom.
The candidate was at once elected. Whether William, Edgar, or
any other, was spoken of we know not; but as to the recommendation of
Edward and the consequent election of Harold the English writers are
express. The next day Edward was buried, and Harold was crowned
in regular form by Ealdred Archbishop of York in Edward’s new
church at Westminster. Northumberland refused to acknowledge him;
but the malcontents were won over by the coming of the king and his
friend Saint Wulfstan Bishop of Worcester. It was most likely
now, as a seal of this reconciliation, that Harold married Ealdgyth,
the sister of the two northern earls Edwin and Morkere, and the widow
of the Welsh king Gruffydd. He doubtless hoped in this way to
win the loyalty of the earls and their followers.</p>
<p>The accession of Harold was perfectly regular according to English
law. In later times endless fables arose; but the Norman writers
of the time do not deny the facts of the recommendation, election, and
coronation. They slur them over, or, while admitting the mere
facts, they represent each act as in some way invalid. No writer
near the time asserts a deathbed nomination of William; they speak only
of a nomination at some earlier time. But some Norman writers
represent Harold as crowned by Stigand Archbishop of Canterbury.
This was not, in the ideas of those times, a trifling question.
A coronation was then not a mere pageant; it was the actual admission
to the kingly office. Till his crowning and anointing, the claimant
of the crown was like a bishop-elect before his consecration.
He had, by birth or election, the sole right to become king; it was
the coronation that made him king. And as the ceremony took the
form of an ecclesiastical sacrament, its validity might seem to depend
on the lawful position of the officiating bishop. In England to
perform that ceremony was the right and duty of the Archbishop of Canterbury;
but the canonical position of Stigand was doubtful. He had been
appointed on the flight of Robert; he had received the <i>pallium</i>,
the badge of arch-episcopal rank, only from the usurping Benedict the
Tenth. It was therefore good policy in Harold to be crowned by
Ealdred, to whose position there was no objection. This is the
only difference of fact between the English and Norman versions at this
stage. And the difference is easily explained. At William’s
coronation the king walked to the altar between the two archbishops,
but it was Ealdred who actually performed the ceremony. Harold’s
coronation doubtless followed the same order. But if Stigand took
any part in that coronation, it was easy to give out that he took that
special part on which the validity of the rite depended.</p>
<p>Still, if Harold’s accession was perfectly lawful, it was none
the less strange and unusual. Except the Danish kings chosen under
more or less of compulsion, he was the first king who did not belong
to the West-Saxon kingly house. Such a choice could be justified
only on the ground that that house contained no qualified candidate.
Its only known members were the children of the Ætheling Edward,
young Edgar and his sisters. Now Edgar would certainly have been
passed by in favour of any better qualified member of the kingly house,
as his father had been passed by in favour of King Edward. And
the same principle would, as things stood, justify passing him by in
favour of a qualified candidate not of the kingly house. But Edgar’s
right to the crown is never spoken of till a generation or two later,
when the doctrines of hereditary right had gained much greater strength,
and when Henry the Second, great-grandson through his mother of Edgar’s
sister Margaret, insisted on his descent from the old kings. This
distinction is important, because Harold is often called an usurper,
as keeping out Edgar the heir by birth. But those who called him
an usurper at the time called him so as keeping out William the heir
by bequest. William’s own election was out of the question.
He was no more of the English kingly house than Harold; he was a foreigner
and an utter stranger. Had Englishmen been minded to choose a
foreigner, they doubtless would have chosen Swegen of Denmark.
He had found supporters when Edward was chosen; he was afterwards appealed
to to deliver England from William. He was no more of the English
kingly house than Harold or William; but he was grandson of a man who
had reigned over England, Northumberland might have preferred him to
Harold; any part of England would have preferred him to William.
In fact any choice that could have been made must have had something
strange about it. Edgar himself, the one surviving male of the
old stock, besides his youth, was neither born in the land nor the son
of a crowned king. Those two qualifications had always been deemed
of great moment; an elaborate pedigree went for little; actual royal
birth went for a great deal. There was now no son of a king to
choose. Had there been even a child who was at once a son of Edward
and a sister’s son of Harold, he might have reigned with his uncle
as his guardian and counsellor. As it was, there was nothing to
do but to choose the man who, though not of kingly blood, had ruled
England well for thirteen years.</p>
<p>The case thus put seemed plain to every Englishman, at all events
to every man in Wessex, East-Anglia, and southern Mercia. But
it would not seem so plain in <i>other</i> lands. To the greater
part of Western Europe William’s claim might really seem the better.
William himself doubtless thought his own claim the better; he deluded
himself as he deluded others. But we are more concerned with William
as a statesman; and if it be statesmanship to adapt means to ends, whatever
the ends may be, if it be statesmanship to make men believe that the
worse cause is the better, then no man ever showed higher statesmanship
than William showed in his great pleading before all Western Christendom.
It is a sign of the times that it was a pleading before all Western
Christendom. Others had claimed crowns; none had taken such pains
to convince all mankind that the claim was a good one. Such an
appeal to public opinion marks on one side a great advance. It
was a great step towards the ideas of International Law and even of
European concert. It showed that the days of mere force were over,
that the days of subtle diplomacy had begun. Possibly the change
was not without its dark side; it may be doubted whether a change from
force to fraud is wholly a gain. Still it was an appeal from the
mere argument of the sword to something which at least professed to
be right and reason. William does not draw the sword till he has
convinced himself and everybody else that he is drawing it in a just
cause. In that age the appeal naturally took a religious shape.
Herein lay its immediate strength; herein lay its weakness as regarded
the times to come. William appealed to Emperor, kings, princes,
Christian men great and small, in every Christian land. He would
persuade all; he would ask help of all. But above all he appealed
to the head of Christendom, the Bishop of Rome. William in his
own person could afford to do so; where he reigned, in Normandy or in
England, there was no fear of Roman encroachments; he was fully minded
to be in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme.
While he lived, no Pope ventured to dispute his right. But by
acknowledging the right of the Pope to dispose of crowns, or at least
to judge as to the right to crowns, he prepared many days of humiliation
for kings in general and specially for his own successors. One
man in Western Europe could see further than William, perhaps even further
than Lanfranc. The chief counsellor of Pope Alexander the Second
was the Archdeacon Hildebrand, the future Gregory the Seventh.
If William outwitted the world, Hildebrand outwitted William.
William’s appeal to the Pope to decide between two claimants for
the English crown strengthened Gregory not a little in his daring claim
to dispose of the crowns of Rome, of Italy, and of Germany. Still
this recognition of Roman claims led more directly to the humiliation
of William’s successor in his own kingdom. Moreover William’s
successful attempt to represent his enterprise as a holy war, a crusade
before crusades were heard of, did much to suggest and to make ready
the way for the real crusades a generation later. It was not till
after William’s death that Urban preached the crusade, but it
was during William’s life that Gregory planned it.</p>
<p>The appeal was strangely successful. William convinced, or
seemed to convince, all men out of England and Scandinavia that his
claim to the English crown was just and holy, and that it was a good
work to help him to assert it in arms. He persuaded his own subjects;
he certainly did not constrain them. He persuaded some foreign
princes to give him actual help, some to join his muster in person;
he persuaded all to help him so far as not to hinder their subjects
from joining him as volunteers. And all this was done by sheer
persuasion, by argument good or bad. In adapting of means to ends,
in applying to each class of men that kind of argument which best suited
it, the diplomacy, the statesmanship, of William was perfect.
Again we ask, How far was it the statesmanship of William, how far of
Lanfranc? But a prince need not do everything with his own hands
and say everything with his own tongue. It was no small part of
the statesmanship of William to find out Lanfranc, to appreciate him
and to trust him. And when two subtle brains were at work, more
could be done by the two working in partnership than by either working
alone.</p>
<p>By what arguments did the Duke of the Normans and the Prior of Bec
convince mankind that the worse cause was the better? We must
always remember the transitional character of the age. England
was in political matters in advance of other Western lands; that is,
it lagged behind other Western lands. It had not gone so far on
the downward course. It kept far more than Gaul or even Germany
of the old Teutonic institutions, the substance of which later ages
have won back under new shapes. Many things were understood in
England which are now again understood everywhere, but which were no
longer understood in France or in the lands held of the French crown.
The popular election of kings comes foremost. Hugh Capet was an
elective king as much as Harold; but the French kings had made their
crown the most strictly hereditary of all crowns. They avoided
any interregnum by having their sons crowned in their lifetime.
So with the great fiefs of the crown. The notion of kingship as
an office conferred by the nation, of a duchy or county as an office
held under the king, was still fully alive in England; in Gaul it was
forgotten. Kingdom, duchies, counties, had all become possessions
instead of offices, possessions passing by hereditary succession of
some kind. But no rule of hereditary succession was universally
or generally accepted. To this day the kingdoms of Europe differ
as to the question of female succession, and it is but slowly that the
doctrine of representation has ousted the more obvious doctrine of nearness
of kin. All these points were then utterly unsettled; crowns,
save of course that of the Empire, were to pass by hereditary right;
only what was hereditary right? At such a time claims would be
pressed which would have seemed absurd either earlier or later.
To Englishmen, if it seemed strange to elect one who was not of the
stock of Cerdic, it seemed much more strange to be called on to accept
without election, or to elect as a matter of course, one who was not
of the stock of Cerdic and who was a stranger into the bargain.
Out of England it would not seem strange when William set forth that
Edward, having no direct heirs, had chosen his near kinsman William
as his successor. Put by itself, that statement had a plausible
sound. The transmission of a crown by bequest belongs to the same
range of ideas as its transmission by hereditary right; both assume
the crown to be a property and not an office. Edward’s nomination
of Harold, the election of Harold, the fact that William’s kindred
to Edward lay outside the royal line of England, the fact that there
was, in the person of Edgar, a nearer kinsman within that royal line,
could all be slurred over or explained away or even turned to William’s
profit. Let it be that Edward on his death-bed had recommended
Harold, and that the Witan had elected Harold. The recommendation
was wrung from a dying man in opposition to an earlier act done when
he was able to act freely. The election was brought about by force
or fraud; if it was free, it was of no force against William’s
earlier claim of kindred and bequest. As for Edgar, as few people
in England thought of him, still fewer out of England would have ever
heard of him. It is more strange that the bastardy of William
did not tell against him, as it had once told in his own duchy.
But this fact again marks the transitional age. Altogether the
tale that a man who was no kinsman of the late king had taken to himself
the crown which the king had bequeathed to a kinsman, might, even without
further aggravation, be easily made to sound like a tale of wrong.</p>
<p>But the case gained tenfold strength when William added that the
doer of the wrong was of all men the one most specially bound not to
do it. The usurper was in any case William’s man, bound
to act in all things for his lord. Perhaps he was more; perhaps
he had directly sworn to receive William as king. Perhaps he had
promised all this with an oath of special solemnity. It would
be easy to enlarge on all these further counts as making up an amount
of guilt which William not only had the right to chastise, but which
he would be lacking in duty if he failed to chastise. He had to
punish the perjurer, to avenge the wrongs of the saints. Surely
all who should help him in so doing would be helping in a righteous
work.</p>
<p>The answer to all this was obvious. Putting the case at the
very worst, assuming that Harold had sworn all that he is ever said
to have sworn, assuming that he swore it in the most solemn way in which
he is ever said to have sworn it, William’s claim was not thereby
made one whit better. Whatever Harold’s own guilt might
be, the people of England had no share in it. Nothing that Harold
had done could bar their right to choose their king freely. Even
if Harold declined the crown, that would not bind the electors to choose
William. But when the notion of choosing kings had begun to sound
strange, all this would go for nothing. There would be no need
even to urge that in any case the wrong done by Harold to William gave
William a <i>casus belli</i> against Harold, and that William, if victorious,
might claim the crown of England, as a possession of Harold’s,
by right of conquest. In fact William never claimed the crown
by conquest, as conquest is commonly understood. He always represented
himself as the lawful heir, unhappily driven to use force to obtain
his rights. The other pleas were quite enough to satisfy most
men out of England and Scandinavia. William’s work was to
claim the crown of which he was unjustly deprived, and withal to deal
out a righteous chastisement on the unrighteous and ungodly man by whom
he had been deprived of it.</p>
<p>In the hands of diplomatists like William and Lanfranc, all these
arguments, none of which had in itself the slightest strength, were
enough to turn the great mass of continental opinion in William’s
favour. But he could add further arguments specially adapted to
different classes of minds. He could hold out the prospect of
plunder, the prospect of lands and honours in a land whose wealth was
already proverbial. It might of course be answered that the enterprise
against England was hazardous and its success unlikely. But in
such matters, men listen rather to their hopes than to their fears.
To the Normans it would be easy, not only to make out a case against
Harold, but to rake up old grudges against the English nation.
Under Harold the son of Cnut, Alfred, a prince half Norman by birth,
wholly Norman by education, the brother of the late king, the lawful
heir to the crown, had been betrayed and murdered by somebody.
A widespread belief laid the deed to the charge of the father of the
new king. This story might easily be made a ground of national
complaint by Normandy against England, and it was easy to infer that
Harold had some share in the alleged crime of Godwine. It was
easy to dwell on later events, on the driving of so many Normans out
of England, with Archbishop Robert at their head. Nay, not only
had the lawful primate been driven out, but an usurper had been set
in his place, and this usurping archbishop had been made to bestow a
mockery of consecration on the usurping king. The proposed aggression
on England was even represented as a missionary work, undertaken for
the good of the souls of the benighted islanders. For, though
the English were undoubtedly devout after their own fashion, there was
much in the ecclesiastical state of England which displeased strict
churchmen beyond sea, much that William, when he had the power, deemed
it his duty to reform. The insular position of England naturally
parted it in many things from the usages and feelings of the mainland,
and it was not hard to get up a feeling against the nation as well as
against its king. All this could not really strengthen William’s
claim; but it made men look more favourably on his enterprise.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The fact that the Witan were actually in session at Edward’s
death had made it possible to carry out Harold’s election and
coronation with extreme speed. The electors had made their choice
before William had any opportunity of formally laying his claim before
them. This was really an advantage to him; he could the better
represent the election and coronation as invalid. His first step
was of course to send an embassy to Harold to call on him even now to
fulfil his oath. The accounts of this embassy, of which we have
no English account, differ as much as the different accounts of the
oath. Each version of course makes William demand and Harold refuse
whatever it had made Harold swear. These demands and refusals
range from the resignation of the kingdom to a marriage with William’s
daughter. And it is hard to separate this embassy from later messages
between the rivals. In all William demands, Harold refuses; the
arguments on each side are likely to be genuine. Harold is called
on to give up the crown to William, to hold it of William, to hold part
of the kingdom of William, to submit the question to the judgement of
the Pope, lastly, if he will do nothing else, at least to marry William’s
daughter. Different writers place these demands at different times,
immediately after Harold’s election or immediately before the
battle. The last challenge to a single combat between Harold and
William of course appears only on the eve of the battle. Now none
of these accounts come from contemporary partisans of Harold; every
one is touched by hostile feeling towards him. Thus the constitutional
language that is put into his mouth, almost startling from its modern
sound, has greater value. A King of the English can do nothing
without the consent of his Witan. They gave him the kingdom; without
their consent, he cannot resign it or dismember it or agree to hold
it of any man; without their consent, he cannot even marry a foreign
wife. Or he answers that the daughter of William whom he promised
to marry is dead, and that the sister whom he promised to give to a
Norman is dead also. Harold does not deny the fact of his oath—whatever
its nature; he justifies its breach because it was taken against is
will, and because it was in itself of no strength, as binding him to
do impossible things. He does not deny Edward’s earlier
promise to William; but, as a testament is of no force while the testator
liveth, he argues that it is cancelled by Edward’s later nomination
of himself. In truth there is hardly any difference between the
disputants as to matters of fact. One side admits at least a plighting
of homage on the part of Harold; the other side admits Harold’s
nomination and election. The real difference is as to the legal
effect of either. Herein comes William’s policy. The
question was one of English law and of nothing else, a matter for the
Witan of England and for no other judges. William, by ingeniously
mixing all kinds of irrelevant issues, contrived to remove the dispute
from the region of municipal into that of international law, a law whose
chief representative was the Bishop of Rome. By winning the Pope
to his side, William could give his aggression the air of a religious
war; but in so doing, he unwittingly undermined the throne that he was
seeking and the thrones of all other princes.</p>
<p>The answers which Harold either made, or which writers of his time
thought that he ought to have made, are of the greatest moment in our
constitutional history. The King is the doer of everything; but
he can do nothing of moment without the consent of his Witan.
They can say Yea or Nay to every proposal of the King. An energetic
and popular king would get no answer but Yea to whatever he chose to
ask. A king who often got the answer of Nay, Nay, was in great
danger of losing his kingdom. The statesmanship of William knew
how to turn this constitutional system, without making any change in
the letter, into a despotism like that of Constantinople or Cordova.
But the letter lived, to come to light again on occasion. The
Revolution of 1399 was a falling back on the doctrines of 1066, and
the Revolution of 1688 was a falling back on the doctrines of 1399.
The principle at all three periods is that the power of the King is
strictly limited by law, but that, within the limits which the law sets
to his power, he acts according to his own discretion. King and
Witan stand out as distinct powers, each of which needs the assent of
the other to its acts, and which may always refuse that assent.
The political work of the last two hundred years has been to hinder
these direct collisions between King and Parliament by the ingenious
conventional device of a body of men who shall be in name the ministers
of the Crown, but in truth the ministers of one House of Parliament.
We do not understand our own political history, still less can we understand
the position and the statesmanship of the Conqueror, unless we fully
take in what the English constitution in the eleventh century really
was, how very modern-sounding are some of its doctrines, some of its
forms. Statesmen of our own day might do well to study the meagre
records of the Gemót of 1047. There is the earliest recorded
instance of a debate on a question of foreign policy. Earl Godwine
proposes to give help to Denmark, then at war with Norway. He
is outvoted on the motion of Earl Leofric, the man of moderate politics,
who appears as leader of the party of non-intervention. It may
be that in some things we have not always advanced in the space of eight
hundred years.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The negotiations of William with his own subjects, with foreign powers,
and with the Pope, are hard to arrange in order. Several negotiations
were doubtless going on at the same time. The embassy to Harold
would of course come first of all. Till his demand had been made
and refused, William could make no appeal elsewhere. We know not
whether the embassy was sent before or after Harold’s journey
to Northumberland, before or after his marriage with Ealdgyth.
If Harold was already married, the demand that he should marry William’s
daughter could have been meant only in mockery. Indeed, the whole
embassy was so far meant in mockery that it was sent without any expectation
that its demands would be listened to. It was sent to put Harold,
from William’s point of view, more thoroughly in the wrong, and
to strengthen William’s case against him. It would therefore
be sent at the first moment; the only statement, from a very poor authority
certainly, makes the embassy come on the tenth day after Edward’s
death. Next after the embassy would come William’s appeal
to his own subjects, though Lanfranc might well be pleading at Rome
while William was pleading at Lillebonne. The Duke first consulted
a select company, who promised their own services, but declined to pledge
any one else. It was held that no Norman was bound to follow the
Duke in an attempt to win for himself a crown beyond the sea.
But voluntary help was soon ready. A meeting of the whole baronage
of Normandy was held at Lillebonne. The assembly declined any
obligation which could be turned into a precedent, and passed no general
vote at all. But the barons were won over one by one, and each
promised help in men and ships according to his means.</p>
<p>William had thus, with some difficulty, gained the support of his
own subjects; but when he had once gained it, it was a zealous support.
And as the flame spread from one part of Europe to another, the zeal
of Normandy would wax keener and keener. The dealings of William
with foreign powers are told us in a confused, piecemeal, and sometimes
contradictory way. We hear that embassies went to the young King
Henry of Germany, son of the great Emperor, the friend of England, and
also to Swegen of Denmark. The Norman story runs that both princes
promised William their active support. Yet Swegen, the near kinsman
of Harold, was a friend of England, and the same writer who puts this
promise into his mouth makes him send troops to help his English cousin.
Young Henry or his advisers could have no motive for helping William;
but subjects of the Empire were at least not hindered from joining his
banner. To the French king William perhaps offered the bait of
holding the crown of England of him; but Philip is said to have discouraged
William’s enterprise as much as he could. Still he did not
hinder French subjects from taking a part in it. Of the princes
who held of the French crown, Eustace of Boulogne, who joined the muster
in person, and Guy of Ponthieu, William’s own vassal, who sent
his son, seem to have been the only ones who did more than allow the
levying of volunteers in their dominions. A strange tale is told
that Conan of Britanny took this moment for bringing up his own forgotten
pretensions to the Norman duchy. If William was going to win England,
let him give up Normandy to him. He presently, the tale goes,
died of a strange form of poisoning, in which it is implied that William
had a hand. This is the story of Walter and Biota over again.
It is perhaps enough to say that the Breton writers know nothing of
the tale.</p>
<p>But the great negotiation of all was with the Papal court.
We might have thought that the envoy would be Lanfranc, so well skilled
in Roman ways; but William perhaps needed him as a constant adviser
by his own person. Gilbert, Archdeacon of Lisieux, was sent to
Pope Alexander. No application could better suit papal interests
than the one that was now made; but there were some moral difficulties.
Not a few of the cardinals, Hildebrand tells us himself, argued, not
without strong language towards Hildebrand, that the Church had nothing
to do with such matters, and that it was sinful to encourage a claim
which could not be enforced without bloodshed. But with many,
with Hildebrand among them, the notion of the Church as a party or a
power came before all thoughts of its higher duties. One side
was carefully heard; the other seems not to have been heard at all.
