CHAPTER VIII

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THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.[497] A.D. 1028–1051.

§ 1. _Birth, Character, and Accession of William._ A.D. 1028–1035.

[Sidenote: Character and greatness of WILLIAM.]

William, King of the English and Duke of the Normans, bears a name which must for ever stand forth among the foremost of mankind. No man that ever trod this earth was ever endowed with greater natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater things. If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts, without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world’s [Sidenote: Lasting results of his career.] greatest men. No man ever did his work more effectually at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as [Sidenote: A good side to his character.] more truly an abiding possession for all time. And, when we consider all the circumstances of his life, when we judge him by the standard of his own age, above all, when we compare him with those who came after him in his own house, we shall perhaps be inclined to dwell on his great qualities, on his many undoubted virtues, rather than to put his no less undoubted crimes in their darkest light. As we cannot refuse to place him among the greatest of men, neither will a candid judgement incline us to place him among the worst of men. If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure glory of Timoleôn, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut; but he has even less in common with the mere enemies of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swends, and the Buonapartes, whom God has from time to time sent as simple scourges of a guilty world. Happily there are few men in history of whom we have [Sidenote: English and Norman portraits of him.] better materials for drawing the portrait. We see him as he appeared to admiring followers of his own race; we see him also as he appeared to men of the conquered nation who had looked on him and had lived in his household.[498] We have to make allowance for flattery on the one side; we have not to make allowance for calumny on the other. The feeling with which the Normans looked on their conquering leader was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of love; and the feeling with which the vanquished English looked on their Conqueror was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of simple hatred. Assuredly William’s English subjects did not love him; but they felt a sort of sullen reverence for the King who was richer and mightier than all the Kings that were before him. In speaking of him, the Chronicler writes as it were with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself, but was rather drawing the portrait [Sidenote: Justice done to him by the English Chronicler.] of a being of another nature. Yet he holds the balance fairly between the dark and the bright qualities of one so far raised above the common lot of man. He does not conceal his crimes and his oppressions; but he sets before us the merits of his government and the good peace that he made in this land; he judicially sums up what was good and what was evil in him; he warns men to follow the good and to avoid the evil, and he sends him out of the world with a charitable prayer for the repose of his soul. And, at the moment when he wrote, it was no marvel if the Chronicler was inclined to dwell on the good rather than on the evil. The Crown of William passed to one who shared largely in his mere intellectual gifts, but who had no fellowship with the greater and nobler elements of his character. To appreciate William the Conqueror we have but to cast our glance onwards to William the Red. We shall then well understand how men writhing under the scorpions of the son might look back with regret to the whips of the father. We can understand how, under his godless rule, men might feel kindly towards the memory of one who never wholly cast away the thoughts of justice and mercy, and who, in his darkest hours, had still somewhat of the fear of God before his eyes.

[Sidenote: Strength of will in William.]

