William the Conqueror

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

CHAPTER II.

THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM.

A.D. 1028–1051.

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 _Normans_, 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 _Duces Francorum_ 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 _Dux Francorum_ and the _Rex Francorum_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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, _Moretoliam_ or _Moretonium_, in the diocese of

Avranches, which must be carefully distinguished from Mortagne-en-Perche,

_Mauritania_ or _Moretonia_ 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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER III.

WILLIAM’S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.

A.D. 1051–1052.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

CHAPTER IV.

THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY.

A.D. 1052–1063.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

CHAPTER V.

HAROLD’S OATH TO WILLIAM.

A.D. 1064?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

CHAPTER VI.

THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM.

JANUARY-OCTOBER 1066.

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.

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 _pallium_,

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.

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.

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 _other_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _casus belli_ 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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

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 _French_, is the name most commonly opposed to

_English_, 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.

CHAPTER VII.

WILLIAM’S INVASION OF ENGLAND.

AUGUST-DECEMBER 1066.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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 _folk-fight_. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND.

DECEMBER 1066-MARCH 1070.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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 _marquesses_, 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.

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.

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 _Wild_, 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.

* * * * *

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.

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.”

* * * * *

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.

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 _de facto_ 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.

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 _fyrd_, 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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND.

1070–1086.

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.

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.”

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 _king_ and not a

_roy_; but he gathers round him a _parliament_ and not a _vitenagemót_.

We have a _sheriff_ and not a _viscount_; but his district is more

commonly called a _county_ than a _shire_. But _county_ and _shire_ 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.

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 _Englishry_, 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.

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.

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 _folkland_, its _ager publicus_, the

property of no one man but of the whole state. Out of this, by the

common consent, portions might be cut off and _booked_—granted by a

written document—to particular men as their own _bookland_. The King

might have his private estate, to be dealt with at his own pleasure, but

of the _folkland_, 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 _folkland_, 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 _folkland_, 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, _Terra Regis_, 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.

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 _heriot_ developed into the later _relief_, 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.

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 landowner 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.

* * * * *

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 _Gemót_,

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

_bishopstool_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER X.

THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM.

1070–1086.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, _Bretwalda_ and _Basileus_ 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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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 _Bostar_—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 _barbarians_. By that

phrase a Teutonic writer can hardly mean the insular part of William’s

subjects.

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.

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

_commune_ 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

_commune_, 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.

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 _commune_ was

abolished, but the Conqueror swore to observe all the ancient rights of

the city.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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 _staller_ 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 _bride-ale_—the name that

lurks in the modern shape of _bridal_—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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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 _forest_ 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 _afforest_ 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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER XI.

THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM.

1081–1087.

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.

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.

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.

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 _Sanctus Canutus_ by a Pope who

could not speak the Scandinavian name.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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 formulæ. 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.

The formulæ 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 formulæ 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

_invasiones_ and _occupationes_, 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, _per vim_ 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.

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

_antecessor_; he inherited all his rights and all his burthens. He

inherited therewith any disputes as to the extent of the lands of the

_antecessor_ 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—_emere_ 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 _antecessor_ was himself the third life, the grantee, his

_heir_, 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 _antecessor_, 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.

* * * * *

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.

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

_antecessor_ 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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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

“Qui dux Normannis, qui Cæsar præfuit Anglis.”

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.

* * * * *

THE END.

* * * * *

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARKE, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.