We hear of no summons to Harold, and the King of the English could not
have pleaded at the Pope’s bar without acknowledging that his
case was at least doubtful. The judgement of Alexander or of Hildebrand
was given for William. Harold was declared to be an usurper, perhaps
declared excommunicated. The right to the English crown was declared
to be in the Duke of the Normans, and William was solemnly blessed in
the enterprise in which he was at once to win his own rights, to chastise
the wrong-doer, to reform the spiritual state of the misguided islanders,
to teach them fuller obedience to the Roman See and more regular payment
of its temporal dues. William gained his immediate point; but
his successors on the English throne paid the penalty. Hildebrand
gained his point for ever, or for as long a time as men might be willing
to accept the Bishop of Rome as a judge in any matters. The precedent
by which Hildebrand, under another name, took on him to dispose of a
higher crown than that of England was now fully established.</p>
<p>As an outward sign of papal favour, William received a consecrated
banner and a ring containing a hair of Saint Peter. Here was something
for men to fight for. The war was now a holy one. All who
were ready to promote their souls’ health by slaughter and plunder
might flock to William’s standard, to the standard of Saint Peter.
Men came from most French-speaking lands, the Normans of Apulia and
Sicily being of course not slow to take up the quarrel of their kinsfolk.
But, next to his own Normandy, the lands which sent most help were Flanders,
the land of Matilda, and Britanny, where the name of the Saxon might
still be hateful. We must never forget that the host of William,
the men who won England, the men who settled in England, were not an
exclusively Norman body. Not Norman, but <i>French</i>, is the
name most commonly opposed to <i>English</i>, as the name of the conquering
people. Each Norman severally would have scorned that name for
himself personally; but it was the only name that could mark the whole
of which he and his countrymen formed a part. Yet, if the Normans
were but a part, they were the greatest and the noblest part; their
presence alone redeemed the enterprise from being a simple enterprise
of brigandage. The Norman Conquest was after all a Norman Conquest;
men of other lands were merely helpers. So far as it was not Norman,
it was Italian; the subtle wit of Lombard Lanfranc and Tuscan Hildebrand
did as much to overthrow us as the lance and bow of Normandy.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER VII—WILLIAM’S INVASION OF ENGLAND—AUGUST-DECEMBER
1066</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The statesmanship of William had triumphed. The people of England
had chosen their king, and a large part of the world had been won over
by the arts of a foreign prince to believe that it was a righteous and
holy work to set him on the throne to which the English people had chosen
the foremost man among themselves. No diplomatic success was ever
more thorough. Unluckily we know nothing of the state of feeling
in England while William was plotting and pleading beyond the sea.
Nor do we know how much men in England knew of what was going on in
other lands, or what they thought when they heard of it. We know
only that, after Harold had won over Northumberland, he came back and
held the Easter Gemót at Westminster. Then in the words
of the Chronicler, “it was known to him that William Bastard,
King Edward’s kinsman, would come hither and win this land.”
This is all that our own writers tell us about William Bastard, between
his peaceful visit to England in 1052 and his warlike visit in 1066.
But we know that King Harold did all that man could do to defeat his
purposes, and that he was therein loyally supported by the great mass
of the English nation, we may safely say by all, save his two brothers-in-law
and so many as they could influence.</p>
<p>William’s doings we know more fully. The military events
of this wonderful year there is no need to tell in detail. But
we see that William’s generalship was equal to his statesmanship,
and that it was met by equal generalship on the side of Harold.
Moreover, the luck of William is as clear as either his statesmanship
or his generalship. When Harold was crowned on the day of the
Epiphany, he must have felt sure that he would have to withstand an
invasion of England before the year was out. But it could not
have come into the mind of Harold, William, or Lanfranc, or any other
man, that he would have to withstand two invasions of England at the
same moment.</p>
<p>It was the invasion of Harold of Norway, at the same time as the
invasion of William, which decided the fate of England. The issue
of the struggle might have gone against England, had she had to strive
against one enemy only; as it was, it was the attack made by two enemies
at once which divided her strength, and enabled the Normans to land
without resistance. The two invasions came as nearly as possible
at the same moment. Harold Hardrada can hardly have reached the
Yorkshire coast before September; the battle of Fulford was fought on
September 20th and that of Stamfordbridge on September 25th. William
landed on September 28th, and the battle of Senlac was fought on October
14th. Moreover William’s fleet was ready by August 12th;
his delay in crossing was owing to his waiting for a favourable wind.
When William landed, the event of the struggle in the North could not
have been known in Sussex. He might have had to strive, not with
Harold of England, but with Harold of Norway as his conqueror.</p>
<p>At what time of the year Harold Hardrada first planned his invasion
of England is quite uncertain. We can say nothing of his doings
till he is actually afloat. And with the three mighty forms of
William and the two Harolds on the scene, there is something at once
grotesque and perplexing in the way in which an English traitor flits
about among them. The banished Tostig, deprived of his earldom
in the autumn of 1065, had then taken refuge in Flanders. He now
plays a busy part, the details of which are lost in contradictory accounts.
But it is certain that in May 1066 he made an ineffectual attack on
England. And this attack was most likely made with the connivance
of William. It suited William to use Tostig as an instrument,
and to encourage so restless a spirit in annoying the common enemy.
It is also certain that Tostig was with the Norwegian fleet in September,
and that he died at Stamfordbridge. We know also that he was in
Scotland between May and September. It is therefore hard to believe
that Tostig had so great a hand in stirring up Harold Hardrada to his
expedition as the Norwegian story makes out. Most likely Tostig
simply joined the expedition which Harold Hardrada independently planned.
One thing is certain, that, when Harold of England was attacked by two
enemies at once, it was not by two enemies acting in concert.
The interests of William and of Harold of Norway were as much opposed
to one another as either of them was to the interests of Harold of England.</p>
<p>One great difficulty beset Harold and William alike. Either
in Normandy or in England it was easy to get together an army ready
to fight a battle; it was not easy to keep a large body of men under
arms for any long time without fighting. It was still harder to
keep them at once without fighting and without plundering. What
William had done in this way in two invasions of Normandy, he was now
called on to do on a greater scale. His great and motley army
was kept during a great part of August and September, first at the Dive,
then at Saint Valery, waiting for the wind that was to take it to England.
And it was kept without doing any serious damage to the lands where
they were encamped. In a holy war, this time was of course largely
spent in appeals to the religious feelings of the army. Then came
the wonderful luck of William, which enabled him to cross at the particular
moment when he did cross. A little earlier or later, he would
have found his landing stoutly disputed; as it was, he landed without
resistance. Harold of England, not being able, in his own words,
to be everywhere at once, had done what he could. He and his brothers
Gyrth and Leofwine undertook the defence of southern England against
the Norman; the earls of the North, his brothers-in-law Edwin and Morkere,
were to defend their own land against the Norwegians. His own
preparations were looked on with wonder. To guard the long line
of coast against the invader, he got together such a force both by sea
and land as no king had ever got together before, and he kept it together
for a longer time than William did, through four months of inaction,
save perhaps some small encounters by sea. At last, early in September,
provisions failed; men were no doubt clamouring to go back for the harvest,
and the great host had to be disbanded. Could William have sailed
as soon as his fleet was ready, he would have found southern England
thoroughly prepared to meet him. Meanwhile the northern earls
had clearly not kept so good watch as the king. Harold Hardrada
harried the Yorkshire coast; he sailed up the Ouse, and landed without
resistance. At last the earls met him in arms and were defeated
by the Northmen at Fulford near York. Four days later York capitulated,
and agreed to receive Harold Hardrada as king. Meanwhile the news
reached Harold of England; he got together his housecarls and such other
troops as could be mustered at the moment, and by a march of almost
incredible speed he was able to save the city and all northern England.
The fight of Stamfordbridge, the defeat and death of the most famous
warrior of the North, was the last and greatest success of Harold of
England. But his northward march had left southern England utterly
unprotected. Had the south wind delayed a little longer, he might,
before the second enemy came, have been again on the South-Saxon coast.
As it was, three days after Stamfordbridge, while Harold of England
was still at York, William of Normandy landed without opposition at
Pevensey.</p>
<p>Thus wonderfully had an easy path into England been opened for William.
The Norwegian invasion had come at the best moment for his purposes,
and the result had been what he must have wished. With one Harold
he must fight, and to fight with Harold of England was clearly best
for his ends. His work would not have been done, if another had
stepped in to chastise the perjurer. Now that he was in England,
it became a trial of generalship between him and Harold. William’s
policy was to provoke Harold to fight at once. It was perhaps
Harold’s policy—so at least thought Gyrth—to follow
yet more thoroughly William’s own example in the French invasions.
Let him watch and follow the enemy, let him avoid all action, and even
lay waste the land between London and the south coast, and the strength
of the invaders would gradually be worn out. But it might have
been hard to enforce such a policy on men whose hearts were stirred
by the invasion, and one part of whom, the King’s own thegns and
housecarls, were eager to follow up their victory over the Northern
with a yet mightier victory over the Norman. And Harold spoke
as an English king should speak, when he answered that he would never
lay waste a single rood of English ground, that he would never harm
the lands or the goods of the men who had chosen him to be their king.
In the trial of skill between the two commanders, each to some extent
carried his point. William’s havoc of a large part of Sussex
compelled Harold to march at once to give battle. But Harold was
able to give battle at a place of his own choosing, thoroughly suited
for the kind of warfare which he had to wage.</p>
<p>Harold was blamed, as defeated generals are blamed, for being too
eager to fight and not waiting for more troops. But to any one
who studies the ground it is plain that Harold needed, not more troops,
but to some extent better troops, and that he would not have got those
better troops by waiting. From York Harold had marched to London,
as the meeting-place for southern and eastern England, as well as for
the few who actually followed him from the North and those who joined
him on the march. Edwin and Morkere were bidden to follow with
the full force of their earldoms. This they took care not to do.
Harold and his West-Saxons had saved them, but they would not strike
a blow back again. Both now and earlier in the year they doubtless
aimed at a division of the kingdom, such as had been twice made within
fifty years. Either Harold or William might reign in Wessex and
East-Anglia; Edwin should reign in Northumberland and Mercia.
William, the enemy of Harold but no enemy of theirs, might be satisfied
with the part of England which was under the immediate rule of Harold
and his brothers, and might allow the house of Leofric to keep at least
an under-kingship in the North. That the brother earls held back
from the King’s muster is undoubted, and this explanation fits
in with their whole conduct both before and after. Harold had
thus at his command the picked men of part of England only, and he had
to supply the place of those who were lacking with such forces as he
could get. The lack of discipline on the part of these inferior
troops lost Harold the battle. But matters would hardly have been
mended by waiting for men who had made up their minds not to come.</p>
<p>The messages exchanged between King and Duke immediately before the
battle, as well as at an earlier time, have been spoken of already.
The challenge to single combat at least comes now. When Harold
refused every demand, William called on Harold to spare the blood of
his followers, and decide his claims by battle in his own person.
Such a challenge was in the spirit of Norman jurisprudence, which in
doubtful cases looked for the judgement of God, not, as the English
did, by the ordeal, but by the personal combat of the two parties.
Yet this challenge too was surely given in the hope that Harold would
refuse it, and would thereby put himself, in Norman eyes, yet more thoroughly
in the wrong. For the challenge was one which Harold could not
but refuse. William looked on himself as one who claimed his own
from one who wrongfully kept him out of it. He was plaintiff in
a suit in which Harold was defendant; that plaintiff and defendant were
both accompanied by armies was an accident for which the defendant,
who had refused all peaceful means of settlement, was to blame.
But Harold and his people could not look on the matter as a mere question
between two men. The crown was Harold’s by the gift of the
nation, and he could not sever his own cause from the cause of the nation.
The crown was his; but it was not his to stake on the issue of a single
combat. If Harold were killed, the nation might give the crown
to whom they thought good; Harold’s death could not make William’s
claim one jot better. The cause was not personal, but national.
The Norman duke had, by a wanton invasion, wronged, not the King only,
but every man in England, and every man might claim to help in driving
him out. Again, in an ordinary wager of battle, the judgement
can be enforced; here, whether William slew Harold or Harold slew William,
there was no means of enforcing the judgement except by the strength
of the two armies. If Harold fell, the English army were not likely
to receive William as king; if William fell, the Norman army was still
less likely to go quietly out of England. The challenge was meant
as a mere blind; it would raise the spirit of William’s followers;
it would be something for his poets and chroniclers to record in his
honour; that was all.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The actual battle, fought on Senlac, on Saint Calixtus’ day,
was more than a trial of skill and courage between two captains and
two armies. It was, like the old battles of Macedonian and Roman,
a trial between two modes of warfare. The English clave to the
old Teutonic tactics. They fought on foot in the close array of
the shield-wall. Those who rode to the field dismounted when the
fight began. They first hurled their javelins, and then took to
the weapons of close combat. Among these the Danish axe, brought
in by Cnut, had nearly displaced the older English broadsword.
Such was the array of the housecarls and of the thegns who had followed
Harold from York or joined him on his march. But the treason of
Edwin and Morkere had made it needful to supply the place of the picked
men of Northumberland with irregular levies, armed almost anyhow.
Of their weapons of various kinds the bow was the rarest. The
strength of the Normans lay in the arms in which the English were lacking,
in horsemen and archers. These last seem to have been a force
of William’s training; we first hear of the Norman bowmen at Varaville.
These two ways of fighting were brought each one to perfection by the
leaders on each side. They had not yet been tried against one
another. At Stamfordbridge Harold had defeated an enemy whose
tactics were the same as his own. William had not fought a pitched
battle since Val-ès-dunes in his youth. Indeed pitched
battles, such as English and Scandinavian warriors were used to in the
wars of Edmund and Cnut, were rare in continental warfare. That
warfare mainly consisted in the attack and defence of strong places,
and in skirmishes fought under their walls. But William knew how
to make use of troops of different kinds and to adapt them to any emergency.
Harold too was a man of resources; he had gained his Welsh successes
by adapting his men to the enemy’s way of fighting. To withstand
the charge of the Norman horsemen, Harold clave to the national tactics,
but he chose for the place of battle a spot where those tactics would
have the advantage. A battle on the low ground would have been
favourable to cavalry; Harold therefore occupied and fenced in a hill,
the hill of Senlac, the site in after days of the abbey and town of
Battle, and there awaited the Norman attack. The Norman horsemen
had thus to make their way up the hill under the shower of the English
javelins, and to meet the axes as soon as they reached the barricade.
And these tactics were thoroughly successful, till the inferior troops
were tempted to come down from the hill and chase the Bretons whom they
had driven back. This suggested to William the device of the feigned
flight; the English line of defence was broken, and the advantage of
ground was lost. Thus was the great battle lost. And the
war too was lost by the deaths of Harold and his brothers, which left
England without leaders, and by the unyielding valour of Harold’s
immediate following. They were slain to a man, and south-eastern
England was left defenceless.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>William, now truly the Conqueror in the vulgar sense, was still far
from having full possession of his conquest. He had military possession
of part of one shire only; he had to look for further resistance, and
he met with not a little. But his combined luck and policy served
him well. He could put on the form of full possession before he
had the reality; he could treat all further resistance as rebellion
against an established authority; he could make resistance desultory
and isolated. William had to subdue England in detail; he had
never again to fight what the English Chroniclers call a <i>folk-fight</i>.
His policy after his victory was obvious. Still uncrowned, he
was not, even in his own view, king, but he alone had the right to become
king. He had thus far been driven to maintain his rights by force;
he was not disposed to use force any further, if peaceful possession
was to be had. His course was therefore to show himself stern
to all who withstood him, but to take all who submitted into his protection
and favour. He seems however to have looked for a speedier submission
than really happened. He waited a while in his camp for men to
come in and acknowledge him. As none came, he set forth to win
by the strong arm the land which he claimed of right.</p>
<p>Thus to look for an immediate submission was not unnatural; fully
believing in the justice of his own cause, William would believe in
it all the more after the issue of the battle. God, Harold had
said, should judge between himself and William, and God had judged in
William’s favour. With all his clear-sightedness, he would
hardly understand how differently things looked in English eyes.
Some indeed, specially churchmen, specially foreign churchmen, now began
to doubt whether to fight against William was not to fight against God.
But to the nation at large William was simply as Hubba, Swegen, and
Cnut in past times. England had before now been conquered, but
never in a single fight. Alfred and Edmund had fought battle after
battle with the Dane, and men had no mind to submit to the Norman because
he had been once victorious. But Alfred and Edmund, in alternate
defeat and victory, lived to fight again; their people had not to choose
a new king; the King had merely to gather a new army. But Harold
was slain, and the first question was how to fill his place. The
Witan, so many as could be got together, met to choose a king, whose
first duty would be to meet William the Conqueror in arms. The
choice was not easy. Harold’s sons were young, and not born
Æthelings. His brothers, of whom Gyrth at least must have
been fit to reign, had fallen with him. Edwin and Morkere were
not at the battle, but they were at the election. But schemes
for winning the crown for the house of Leofric would find no favour
in an assembly held in London. For lack of any better candidate,
the hereditary sentiment prevailed. Young Edgar was chosen.
But the bishops, it is said, did not agree; they must have held that
God had declared in favour of William. Edwin and Morkere did agree;
but they withdrew to their earldoms, still perhaps cherishing hopes
of a divided kingdom. Edgar, as king-elect, did at least one act
of kingship by confirming the election of an abbot of Peterborough;
but of any general preparation for warfare there is not a sign.
The local resistance which William met with shows that, with any combined
action, the case was not hopeless. But with Edgar for king, with
the northern earls withdrawing their forces, with the bishops at least
lukewarm, nothing could be done. The Londoners were eager to fight;
so doubtless were others; but there was no leader. So far from
there being another Harold or Edmund to risk another battle, there was
not even a leader to carry out the policy of Fabius and Gyrth.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the Conqueror was advancing, by his own road and after
his own fashion. We must remember the effect of the mere slaughter
of the great battle. William’s own army had suffered severely:
he did not leave Hastings till he had received reinforcements from Normandy.
But to England the battle meant the loss of the whole force of the south-eastern
shires. A large part of England was left helpless. William
followed much the same course as he had followed in Maine. A legal
claimant of the crown, it was his interest as soon as possible to become
a crowned king, and that in his kinsman’s church at Westminster.
But it was not his interest to march straight on London and demand the
crown, sword in hand. He saw that, without the support of the
northern earls, Edgar could not possibly stand, and that submission
to himself was only a question of time. He therefore chose a roundabout
course through those south-eastern shires which were wholly without
means of resisting him. He marched from Sussex into Kent, harrying
the land as he went, to frighten the people into submission. The
men of Romney had before the battle cut in pieces a party of Normans
who had fallen into their hands, most likely by sea. William took
some undescribed vengeance for their slaughter. Dover and its
castle, the castle which, in some accounts, Harold had sworn to surrender
to William, yielded without a blow. Here then he was gracious.
When some of his unruly followers set fire to the houses of the town,
William made good the losses of their owners. Canterbury submitted;
from thence, by a bold stroke, he sent messengers who received the submission
of Winchester. He marched on, ravaging as he went, to the immediate
neighbourhood of London, but keeping ever on the right bank of the Thames.
But a gallant sally of the citizens was repulsed by the Normans, and
the suburb of Southwark was burned. William marched along the
river to Wallingford. Here he crossed, receiving for the first
time the active support of an Englishman of high rank, Wiggod of Wallingford,
sheriff of Oxfordshire. He became one of a small class of Englishmen
who were received to William’s fullest favour, and kept at least
as high a position under him as they had held before. William
still kept on, marching and harrying, to the north of London, as he
had before done to the south. The city was to be isolated within
a cordon of wasted lands. His policy succeeded. As no succours
came from the North, the hearts of those who had chosen them a king
failed at the approach of his rival. At Berkhampstead Edgar himself,
with several bishops and chief men, came to make their submission.
They offered the crown to William, and, after some debate, he accepted
it. But before he came in person, he took means to secure the
city. The beginnings of the fortress were now laid which, in the
course of William’s reign, grew into the mighty Tower of London.</p>
<p>It may seem strange that when his great object was at last within
his grasp, William should have made his acceptance of it a matter of
debate. He claims the crown as his right; the crown is offered
to him; and yet he doubts about taking it. Ought he, he asks,
to take the crown of a kingdom of which he has not as yet full possession?
At that time the territory of which William had even military possession
could not have stretched much to the north-west of a line drawn from
Winchester to Norwich. Outside that line men were, as William
is made to say, still in rebellion. His scruples were come over
by an orator who was neither Norman nor English, but one of his foreign
followers, Haimer Viscount of Thouars. The debate was most likely
got up at William’s bidding, but it was not got up without a motive.
William, ever seeking outward legality, seeking to do things peaceably
when they could be done peaceably, seeking for means to put every possible
enemy in the wrong, wished to make his acceptance of the English crown
as formally regular as might be. Strong as he held his claim to
be by the gift of Edward, it would be better to be, if not strictly
chosen, at least peacefully accepted, by the chief men of England.
It might some day serve his purpose to say that the crown had been offered
to him, and that he had accepted it only after a debate in which the
chief speaker was an impartial stranger. Having gained this point
more, William set out from Berkhampstead, already, in outward form,
King-elect of the English.</p>
<p>The rite which was to change him from king-elect into full king took
place in Eadward’s church of Westminster on Christmas day, 1066,
somewhat more than two months after the great battle, somewhat less
than twelve months after the death of Edward and the coronation of Harold.
Nothing that was needed for a lawful crowning was lacking. The
consent of the people, the oath of the king, the anointing by the hands
of a lawful metropolitan, all were there. Ealdred acted as the
actual celebrant, while Stigand took the second place in the ceremony.
But this outward harmony between the nation and its new king was marred
by an unhappy accident. Norman horsemen stationed outside the
church mistook the shout with which the people accepted the new king
for the shout of men who were doing him damage. But instead of
going to his help, they began, in true Norman fashion, to set fire to
the neighbouring houses. The havoc and plunder that followed disturbed
the solemnities of the day and were a bad omen for the new reign.