In estimating the character of William, one feature stands out preeminently above all others. Throughout his career, we admire in him the embodiment, in the highest degree that human nature will allow, of the fixed purpose and the unbending will. From time to time there have been men who seem to have come into the world to sway the course of events at their good pleasure, men who have made destiny itself their vassal, and whose decrees it seems in vain for lesser men to seek to withstand. Such was the man who, with the blood of thousands reeking on his hands, could lay down despotic power, could walk unattended to his house, and calmly offer to give an account for any of his actions;[499] and such in might, though assuredly not such in crime, was our first Norman King. Whatever the will of William decreed, he found a means to bring it about. Whatever his hand found to do, he did [Sidenote: His military genius.] it with all his might. As a warrior, as a general, it is needless to sound his praises. His warlike exploits set him among the foremost captains of history, but his warlike exploits are but the smallest part of his fame. Others beside him could have led the charge at Val-ès-dunes; others beside him could have chosen the happy moment for the ambush at Varaville; others beside him could have endured the weariness of the long blockade beneath the donjon of Brionne. Others, it may even be, beside him could have cut their way through palisade and shield-wall and battle-axe to the royal Standard of England. [Sidenote: His statesmanship.] But none in his own age, and few in any age, have shown themselves like him masters of every branch of the consummate craft of the statesman. Calm and clear-sighted, he saw his object before him; he knew when to tarry and when to hasten; he knew when to strike and how to strike, and how to use alike the noblest and the vilest of [Sidenote: His unscrupulousness as to means.] men as his instruments. Utterly unscrupulous, though far from unprincipled, taking no pleasure in wrong or oppression for its own sake, always keeping back his hands from needless bloodshed, he yet never shrank from force or fraud, from wrong or bloodshed or oppression, when they seemed to him the straightest paths to accomplish his purpose. His crimes admit of no denial; but, with one single exception, they never were wanton crimes. And when we come to see the school in which he was brought up, when we see the men whom he had to deal with from his childhood, our wonder really ought to [Sidenote: His personal virtues.] be that his crimes were not infinitely blacker. His personal virtues were throughout life many and great. We hear much of his piety, and we see reason to believe that his piety was something more than the mere conventional [Sidenote: His religious zeal.] piety of lavish gifts to monasteries. Punctual in every exercise of devotion, paying respect and honour of every kind to religion and its ministers, William showed, in two ways most unusual among the princes of that age, that his zeal for holy things was neither hypocrisy, nor fanaticism, nor superstition. Like his illustrious contemporary on the Imperial throne, he appeared as a real ecclesiastical reformer, and he allowed the precepts of his religion to have a distinct influence on his private life. He was one of the few princes of that age whose hands [Sidenote: General excellence of his ecclesiastical appointments.] were perfectly clean from the guilt of simony. His ecclesiastical appointments for the most part do him honour; the patron of Lanfranc and Anselm can never be spoken of without respect. In his personal conduct he practised at least one most unusual virtue; in a profligate age he was a model of conjugal fidelity. He was a good and faithful friend, an affectionate brother—we must perhaps add, too indulgent a father. And strong as was his sense of religion, deep as was his reverence for the Church, open-handed as was his bounty to her ministers, no prince that ever reigned was less disposed to yield to ecclesiastical usurpations. No prince ever knew better how to control the priesthood within his own dominions; none knew better both how to win the voice of Rome to abet his purposes, and how to bid defiance to her demands when they infringed on the rights of his Crown and the laws of his Kingdom. While all Europe rang with the great strife of Pope and Cæsar, England and Normandy remained at peace under the rule of one who knew how, firmly and calmly, to hold his own against Hildebrand himself.

[Sidenote: Effects of his reign in Normandy, France, and England.]

But to know what William was, no way is so clear as to see what William did in both the countries over which he was so strangely called to rule. We are too apt to look on him simply as the Conqueror of England. But so to do is to look at him only in his most splendid, but at the same time his least honourable, aspect. William learned to become the Conqueror of England only by first becoming the Conqueror of Normandy and the Conqueror of France. He found means to conquer Normandy by the help of France and to conquer France by the help of Normandy. He turned a jealous overlord into an effective ally against his rebellious subjects, and he turned those rebellious subjects into faithful supporters against [Sidenote: His early struggles.] that jealous overlord. He came to his Duchy under every disadvantage. At once bastard and minor, with competitors for his coronet arising at every moment, with turbulent barons to hold in check and envious neighbours to guard against, he was, throughout the whole of his early life, beset by troubles, none of which were of his own making, and he came honourably out of all. The [Sidenote: Excellence of his rule in Normandy.] change which William wrought in Normandy was nothing less than a change from anarchy to good order. Instead of a state, torn by internal feuds and open to the attacks of every enemy, his Duchy became, under his youthful rule, a loyal and well-governed land, respected by all its neighbours, and putting most of them to shame by its prosperity. In the face of every obstacle, the mighty genius of the once despised Bastard raised himself and his principality to a place in the eyes of Europe such as Normandy and its prince had never held before. And these great successes were gained with far less of cruelty or harshness than might have been looked for in so [Sidenote: His general forbearance and occasional cruelty.] ruthless an age. He shared indeed in the fierce passions of his race, and in one or two cases his wrath hurried him, or his policy beguiled him, into acts at which humanity shudders. At all stages of his life, if he was debonair to those who would do his will, he was beyond measure stern to all who withstood it.[500] Yet, when we think of all that he went through, of the treachery and ingratitude which he met with on every side, how his most faithful friends were murdered beside him, how he himself had to flee for his life or to lurk in mean disguises, we shall see that it is not without reason that his panegyrist praises his general forbearance and clemency. In short, the reign of William as Duke of the Normans was alike prosperous and honourable in the highest degree. Had he never stretched forth his hand to grasp the diadem which was another’s, his fame would not have filled the world as now it does, but he would have gone down to his grave as one of the best, as well as one of the greatest, rulers of his time.