It was no personal fault of William’s; in putting himself in the
hands of subjects of such new and doubtful loyalty, he needed men near
at hand whom he could trust. But then it was his doing that England
had to receive a king who needed foreign soldiers to guard him.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>William was now lawful King of the English, so far as outward ceremonies
could make him so. But he knew well how far he was from having
won real kingly authority over the whole kingdom. Hardly a third
part of the land was in his obedience. He had still, as he doubtless
knew, to win his realm with the edge of the sword. But he could
now go forth to further conquests, not as a foreign invader, but as
the king of the land, putting down rebellion among his own subjects.
If the men of Northumberland should refuse to receive him, he could
tell them that he was their lawful king, anointed by their own archbishop.
It was sound policy to act as king of the whole land, to exercise a
semblance of authority where he had none in fact. And in truth
he was king of the whole land, so far as there was no other king.
The unconquered parts of the land were in no mood to submit; but they
could not agree on any common plan of resistance under any common leader.
Some were still for Edgar, some for Harold’s sons, some for Swegen
of Denmark. Edwin and Morkere doubtless were for themselves.
If one common leader could have been found even now, the throne of the
foreign king would have been in no small danger. But no such leader
came: men stood still, or resisted piecemeal, so the land was conquered
piecemeal, and that under cover of being brought under the obedience
of its lawful king.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Now that the Norman duke has become an English king, his career as
an English statesman strictly begins, and a wonderful career it is.
Its main principle was to respect formal legality wherever he could.
All William’s purposes were to be carried out, as far as possible,
under cover of strict adherence to the law of the land of which he had
become the lawful ruler. He had sworn at his crowning to keep
the laws of the land, and to rule his kingdom as well as any king that
had gone before him. And assuredly he meant to keep his oath.
But a foreign king, at the head of a foreign army, and who had his foreign
followers to reward, could keep that oath only in its letter and not
in its spirit. But it is wonderful how nearly he came to keep
it in the letter. He contrived to do his most oppressive acts,
to deprive Englishmen of their lands and offices, and to part them out
among strangers, under cover of English law. He could do this.
A smaller man would either have failed to carry out his purposes at
all, or he could have carried them out only by reckless violence.
When we examine the administration of William more in detail, we shall
see that its effects in the long run were rather to preserve than to
destroy our ancient institutions. He knew the strength of legal
fictions; by legal fictions he conquered and he ruled. But every
legal fiction is outward homage to the principle of law, an outward
protest against unlawful violence. That England underwent a Norman
Conquest did in the end only make her the more truly England.
But that this could be was because that conquest was wrought by the
Bastard of Falaise and by none other.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER VIII—THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND—DECEMBER 1066-MARCH
1070</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The coronation of William had its effect in a moment. It made
him really king over part of England; it put him into a new position
with regard to the rest. As soon as there was a king, men flocked
to swear oaths to him and become his men. They came from shires
where he had no real authority. It was most likely now, rather
than at Berkhampstead, that Edwin and Morkere at last made up their
minds to acknowledge some king. They became William’s men
and received again their lands and earldoms as his grant. Other
chief men from the North also submitted and received their lands and
honours again. But Edwin and Morkere were not allowed to go back
to their earldoms. William thought it safer to keep them near
himself, under the guise of honour—Edwin was even promised one
of his daughters in marriage—but really half as prisoners, half
as hostages. Of the two other earls, Waltheof son of Siward, who
held the shires of Northampton and Huntingdon, and Oswulf who held the
earldom of Bernicia or modern Northumberland, we hear nothing at this
moment. As for Waltheof, it is strange if he were not at Senlac;
it is strange if he were there and came away alive. But we only
know that he was in William’s allegiance a few months later.
Oswulf must have held out in some marked way. It was William’s
policy to act as king even where he had no means of carrying out his
kingly orders. He therefore in February 1067 granted the Bernician
earldom to an Englishman named Copsige, who had acted as Tostig’s
lieutenant. This implies the formal deprivation of Oswulf.
But William sent no force with the new earl, who had to take possession
as he could. That is to say, of two parties in a local quarrel,
one hoped to strengthen itself by making use of William’s name.
And William thought that it would strengthen his position to let at
least his name be heard in every corner of the kingdom. The rest
of the story stands rather aloof from the main history. Copsige
got possession of the earldom for a moment. He was then killed
by Oswulf and his partisans, and Oswulf himself was killed in the course
of the year by a common robber. At Christmas, 1067, William again
granted or sold the earldom to another of the local chiefs, Gospatric.
But he made no attempt to exercise direct authority in those parts till
the beginning of the year 1069.</p>
<p>All this illustrates William’s general course. Crowned
king over the land, he would first strengthen himself in that part of
the kingdom which he actually held. Of the passive disobedience
of other parts he would take no present notice. In northern and
central England William could exercise no authority; but those lands
were not in arms against him, nor did they acknowledge any other king.
Their earls, now his earls, were his favoured courtiers. He could
afford to be satisfied with this nominal kingship, till a fit opportunity
came to make it real. He could afford to lend his name to the
local enterprise of Copsige. It would at least be another count
against the men of Bernicia that they had killed the earl whom King
William gave them.</p>
<p>Meanwhile William was taking very practical possession in the shires
where late events had given him real authority. His policy was
to assert his rights in the strongest form, but to show his mildness
and good will by refraining from carrying them out to the uttermost.
By right of conquest William claimed nothing. He had come to take
his crown, and he had unluckily met with some opposition in taking it.
The crown lands of King Edward passed of course to his successor.
As for the lands of other men, in William’s theory all was forfeited
to the crown. The lawful heir had been driven to seek his kingdom
in arms; no Englishman had helped him; many Englishmen had fought against
him. All then were directly or indirectly traitors. The
King might lawfully deal with the lands of all as his own. But
in the greater part of the kingdom it was impossible, in no part was
it prudent, to carry out this doctrine in its fulness. A passage
in Domesday, compared with a passage in the English Chronicles, shows
that, soon after William’s coronation, the English as a body,
within the lands already conquered, redeemed their lands. They
bought them back at a price, and held them as a fresh grant from King
William. Some special offenders, living and dead, were exempted
from this favour. The King took to himself the estates of the
house of Godwine, save those of Edith, the widow of his revered predecessor,
whom it was his policy to treat with all honour. The lands too
of those who had died on Senlac were granted back to their heirs only
of special favour, sometimes under the name of alms. Thus, from
the beginning of his reign, William began to make himself richer than
any king that had been before him in England or than any other Western
king of his day. He could both punish his enemies and reward his
friends. Much of what he took he kept; much he granted away, mainly
to his foreign followers, but sometimes also to Englishmen who had in
any way won his favour. Wiggod of Wallingford was one of the very
few Englishmen who kept and received estates which put them alongside
of the great Norman landowners. The doctrine that all land was
held of the King was now put into a practical shape. All, Englishmen
and strangers, not only became William’s subjects, but his men
and his grantees. Thus he went on during his whole reign.
There was no sudden change from the old state of things to the new.
After the general redemption of lands, gradually carried out as William’s
power advanced, no general blow was dealt at Englishmen as such.
They were not, like some conquered nations, formally degraded or put
under any legal incapacities in their own land. William simply
distinguished between his loyal and his disloyal subjects, and used
his opportunities for punishing the disloyal and rewarding the loyal.
Such punishments and rewards naturally took the shape of confiscations
and grants of land. If punishment was commonly the lot of the
Englishman, and reward was the lot of the stranger, that was only because
King William treated all men as they deserved. Most Englishmen
were disloyal; most strangers were loyal. But disloyal strangers
and loyal Englishmen fared according to their deserts. The final
result of this process, begun now and steadily carried on, was that,
by the end of William’s reign, the foreign king was surrounded
by a body of foreign landowners and office-bearers of foreign birth.
When, in the early days of his conquest, he gathered round him the great
men of his realm, it was still an English assembly with a sprinkling
of strangers. By the end of his reign it had changed, step by
step, into an assembly of strangers with a sprinkling of Englishmen.</p>
<p>This revolution, which practically transferred the greater part of
the soil of England to the hands of strangers, was great indeed.
But it must not be mistaken for a sudden blow, for an irregular scramble,
for a formal proscription of Englishmen as such. William, according
to his character and practice, was able to do all this gradually, according
to legal forms, and without drawing any formal distinction between natives
and strangers. All land was held of the King of the English, according
to the law of England. It may seem strange how such a process
of spoliation, veiled under a legal fiction, could have been carried
out without resistance. It was easier because it was gradual and
piecemeal. The whole country was not touched at once, nor even
the whole of any one district. One man lost his land while his
neighbour kept his, and he who kept his land was not likely to join
in the possible plots of the other. And though the land had never
seen so great a confiscation, or one so largely for the behoof of foreigners,
yet there was nothing new in the thing itself. Danes had settled
under Cnut, and Normans and other Frenchmen under Edward. Confiscation
of land was the everyday punishment for various public and private crimes.
In any change, such as we should call a change of ministry, as at the
fall and the return of Godwine, outlawry and forfeiture of lands was
the usual doom of the weaker party, a milder doom than the judicial
massacres of later ages. Even a conquest of England was nothing
new, and William at this stage contrasted favourably with Cnut, whose
early days were marked by the death of not a few. William, at
any rate since his crowning, had shed the blood of no man. Men
perhaps thought that things might have been much worse, and that they
were not unlikely to mend. Anyhow, weakened, cowed, isolated,
the people of the conquered shires submitted humbly to the Conqueror’s
will. It needed a kind of oppression of which William himself
was never guilty to stir them into actual revolt.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The provocation was not long in coming. Within three months
after his coronation, William paid a visit to his native duchy.
The ruler of two states could not be always in either; he owed it to
his old subjects to show himself among them in his new character; and
his absence might pass as a sign of the trust he put in his new subjects.
But the means which he took to secure their obedience brought out his
one weak point. We cannot believe that he really wished to goad
the people into rebellion; yet the choice of his lieutenants might seem
almost like it. He was led astray by partiality for his brother
and for his dearest friend. To Bishop Ode of Bayeux, and to William
Fitz-Osbern, the son of his early guardian, he gave earldoms, that of
Kent to Odo, that of Hereford to William. The Conqueror was determined
before all things that his kingdom should be united and obedient; England
should not be split up like Gaul and Germany; he would have no man in
England whose formal homage should carry with it as little of practical
obedience as his own homage to the King of the French. A Norman
earl of all Wessex or all Mercia might strive after such a position.
William therefore forsook the old practice of dividing the whole kingdom
into earldoms. In the peaceful central shires he would himself
rule through his sheriffs and other immediate officers; he would appoint
earls only in dangerous border districts where they were needed as military
commanders. All William’s earls were in fact <i>marquesses</i>,
guardians of a march or frontier. Ode had to keep Kent against
attacks from the continent; William Fitz-Osbern had to keep Herefordshire
against the Welsh and the independent English. This last shire
had its own local warfare. William’s authority did not yet
reach over all the shires beyond London and Hereford; but Harold had
allowed some of Edward’s Norman favourites to keep power there.
Hereford then and part of its shire formed an isolated part of William’s
dominions, while the lands around remained unsubdued. William
Fitz-Osbern had to guard this dangerous land as earl. But during
the King’s absence both he and Ode received larger commissions
as viceroys over the whole kingdom. Ode guarded the South and
William the North and North-East. Norwich, a town dangerous from
its easy communication with Denmark, was specially under his care.
The nominal earls of the rest of the land, Edwin, Morkere, and Waltheof,
with Edgar, King of a moment, Archbishop Stigand, and a number of other
chief men, William took with him to Normandy. Nominally his cherished
friends and guests, they went in truth, as one of the English Chroniclers
calls them, as hostages.</p>
<p>William’s stay in Normandy lasted about six months. It
was chiefly devoted to rejoicings and religious ceremonies, but partly
to Norman legislation. Rich gifts from the spoils of England were
given to the churches of Normandy; gifts richer still were sent to the
Church of Rome whose favour had wrought so much for William. In
exchange for the banner of Saint Peter, Harold’s standard of the
Fighting-man was sent as an offering to the head of all churches.
While William was in Normandy, Archbishop Maurilius of Rouen died.
The whole duchy named Lanfranc as his successor; but he declined the
post, and was himself sent to Rome to bring the pallium for the new
archbishop John, a kinsman of the ducal house. Lanfranc doubtless
refused the see of Rouen only because he was designed for a yet greater
post in England; the subtlest diplomatist in Europe was not sent to
Rome merely to ask for the pallium for Archbishop John.</p>
<p>Meanwhile William’s choice of lieutenants bore its fruit in
England. They wrought such oppression as William himself never
wrought. The inferior leaders did as they thought good, and the
two earls restrained them not. The earls meanwhile were in one
point there faithfully carrying out the policy of their master in the
building of castles; a work, which specially when the work of Ode and
William Fitz-Osbern, is always spoken of by the native writers with
marked horror. The castles were the badges and the instruments
of the Conquest, the special means of holding the land in bondage.
Meanwhile tumults broke forth in various parts. The slaughter
of Copsige, William’s earl in Northumberland, took place about
the time of the King’s sailing for Normandy. In independent
Herefordshire the leading Englishman in those parts, Eadric, whom the
Normans called the <i>Wild</i>, allied himself with the Welsh, harried
the obedient lands, and threatened the castle of Hereford. Nothing
was done on either side beyond harrying and skirmishes; but Eadric’s
corner of the land remained unsubdued. The men of Kent made a
strange foreign alliance with Eustace of Boulogne, the brother-in-law
of Edward, the man whose deeds had led to the great movement of Edward’s
reign, to the banishment and the return of Godwine. He had fought
against England on Senlac, and was one of four who had dealt the last
blow to the wounded Harold. But the oppression of Ode made the
Kentishmen glad to seek any help against him. Eustace, now William’s
enemy, came over, and gave help in an unsuccessful attack on Dover castle.
Meanwhile in the obedient shires men were making ready for revolt; in
the unsubdued lands they were making ready for more active defence.
Many went beyond sea to ask for foreign help, specially in the kindred
lands of Denmark and Northern Germany. Against this threatening
movement William’s strength lay in the incapacity of his enemies
for combined action. The whole land never rose at once, and Danish
help did not come at the times or in the shape when it could have done
most good.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The news of these movements brought William back to England in December.
He kept the Midwinter feast and assembly at Westminster; there the absent
Eustace was, by a characteristic stroke of policy, arraigned as a traitor.
He was a foreign prince against whom the Duke of the Normans might have
led a Norman army. But he had also become an English landowner,
and in that character he was accountable to the King and Witan of England.
He suffered the traitor’s punishment of confiscation of lands.
Afterwards he contrived to win back William’s favour, and he left
great English possessions to his second wife and his son. Another
stroke of policy was to send an embassy to Denmark, to ward off the
hostile purposes of Swegen, and to choose as ambassador an English prelate
who had been in high favour with both Edward and Harold, Æthelsige,
Abbot of Ramsey. It came perhaps of his mission that Swegen practically
did nothing for two years. The envoy’s own life was a chequered
one. He lost William’s favour, and sought shelter in Denmark.
He again regained William’s favour—perhaps by some service
at the Danish court—and died in possession of his abbey.</p>
<p>It is instructive to see how in this same assembly William bestowed
several great offices. The earldom of Northumberland was vacant
by the slaughter of two earls, the bishopric of Dorchester by the peaceful
death of its bishop. William had no real authority in any part
of Northumberland, or in more than a small part of the diocese of Dorchester.
But he dealt with both earldom and bishopric as in his own power.
It was now that he granted Northumberland to Gospatric. The appointment
to the bishopric was the beginning of a new system. Englishmen
were now to give way step by step to strangers in the highest offices
and greatest estates of the land. He had already made two Norman
earls, but they were to act as military commanders. He now made
an English earl, whose earldom was likely to be either nominal or fatal.
The appointment of Remigius of Fécamp to the see of Dorchester
was of more real importance. It is the beginning of William’s
ecclesiastical reign, the first step in William’s scheme of making
the Church his instrument in keeping down the conquered. While
William lived, no Englishman was appointed to a bishopric. As
bishoprics became vacant by death, foreigners were nominated, and excuses
were often found for hastening a vacancy by deprivation. At the
end of William’s reign one English bishop only was left.
With abbots, as having less temporal power than bishops, the rule was
less strict. Foreigners were preferred, but Englishmen were not
wholly shut out. And the general process of confiscation and regrant
of lands was vigorously carried out. The Kentish revolt and the
general movement must have led to many forfeitures and to further grants
to loyal men of either nation. As the English Chronicles pithily
puts it, “the King gave away every man’s land.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>William could soon grant lands in new parts of England. In
February 1068 he for the first time went forth to warfare with those
whom he called his subjects, but who had never submitted to him.
In the course of the year a large part of England was in arms against
him. But there was no concert; the West rose and the North rose;
but the West rose first, and the North did not rise till the West had
been subdued. Western England threw off the purely passive state
which had lasted through the year 1067. Hitherto each side had
left the other alone. But now the men of the West made ready for
a more direct opposition to the foreign government. If they could
not drive William out of what he had already won, they would at least
keep him from coming any further. Exeter, the greatest city of
the West, was the natural centre of resistance; the smaller towns, at
least of Devonshire and Dorset entered into a league with the capital.
They seem to have aimed, like Italian cities in the like case, at the
formation of a civic confederation, which might perhaps find it expedient
to acknowledge William as an external lord, but which would maintain
perfect internal independence. Still, as Gytha, widow of Godwine,
mother of Harold, was within the walls of Exeter, the movement was doubtless
also in some sort on behalf of the House of Godwine. In any case,
Exeter and the lands and towns in its alliance with Exeter strengthened
themselves in every way against attack.</p>
<p>Things were not now as on the day of Senlac, when Englishmen on their
own soil withstood one who, however he might cloke his enterprise, was
to them simply a foreign invader. But William was not yet, as
he was in some later struggles, the <i>de facto</i> king of the whole
land, whom all had acknowledged, and opposition to whom was in form
rebellion. He now held an intermediate position. He was
still an invader; for Exeter had never submitted to him; but the crowned
King of the English, peacefully ruling over many shires, was hardly
a mere invader; resistance to him would have the air of rebellion in
the eyes of many besides William and his flatterers. And they
could not see, what we plainly see, what William perhaps dimly saw,
that it was in the long run better for Exeter, or any other part of
England, to share, even in conquest, the fate of the whole land, rather
than to keep on a precarious independence to the aggravation of the
common bondage. This we feel throughout; William, with whatever
motive, is fighting for the unity of England. We therefore cannot
seriously regret his successes. But none the less honour is due
to the men whom the duty of the moment bade to withstand him.
They could not see things as we see them by the light of eight hundred
years.</p>
<p>The movement evidently stirred several shires; but it is only of
Exeter that we hear any details. William never used force till
he had tried negotiation. He sent messengers demanding that the
citizens should take oaths to him and receive him within their walls.
The choice lay now between unconditional submission and valiant resistance.
But the chief men of the city chose a middle course which could gain
nothing. They answered as an Italian city might have answered
a Swabian Emperor. They would not receive the King within their
walls; they would take no oaths to him; but they would pay him the tribute
which they had paid to earlier kings. That is, they would not
have him as king, but only as overlord over a commonwealth otherwise
independent. William’s answer was short; “It is not
my custom to take subjects on those conditions.” He set
out on his march; his policy was to overcome the rebellious English
by the arms of the loyal English. He called out the <i>fyrd</i>,
the militia, of all or some of the shires under his obedience.
They answered his call; to disobey it would have needed greater courage
than to wield the axe on Senlac. This use of English troops became
William’s custom in all his later wars, in England and on the
mainland; but of course he did not trust to English troops only.
The plan of the campaign was that which had won Le Mans and London.
The towns of Dorset were frightfully harried on the march to the capital
of the West. Disunion at once broke out; the leading men in Exeter
sent to offer unconditional submission and to give hostages. But
the commonalty disowned the agreement; notwithstanding the blinding
of one of the hostages before the walls, they defended the city valiantly
for eighteen days. It was only when the walls began to crumble
away beneath William’s mining-engines that the men of Exeter at
last submitted to his mercy. And William’s mercy could be
trusted. No man was harmed in life, limb, or goods. But,
to hinder further revolts, a castle was at once begun, and the payments
made by the city to the King were largely raised.</p>
<p>Gytha, when the city yielded, withdrew to the Steep Holm, and thence
to Flanders. Her grandsons fled to Ireland; from thence, in the
course of the same year and the next, they twice landed in Somerset
and Devonshire. The Irish Danes who followed them could not be
kept back from plunder. Englishmen as well as Normans withstood
them, and the hopes of the House of Godwine came to an end.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>On the conquest of Exeter followed the submission of the whole West.
All the land south of the Thames was now in William’s obedience.
Gloucestershire seems to have submitted at the same time; the submission
of Worcestershire is without date. A vast confiscation of lands
followed, most likely by slow degrees. Its most memorable feature
is that nearly all Cornwall was granted to William’s brother Robert
Count of Mortain. His vast estate grew into the famous Cornish
earldom and duchy of later times. Southern England was now conquered,
and, as the North had not stirred during the stirring of the West, the
whole land was outwardly at peace. William now deemed it safe
to bring his wife to share his new greatness. The Duchess Matilda
came over to England, and was hallowed to Queen at Westminster by Archbishop
Ealdred. We may believe that no part of his success gave William
truer pleasure. But the presence of the Lady was important in
another way. It was doubtless by design that she gave birth on
English soil to her youngest son, afterwards the renowned King Henry
the First. He alone of William’s children was in any sense
an Englishman. Born on English ground, son of a crowned King and
his Lady, Englishmen looked on him as a countryman. And his father
saw the wisdom of encouraging such a feeling. Henry, surnamed
in after days the Clerk, was brought up with special care; he was trained
in many branches of learning unusual among the princes of his age, among
them in a thorough knowledge of the tongue of his native land.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The campaign of Exeter is of all William’s English campaigns
the richest in political teaching. We see how near the cities
of England came for a moment—as we shall presently see a chief
city of northern Gaul—to running the same course as the cities
of Italy and Provence. Signs of the same tendency may sometimes
be suspected elsewhere, but they are not so clearly revealed.
William’s later campaigns are of the deepest importance in English
history; they are far richer in recorded personal actors than the siege
of Exeter; but they hardly throw so much light on the character of William
and his statesmanship. William is throughout ever ready, but never
hasty—always willing to wait when waiting seems the best policy—always
ready to accept a nominal success when there is a chance of turning
it into a real one, but never accepting nominal success as a cover for
defeat, never losing an inch of ground without at once taking measures
to recover it. By this means, he has in the former part of 1068
extended his dominion to the Land’s End; before the end of the
year he extends it to the Tees. In the next year he has indeed
to win it back again; but he does win it back and more also. Early
in 1070 he was at last, in deed as well as in name, full King over all
England.</p>
<p>The North was making ready for war while the war in the West went
on, but one part of England did nothing to help the other. In
the summer the movement in the North took shape. The nominal earls
Edwin, Morkere, and Gospatric, with the Ætheling Edgar and others,
left William’s court to put themselves at the head of the movement.
Edwin was specially aggrieved, because the king had promised him one
of his daughters in marriage, but had delayed giving her to him.
The English formed alliances with the dependent princes of Wales and
Scotland, and stood ready to withstand any attack. William set
forth; as he had taken Exeter, he took Warwick, perhaps Leicester.
This was enough for Edwin and Morkere. They submitted, and were
again received to favour. More valiant spirits withdrew northward,
ready to defend Durham as the last shelter of independence, while Edgar
and Gospatric fled to the court of Malcolm of Scotland. William
went on, receiving the submission of Nottingham and York; thence he
turned southward, receiving on his way the submission of Lincoln, Cambridge,
and Huntingdon. Again he deemed it his policy to establish his
power in the lands which he had already won rather than to jeopard matters
by at once pressing farther. In the conquered towns he built castles,
and he placed permanent garrisons in each district by granting estates
to his Norman and other followers. Different towns and districts
suffered in different degrees, according doubtless to the measure of
resistance met with in each. Lincoln and Lincolnshire were on
the whole favourably treated. An unusual number of Englishmen
kept lands and offices in city and shire. At Leicester and Northampton,
and in their shires, the wide confiscations and great destruction of
houses point to a stout resistance. And though Durham was still
untouched, and though William had assuredly no present purpose of attacking
Scotland, he found it expedient to receive with all favour a nominal
submission brought from the King of Scots by the hands of the Bishop
of Durham.</p>
<p>If William’s policy ever seems less prudent than usual, it
was at the beginning of the next year, 1069. The extreme North
still stood out. William had twice commissioned English earls
of Northumberland to take possession if they could. He now risked
the dangerous step of sending a stranger. Robert of Comines was
appointed to the earldom forfeited by the flight of Gospatric.
While it was still winter, he went with his force to Durham. By
help of the Bishop, he was admitted into the city, but he and his whole
force were cut off by the people of Durham and its neighbourhood.
Robert’s expedition in short led only to a revolt of York, where
Edgar was received and siege was laid to the castle. William marched
in person with all speed; he relieved the castle; he recovered the city
and strengthened it by a second castle on the other side of the river.
Still he thought it prudent to take no present steps against Durham.
Soon after this came the second attempt of Harold’s sons in the
West.</p>
<p>Later in this year William’s final warfare for the kingdom
began. In August, 1069 the long-promised help from Denmark came.
Swegen sent his brother Osbeorn and his sons Harold and Cnut, at the
head of the whole strength of Denmark and of other Northern lands.
If the two enterprises of Harold’s sons had been planned in concert
with their Danish kinsmen, the invaders or deliverers from opposite
sides had failed to act together. Nor are Swegen’s own objects
quite clear. He sought to deliver England from William and his
Normans, but it is not so plain in whose interest he acted. He
would naturally seek the English crown for himself or for one of his
sons; the sons of Harold he would rather make earls than kings.
But he could feel no interest in the kingship of Edgar. Yet, when
the Danish fleet entered the Humber, and the whole force of the North
came to meet it, the English host had the heir of Cerdic at its head.
It is now that Waltheof the son of Siward, Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon,
first stands out as a leading actor. Gospatric too was there;
but this time not Edwin and Morkere. Danes and English joined
and marched upon York; the city was occupied; the castles were taken;
the Norman commanders were made prisoners, but not till they had set
fire to the city and burned the greater part of it, along with the metropolitan
minster. It is amazing to read that, after breaking down the castles,
the English host dispersed, and the Danish fleet withdrew into the Humber.</p>
<p>England was again ruined by lack of concert. The news of the
coming of the Danes led only to isolated movements which were put down
piecemeal. The men of Somerset and Dorset and the men of Devonshire
and Cornwall were put down separately, and the movement in Somerset
was largely put down by English troops. The citizens of Exeter,
as well as the Norman garrison of the castle, stood a siege on behalf
of William. A rising on the Welsh border under Eadric led only
to the burning of Shrewsbury; a rising in Staffordshire was held by
William to call for his own presence. But he first marched into
Lindesey, and drove the crews of the Danish ships across into Holderness;
there he left two Norman leaders, one of them his brother Robert of
Mortain and Cornwall; he then went westward and subdued Staffordshire,
and marched towards York by way of Nottingham. A constrained delay
by the Aire gave him an opportunity for negotiation with the Danish
leaders. Osbeorn took bribes to forsake the English cause, and
William reached and entered York without resistance. He restored
the castles and kept his Christmas in the half-burned city. And
now William forsook his usual policy of clemency. The Northern
shires had been too hard to win. To weaken them, he decreed a
merciless harrying of the whole land, the direct effects of which were
seen for many years, and which left its mark on English history for
ages. Till the growth of modern industry reversed the relative
position of Northern and Southern England, the old Northumbrian kingdom
never fully recovered from the blow dealt by William, and remained the
most backward part of the land. Herein comes one of the most remarkable
results of William’s coming. His greatest work was to make
England a kingdom which no man henceforth thought of dividing.
But the circumstances of his conquest of Northern England ruled that
for several centuries the unity of England should take the form of a
distinct preponderance of Southern England over Northern. William’s
reign strengthened every tendency that way, chiefly by the fearful blow
now dealt to the physical strength and well-being of the Northern shires.
From one side indeed the Norman Conquest was truly a Saxon conquest.
The King of London and Winchester became more fully than ever king over
the whole land.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The Conqueror had now only to gather in what was still left to conquer.
But, as military exploits, none are more memorable than the winter marches
which put William into full possession of England. The lands beyond
Tees still held out; in January 1070 he set forth to subdue them.
The Earls Waltheof and Gospatric made their submission, Waltheof in
person, Gospatric by proxy. William restored both of them to their
earldoms, and received Waltheof to his highest favour, giving him his
niece Judith in marriage. But he systematically wasted the land,
as he had wasted Yorkshire. He then returned to York, and thence
set forth to subdue the last city and shire that held out. A fearful
march led him to the one remaining fragment of free England, the unconquered
land of Chester. We know not how Chester fell; but the land was
not won without fighting, and a frightful harrying was the punishment.
In all this we see a distinct stage of moral downfall in the character
of the Conqueror. Yet it is thoroughly characteristic. All
is calm, deliberate, politic. William will have no more revolts,
and he will at any cost make the land incapable of revolt. Yet,
as ever, there is no blood shed save in battle. If men died of
hunger, that was not William’s doing; nay, charitable people like
Abbot Æthelwig of Evesham might do what they could to help the
sufferers. But the lawful king, kept so long out of his kingdom,
would, at whatever price, be king over the whole land. And the
great harrying of the northern shires was the price paid for William’s
kingship over them.</p>
<p>At Chester the work was ended which had begun at Pevensey.
Less than three years and a half, with intervals of peace, had made
the Norman invader king over all England. He had won the kingdom;
he had now to keep it. He had for seventeen years to deal with
revolts on both sides of the sea, with revolts both of Englishmen and
of his own followers. But in England his power was never shaken;
in England he never knew defeat. His English enemies he had subdued;
the Danes were allowed to remain and in some sort to help in his work
by plundering during the winter. The King now marched to the Salisbury
of that day, the deeply fenced hill of Old Sarum. The men who
had conquered England were reviewed in the great plain, and received
their rewards. Some among them had by failures of duty during
the winter marches lost their right to reward. Their punishment
was to remain under arms forty days longer than their comrades.
William could trust himself to the very mutineers whom he had picked
out for punishment. He had now to begin his real reign; and the
champion of the Church had before all things to reform the evil customs
of the benighted islanders, and to give them shepherds of their souls
who might guide them in the right way,</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER IX—THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND—1070-1086</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>England was now fully conquered, and William could for a moment sit
down quietly to the rule of the kingdom that he had won. The time
that immediately followed is spoken of as a time of comparative quiet,
and of less oppression than the times either before or after.
Before and after, warfare, on one side of the sea or the other, was
the main business. Hitherto William has been winning his kingdom
in arms. Afterwards he was more constantly called away to his
foreign dominions, and his absence always led to greater oppression
in England. Just now he had a moment of repose, when he could
give his mind to the affairs of Church and State in England. Peace
indeed was not quite unbroken. Events were tending to that famous
revolt in the Fenland which is perhaps the best remembered part of William’s
reign. But even this movement was merely local, and did not seriously
interfere with William’s government. He was now striving
to settle the land in peace, and to make his rule as little grievous
to the conquered as might be. The harrying of Northumberland showed
that he now shrank from no harshness that would serve his ends; but
from mere purposeless oppression he was still free. Nor was he
ever inclined to needless change or to that scorn of the conquered which
meaner conquerors have often shown. He clearly wished both to
change and to oppress as little as he could. This is a side of
him which has been greatly misunderstood, largely through the book that
passes for the History of Ingulf Abbot of Crowland. Ingulf was
William’s English secretary; a real history of his writing would
be most precious. But the book that goes by his name is a forgery
not older than the fourteenth century, and is in all points contradicted
by the genuine documents of the time. Thus the forger makes William
try to abolish the English language and order the use of French in legal
writings. This is pure fiction. The truth is that, from
the time of William’s coming, English goes out of use in legal
writings, but only gradually, and not in favour of French. Ever
since the coming of Augustine, English and Latin had been alternative
tongues; after the coming of William English becomes less usual, and
in the course of the twelfth century it goes out of use in favour of
Latin. There are no French documents till the thirteenth century,
and in that century English begins again. Instead of abolishing
the English tongue, William took care that his English-born son should
learn it, and he even began to learn it himself. A king of those
days held it for his duty to hear and redress his subjects’ complaints;
he had to go through the land and see for himself that those who acted
in his name did right among his people. This earlier kings had
done; this William wished to do; but he found his ignorance of English
a hindrance. Cares of other kinds checked his English studies,
but he may have learned enough to understand the meaning of his own
English charters. Nor did William try, as he is often imagined
to have done, to root out the ancient institutions of England, and to
set up in their stead either the existing institutions of Normandy or
some new institutions of his own devising. The truth is that with
William began a gradual change in the laws and customs of England, undoubtedly
great, but far less than is commonly thought. French names have
often supplanted English, and have made the amount of change seem greater
than it really was. Still much change did follow on the Norman
Conquest, and the Norman Conquest was so completely William’s
own act that all that came of it was in some sort his act also.
But these changes were mainly the gradual results of the state of things
which followed William’s coming; they were but very slightly the
results of any formal acts of his. With a foreign king and foreigners
in all high places, much practical change could not fail to follow,
even where the letter of the law was unchanged. Still the practical
change was less than if the letter of the law had been changed as well.
English law was administered by foreign judges; the foreign grantees
of William held English land according to English law. The Norman
had no special position as a Norman; in every rank except perhaps the
very highest and the very lowest, he had Englishmen to his fellows.
All this helped to give the Norman Conquest of England its peculiar
character, to give it an air of having swept away everything English,
while its real work was to turn strangers into Englishmen. And
that character was impressed on William’s work by William himself.
The king claiming by legal right, but driven to assert his right by
the sword, was unlike both the foreign king who comes in by peaceful
succession and the foreign king who comes in without even the pretext
of law. The Normans too, if born soldiers, were also born lawyers,
and no man was more deeply impressed with the legal spirit than William
himself. He loved neither to change the law nor to transgress
the law, and he had little need to do either. He knew how to make
the law his instrument, and, without either changing or transgressing
it, to use it to make himself all-powerful. He thoroughly enjoyed
that system of legal fictions and official euphemisms which marks his
reign. William himself became in some sort an Englishman, and
those to whom he granted English lands had in some sort to become Englishmen
in order to hold them. The Norman stepped into the exact place
of the Englishman whose land he held; he took his rights and his burthens,
and disputes about those rights and burthens were judged according to
English law by the witness of Englishmen. Reigning over two races
in one land, William would be lord of both alike, able to use either
against the other in case of need. He would make the most of everything
in the feelings and customs of either that tended to strengthen his
own hands. And, in the state of things in which men then found
themselves, whatever strengthened William’s hands strengthened
law and order in his kingdom.</p>
<p>There was therefore nothing to lead William to make any large changes
in the letter of the English law. The powers of a King of the
English, wielded as he knew how to wield them, made him as great as
he could wish to be. Once granting the original wrong of his coming
at all and bringing a host of strangers with him, there is singularly
little to blame in the acts of the Conqueror. Of bloodshed, of
wanton interference with law and usage, there is wonderfully little.
Englishmen and Normans were held to have settled down in peace under
the equal protection of King William. The two races were drawing
together; the process was beginning which, a hundred years later, made
it impossible, in any rank but the highest and the lowest, to distinguish
Norman from Englishman. Among the smaller landowners and the townsfolk
this intermingling had already begun, while earls and bishops were not
yet so exclusively Norman, nor had the free churls of England as yet
sunk so low as at a later stage. Still some legislation was needed
to settle the relations of the two races. King William proclaimed
the “renewal of the law of King Edward.” This phrase
has often been misunderstood; it is a common form when peace and good
order are restored after a period of disturbance. The last reign
which is looked back to as to a time of good government becomes the
standard of good government, and it is agreed between king and people,
between contending races or parties, that things shall be as they were
in the days of the model ruler. So we hear in Normandy of the
renewal of the law of Rolf, and in England of the renewal of the law
of Cnut. So at an earlier time Danes and Englishmen agreed in
the renewal of the law of Edgar. So now Normans and Englishmen
agreed in the renewal of the law of Edward. There was no code
either of Edward’s or of William’s making. William
simply bound himself to rule as Edward had ruled. But in restoring
the law of King Edward, he added, “with the additions which I
have decreed for the advantage of the people of the English.”</p>
<p>These few words are indeed weighty. The little legislation
of William’s reign takes throughout the shape of additions.
Nothing old is repealed; a few new enactments are set up by the side
of the old ones. And these words describe, not only William’s
actual legislation, but the widest general effect of his coming.
The Norman Conquest did little towards any direct abolition of the older
English laws or institutions. But it set up some new institutions
alongside of old ones; and it brought in not a few names, habits, and
ways of looking at things, which gradually did their work. In
England no man has pulled down; many have added and modified.
Our law is still the law of King Edward with the additions of King William.
Some old institutions took new names; some new institutions with new
names sprang up by the side of old ones. Sometimes the old has
lasted, sometimes the new. We still have a <i>king</i> and not
a <i>roy</i>; but he gathers round him a <i>parliament</i> and not a
<i>vitenagemót</i>. We have a <i>sheriff</i> and not a
<i>viscount</i>; but his district is more commonly called a <i>county</i>
than a <i>shire</i>. But <i>county</i> and <i>shire</i> are French
and English for the same thing, and “parliament” is simply
French for the “deep speech” which King William had with
his Witan. The National Assembly of England has changed its name
and its constitution more than once; but it has never been changed by
any sudden revolution, never till later times by any formal enactment.
There was no moment when one kind of assembly supplanted another.
And this has come because our Conqueror was, both by his disposition
and his circumstances, led to act as a preserver and not as a destroyer.</p>
<p>The greatest recorded acts of William, administrative and legislative,
come in the last days of his reign. But there are several enactments
of William belonging to various periods of his reign, and some of them
to this first moment of peace. Here we distinctly see William
as an English statesman, as a statesman who knew how to work a radical
change under conservative forms. One enactment, perhaps the earliest
of all, provided for the safety of the strangers who had come with him
to subdue and to settle in the land. The murder of a Norman by
an Englishman, especially of a Norman intruder by a dispossessed Englishman,
was a thing that doubtless often happened. William therefore provides
for the safety of those whom he calls “the men whom I brought
with me or who have come after me;” that is, the warriors of Senlac,
Exeter, and York. These men are put within his own peace; wrong
done to them is wrong done to the King, his crown and dignity.
If the murderer cannot be found, the lord and, failing him, the hundred,
must make payment to the King. Of this grew the presentment of
<i>Englishry</i>, one of the few formal badges of distinction between
the conquering and the conquered race. Its practical need could
not have lasted beyond a generation or two, but it went on as a form
ages after it had lost all meaning. An unknown corpse, unless
it could be proved that the dead man was English, was assumed to be
that of a man who had come with King William, and the fine was levied.
Some other enactments were needed when two nations lived side by side
in the same land. As in earlier times, Roman and barbarian each
kept his own law, so now for some purposes the Frenchman—“Francigena”—and
the Englishman kept their own law. This is chiefly with regard
to the modes of appealing to God’s judgement in doubtful cases.
The English did this by ordeal, the Normans by wager of battle.
When a man of one nation appealed a man of the other, the accused chose
the mode of trial. If an Englishman appealed a Frenchman and declined
to prove his charge either way, the Frenchman might clear himself by
oath. But these privileges were strictly confined to Frenchmen
who had come with William and after him. Frenchmen who had in
Edward’s time settled in England as the land of their own choice,
reckoned as Englishmen. Other enactments, fresh enactments of
older laws, touched both races. The slave trade was rife in its
worst form; men were sold out of the land, chiefly to the Danes of Ireland.
Earlier kings had denounced the crime, and earlier bishops had preached
against it. William denounced it again under the penalty of forfeiture
of all lands and goods, and Saint Wulfstan, the Bishop of Worcester,
persuaded the chief offenders, Englishmen of Bristol, to give up their
darling sin for a season. Yet in the next reign Anselm and his
synod had once more to denounce the crime under spiritual penalties,
when they had no longer the strong arm of William to enforce them.</p>
<p>Another law bears more than all the personal impress of William.
In it he at once, on one side, forestalls the most humane theories of
modern times, and on the other sins most directly against them.
His remarkable unwillingness to put any man to death, except among the
chances of the battle-field, was to some extent the feeling of his age.
With him the feeling takes the shape of a formal law. He forbids
the infliction of death for any crime whatever. But those who
may on this score be disposed to claim the Conqueror as a sympathizer
will be shocked at the next enactment. Those crimes which kings
less merciful than William would have punished with death are to be
punished with loss of eyes or other foul and cruel mutilations.
Punishments of this kind now seem more revolting than death, though
possibly, now as then, the sufferer himself might think otherwise.
But in those days to substitute mutilation for death, in the case of
crimes which were held to deserve death, was universally deemed an act
of mercy. Grave men shrank from sending their fellow-creatures
out of the world, perhaps without time for repentance; but physical
sympathy with physical suffering had little place in their minds.
In the next century a feeling against bodily mutilation gradually comes
in; but as yet the mildest and most thoughtful men, Anselm himself,
make no protest against it when it is believed to be really deserved.
There is no sign of any general complaint on this score. The English
Chronicler applauds the strict police of which mutilation formed a part,
and in one case he deliberately holds it to be the fitting punishment
of the offence. In fact, when penal settlements were unknown and
legal prisons were few and loathsome, there was something to be said
for a punishment which disabled the criminal from repeating his offence.
In William’s jurisprudence mutilation became the ordinary sentence
of the murderer, the robber, the ravisher, sometimes also of English
revolters against William’s power. We must in short balance
his mercy against the mercy of Kirk and Jeffreys.</p>
<p>The ground on which the English Chronicler does raise his wail on
behalf of his countrymen is the special jurisprudence of the forests
and the extortions of money with which he charges the Conqueror.
In both these points the royal hand became far heavier under the Norman
rule. In both William’s character grew darker as he grew
older. He is charged with unlawful exactions of money, in his
character alike of sovereign and of landlord. We read of his sharp
practice in dealing with the profits of the royal demesnes. He
would turn out the tenant to whom he had just let the land, if another
offered a higher rent. But with regard to taxation, we must remember
that William’s exactions, however heavy at the time, were a step
in the direction of regular government. In those days all taxation
was disliked. Direct taking of the subject’s money by the
King was deemed an extraordinary resource to be justified only by some
extraordinary emergency, to buy off the Danes or to hire soldiers against
them. Men long after still dreamed that the King could “live
of his own,” that he could pay all expenses of his court and government
out of the rents and services due to him as a landowner, without asking
his people for anything in the character of sovereign. Demands
of money on behalf of the King now became both heavier and more frequent.
And another change which had long been gradually working now came to
a head. When, centuries later, the King was bidden to “live
of his own,” men had forgotten that the land of the King had once
been the land of the nation. In all Teutonic communities, great
and small, just as in the city communities of Greece and Italy, the
community itself was a chief landowner. The nation had its <i>folkland</i>,
its <i>ager publicus</i>, the property of no one man but of the whole
state. Out of this, by the common consent, portions might be cut
off and <i>booked—</i>granted by a written document—to particular
men as their own <i>bookland</i>. The King might have his private
estate, to be dealt with at his own pleasure, but of the <i>folkland</i>,
the land of the nation, he was only the chief administrator, bound to
act by the advice of his Witan. But in this case more than in
others, the advice of the Witan could not fail to become formal; the
<i>folkland</i>, ever growing through confiscations, ever lessening
through grants, gradually came to be looked on as the land of the King,
to be dealt with as he thought good. We must not look for any
change formally enacted; but in Edward’s day the notion of <i>folkland</i>,
as the possession of the nation and not of the King, could have been
only a survival, and in William’s day even the survival passed
away. The land which was practically the land of King Edward became,
as a matter of course, <i>Terra Regis</i>, the land of King William.