[Sidenote: His reign in England.]

If we turn from William Duke of the Normans to William King of the English, we may indeed mourn that, in a moral sense, the fine gold has become dim, but our admiration for mere greatness, for the highest craft of the statesman and the soldier, will rise higher than ever. No doubt he was highly favoured by fortune; nothing but an extraordinary combination of events could have made the Conquest of England possible. But then [Sidenote: Difficulties of his undertaking.] it is the true art of statesmanship, the art by which men like William carry the world before them, to know how to grasp every fortunate moment and to take advantage of every auspicious turn of events. Doubtless William could never have conquered England except under peculiarly favourable circumstances; but then none but such a man as William could have conquered England under any circumstances at all. He conquered and retained a land far greater than his paternal Duchy, and a land in [Sidenote: Skill displayed in his claim on the English Crown;] which he had not a single native partisan. Yet he contrived to put himself forward in the eyes of the world as a legal claimant, and not as an unprovoked invader. We must condemn the fraud, but we cannot help admiring the skill, by which he made men believe that he was the true heir of England, shut out from his inheritance by a perjured usurper. Never was a more subtle web of fallacy woven by the craft of man; never did diplomatic ingenuity more triumphantly obtain its end. He contrived to make an utterly unjust aggression bear the aspect, not only of righteous, but almost of holy, warfare. The wholesale spoiler of a Christian people contrived to win for himself something very like the position of a Crusader. And, landed on English ground, with no rights but those of his own sword, with no supporters but his own foreign [Sidenote: in his acquisition of it;] army, he yet contrived to win the English Crown with every circumstance of formal legality. He was elected, crowned, and anointed like his native predecessors, and he swore at the hands of an English Primate to observe the ancient laws of England. By force and by craft, but with the outward pretext of law always put prominently forward, he gradually obtained full possession of the whole land; he deprived the nation one by one of its native [Sidenote: and in his subsequent government.] leaders, and put in their places men of foreign birth and wholly dependent on himself. No prince ever more richly rewarded those to whom he owed his Crown, but no prince ever took more jealous care that they should never be able to bring his Crown into jeopardy. None but a man like him could have held down both conquerors and conquered, and have made his will the only law for Norman and Englishman alike. His consummate policy guarded against the dangers which he saw rife in every other country; he put the finishing stroke to the work of Ecgberht, and made England the most united Kingdom in Western Christendom. Normans and Englishmen conspired against him, and called the fleets and hosts of Denmark to their help. But William held his own alike against revolters at home and against invaders from abroad. Norman and English rebels were alike crushed; sometimes the Dane was bought off, sometimes he shrank from the firm array with which the land was guarded. All opposition was [Sidenote: Severity of his police.] quelled by fire and sword; but when it was quelled, whenever and wherever William’s rule was quietly accepted, his hand was heavy upon all smaller disturbers of the peace of the world. Life, property, female honour, stood indeed but a small chance while the process of Conquest was going on, but, when William’s work was fully accomplished, they were safer under him than they had ever been under England’s native Kings. As the stern avenger of crime, even the conquered learned to bless him, and to crown his good deeds with a tribute of praise hardly inferior to that which waits on the name of his illustrious rival.[501]

[Sidenote: The worst features of his character brought out in England.]