That land was now enlarged by greater confiscations and lessened by
greater grants than ever. For a moment, every lay estate had been
part of the land of William. And far more than had been the land
of the nation remained the land of the King, to be dealt with as he
thought good.</p>
<p>In the tenure of land William seems to have made no formal change.
But the circumstances of his reign gave increased strength to certain
tendencies which had been long afloat. And out of them, in the
next reign, the malignant genius of Randolf Flambard devised a systematic
code of oppression. Yet even in his work there is little of formal
change. There are no laws of William Rufus. The so called
feudal incidents, the claims of marriage, wardship, and the like, on
the part of the lord, the ancient <i>heriot</i> developed into the later
<i>relief</i>, all these things were in the germ under William, as they
had been in the germ long before him. In the hands of Randolf
Flambard they stiffen into established custom; their legal acknowledgement
comes from the charter of Henry the First which promises to reform their
abuses. Thus the Conqueror clearly claimed the right to interfere
with the marriages of his nobles, at any rate to forbid a marriage to
which he objected on grounds of policy. Under Randolf Flambard
this became a regular claim, which of course was made a means of extorting
money. Under Henry the claim is regulated and modified, but by
being regulated and modified, it is legally established.</p>
<p>The ordinary administration of the kingdom went on under William,
greatly modified by the circumstances of his reign, but hardly at all
changed in outward form. Like the kings that were before him,
he “wore his crown” at the three great feasts, at Easter
at Winchester, at Pentecost at Westminster, at Christmas at Gloucester.
Like the kings that were before him, he gathered together the great
men of the realm, and when need was, the small men also. Nothing
seems to have been changed in the constitution or the powers of the
assembly; but its spirit must have been utterly changed. The innermost
circle, earls, bishops, great officers of state and household, gradually
changed from a body of Englishmen with a few strangers among them into
a body of strangers among whom two or three Englishmen still kept their
places. The result of their “deep speech” with William
was not likely to be other than an assent to William’s will.
The ordinary freeman did not lose his abstract right to come and shout
“Yea, yea,” to any addition that King William made to the
law of King Edward. But there would be nothing to tempt him to
come, unless King William thought fit to bid him. But once at
least William did gather together, if not every freeman, at least all
freeholders of the smallest account. On one point the Conqueror
had fully made up his mind; on one point he was to be a benefactor to
his kingdom through all succeeding ages. The realm of England
was to be one and indivisible. No ruler or subject in the kingdom
of England should again dream that that kingdom could be split asunder.
When he offered Harold the underkingship of the realm or of some part
of it, he did so doubtless only in the full conviction that the offer
would be refused. No such offer should be heard of again.
There should be no such division as had been between Cnut and Edmund,
between Harthacnut and the first Harold, such as Edwin and Morkere had
dreamed of in later times. Nor should the kingdom be split asunder
in that subtler way which William of all men best understood, the way
in which the Frankish kingdoms, East and West, had split asunder.
He would have no dukes or earls who might become kings in all but name,
each in his own duchy or earldom. No man in his realm should be
to him as he was to his overlord at Paris. No man in his realm
should plead duty towards an immediate lord as an excuse for breach
of duty towards the lord of that immediate lord. Hence William’s
policy with regard to earldoms. There was to be nothing like the
great governments which had been held by Godwine, Leofric, and Siward;
an Earl of the West-Saxons or the Northumbrians was too like a Duke
of the Normans to be endured by one who was Duke of the Normans himself.
The earl, even of the king’s appointment, still represented the
separate being of the district over which he was set. He was the
king’s representative rather than merely his officer; if he was
a magistrate and not a prince, he often sat in the seat of former princes,
and might easily grow into a prince. And at last, at the very
end of his reign, as the finishing of his work, he took the final step
that made England for ever one. In 1086 every land-owner in England
swore to be faithful to King William within and without England and
to defend him against his enemies. The subject’s duty to
the King was to any duty which the vassal might owe to any inferior
lord. When the King was the embodiment of national unity and orderly
government, this was the greatest of all steps in the direction of both.
Never did William or any other man act more distinctly as an English
statesman, never did any one act tell more directly towards the later
making of England, than this memorable act of the Conqueror. Here
indeed is an addition which William made to the law of Edward for the
truest good of the English folk. And yet no enactment has ever
been more thoroughly misunderstood. Lawyer after lawyer has set
down in his book that, at the assembly of Salisbury in 1086, William
introduced “the feudal system.” If the words “feudal
system” have any meaning, the object of the law now made was to
hinder any “feudal system” from coming into England.
William would be king of a kingdom, head of a commonwealth, personal
lord of every man in his realm, not merely, like a King of the French,
external lord of princes whose subjects owed him no allegiance.
This greatest monument of the Conqueror’s statesmanship was carried
into effect in a special assembly of the English nation gathered on
the first day of August 1086 on the great plain of Salisbury.
Now, perhaps for the first time, we get a distinct foreshadowing of
Lords and Commons. The Witan, the great men of the realm, and
“the landsitting men,” the whole body of landowners, are
now distinguished. The point is that William required the personal
presence of every man whose personal allegiance he thought worth having.
Every man in the mixed assembly, mixed indeed in race and speech, the
King’s own men and the men of other lords, took the oath and became
the man of King William. On that day England became for ever a
kingdom one and indivisible, which since that day no man has dreamed
of parting asunder.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The great assembly of 1086 will come again among the events of William’s
later reign; it comes here as the last act of that general settlement
which began in 1070. That settlement, besides its secular side,
has also an ecclesiastical side of a somewhat different character.
In both William’s coming brought the island kingdom into a closer
connexion with the continent; and brought a large displacement of Englishmen
and a large promotion of strangers. But on the ecclesiastical
side, though the changes were less violent, there was a more marked
beginning of a new state of things. The religious missionary was
more inclined to innovate than the military conqueror. Here William
not only added but changed; on one point he even proclaimed that the
existing law of England was bad. Certainly the religious state
of England was likely to displease churchmen from the mainland.
The English Church, so directly the child of the Roman, was, for that
very reason, less dependent on her parent. She was a free colony,
not a conquered province. The English Church too was most distinctly
national; no land came so near to that ideal state of things in which
the Church is the nation on its religious side. Papal authority
therefore was weaker in England than elsewhere, and a less careful line
was drawn between spiritual and temporal things and jurisdictions.
Two friendly powers could take liberties with each other. The
national assemblies dealt with ecclesiastical as well as with temporal
matters; one indeed among our ancient laws blames any assembly that
did otherwise. Bishop and earl sat together in the local <i>Gemót</i>,
to deal with many matters which, according to continental ideas, should
have been dealt with in separate courts. And, by what in continental
eyes seemed a strange laxity of discipline, priests, bishops, members
of capitular bodies, were often married. The English diocesan
arrangements were unlike continental models. In Gaul, by a tradition
of Roman date, the bishop was bishop of the city. His diocese
was marked by the extent of the civil jurisdiction of the city.
His home, his head church, his <i>bishopstool</i> in the head church,
were all in the city. In Teutonic England the bishop was commonly
bishop, not of a city but of a tribe or district; his style was that
of a tribe; his home, his head church, his bishopstool, might be anywhere
within the territory of that tribe. Still, on the greatest point
of all, matters in England were thoroughly to William’s liking;
nowhere did the King stand forth more distinctly as the Supreme Governor
of the Church. In England, as in Normandy, the right of the sovereign
to the investiture of ecclesiastical benefices was ancient and undisputed.
What Edward had freely done, William went on freely doing, and Hildebrand
himself never ventured on a word of remonstrance against a power which
he deemed so wrongful in the hands of his own sovereign. William
had but to stand on the rights of his predecessors. When Gregory
asked for homage for the crown which he had in some sort given, William
answered indeed as an English king. What the kings before him
had done for or paid to the Roman see, that would he do and pay; but
this no king before him had ever done, nor would he be the first to
do it. But while William thus maintained the rights of his crown,
he was willing and eager to do all that seemed needful for ecclesiastical
reform. And the general result of his reform was to weaken the
insular independence of England, to make her Church more like the other
Churches of the West, and to increase the power of the Roman Bishop.</p>
<p>William had now a fellow-worker in his taste. The subtle spirit
which had helped to win his kingdom was now at his side to help him
to rule it. Within a few months after the taking of Chester Lanfranc
sat on the throne of Augustine. As soon as the actual Conquest
was over, William began to give his mind to ecclesiastical matters.
It might look like sacrilege when he caused all the monasteries of England
to be harried. But no harm was done to the monks or to their possessions.
The holy houses were searched for the hoards which the rich men of England,
fearing the new king, had laid up in the monastic treasuries.
William looked on these hoards as part of the forfeited goods of rebels,
and carried them off during the Lent of 1070. This done, he sat
steadily down to the reform of the English Church.</p>
<p>He had three papal legates to guide him, one of whom, Ermenfrid,
Bishop of Sitten, had come in on a like errand in the time of Edward.
It was a kind of solemn confirmation of the Conquest, when, at the assembly
held at Winchester in 1070, the King’s crown was placed on his
head by Ermenfrid. The work of deposing English prelates and appointing
foreign successors now began. The primacy of York was regularly
vacant; Ealdred had died as the Danes sailed up the Humber to assault
or to deliver his city. The primacy of Canterbury was to be made
vacant by the deposition of Stigand. His canonical position had
always been doubtful; neither Harold nor William had been crowned by
him; yet William had treated him hitherto with marked courtesy, and
he had consecrated at least one Norman bishop, Remigius of Dorchester.
He was now deprived both of the archbishopric and of the bishopric of
Winchester which he held with it, and was kept under restraint for the
rest of his life. According to foreign canonical rules the sentence
may pass as just; but it marked a stage in the conquest of England when
a stout-hearted Englishman was removed from the highest place in the
English Church to make way for the innermost counsellor of the Conqueror.
In the Pentecostal assembly, held at Windsor, Lanfranc was appointed
archbishop; his excuses were overcome by his old master Herlwin of Bec;
he came to England, and on August 15, 1070 he was consecrated to the
primacy.</p>
<p>Other deprivations and appointments took place in these assemblies.
The see of York was given to Thomas, a canon of Bayeux, a man of high
character and memorable in the local history of his see. The abbey
of Peterborough was vacant by the death of Brand, who had received the
staff from the uncrowned Eadgar. It was only by rich gifts that
he had turned away the wrath of William from his house. The Fenland
was perhaps already stirring, and the Abbot of Peterborough might have
to act as a military commander. In this case the prelate appointed,
a Norman named Turold, was accordingly more of a soldier than of a monk.
From these assemblies of 1070 the series of William’s ecclesiastical
changes goes on. As the English bishops die or are deprived, strangers
take their place. They are commonly Normans, but Walcher, who
became Bishop of Durham in 1071, was one of those natives of Lorraine
who had been largely favoured in Edward’s day. At the time
of William’s death Wulfstan was the only Englishman who kept a
bishopric. Even his deprivation had once been thought of.
The story takes a legendary shape, but it throws an important light
on the relations of Church and State in England. In an assembly
held in the West Minster Wulfstan is called on by William and Lanfranc
to give up his staff. He refuses; he will give it back to him
who gave it, and places it on the tomb of his dead master Edward.
No of his enemies can move it. The sentence is recalled, and the
staff yields to his touch. Edward was not yet a canonized saint;
the appeal is simply from the living and foreign king to the dead and
native king. This legend, growing up when Western Europe was torn
in pieces by the struggle about investitures, proves better than the
most authentic documents how the right which Popes denied to Emperors
was taken for granted in the case of an English king. But, while
the spoils of England, temporal and spiritual, were thus scattered abroad
among men of the conquering race, two men at least among them refused
all share in plunder which they deemed unrighteous. One gallant
Norman knight, Gulbert of Hugleville, followed William through all his
campaigns, but when English estates were offered as his reward, he refused
to share in unrighteous gains, and went back to the lands of his fathers
which he could hold with a good conscience. And one monk, Wimund
of Saint-Leutfried, not only refused bishoprics and abbeys, but rebuked
the Conqueror for wrong and robbery. And William bore no grudge
against his censor, but, when the archbishopric of Rouen became vacant,
he offered it to the man who had rebuked him. Among the worthies
of England Gulbert and Wimund can hardly claim a place, but a place
should surely be theirs among the men whom England honours.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The primacy of Lanfranc is one of the most memorable in our history.
In the words of the parable put forth by Anselm in the next reign, the
plough of the English Church was for seventeen years drawn by two oxen
of equal strength. By ancient English custom the Archbishop of
Canterbury was the King’s special counsellor, the special representative
of his Church and people. Lanfranc cannot be charged with any
direct oppression; yet in the hands of a stranger who had his spiritual
conquest to make, the tribunitian office of former archbishops was lost
in that of chief minister of the sovereign. In the first action
of their joint rule, the interest of king and primate was the same.
Lanfranc sought for a more distinct acknowledgement of the superiority
of Canterbury over the rival metropolis of York. And this fell
in with William’s schemes for the consolidation of the kingdom.
The political motive is avowed. Northumberland, which had been
so hard to subdue and which still lay open to Danish invaders or deliverers,
was still dangerous. An independent Archbishop of York might consecrate
a King of the Northumbrians, native or Danish, who might grow into a
King of the English. The Northern metropolitan had unwillingly
to admit the superiority, and something more, of the Southern.
The caution of William and his ecclesiastical adviser reckoned it among
possible chances that even Thomas of Bayeux might crown an invading
Cnut or Harold in opposition to his native sovereign and benefactor.</p>
<p>For some of his own purposes, William had perhaps chosen his minister
too wisely. The objects of the two colleagues were not always
the same. Lanfranc, sprung from Imperialist Pavia, was no zealot
for extravagant papal claims. The caution with which he bore himself
during the schism which followed the strife between Gregory and Henry
brought on him more than one papal censure. Yet the general tendency
of his administration was towards the growth of ecclesiastical, and
even of papal, claims. William never dreamed of giving up his
ecclesiastical supremacy or of exempting churchmen from the ordinary
power of the law. But the division of the civil and ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, the increased frequency of synods distinct from the general
assemblies of the realm—even though the acts of those synods needed
the royal assent—were steps towards that exemption of churchmen
from the civil power which was asserted in one memorable saying towards
the end of William’s own reign. William could hold his own
against Hildebrand himself; yet the increased intercourse with Rome,
the more frequent presence of Roman Legates, all tended to increase
the papal claims and the deference yielded to them. William refused
homage to Gregory; but it is significant that Gregory asked for it.
It was a step towards the day when a King of England was glad to offer
it. The increased strictness as to the marriage of the clergy
tended the same way. Lanfranc did not at once enforce the full
rigour of Hildebrand’s decrees. Marriage was forbidden for
the future; the capitular clergy had to part from their wives; but the
vested interest of the parish priest was respected. In another
point William directly helped to undermine his own authority and the
independence of his kingdom. He exempted his abbey of the Battle
from the authority of the diocesan bishop. With this began a crowd
of such exemptions, which, by weakening local authority, strengthened
the power of the Roman see. All these things helped on Hildebrand’s
great scheme which made the clergy everywhere members of one distinct
and exclusive body, with the Roman Bishop at their head. Whatever
tended to part the clergy from other men tended to weaken the throne
of every king. While William reigned with Lanfranc at his side,
these things were not felt; but the seed was sown for the controversy
between Henry and Thomas and for the humiliation of John.</p>
<p>Even those changes of Lanfranc’s primacy which seem of purely
ecclesiastical concern all helped, in some way to increase the intercourse
between England and the continent or to break down some insular peculiarity.
And whatever did this increased the power of Rome. Even the decree
of 1075 that bishoprics should be removed to the chief cities of their
dioceses helped to make England more like Gaul or Italy. So did
the fancy of William’s bishops and abbots for rebuilding their
churches on a greater scale and in the last devised continental style.
All tended to make England less of another world. On the other
hand, one insular peculiarity well served the purposes of the new primate.
Monastic chapters in episcopal churches were almost unknown out of England.
Lanfranc, himself a monk, favoured monks in this matter also.
In several churches the secular canons were displaced by monks.
The corporate spirit of the regulars, and their dependence on Rome,
was far stronger than that of the secular clergy. The secular
chapters could be refractory, but the disputes between them and their
bishops were mainly of local importance; they form no such part of the
general story of ecclesiastical and papal advance as the long tale of
the quarrel between the archbishops and the monks of Christ Church.</p>
<p>Lanfranc survived William, and placed the crown on the head of his
successor. The friendship between king and archbishop remained
unbroken through their joint lives. Lanfranc’s acts were
William’s acts; what the Primate did must have been approved by
the King. How far William’s acts were Lanfranc’s acts
it is less easy to say. But the Archbishop was ever a trusted
minister, and a trusted counsellor, and in the King’s frequent
absences from England, he often acted as his lieutenant. We do
not find him actually taking a part in warfare, but he duly reports
military successes to his sovereign. It was William’s combined
wisdom and good luck to provide himself with a counsellor than whom
for his immediate purposes none could be better. A man either
of a higher or a lower moral level than Lanfranc, a saint like Anselm
or one of the mere worldly bishops of the time, would not have done
his work so well. William needed an ecclesiastical statesman,
neither unscrupulous nor over-scrupulous, and he found him in the lawyer
of Pavia, the doctor of Avranches, the monk of Bec, the abbot of Saint
Stephen’s. If Lanfranc sometimes unwittingly outwitted both
his master and himself, if his policy served the purposes of Rome more
than suited the purposes of either, that is the common course of human
affairs. Great men are apt to forget that systems which they can
work themselves cannot be worked by smaller men. From this error
neither William nor Lanfranc was free. But, from their own point
of view, it was their only error. Their work was to subdue England,
soul and body; and they subdued it. That work could not be done
without great wrong: but no other two men of that day could have done
it with so little wrong. The shrinking from needless and violent
change which is so strongly characteristic of William, and less strongly
of Lanfranc also, made their work at the time easier to be done; in
the course of ages it made it easier to be undone.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER X—THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM—1070-1086</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The years which saw the settlement of England, though not years of
constant fighting like the two years between the march to Exeter and
the fall of Chester, were not years of perfect peace. William
had to withstand foes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes in
his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his first
wound in personal conflict. Nothing shook his firm hold either
on duchy or kingdom; but in his later years his good luck forsook him.
And men did not fail to connect this change in his future with a change
in himself, above all with one deed of blood which stands out as utterly
unlike all his other recorded acts.</p>
<p>But the amount of warfare which William had to go through in these
later years was small compared with the great struggles of his earlier
days. There is no tale to tell like the war of Val-ès-dunes,
like the French invasions of Normandy, like the campaigns that won England.
One event only of the earlier time is repeated almost as exactly as
an event can be repeated. William had won Maine once; he had now
to win it again, and less thoroughly. As Conqueror his work is
done; a single expedition into Wales is the only campaign of this part
of his life that led to any increase of territory.</p>
<p>When William sat down to the settlement of his kingdom after the
fall of Chester, he was in the strictest sense full king over all England.
For the moment the whole land obeyed him; at no later moment did any
large part of the land fail to obey him. All opposition was now
revolt. Men were no longer keeping out an invader; when they rose,
they rose against a power which, however wrongfully, was the established
government of the land. Two such movements took place. One
was a real revolt of Englishmen against foreign rule. The other
was a rebellion of William’s own earls in their own interests,
in which English feeling went with the King. Both were short sharp
struggles which stand out boldly in the tale. More important in
the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations
of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain.
With the crown of the West-Saxon kings, he had taken up their claims
to supremacy over the whole island, and probably beyond it. And
even without such claims, border warfare with his Welsh and Scottish
neighbours could not be avoided. Counting from the completion
of the real conquest of England in 1070, there were in William’s
reign three distinct sources of disturbance. There were revolts
within the kingdom of England. There was border warfare in Britain.
There were revolts in William’s continental dominions. And
we may add actual foreign warfare or threats of foreign warfare, affecting
William, sometimes in his Norman, sometimes in his English character.</p>
<p>With the affairs of Wales William had little personally to do.
In this he is unlike those who came immediately before and after him.
In the lives of Harold and of William Rufus personal warfare against
the Welsh forms an important part. William the Great commonly
left this kind of work to the earls of the frontier, to Hugh of Chester,
Roger of Shrewsbury, and to his early friend William of Hereford, so
long as that fierce warrior’s life lasted. These earls were
ever at war with the Welsh princes, and they extended the English kingdom
at their cost. Once only did the King take a personal share in
the work, when he entered South Wales, in 1081. We hear vaguely
of his subduing the land and founding castles; we see more distinctly
that he released many subjects who were in British bondage, and that
he went on a religious pilgrimage to Saint David’s. This
last journey is in some accounts connected with schemes for the conquest
of Ireland. And in one most remarkable passage of the English
Chronicle, the writer for once speculates as to what might have happened
but did not. Had William lived two years longer, he would have
won Ireland by his wisdom without weapons. And if William had
won Ireland either by wisdom or by weapons, he would assuredly have
known better how to deal with it than most of those who have come after
him. If any man could have joined together the lands which God
has put asunder, surely it was he. This mysterious saying must
have a reference to some definite act or plan of which we have no other
record. And some slight approach to the process of winning Ireland
without weapons does appear in the ecclesiastical intercourse between
England and Ireland which now begins. Both the native Irish princes
and the Danes of the east coast begin to treat Lanfranc as their metropolitan,
and to send bishops to him for consecration. The name of the King
of the English is never mentioned in the letters which passed between
the English primate and the kings and bishops of Ireland. It may
be that William was biding his time for some act of special wisdom;
but our speculations cannot go any further than those of the Peterborough
Chronicler.</p>
<p>Revolt within the kingdom and invasion from without both began in
the year in which the Conquest was brought to an end. William’s
ecclesiastical reforms were interrupted by the revolt of the Fenland.
William’s authority had never been fully acknowledged in that
corner of England, while he wore his crown and held his councils elsewhere.
But the place where disturbances began, the abbey of Peterborough, was
certainly in William’s obedience. The warfare made memorable
by the name of Hereward began in June 1070, and a Scottish harrying
of Northern England, the second of five which are laid to the charge
of Malcolm, took place in the same year, and most likely about the same
time. The English movement is connected alike with the course
of the Danish fleet and with the appointment of Turold to the abbey
of Peterborough. William had bribed the Danish commanders to forsake
their English allies, and he allowed them to ravage the coast.
A later bribe took them back to Denmark; but not till they had shown
themselves in the waters of Ely. The people, largely of Danish
descent, flocked to them, thinking, as the Chronicler says, that they
would win the whole land. The movement was doubtless in favour
of the kingship of Swegen. But nothing was done by Danes and English
together save to plunder Peterborough abbey. Hereward, said to
have been the nephew of Turold’s English predecessor, doubtless
looked on the holy place, under a Norman abbot, as part of the enemy’s
country.</p>
<p>The name of Hereward has gathered round it such a mass of fiction,
old and new, that it is hard to disentangle the few details of his real
history. His descent and birth-place are uncertain; but he was
assuredly a man of Lincolnshire, and assuredly not the son of Earl Leofric.
For some unknown cause, he had been banished in the days of Edward or
of Harold. He now came back to lead his countrymen against William.
He was the soul of the movement of which the abbey of Ely became the
centre. The isle, then easily defensible, was the last English
ground on which the Conqueror was defied by Englishmen fighting for
England. The men of the Fenland were zealous; the monks of Ely
were zealous; helpers came in from other parts of England. English
leaders left their shelter in Scotland to share the dangers of their
countrymen; even Edwin and Morkere at last plucked up heart to leave
William’s court and join the patriotic movement. Edwin was
pursued; he was betrayed by traitors; he was overtaken and slain, to
William’s deep grief, we are told. His brother reached the
isle, and helped in its defence. William now felt that the revolt
called for his own presence and his full energies. The isle was
stoutly attacked and stoutly defended, till, according to one version,
the monks betrayed the stronghold to the King. According to another,
Morkere was induced to surrender by promises of mercy which William
failed to fulfil. In any case, before the year 1071 was ended,
the isle of Ely was in William’s hands. Hereward alone with
a few companions made their way out by sea. William was less merciful
than usual; still no man was put to death. Some were mutilated,
some imprisoned; Morkere and other chief men spent the rest of their
days in bonds. The temper of the Conqueror had now fearfully hardened.
Still he could honour a valiant enemy; those who resisted to the last
fared best. All the legends of Hereward’s later days speak
of him as admitted to William’s peace and favour. One makes
him die quietly, another kills him at the hands of Norman enemies, but
not at William’s bidding or with William’s knowledge.
Evidence a little better suggests that he bore arms for his new sovereign
beyond the sea; and an entry in Domesday also suggests that he held
lands under Count Robert of Mortain in Warwickshire. It would
suit William’s policy, when he received Hereward to his favour,
to make him exchange lands near to the scene of his exploits for lands
in a distant shire held under the lordship of the King’s brother.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, most likely in the summer months of 1070, Malcolm ravaged
Cleveland, Durham, and other districts where there must have been little
left to ravage. Meanwhile the Ætheling Edgar and his sisters,
with other English exiles, sought shelter in Scotland, and were hospitably
received. At the same time Gospatric, now William’s earl
in Northumberland, retaliated by a harrying of Scottish Cumberland,
which provoked Malcolm to greater cruelties. It was said that
there was no house in Scotland so poor that it had not an English bondman.
Presently some of Malcolm’s English guests joined the defenders
of Ely; those of highest birth stayed in Scotland, and Malcolm, after
much striving, persuaded Margaret the sister of Edgar to become his
wife. Her praises are written in Scottish history, and the marriage
had no small share in the process which made the Scottish kings and
the lands which formed their real kingdom practically English.
The sons and grandsons of Margaret, sprung of the Old-English kingly
house, were far more English within their own realm than the Norman
and Angevin kings of Southern England. But within the English
border men looked at things with other eyes. Thrice again did
Malcolm ravage England; two and twenty years later he was slain in his
last visit of havoc. William meanwhile and his earls at least
drew to themselves some measure of loyalty from the men of Northern
England as the guardians of the land against the Scot.</p>
<p>For the present however Malcolm’s invasion was only avenged
by Gospatric’s harrying in Cumberland. The year 1071 called
William to Ely; in the early part of 1072 his presence was still needed
on the mainland; in August he found leisure for a march against Scotland.
He went as an English king, to assert the rights of the English crown,
to avenge wrongs done to the English land; and on such an errand Englishmen
followed him gladly. Eadric, the defender of Herefordshire, had
made his peace with the King, and he now held a place of high honour
in his army. But if William met with any armed resistance on his
Scottish expedition, it did not amount to a pitched battle. He
passed through Lothian into Scotland; he crossed Forth and drew near
to Tay, and there, by the round tower of Abernethy, the King of Scots
swore oaths and gave hostages and became the man of the King of the
English. William might now call himself, like his West-Saxon predecessors,
<i>Bretwalda</i> and <i>Basileus</i> of the isle of Britain. This
was the highest point of his fortune. Duke of the Normans, King
of the English, he was undisputed lord from the march of Anjou to the
narrow sea between Caithness and Orkney.</p>
<p>The exact terms of the treaty between William’s royal vassal
and his overlord are unknown. But one of them was clearly the
removal of Edgar from Scotland. Before long he was on the continent.
William had not yet learned that Edgar was less dangerous in Britain
than in any other part of the world, and that he was safest of all in
William’s own court. Homage done and hostages received,
the Lord of all Britain returned to his immediate kingdom. His
march is connected with many legendary stories. In real history
it is marked by the foundation of the castle of Durham, and by the Conqueror’s
confirmation of the privileges of the palatine bishops. If all
the earls of England had been like the earls of Chester, and all the
bishops like the bishops of Durham, England would assuredly have split
up, like Germany, into a loose federation of temporal and spiritual
princes. This it was William’s special work to hinder; but
he doubtless saw that the exceptional privileges of one or two favoured
lordships, standing in marked contrast to the rest, would not really
interfere with his great plan of union. And William would hardly
have confirmed the sees of London or Winchester in the privileges which
he allowed to the distant see of Durham. He now also made a grant
of earldoms, the object of which is less clear than that of most of
his actions. It is not easy to say why Gospatric was deprived
of his earldom. His former acts of hostility to William had been
covered by his pardon and reappointment in 1069; and since then he had
acted as a loyal, if perhaps an indiscreet, guardian of the land.
Two greater earldoms than his had become vacant by the revolt, the death,
the imprisonment, of Edwin and Morkere. But these William had
no intention of filling. He would not have in his realm anything
so dangerous as an earl of the Mercian’s or the Northumbrians
in the old sense, whether English or Norman. But the defence of
the northern frontier needed an earl to rule Northumberland in the later
sense, the land north of the Tyne. And after the fate of Robert
of Comines, William could not as yet put a Norman earl in so perilous
a post. But the Englishman whom he chose was open to the same
charges as the deposed Gospatric. For he was Waltheof the son
of Siward, the hero of the storm of York in 1069. Already Earl
of Northampton and Huntingdon, he was at this time high in the King’s
personal favour, perhaps already the husband of the King’s niece.
One side of William’s policy comes out here. Union was sometimes
helped by division. There were men whom William loved to make
great, but whom he had no mind to make dangerous. He gave them
vast estates, but estates for the most part scattered over different
parts of the kingdom. It was only in the border earldoms and in
Cornwall that he allowed anything at all near to the lordship of a whole
shire to be put in the hands of a single man. One Norman and one
Englishman held two earldoms together; but they were earldoms far apart.
Roger of Montgomery held the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Sussex, and
Waltheof to his midland earldom of Northampton and Huntingdon now added
the rule of distant Northumberland. The men who had fought most
stoutly against William were the men whom he most willingly received
to favour. Eadric and Hereward were honoured; Waltheof was honoured
more highly. He ranked along with the greatest Normans; his position
was perhaps higher than any but the King’s born kinsmen.
But the whole tale of Waltheof is a problem that touches the character
of the king under whom he rose and fell. Lifted up higher than
any other man among the conquered, he was the one man whom William put
to death on a political charge. It is hard to see the reasons
for either his rise or his fall. It was doubtless mainly his end
which won him the abiding reverence of his countrymen. His valour
and his piety are loudly praised. But his valour we know only
from his one personal exploit at York; his piety was consistent with
a base murder. In other matters, he seems amiable, irresolute,
and of a scrupulous conscience, and Northumbrian morality perhaps saw
no great crime in a murder committed under the traditions of a Northumbrian
deadly feud. Long before Waltheof was born, his grandfather Earl
Ealdred had been killed by a certain Carl. The sons of Carl had
fought by his side at York; but, notwithstanding this comradeship, the
first act of Waltheof’s rule in Northumberland was to send men
to slay them beyond the bounds of his earldom. A crime that was
perhaps admired in Northumberland and unheard of elsewhere did not lose
him either the favour of the King or the friendship of his neighbour
Bishop Walcher, a reforming prelate with whom Waltheof acted in concert.
And when he was chosen as the single exception to William’s merciful
rule, it was not for this undoubted crime, but on charges of which,
even if guilty, he might well have been forgiven.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The sojourn of William on the continent in 1072 carries us out of
England and Normandy into the general affairs of Europe. Signs
may have already showed themselves of what was coming to the south of
Normandy; but the interest of the moment lay in the country of Matilda.
Flanders, long the firm ally of Normandy, was now to change into a bitter
enemy. Count Baldwin died in 1067; his successor of the same name
died three years later, and a war followed between his widow Richildis,
the guardian of his young son Arnulf, and his brother Robert the Frisian.
Robert had won fame in the East; he had received the sovereignty of
Friesland—a name which takes in Holland and Zealand—and
he was now invited to deliver Flanders from the oppressions of Richildis.
Meanwhile, Matilda was acting as regent of Normandy, with Earl William
of Hereford as her counsellor. Richildis sought help of her son’s
two overlords, King Henry of Germany and King Philip of France.
Philip came in person; the German succours were too late. From
Normandy came Earl William with a small party of knights. The
kings had been asked for armies; to the Earl she offered herself, and
he came to fight for his bride. But early in 1071 Philip, Arnulf,
and William, were all overthrown by Robert the Frisian in the battle
of Cassel. Arnulf and Earl William were killed; Philip made peace
with Robert, henceforth undisputed Count of Flanders.</p>
<p>All this brought King William to the continent, while the invasion
of Malcolm was still unavenged. No open war followed between Normandy
and Flanders; but for the rest of their lives Robert and William were
enemies, and each helped the enemies of the other. William gave
his support to Baldwin brother of the slain Arnulf, who strove to win
Flanders from Robert. But the real interest of this episode lies
in the impression which was made in the lands east of Flanders.
In the troubled state of Germany, when Henry the Fourth was striving
with the Saxons, both sides seem to have looked to the Conqueror of
England with hope and with fear. On this matter our English and
Norman authorities are silent, and the notices in the contemporary German
writers are strangely unlike one another. But they show at least
that the prince who ruled on both sides of the sea was largely in men’s
thoughts. The Saxon enemy of Henry describes him in his despair
as seeking help in Denmark, France, Aquitaine, and also of the King
of the English, promising him the like help, if he should ever need
it. William and Henry had both to guard against Saxon enmity,
but the throne at Winchester stood firmer than the throne at Goslar.
But the historian of the continental Saxons puts into William’s
mouth an answer utterly unsuited to his position. He is made,
when in Normandy, to answer that, having won his kingdom by force, he
fears to leave it, lest he might not find his way back again.
Far more striking is the story told three years later by Lambert of
Herzfeld. Henry, when engaged in an Hungarian war, heard that
the famous Archbishop Hanno of Köln had leagued with William <i>Bostar</i>—so
is his earliest surname written—King of the English, and that
a vast army was coming to set the island monarch on the German throne.
The host never came; but Henry hastened back to guard his frontier against
<i>barbarians</i>. By that phrase a Teutonic writer can hardly
mean the insular part of William’s subjects.</p>
<p>Now assuredly William never cherished, as his successor probably
did, so wild a dream as that of a kingly crowning at Aachen, to be followed
perhaps by an imperial crowning at Rome. But that such schemes
were looked on as a practical danger against which the actual German
King had to guard, at least shows the place which the Conqueror of England
held in European imagination.</p>
<p>For the three or four years immediately following the surrender of
Ely, William’s journeys to and fro between his kingdom and his
duchy were specially frequent. Matilda seems to have always stayed
in Normandy; she is never mentioned in England after the year of her
coronation and the birth of her youngest son, and she commonly acted
as regent of the duchy. In the course of 1072 we see William in
England, in Normandy, again in England, and in Scotland. In 1073
he was called beyond sea by a formidable movement. His great continental
conquest had risen against him; Le Mans and all Maine were again independent.
City and land chose for them a prince who came by female descent from
the stock of their ancient counts. This was Hugh the son of Azo
Marquess of Liguria and of Gersendis the sister of the last Count Herbert.
The Normans were driven out of Le Mans; Azo came to take possession
in the name of his son, but he and the citizens did not long agree.
He went back, leaving his wife and son under the guardianship of Geoffrey
of Mayenne. Presently the men of Le Mans threw off princely rule
altogether and proclaimed the earliest <i>commune</i> in Northern Gaul.
Here then, as at Exeter, William had to strive against an armed commonwealth,
and, as at Exeter, we specially wish to know what were to be the relations
between the capital and the county at large. The mass of the people
throughout Maine threw themselves zealously into the cause of the commonwealth.
But their zeal might not have lasted long, if, according to the usual
run of things in such cases, they had simply exchanged the lordship
of their hereditary masters for the corporate lordship of the citizens
of Le Mans. To the nobles the change was naturally distasteful.
They had to swear to the <i>commune</i>, but many of them, Geoffrey
for one, had no thought of keeping their oaths. Dissensions arose;
Hugh went back to Italy; Geoffrey occupied the castle of Le Mans, and
the citizens dislodged him only by the dangerous help of the other prince
who claimed the overlordship of Maine, Count Fulk of Anjou.</p>
<p>If Maine was to have a master from outside, the lord of Anjou hardly
promised better than the lord of Normandy. But men in despair
grasp at anything. The strange thing is that Fulk disappears now
from the story; William steps in instead. And it was at least
as much in his English as in his Norman character that the Duke and
King won back the revolted land. A place in his army was held
by English warriors, seemingly under the command of Hereward himself.
Men who had fought for freedom in their own land now fought at the bidding
of their Conqueror to put down freedom in another land. They went
willingly; the English Chronicler describes the campaign with glee,
and breaks into verse—or incorporates a contemporary ballad—at
the tale of English victory. Few men of that day would see that
the cause of Maine was in truth the cause of England. If York
and Exeter could not act in concert with one another, still less could
either act in concert with Le Mans. Englishmen serving in Maine
would fancy that they were avenging their own wrongs by laying waste
the lands of any man who spoke the French tongue. On William’s
part, the employment of Englishmen, the employment of Hereward, was
another stroke of policy. It was more fully following out the
system which led Englishmen against Exeter, which led Eadric and his
comrades into Scotland. For in every English soldier whom William
carried into Maine he won a loyal English subject. To men who
had fought under his banners beyond the sea he would be no longer the
Conqueror but the victorious captain; they would need some very special
oppression at home to make them revolt against the chief whose laurels
they had helped to win. As our own gleeman tells the tale, they
did little beyond harrying the helpless land; but in continental writers
we can trace a regular campaign, in which we hear of no battles, but
of many sieges. William, as before, subdued the land piecemeal,
keeping the city for the last. When he drew near to Le Mans, its
defenders surrendered at his summons, to escape fire and slaughter by
speedy submission. The new <i>commune</i> was abolished, but the
Conqueror swore to observe all the ancient rights of the city.</p>
<p>All this time we have heard nothing of Count Fulk. Presently
we find him warring against nobles of Maine who had taken William’s
part, and leaguing with the Bretons against William himself. The
King set forth with his whole force, Norman and English; but peace was
made by the mediation of an unnamed Roman cardinal, abetted, we are
told, by the chief Norman nobles. Success against confederated
Anjou and Britanny might be doubtful, with Maine and England wavering
in their allegiance, and France, Scotland, and Flanders, possible enemies
in the distance. The rights of the Count of Anjou over Maine were
formally acknowledged, and William’s eldest son Robert did homage
to Fulk for the county. Each prince stipulated for the safety
and favour of all subjects of the other who had taken his side.
Between Normandy and Anjou there was peace during the rest of the days
of William; in Maine we shall see yet another revolt, though only a
partial one.</p>
<p>William went back to England in 1073. In 1074 he went to the
continent for a longer absence. As the time just after the first
completion of the Conquest is spoken of as a time when Normans and English
were beginning to sit down side by side in peace, so the years which
followed the submission of Ely are spoken of as a time of special oppression.
This fact is not unconnected with the King’s frequent absences
from England. Whatever we say of William’s own position,
he was a check on smaller oppressors. Things were always worse
when the eye of the great master was no longer watching. William’s
one weakness was that of putting overmuch trust in his immediate kinsfolk
and friends. Of the two special oppressors, William Fitz-Osbern
had thrown away his life in Flanders; but Bishop Ode was still at work,
till several years later his king and brother struck him down with a
truly righteous blow.</p>
<p>The year 1074, not a year of fighting, was pro-eminently a year of
intrigue. William’s enemies on the continent strove to turn
the representative of the West-Saxon kings to help their ends.
Edgar flits to and fro between Scotland and Flanders, and the King of
the French tempts him with the offer of a convenient settlement on the
march of France, Normandy, and Flanders. Edgar sets forth from
Scotland, but is driven back by a storm; Malcolm and Margaret then change
their minds, and bid him make his peace with King William. William
gladly accepts his submission; an embassy is sent to bring him with
all worship to the King in Normandy. He abides for several years
in William’s court contented and despised, receiving a daily pension
and the profits of estates in England of no great extent which the King
of a moment held by the grant of a rival who could afford to be magnanimous.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Edgar’s after-life showed that he belonged to that class of
men who, as a rule slothful and listless, can yet on occasion act with
energy, and who act most creditably on behalf of others. But William
had no need to fear him, and he was easily turned into a friend and
a dependant. Edgar, first of Englishmen by descent, was hardly
an Englishman by birth. William had now to deal with the Englishman
who stood next to Edgar in dignity and far above him in personal estimation.
We have reached the great turning-point in William’s reign and
character, the black and mysterious tale of the fate of Waltheof.
The Earl of Northumberland, Northampton, and Huntingdon, was not the
only earl in England of English birth. The earldom of the East-Angles
was held by a born Englishman who was more hateful than any stranger.
Ralph of Wader was the one Englishman who had fought at William’s
side against England. He often passes for a native of Britanny,
and he certainly held lands and castles in that country; but he was
Breton only by the mother’s side. For Domesday and the Chronicles
show that he was the son of an elder Earl Ralph, who had been <i>staller</i>
or master of the horse in Edward’s days, and who is expressly
said to have been born in Norfolk. The unusual name suggests that
the elder Ralph was not of English descent. He survived the coming
of William, and his son fought on Senlac among the countrymen of his
mother. This treason implies an unrecorded banishment in the days
of Edward or Harold. Already earl in 1069, he had in that year
acted vigorously for William against the Danes. But he now conspired
against him along with Roger, the younger son of William Fitz-Osbern,
who had succeeded his father in the earldom of Hereford, while his Norman
estates had passed to his elder brother William. What grounds
of complaint either Ralph or Roger had against William we know not;
but that the loyalty of the Earl of Hereford was doubtful throughout
the year 1074 appears from several letters of rebuke and counsel sent
to him by the Regent Lanfranc. At last the wielder of both swords
took to his spiritual arms, and pronounced the Earl excommunicate, till
he should submit to the King’s mercy and make restitution to the
King and to all men whom he had wronged. Roger remained stiff-necked
under the Primate’s censure, and presently committed an act of
direct disobedience. The next year, 1075, he gave his sister Emma
in marriage to Earl Ralph. This marriage the King had forbidden,
on some unrecorded ground of state policy. Most likely he already
suspected both earls, and thought any tie between them dangerous.
The notice shows William stepping in to do, as an act of policy, what
under his successors became a matter of course, done with the sole object
of making money. The <i>bride-ale</i>—the name that lurks
in the modern shape of <i>bridal</i>—was held at Exning in Cambridgeshire;
bishops and abbots were guests of the excommunicated Roger; Waltheof
was there, and many Breton comrades of Ralph. In their cups they
began to plot how they might drive the King out of the kingdom.
Charges, both true and false, were brought against William; in a mixed
gathering of Normans, English, and Bretons, almost every act of William’s
life might pass as a wrong done to some part of the company, even though
some others of the company were his accomplices. Above all, the
two earls Ralph and Roger made a distinct proposal to their fellow-earl
Waltheof. King William should be driven out of the land; one of
the three should be King; the other two should remain earls, ruling
each over a third of the kingdom. Such a scheme might attract
earls, but no one else; it would undo William’s best and greatest
work; it would throw back the growing unity of the kingdom by all the
steps that it had taken during several generations.</p>
<p>Now what amount of favour did Waltheof give to these schemes?
Weighing the accounts, it would seem that, in the excitement of the
bride-ale, he consented to the treason, but that he thought better of
it the next morning. He went to Lanfranc, at once regent and ghostly
father, and confessed to him whatever he had to confess. The Primate
assigned his penitent some ecclesiastical penances; the Regent bade
the Earl go into Normandy and tell the whole tale to the King.