Here then was a career through which none but one of the greatest of mankind could have passed successfully. But it was a career which brought out into full play all those darker features of his character which found but little room for their developement during his earlier reign in his native Duchy. There is no reason to believe that William came into England with any fixed determination to rule otherwise in England than he had already ruled in Normandy. Cnut can hardly fail to have been his model, and William’s earliest days in England were far more promising than the earliest days of Cnut. At no time of his life does William appear as one of those tyrants who actually delight in oppression, to whom the infliction of human suffering is really a source of morbid pleasure. [Sidenote: His false position gradually developed itself, and led him to oppression.] But, if he took no pleasure in the infliction of suffering, it was at least a matter about which he was utterly reckless; he stuck at no injustice which was needed to carry out his purpose. His will was fixed, to win and to keep the Crown of England at all hazards. We may well believe that he would have been well pleased could he have won that Crown without bloodshed. But, rather than not win it, he did not shrink from the guilt of carrying on a desolating war against a people who had never wronged him. We may well believe that, when he swore to govern his new subjects as well as they had been governed by their own Kings, it was his full purpose to keep his oath. That he acted on any settled scheme of uprooting the nationality, the laws, or the language of England is an exploded fable.[502] But he could not govern England as he had governed Normandy; he could not govern England as Cnut had governed England; he could not himself be as Cnut, neither could his Normans be as Cnut’s Danes. He gradually found that there was no way for him to govern England save by oppressions, exactions, and confiscations, by the bondage or the death of the noblest of the land. He made the discovery, and he shrank not from its practical consequences. A reign which had begun with as good hopes as the reign of a foreign conqueror could begin with gradually changed into one of the most tremendous tyrannies on record. Northumberland was hard to be kept in order, and Northumberland was made a desert. [Sidenote: General change for the worse in his character.] This was the dictate of a relentless policy; but when William had once set forth on the downward course of evil, he soon showed that he could do wrong when no policy commanded it, merely to supply means for his [Sidenote: Formation of the New Forest.] personal gratification. To lay waste Hampshire merely to make a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to lay waste Northumberland to rid himself of a political danger. He could still be merciful when mercy was not dangerous, but he had now learned to shed innocent blood without remorse, if its shedding seemed to add safety to his throne. The repeated revolts of Eadgar were forgiven as often as they occurred; but Waltheof, caressed, [Sidenote: Death of Waltheof.] flattered, promoted, was sent to the scaffold on the first convenient pretext. It is hardly superstitious to point out, alike with ancient and with modern authorities,[503] that the New Forest became a spot fatal to William’s house, and that, after the death of Waltheof, his old prosperity [Sidenote: Crimes and misfortunes of his last years.] forsook him. Nothing indeed occurred to loosen his hold on England; but his last years were spent in bickerings with his unworthy son, and in a petty border warfare, in which the Conqueror had, for the first time, to undergo defeat. At last he found his death-wound in an inglorious quarrel, in the personal commission of cruelties which aroused the indignation of his own age; and the mighty King and Conqueror, forsaken by his servants and children, had to owe his funeral rites to the voluntary charity of a loyal vassal, and within the walls of his own minster he could not find an undisputed grave.

[Sidenote: William’s surnames: the _Great_, the _Conqueror_, the _Bastard_.]