Waltheof went, with gifts in hand; he told his story and craved forgiveness.
William made light of the matter, and kept Waltheof with him, but seemingly
not under restraint, till he came back to England.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the other two earls were in open rebellion. Ralph,
half Breton by birth and earl of a Danish land, asked help in Britanny
and Denmark. Bretons from Britanny and Bretons settled in England
flocked to him. King Swegen, now almost at the end of his reign
and life, listened to the call of the rebels, and sent a fleet under
the command of his son Cnut, the future saint, together with an earl
named Hakon. The revolt in England was soon put down, both in
East and West. The rebel earls met with no support save from those
who were under their immediate influence. The country acted zealously
for the King. Lanfranc could report that Earl Ralph and his army
were fleeing, and that the King’s men, French and English, were
chasing them. In another letter he could add, with some strength
of language, that the kingdom was cleansed from the filth of the Bretons.
At Norwich only the castle was valiantly defended by the newly married
Countess Emma. Roger was taken prisoner; Ralph fled to Britanny;
their followers were punished with various mutilations, save the defenders
of Norwich, who were admitted to terms. The Countess joined her
husband in Britanny, and in days to come Ralph did something to redeem
so many treasons by dying as an armed pilgrim in the first crusade.</p>
<p>The main point of this story is that the revolt met with no English
support whatever. Not only did Bishop Wulfstan march along with
his fierce Norman brethren Ode and Geoffrey; the English people everywhere
were against the rebels. For this revolt offered no attraction
to English feeling; had the undertaking been less hopeless, nothing
could have been gained by exchanging the rule of William for that of
Ralph or Roger. It might have been different if the Danes had
played their part better. The rebellion broke out while William
was in Normandy; it was the sailing of the Danish fleet which brought
him back to England. But never did enterprise bring less honour
on its leaders than this last Danish voyage up the Humber. All
that the holy Cnut did was to plunder the minster of Saint Peter at
York and to sail away.</p>
<p>His coming however seems to have altogether changed the King’s
feelings with regard to Waltheof. As yet he had not been dealt
with as a prisoner or an enemy. He now came back to England with
the King, and William’s first act was to imprison both Waltheof
and Roger. The imprisonment of Roger, a rebel taken in arms, was
a matter of course. As for Waltheof, whatever he had promised
at the bride-ale, he had done no disloyal act; he had had no share in
the rebellion, and he had told the King all that he knew. But
he had listened to traitors, and it might be dangerous to leave him
at large when a Danish fleet, led by his old comrade Cnut, was actually
afloat. Still what followed is strange indeed, specially strange
with William as its chief doer.</p>
<p>At the Midwinter Gemót of 1075-1076 Roger and Waltheof were
brought to trial. Ralph was condemned in absence, like Eustace
of Boulogne. Roger was sentenced to forfeiture and imprisonment
for life. Waltheof made his defence; his sentence was deferred;
he was kept at Winchester in a straiter imprisonment than before.
At the Pentecostal Gemót of 1076, held at Westminster, his case
was again argued, and he was sentenced to death. On the last day
of May the last English earl was beheaded on the hills above Winchester.</p>
<p>Such a sentence and execution, strange at any time, is specially
strange under William. Whatever Waltheof had done, his offence
was lighter than that of Roger; yet Waltheof has the heavier and Roger
the lighter punishment. With Scroggs or Jeffreys on the bench,
it might have been argued that Waltheof’s confession to the King
did not, in strictness of law, wipe out the guilt of his original promise
to the conspirators; but William the Great did not commonly act after
the fashion of Scroggs and Jeffreys. To deprive Waltheof of his
earldom might doubtless be prudent; a man who had even listened to traitors
might be deemed unfit for such a trust. It might be wise to keep
him safe under the King’s eye, like Edwin, Morkere, and Edgar.
But why should he be picked out for death, when the far more guilty
Roger was allowed to live? Why should he be chosen as the one
victim of a prince who never before or after, in Normandy or in England,
doomed any man to die on a political charge? These are questions
hard to answer. It is not enough to say that Waltheof was an Englishman,
that it was William’s policy gradually to get rid of Englishmen
in high places, and that the time was now come to get rid of the last.
For such a policy forfeiture, or at most imprisonment, would have been
enough. While other Englishmen lost lands, honours, at most liberty,
Waltheof alone lost his life by a judicial sentence. It is likely
enough that many Normans hungered for the lands and honours of the one
Englishman who still held the highest rank in England. Still forfeiture
without death might have satisfied even them. But Waltheof was
not only earl of three shires; he was husband of the King’s near
kinswoman. We are told that Judith was the enemy and accuser of
her husband. This may have touched William’s one weak point.
Yet he would hardly have swerved from the practice of his whole life
to please the bloody caprice of a niece who longed for the death of
her husband. And if Judith longed for Waltheof’s death,
it was not from a wish to supply his place with another. Legend
says that she refused a second husband offered her by the King; it is
certain that she remained a widow.</p>
<p>Waltheof’s death must thus remain a mystery, an isolated deed
of blood unlike anything else in William’s life. It seems
to have been impolitic; it led to no revolt, but it called forth a new
burst of English feeling. Waltheof was deemed the martyr of his
people; he received the same popular canonization as more than one English
patriot. Signs and wonders were wrought at his tomb at Crowland,
till displays of miraculous power which were so inconsistent with loyalty
and good order were straitly forbidden. The act itself marks a
stage in the downward course of William’s character. In
itself, the harrying of Northumberland, the very invasion of England,
with all the bloodshed that they caused, might be deemed blacker crimes
than the unjust death of a single man. But as human nature stands,
the less crime needs a worse man to do it. Crime, as ever, led
to further crime and was itself the punishment of crime. In the
eyes of William’s contemporaries the death of Waltheof, the blackest
act of William’s life, was also its turning-point. From
the day of the martyrdom on Saint Giles’ hill the magic of William’s
name and William’s arms passed away. Unfailing luck no longer
waited on him; after Waltheof’s death he never, till his last
campaign of all, won a battle or took a town. In this change of
William’s fortunes the men of his own day saw the judgement of
God upon his crime. And in the fact at least they were undoubtedly
right. Henceforth, though William’s real power abides unshaken,
the tale of his warfare is chiefly a tale of petty defeats. The
last eleven years of his life would never have won him the name of Conqueror.
But in the higher walk of policy and legislation never was his nobler
surname more truly deserved. Never did William the Great show
himself so truly great as in these later years.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The death of Waltheof and the popular judgement on it suggest another
act of William’s which cannot have been far from it in point of
time, and about which men spoke in his own day in the same spirit.
If the judgement of God came on William for the beheading of Waltheof,
it came on him also for the making of the New Forest. As to that
forest there is a good deal of ancient exaggeration and a good deal
of modern misconception. The word <i>forest</i> is often misunderstood.
In its older meaning, a meaning which it still keeps in some parts,
a forest has nothing to do with trees. It is a tract of land put
outside the common law and subject to a stricter law of its own, and
that commonly, probably always, to secure for the King the freer enjoyment
of the pleasure of hunting. Such a forest William made in Hampshire;
the impression which it made on men’s minds at the time is shown
by its having kept the name of the New Forest for eight hundred years.
There is no reason to think that William laid waste any large tract
of specially fruitful country, least of all that he laid waste a land
thickly inhabited; for most of the Forest land never can have been such.
But it is certain from Domesday and the Chronicle that William did <i>afforest</i>
a considerable tract of land in Hampshire; he set it apart for the purposes
of hunting; he fenced it in by special and cruel laws—stopping
indeed short of death—for the protection of his pleasures, and
in this process some men lost their lands, and were driven from their
homes. Some destruction of houses is here implied; some destruction
of churches is not unlikely. The popular belief, which hardly
differs from the account of writers one degree later than Domesday and
the Chronicle, simply exaggerates the extent of destruction. There
was no such wide-spread laying waste as is often supposed, because no
such wide-spread laying waste was needed. But whatever was needed
for William’s purpose was done; and Domesday gives us the record.
And the act surely makes, like the death of Waltheof, a downward stage
in William’s character. The harrying of Northumberland was
in itself a far greater crime, and involved far more of human wretchedness.
But it is not remembered in the same way, because it has left no such
abiding memorial. But here again the lesser crime needed a worse
man to do it. The harrying of Northumberland was a crime done
with a political object; it was the extreme form of military severity;
it was not vulgar robbery done with no higher motive than to secure
the fuller enjoyment of a brutal sport. To this level William
had now sunk. It was in truth now that hunting in England finally
took the character of a mere sport. Hunting was no new thing;
in an early state of society it is often a necessary thing. The
hunting of Alfred is spoken of as a grave matter of business, as part
of his kingly duty. He had to make war on the wild beasts, as
he had to make war on the Danes. The hunting of William is simply
a sport, not his duty or his business, but merely his pleasure.
And to this pleasure, the pleasure of inflicting pain and slaughter,
he did not scruple to sacrifice the rights of other men, and to guard
his enjoyment by ruthless laws at which even in that rough age men shuddered.</p>
<p>For this crime the men of his day saw the punishment in the strange
and frightful deaths of his offspring, two sons and a grandson, on the
scene of his crime. One of these himself he saw, the death of
his second son Richard, a youth of great promise, whose prolonged life
might have saved England from the rule of William Rufus. He died
in the Forest, about the year 1081, to the deep grief of his parents.
And Domesday contains a touching entry, how William gave back his land
to a despoiled Englishman as an offering for Richard’s soul.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The forfeiture of three earls, the death of one, threw their honours
and estates into the King’s hands. Another fresh source
of wealth came by the death of the Lady Edith, who had kept her royal
rank and her great estates, and who died while the proceedings against
Waltheof were going on. It was not now so important for William
as it had been in the first years of the Conquest to reward his followers;
he could now think of the royal hoard in the first place. Of the
estates which now fell in to the Crown large parts were granted out.
The house of Bigod, afterwards so renowned as Earls of Norfolk, owe
their rise to their forefather’s share in the forfeited lands
of Earl Ralph. But William kept the greater part to himself; one
lordship in Somerset, part of the lands of the Lady, he gave to the
church of Saint Peter at Rome. Of the three earldoms, those of
Hereford and East-Anglia were not filled up; the later earldoms of those
lands have no connexion with the earls of William’s day.
Waltheof’s southern earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon became
the dowry of his daughter Matilda; that of Huntingdon passed to his
descendants the Kings of Scots. But Northumberland, close on the
Scottish border, still needed an earl; but there is something strange
in the choice of Bishop Walcher of Durham. It is possible that
this appointment was a concession to English feeling stirred to wrath
at the death of Waltheof. The days of English earls were over,
and a Norman would have been looked on as Waltheof’s murderer.
The Lotharingian bishop was a stranger; but he was not a Norman, and
he was no oppressor of Englishmen. But he was strangely unfit
for the place. Not a fighting bishop like Ode and Geoffrey, he
was chiefly devoted to spiritual affairs, specially to the revival of
the monastic life, which had died out in Northern England since the
Danish invasions. But his weak trust in unworthy favourites, English
and foreign, led him to a fearful and memorable end. The Bishop
was on terms of close friendship with Ligulf, an Englishman of the highest
birth and uncle by marriage to Earl Waltheof. He had kept his
estates; but the insolence of his Norman neighbours had caused him to
come and live in the city of Durham near his friend the Bishop.
His favour with Walcher roused the envy of some of the Bishop’s
favourites, who presently contrived his death. The Bishop lamented,
and rebuked them; but he failed to “do justice,” to punish
the offenders sternly and speedily. He was therefore believed
to be himself guilty of Ligulf’s death. One of the most
striking and instructive events of the time followed. On May 14,
1080, a full Gemót of the earldom was held at Gateshead to deal
with the murder of Ligulf. This was one of those rare occasions
when a strong feeling led every man to the assembly. The local
Parliament took its ancient shape of an armed crowd, headed by the noblest
Englishmen left in the earldom. There was no vote, no debate;
the shout was “Short rede good rede, slay ye the Bishop.”
And to that cry, Walcher himself and his companions, the murderers of
Ligulf among them, were slaughtered by the raging multitude who had
gathered to avenge him.</p>
<p>The riot in which Walcher died was no real revolt against William’s
government. Such a local rising against a local wrong might have
happened in the like case under Edward or Harold. No government
could leave such a deed unpunished; but William’s own ideas of
justice would have been fully satisfied by the blinding or mutilation
of a few ringleaders. But William was in Normandy in the midst
of domestic and political cares. He sent his brother Ode to restore
order, and his vengeance was frightful. The land was harried;
innocent men were mutilated and put to death; others saved their lives
by bribes. Earl after earl was set over a land so hard to rule.
A certain Alberie was appointed, but he was removed as unfit.
The fierce Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances tried his hand and resigned.
At the time of William’s death the earldom was held by Geoffrey’s
nephew Robert of Mowbray, a stern and gloomy stranger, but whom Englishmen
reckoned among “good men,” when he guarded the marches of
England against the Scot.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>After the death of Waltheof William seems to have stayed in Normandy
for several years. His ill luck now began. Before the year
1076 was out, he entered, we know not why, on a Breton campaign.
But he was driven from Dol by the combined forces of Britanny and France;
Philip was ready to help any enemy of William. The Conqueror had
now for the first time suffered defeat in his own person. He made
peace with both enemies, promising his daughter Constance to Alan of
Britanny. But the marriage did not follow till ten years later.
The peace with France, as the English Chronicle says, “held little
while;” Philip could not resist the temptation of helping William’s
eldest son Robert when the reckless young man rebelled against his father.
With most of the qualities of an accomplished knight, Robert had few
of those which make either a wise ruler or an honest man. A brave
soldier, even a skilful captain, he was no general; ready of speech
and free of hand, he was lavish rather than bountiful. He did
not lack generous and noble feelings; but of a steady course, even in
evil, he was incapable. As a ruler, he was no oppressor in his
own person; but sloth, carelessness, love of pleasure, incapacity to
say No, failure to do justice, caused more wretchedness than the oppression
of those tyrants who hinder the oppressions of others. William
would not set such an one over any part of his dominions before his
time, and it was his policy to keep his children dependent on him.
While he enriched his brothers, he did not give the smallest scrap of
the spoils of England to his sons. But Robert deemed that he had
a right to something greater than private estates. The nobles
of Normandy had done homage to him as William’s successor; he
had done homage to Fulk for Maine, as if he were himself its count.
He was now stirred up by evil companions to demand that, if his father
would not give him part of his kingdom—the spirit of Edwin and
Morkere had crossed the sea—he would at least give him Normandy
and Maine. William refused with many pithy sayings. It was
not his manner to take off his clothes till he went to bed. Robert
now, with a band of discontented young nobles, plunged into border warfare
against his father. He then wandered over a large part of Europe,
begging and receiving money and squandering all that he got. His
mother too sent him money, which led to the first quarrel between William
and Matilda after so many years of faithful union. William rebuked
his wife for helping his enemy in breach of his orders: she pleaded
the mother’s love for her first-born. The mother was forgiven,
but her messenger, sentenced to loss of eyes, found shelter in a monastery.</p>
<p>At last in 1079 Philip gave Robert a settled dwelling-place in the
border-fortress of Gerberoi. The strife between father and son
became dangerous. William besieged the castle, to undergo before
its walls his second defeat, to receive his first wound, and that at
the hands of his own son. Pierced in the hand by the lance of
Robert, his horse smitten by an arrow, the Conqueror fell to the ground,
and was saved only by an Englishman, Tokig, son of Wiggod of Wallingford,
who gave his life for his king. It seems an early softening of
the tale which says that Robert dismounted and craved his father’s
pardon; it seems a later hardening which says that William pronounced
a curse on his son. William Rufus too, known as yet only as the
dutiful son of his father, was wounded in his defence. The blow
was not only grievous to William’s feelings as a father; it was
a serious military defeat. The two wounded Williams and the rest
of the besiegers escaped how they might, and the siege of Gerberoi was
raised.</p>
<p>We next find the wise men of Normandy debating how to make peace
between father and son. In the course of the year 1080 a peace
was patched up, and a more honourable sphere was found for Robert’s
energies in an expedition into Scotland. In the autumn of the
year of Gerberoi Malcolm had made another wasting inroad into Northumberland.
With the King absent and Northumberland in confusion through the death
of Walcher, this wrong went unavenged till the autumn of 1080.
Robert gained no special glory in Scotland; a second quarrel with his
father followed, and Robert remained a banished man during the last
seven years of William’s reign.</p>
<p>In this same year 1080 a synod of the Norman Church was held, the
Truce of God again renewed which we heard of years ago. The forms
of outrage on which the Truce was meant to put a cheek, and which the
strong hand of William had put down more thoroughly than the Truce would
do, had clearly begun again during the confusions caused by the rebellion
of Robert.</p>
<p>The two next years, 1081-1082, William was in England. His
home sorrows were now pressing heavily on him. His eldest son
was a rebel and an exile; about this time his second son died in the
New Forest; according to one version, his daughter, the betrothed of
Edwin, who had never forgotten her English lover, was now promised to
the Spanish King Alfonso, and died—in answer to her own prayers—before
the marriage was celebrated. And now the partner of William’s
life was taken from him four years after his one difference with her.
On November 3, 1083, Matilda died after a long sickness, to her husband’s
lasting grief. She was buried in her own church at Caen, and churches
in England received gifts from William on behalf of her soul.</p>
<p>The mourner had soon again to play the warrior. Nearly the
whole of William’s few remaining years were spent in a struggle
which in earlier times he would surely have ended in a day. Maine,
city and county, did not call for a third conquest; but a single baron
of Maine defied William’s power, and a single castle of Maine
held out against him for three years. Hubert, Viscount of Beaumont
and Fresnay, revolted on some slight quarrel. The siege of his
castle of Sainte-Susanne went on from the death of Matilda till the
last year but one of William’s reign. The tale is full of
picturesque detail; but William had little personal share in it.
The best captains of Normandy tried their strength in vain against this
one donjon on its rock. William at last made peace with the subject
who was too strong for him. Hubert came to England and received
the King’s pardon. Practically the pardon was the other
way.</p>
<p>Thus for the last eleven years of his life William ceased to be the
Conqueror. Engaged only in small enterprises, he was unsuccessful
in all. One last success was indeed in store for him; but that
was to be purchased with his own life. As he turned away in defeat
from this castle and that, as he felt the full bitterness of domestic
sorrow, he may have thought, as others thought for him, that the curse
of Waltheof, the curse of the New Forest, was ever tracking his steps.
If so, his crimes were done in England, and their vengeance came in
Normandy. In England there was no further room for his mission
as Conqueror; he had no longer foes to overcome. He had an act
of justice to do, and he did it. He had his kingdom to guard,
and he guarded it. He had to take the great step which should
make his kingdom one for ever; and he had, perhaps without fully knowing
what he did, to bid the picture of his reign be painted for all time
as no reign before or after has been painted.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XI—THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM—1081-1087</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Of two events of these last years of the Conqueror’s reign,
events of very different degrees of importance, we have already spoken.
The Welsh expedition of William was the only recorded fighting on British
ground, and that lay without the bounds of the kingdom of England.
William now made Normandy his chief dwelling-place, but he was constantly
called over to England. The Welsh campaign proves his presence
in England in 1081; he was again in England in 1082, but he went back
to Normandy between the two visits. The visit of 1082 was a memorable
one; there is no more characteristic act of the Conqueror than the deed
which marks it. The cruelty and insolence of his brother Ode,
whom he had trusted so much more than he deserved, had passed all bounds.
In avenging the death of Walcher he had done deeds such as William never
did himself or allowed any other man to do. And now, beguiled
by a soothsayer who said that one of his name should be the next Pope,
he dreamed of succeeding to the throne of Gregory the Seventh.
He made all kinds of preparations to secure his succession, and he was
at last about to set forth for Italy at the head of something like an
army. His schemes were by no means to the liking of his brother.
William came suddenly over from Normandy, and met Ode in the Isle of
Wight. There the King got together as many as he could of the
great men of the realm. Before them he arraigned Ode for all his
crimes. He had left him as the lieutenant of his kingdom, and
he had shown himself the common oppressor of every class of men in the
realm. Last of all, he had beguiled the warriors who were needed
for the defence of England against the Danes and Irish to follow him
on his wild schemes in Italy. How was he to deal with such a brother,
William asked of his wise men.</p>
<p>He had to answer himself; no other man dared to speak. William
then gave his judgement. The common enemy of the whole realm should
not be spared because he was the King’s brother. He should
be seized and put in ward. As none dared to seize him, the King
seized him with his own hands. And now, for the first time in
England, we hear words which were often heard again. The bishop
stained with blood and sacrilege appealed to the privileges of his order.
He was a clerk, a bishop; no man might judge him but the Pope.
William, taught, so men said, by Lanfranc, had his answer ready.
“I do not seize a clerk or a bishop; I seize my earl whom I set
over my kingdom.” So the Earl of Kent was carried off to
a prison in Normandy, and Pope Gregory himself pleaded in vain for the
release of the Bishop of Bayeux.</p>
<p>The mind of William was just now mainly given to the affairs of his
island kingdom. In the winter of 1083 he hastened from the death-bed
of his wife to the siege of Sainte-Susanne, and thence to the Midwinter
Gemót in England. The chief object of the assembly was
the specially distasteful one of laying on of a tax. In the course
of the next year, six shillings was levied on every hide of land to
meet a pressing need. The powers of the North were again threatening;
the danger, if it was danger, was greater than when Waltheof smote the
Normans in the gate at York. Swegen and his successor Harold were
dead. Cnut the Saint reigned in Denmark, the son-in-law of Robert
of Flanders. This alliance with William’s enemy joined with
his remembrance of his own two failures to stir up the Danish king to
a yearning for some exploit in England. English exiles were still
found to urge him to the enterprise. William’s conquest
had scattered banished or discontented Englishmen over all Europe.
Many had made their way to the Eastern Rome; they had joined the Warangian
guard, the surest support of the Imperial throne, and at Dyrrhachion,
as on Senlac, the axe of England had met the lance of Normandy in battle.
Others had fled to the North; they prayed Cnut to avenge the death of
his kinsman Harold and to deliver England from the yoke of men—so
an English writer living in Denmark spoke of them—of Roman speech.
Thus the Greek at one end of Europe, the Norman at the other, still
kept on the name of Rome. The fleet of Denmark was joined by the
fleet of Flanders; a smaller contingent was promised by the devout and
peaceful Olaf of Norway, who himself felt no call to take a share in
the work of war.</p>
<p>Against this danger William strengthened himself by the help of the
tax that he had just levied. He could hardly have dreamed of defending
England against Danish invaders by English weapons only. But he
thought as little of trusting the work to his own Normans. With
the money of England he hired a host of mercenaries, horse and foot,
from France and Britanny, even from Maine where Hubert was still defying
him at Sainte-Susanne. He gathered this force on the mainland,
and came back at its head, a force such as England had never before
seen; men wondered how the land might feed them all. The King’s
men, French and English, had to feed them, each man according to the
amount of his land. And now William did what Harold had refused
to do; he laid waste the whole coast that lay open to attack from Denmark
and Flanders. But no Danes, no Flemings, came. Disputes
arose between Cnut and his brother Olaf, and the great enterprise came
to nothing. William kept part of his mercenaries in England, and
part he sent to their homes. Cnut was murdered in a church by
his own subjects, and was canonized as <i>Sanctus Canutus</i> by a Pope
who could not speak the Scandinavian name.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, at the Midwinter Gemót of 1085-1086, held in due
form at Gloucester, William did one of his greatest acts. “The
King had mickle thought and sooth deep speech with his Witan about his
land, how it were set and with whilk men.” In that “deep
speech,” so called in our own tongue, lurks a name well known
and dear to every Englishman. The result of that famous parliament
is set forth at length by the Chronicler. The King sent his men
into each shire, men who did indeed set down in their writ how the land
was set and of what men. In that writ we have a record in the
Roman tongue no less precious than the Chronicles in our own.
For that writ became the Book of Winchester, the book to which our fathers
gave the name of Domesday, the book of judgement that spared no man.</p>
<p>The Great Survey was made in the course of the first seven months
of the year 1086. Commissioners were sent into every shire, who
inquired by the oaths of the men of the hundreds by whom the land had
been held in King Edward’s days and what it was worth then, by
whom it was held at the time of the survey and what it was worth then;
and lastly, whether its worth could be raised. Nothing was to
be left out. “So sooth narrowly did he let spear it out,
that there was not a hide or a yard of land, nor further—it is
shame to tell, and it thought him no shame to do—an ox nor a cow
nor a swine was left that was not set in his writ.” This
kind of searching inquiry, never liked at any time, would be specially
grievous then. The taking of the survey led to disturbances in
many places, in which not a few lives were lost. While the work
was going on, William went to and fro till he knew thoroughly how this
land was set and of what men. He had now a list of all men, French
and English, who held land in his kingdom. And it was not enough
to have their names in a writ; he would see them face to face.
On the making of the survey followed that great assembly, that great
work of legislation, which was the crown of William’s life as
a ruler and lawgiver of England. The usual assemblies of the year
had been held at Winchester and Westminster. An extraordinary
assembly was held in the plain of Salisbury on the first day of August.
The work of that assembly has been already spoken of. It was now
that all the owners of land in the kingdom became the men of the King;
it was now that England became one, with no fear of being again parted
asunder.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The close connexion between the Great Survey and the law and the
oath of Salisbury is plain. It was a great matter for the King
to get in the gold certainly and, we may add, fairly. William
would deal with no man otherwise than according to law as he understood
the law. But he sought for more than this. He would not
only know what this land could be made to pay; he would know the state
of his kingdom in every detail; he would know its military strength;
he would know whether his own will, in the long process of taking from
this man and giving to that, had been really carried out. Domesday
is before all things a record of the great confiscation, a record of
that gradual change by which, in less than twenty years, the greater
part of the land of England had been transferred from native to foreign
owners. And nothing shows like Domesday in what a formally legal
fashion that transfer was carried out. What were the principles
on which it was carried out, we have already seen. All private
property in land came only from the grant of King William. It
had all passed into his hands by lawful forfeiture; he might keep it
himself; he might give it back to its old owner or grant it to a new
one. So it was at the general redemption of lands; so it was whenever
fresh conquests or fresh revolts threw fresh lands into the King’s
hands. The principle is so thoroughly taken for granted, that
we are a little startled to find it incidentally set forth in so many
words in a case of no special importance. A priest named Robert
held a single yardland in alms of the King; he became a monk in the
monastery of Stow-in-Lindesey, and his yardland became the property
of the house. One hardly sees why this case should have been picked
out for a solemn declaration of the general law. Yet, as “the
day on which the English redeemed their lands” is spoken of only
casually in the case of a particular estate, so the principle that no
man could hold lands except by the King’s grant (“Non licet
terram alicui habere nisi regis concessu”) is brought in only
to illustrate the wrongful dealing of Robert and the monks of Stow in
the case of a very small holding indeed.</p>
<p>All this is a vast system of legal fictions; for William’s
whole position, the whole scheme of his government, rested on a system
of legal fictions. Domesday is full of them; one might almost
say that there is nothing else there. A very attentive study of
Domesday might bring out the fact that William was a foreign conqueror,
and that the book itself was a record of the process by which he took
the lands of the natives who had fought against him to reward the strangers
who had fought for him. But nothing of this kind appears on the
surface of the record. The great facts of the Conquest are put
out of sight. William is taken for granted, not only as the lawful
king, but as the immediate successor of Edward. The “time
of King Edward” and the “time of King William” are
the two times that the law knows of. The compilers of the record
are put to some curious shifts to describe the time between “the
day when King Edward was alive and dead” and the day “when
King William came into England.” That coming might have
been as peaceful as the coming of James the First or George the First.
The two great battles are more than once referred to, but only casually
in the mention of particular persons. A very sharp critic might
guess that one of them had something to do with King William’s
coming into England; but that is all. Harold appears only as Earl;
it is only in two or three places that we hear of a “time of Harold,”
and even of Harold “seizing the kingdom” and “reigning.”
These two or three places stand out in such contrast to the general
language of the record that we are led to think that the scribe must
have copied some earlier record or taken down the words of some witness,
and must have forgotten to translate them into more loyal formulae.
So in recording who held the land in King Edward’s day and who
in King William’s, there is nothing to show that in so many cases
the holder under Edward had been turned out to make room for the holder
under William. The former holder is marked by the perfectly colourless
word “ancestor” (“antecessor”), a word as yet
meaning, not “forefather,” but “predecessor”
of any kind. In Domesday the word is most commonly an euphemism
for “dispossessed Englishman.” It is a still more
distinct euphemism where the Norman holder is in more than one place
called the “heir” of the dispossessed Englishmen.</p>
<p>The formulae of Domesday are the most speaking witness to the spirit
of outward legality which ruled every act of William. In this
way they are wonderfully instructive; but from the formulae alone no
one could ever make the real facts of William’s coming and reign.
It is the incidental notices which make us more at home in the local
and personal life of this reign than of any reign before or for a long
time after. The Commissioners had to report whether the King’s
will had been everywhere carried out, whether every man, great and small,
French and English, had what the King meant him to have, neither more
nor less. And they had often to report a state of things different
from what the King had meant to be. Many men had not all that
King William had meant them to have, and many others had much more.
Normans had taken both from Englishmen and from other Normans.
Englishmen had taken from Englishmen; some had taken from ecclesiastical
bodies; some had taken from King William himself; nay King William himself
holds lands which he ought to give up to another man. This last
entry at least shows that William was fully ready to do right, according
to his notions of right. So also the King’s two brothers
are set down among the chief offenders. Of these unlawful holdings
of land, marked in the technical language of the Survey as <i>invasiones</i>
and <i>occupationes</i>, many were doubtless real cases of violent seizure,
without excuse even according to William’s reading of the law.
But this does not always follow, even when the language of the Survey
would seem to imply it. Words implying violence, <i>per vim</i>
and the like, are used in the legal language of all ages, where no force
has been used, merely to mark a possession as illegal. We are
startled at finding the Apostle Paul set down as one of the offenders;
but the words “sanctus Paulus invasit” mean no more than
that the canons of Saint Paul’s church in London held lands to
which the Commissioners held that they had no good title. It is
these cases where one man held land which another claimed that gave
opportunity for those personal details, stories, notices of tenures
and customs, which make Domesday the most precious store of knowledge
of the time.</p>
<p>One fruitful and instructive source of dispute comes from the way
in which the lands in this or that district were commonly granted out.
The in-comer, commonly a foreigner, received all the lands which such
and such a man, commonly a dispossessed Englishman, held in that shire
or district. The grantee stepped exactly into the place of the
<i>antecessor</i>; he inherited all his rights and all his burthens.
He inherited therewith any disputes as to the extent of the lands of
the <i>antecessor</i> or as to the nature of his tenure. And new
disputes arose in the process of transfer. One common source of
dispute was when the former owner, besides lands which were strictly
his own, held lands on lease, subject to a reversionary interest on
the part of the Crown or the Church. The lease or sale—<i>emere</i>
is the usual word—of Church lands for three lives to return to
the Church at the end of the third life was very common. If the
<i>antecessor</i> was himself the third life, the grantee, his <i>heir</i>,
had no claim to the land; and in any case he could take in only with
all its existing liabilities. But the grantee often took possession
of the whole of the land held by the <i>antecessor</i>, as if it were
all alike his own. A crowd of complaints followed from all manner
of injured persons and bodies, great and small, French and English,
lay and clerical. The Commissioners seem to have fairly heard
all, and to have fairly reported all for the King to judge of.
It is their care to do right to all men which has given us such strange
glimpses of the inner life of an age which had none like it before or
after.</p>
<p>The general Survey followed by the general homage might seem to mark
William’s work in England, his work as an English statesman, as
done. He could hardly have had time to redress the many cases
of wrong which the Survey laid before him; but he was able to wring
yet another tax out of the nation according to his new and more certain
register. He then, for the last time, crossed to Normandy with
his new hoard. The Chronicler and other writers of the time dwell
on the physical portents of these two years, the storms, the fires,
the plagues, the sharp hunger, the deaths of famous men on both sides
of the sea. Of the year 1087, the last year of the Conqueror,
it needs the full strength of our ancient tongue to set forth the signs
and wonders. The King had left England safe, peaceful, thoroughly
bowed down under the yoke, cursing the ruler who taxed her and granted
away her lands, yet half blessing him for the “good frith”
that he made against the murderer, the robber, and the ravisher.
But the land that he had won was neither to see his end nor to shelter
his dust. One last gleam of success was, after so many reverses,
to crown his arms; but it was success which was indeed unworthy of the
Conqueror who had entered Exeter and Le Mans in peaceful triumph.
And the death-blow was now to come to him who, after so many years of
warfare, stooped at last for the first time to cruel and petty havoc
without an object.</p>
<p>The border-land of France and Normandy, the French Vexin, the land
of which Mantes is the capital, had always been disputed between kingdom
and duchy. Border wars had been common; just at this time the
inroads of the French commanders at Mantes are said to have been specially
destructive. William not only demanded redress from the King,
but called for the surrender of the whole Vexin. What followed
is a familiar story. Philip makes a foolish jest on the bodily
state of his great rival, unable just then to carry out his threats.
“The King of the English lies in at Rouen; there will be a great
show of candles at his churching.” As at Alençon
in his youth, so now, William, who could pass by real injuries, was
stung to the uttermost by personal mockery. By the splendour of
God, when he rose up again, he would light a hundred thousand candles
at Philip’s cost. He kept his word at the cost of Philip’s
subjects. The ballads of the day told how he went forth and gathered
the fruits of autumn in the fields and orchards and vineyards of the
enemy. But he did more than gather fruits; the candles of his
churching were indeed lighted in the burning streets of Mantes.
The picture of William the Great directing in person mere brutal havoc
like this is strange even after the harrying of Northumberland and the
making of the New Forest. Riding to and fro among the flames,
bidding his men with glee to heap on the fuel, gladdened at the sight
of burning houses and churches, a false step of his horse gave him his
death-blow. Carried to Rouen, to the priory of Saint Gervase near
the city, he lingered from August 15 to September 7, and then the reign
and life of the Conqueror came to an end. Forsaken by his children,
his body stripped and well nigh forgotten, the loyalty of one honest
knight, Herlwin of Conteville, bears his body to his grave in his own
church at Caen. His very grave is disputed—a dispossessed
<i>antecessor</i> claims the ground as his own, and the dead body of
the Conqueror has to wait while its last resting-place is bought with
money. Into that resting-place force alone can thrust his bulky
frame, and the rites of his burial are as wildly cut short as were the
rites of his crowning. With much striving he had at last won his
seven feet of ground; but he was not to keep it for ever. Religious
warfare broke down his tomb and scattered his bones, save one treasured
relic. Civil revolution swept away the one remaining fragment.
And now, while we seek in vain beneath the open sky for the rifled tombs
of Harold and of Waltheof, a stone beneath the vault of Saint Stephen’s
still tells us where the bones of William once lay but where they lie
no longer.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>There is no need to doubt the striking details of the death and burial
of the Conqueror. We shrink from giving the same trust to the
long tale of penitence which is put into the mouth of the dying King.
He may, in that awful hour, have seen the wrong-doing of the last one-and-twenty
years of his life; he hardly threw his repentance into the shape of
a detailed autobiographical confession. But the more authentic
sayings and doings of William’s death-bed enable us to follow
his course as an English statesman almost to his last moments.
His end was one of devotion, of prayers and almsgiving, and of opening
of the prison to them that were bound. All save one of his political
prisoners, English and Norman, he willingly set free. Morkere
and his companions from Ely, Walfnoth son of Godwine, hostage for Harold’s
faith, Wulf son of Harold and Ealdgyth, taken, we can hardly doubt,
as a babe when Chester opened its gates to William, were all set free;
some indeed were put in bonds again by the King’s successor.
But Ode William would not set free; he knew too well how many would
suffer if he were again let loose upon the world. But love of
kindred was still strong; at last he yielded, sorely against his will,
to the prayers and pledges of his other brother. Ode went forth
from his prison, again Bishop of Bayeux, soon again to be Earl of Kent,
and soon to prove William’s foresight by his deeds.</p>
<p>William’s disposal of his dominions on his death-bed carries
on his political history almost to his last breath. Robert, the
banished rebel, might seem to have forfeited all claims to the succession.
But the doctrine of hereditary right had strengthened during the sixty
years of William’s life. He is made to say that, though
he foresees the wretchedness of any land over which Robert should be
the ruler, still he cannot keep him out of the duchy of Normandy which
is his birthright. Of England he will not dare to dispose; he
leaves the decision to God, seemingly to Archbishop Lanfranc as the
vicar of God. He will only say that his wish is for his son William
to succeed him in his kingdom, and he prays Lanfranc to crown him king,
if he deem such a course to be right. Such a message was a virtual
nomination, and William the Red succeeded his father in England, but
kept his crown only by the help of loyal Englishmen against Norman rebels.
William Rufus, it must be remembered, still under the tutelage of his
father and Lanfranc, had not yet shown his bad qualities; he was known
as yet only as the dutiful son who fought for his father against the
rebel Robert. By ancient English law, that strong preference which
was all that any man could claim of right belonged beyond doubt to the
youngest of William’s sons, the English Ætheling Henry.
He alone was born in the land; he alone was the son of a crowned King
and his Lady. It is perhaps with a knowledge of what followed
that William is made to bid his youngest son wait while his eldest go
before him; that he left him landless, but master of a hoard of silver,
there is no reason to doubt. English feeling, which welcomed Henry
thirteen years later, would doubtless have gladly seen his immediate
accession; but it might have been hard, in dividing William’s
dominions, to have shut out the second son in favour of the third.
And in the scheme of events by which conquered England was to rise again,
the reign of Rufus, at the moment the darkest time of all, had its appointed
share.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>That England could rise again, that she could rise with a new life,
strengthened by her momentary overthrow, was before all things owing
to the lucky destiny which, if she was to be conquered, gave her William
the Great as her Conqueror. It is as it is in all human affairs.
William himself could not have done all that he did, wittingly and unwittingly,
unless circumstances had been favourable to him; but favourable circumstances
would have been useless, unless there had been a man like William to
take advantage of them. What he did, wittingly or unwittingly,
he did by virtue of his special position, the position of a foreign
conqueror veiling his conquest under a legal claim. The hour and
the man were alike needed. The man in his own hour wrought a work,
partly conscious, partly unconscious. The more clearly any man
understands his conscious work, the more sure is that conscious work
to lead to further results of which he dreams not. So it was with
the Conqueror of England. His purpose was to win and to keep the
kingdom of England, and to hand it on to those who should come after
him more firmly united than it had ever been before. In this work
his spirit of formal legality, his shrinking from needless change, stood
him in good stead. He saw that as the kingdom of England could
best be won by putting forth a legal claim to it, so it could best be
kept by putting on the character of a legal ruler, and reigning as the
successor of the old kings seeking the unity of the kingdom; he saw,
from the example both of England and of other lands, the dangers which
threatened that unity; he saw what measures were needed to preserve
it in his own day, measures which have preserved it ever since.
Here is a work, a conscious work, which entitles the foreign Conqueror
to a place among English statesmen, and to a place in their highest
rank. Further than this we cannot conceive William himself to
have looked. All that was to come of his work in future ages was
of necessity hidden from his eyes, no less than from the eyes of smaller
men. He had assuredly no formal purpose to make England Norman;
but still less had he any thought that the final outcome of his work
would make England on one side more truly English than if he had never
crossed the sea. In his ecclesiastical work he saw the future
still less clearly. He designed to reform what he deemed abuses,
to bring the English Church into closer conformity with the other Churches
of the West; he assuredly never dreamed that the issue of his reform
would be the strife between Henry and Thomas and the humiliation of
John. His error was that of forgetting that he himself could wield
powers, that he could hold forces in check, which would be too strong
for those who should come after him. At his purposes with regard
to the relations of England and Normandy it would be vain to guess.
The mere leaving of kingdom and duchy to different sons would not necessarily
imply that he designed a complete or lasting separation. But assuredly
William did not foresee that England, dragged into wars with France
as the ally of Normandy, would remain the lasting rival of France after
Normandy had been swallowed up in the French kingdom. If rivalry
between England and France had not come in this way, it would doubtless
have come in some other way; but this is the way in which it did come
about. As a result of the union of Normandy and England under
one ruler, it was part of William’s work, but a work of which
William had no thought. So it was with the increased connexion
of every kind between England and the continent of Europe which followed
on William’s coming. With one part of Europe indeed the
connexion of England was lessened. For three centuries before
William’s coming, dealings in war and peace with the Scandinavian
kingdoms had made up a large part of English history. Since the
baffled enterprise of the holy Cnut, our dealings with that part of
Europe have been of only secondary account.</p>
<p>But in our view of William as an English statesman, the main feature
of all is that spirit of formal legality of which we have so often spoken.
Its direct effects, partly designed, partly undesigned, have affected
our whole history to this day. It was his policy to disguise the
fact of conquest, to cause all the spoils of conquest to be held, in
outward form, according to the ancient law of England. The fiction
became a fact, and the fact greatly helped in the process of fusion
between Normans and English. The conquering race could not keep
itself distinct from the conquered, and the form which the fusion took
was for the conquerors to be lost in the greater mass of the conquered.
William founded no new state, no new nation, no new constitution; he
simply kept what he found, with such modifications as his position made
needful. But without any formal change in the nature of English
kingship, his position enabled him to clothe the crown with a practical
power such as it had never held before, to make his rule, in short,
a virtual despotism. These two facts determined the later course
of English history, and they determined it to the lasting good of the
English nation. The conservative instincts of William allowed
our national life and our national institutions to live on unbroken
through his conquest. But it was before all things the despotism
of William, his despotism under legal forms, which preserved our national
institutions to all time. As a less discerning conqueror might
have swept our ancient laws and liberties away, so under a series of
native kings those laws and liberties might have died out, as they died
out in so many continental lands. But the despotism of the crown
called forth the national spirit in a conscious and antagonistic shape;
it called forth that spirit in men of both races alike, and made Normans
and English one people. The old institutions lived on, to be clothed
with a fresh life, to be modified as changed circumstances might make
needful. The despotism of the Norman kings, the peculiar character
of that despotism, enabled the great revolution of the thirteenth century
to take the forms, which it took, at once conservative and progressive.
So it was when, more than four centuries after William’s day,
England again saw a despotism carried on under the forms of law.
Henry the Eighth reigned as William had reigned; he did not reign like
his brother despots on the continent; the forms of law and freedom lived
on. In the seventeenth century therefore, as in the thirteenth,
the forms stood ready to be again clothed with a new life, to supply
the means for another revolution, again at once conservative and progressive.
It has been remarked a thousand times that, while other nations have
been driven to destroy and to rebuild the political fabric, in England
we have never had to destroy and to rebuild, but have found it enough
to repair, to enlarge, and to improve. This characteristic of
English history is mainly owing to the events of the eleventh century,
and owing above all to the personal agency of William. As far
as mortal man can guide the course of things when he is gone, the course
of our national history since William’s day has been the result
of William’s character and of William’s acts. Well
may we restore to him the surname that men gave him in his own day.
He may worthily take his place as William the Great alongside of Alexander,
Constantine, and Charles. They may have wrought in some sort a
greater work, because they had a wider stage to work it on. But
no man ever wrought a greater and more abiding work on the stage that
fortune gave him than he</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“Qui dux Normannis, qui Caesar praefuit Anglis.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Stranger and conqueror, his deeds won him a right to a place on the
roll of English statesmen, and no man that came after him has won a
right to a higher place.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR ***</p>
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