Such was William the Great, a title which, in the mouths of his contemporaries, he shared with Alexander and with Charles, but which in later times has been displaced by the misunderstood description of Conqueror.[504] But, before he had won any right to either of those lofty titles, William was already known by another surname [Sidenote: Laxity of the Norman Dukes as to marriage and legitimacy.] drawn from the circumstances of his birth. Of all princely lines the ducal house of Normandy was that which paid least regard to the canonical laws of marriage or to the special claims of legitimate birth.[505] The Duchy had been ruled by a whole succession of princes who either were sprung from that irregular kind of union which was known as the Danish marriage,[506] or else were the sons of concubines raised to the rank of wives after the birth of their children. But, among all this brood of spurious or irregular heirs, the greatest of the whole line was the one to whom the reproach, if reproach it was deemed, [Sidenote: Special illegitimacy of William.] of illegitimate birth clave the most abidingly. William the son of Robert was emphatically William the Bastard, and the name clave to him through life, on the Imperial throne of Britain no less than on the ducal chair of Normandy. For, of all the whole line, William was the one whose bastardy was the most undoubted, the least capable of being veiled under ambiguous and euphemistic phrases. The position of Popa and Sprota was a doubtful one;[507] it may, according to Danish ideas, have been perfectly honourable. The children of Richard and Gunnor were, according to the law recognized everywhere but in our own country, legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their parents. But we may doubt whether the notion of the Danish marriage survived as late as the days of Robert, and it is certain that no ecclesiastical sacrament ever gave William a right, according to the law of the Church, to rank as the lawful son of his father. The mother of William is never spoken of in the respectful terms which we find applied to the mother of Richard the Fearless. Throughout the whole of Duke Robert’s life, she remained in the position of an acknowledged mistress, and her illustrious son came forth before the world with no other description than the Bastard.

[Sidenote: Story of William’s birth.]

The irregular birth of one so renowned naturally became the subject of romance and legend. And the spot on which William first saw the light is one which seems to call for the tribute of the legend-maker as its natural due. [Sidenote: Position of Falaise.] The town of Falaise, in the Diocese of Seez, is one of the most famous spots both in the earlier and in the later history of Normandy, and none assuredly surpasses it in the striking character of its natural position. Lying on the edge of the great forest of Gouffer, the spot had its natural attractions for a line of princes renowned, even above others of their time, for their devotion to the sports of the field. The town itself lies in a sort of valley between two eminences. The great Abbey, a foundation of a later date than the times which we are concerned with, has utterly vanished; but two stately parish churches, one of them dating from the days of Norman independence, bear witness to the ecclesiastical splendour of the place. Passing [Sidenote: Historical associations of the Castle.] by them, the traveller gradually ascends to the gate of the Castle, renowned alike in the wars of the twelfth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth centuries. A tall round tower still bears the name of the great Talbot, the guardian of [Sidenote: 1417–1450.] the castle in the great English war, and who afterwards won a still higher fame as the last champion of the ancient [Sidenote: 1453.] freedom of Aquitaine against the encroachments of the Kings of Paris.[508] But this witness of comparatively recent strife is but an excrescence on the original structure. It is the addition made by an English King to one of the noblest works of his Norman forefathers. The Castle where legend fixes the birth of William of Normandy, and where [Sidenote: 1175.] history fixes the famous homage of William of Scotland, is a vast donjon of the eleventh or twelfth century.[509] One of the grandest of those massive square keeps which I have already spoken of as distinguishing the earliest military architecture of Normandy, crowns the summit of a precipitous rock, fronted by another mass of rock wilder still, on which the cannon of England were planted during [Sidenote: The rocks give its name to the town.] Henry’s siege. To these rocks, these _felsen_, the spot owes its name of Falaise,[510] one of the many spots in Normandy where the good old Teutonic speech still lingers in local nomenclature, though in this case the Teutonic name has also preserved its permanent being in the general vocabulary of the Romance speech. Between these two rugged heights lies a narrow dell, through which runs a small beck, a tributary of the neighbouring river Ante. The dell is crowded with mills and tanneries, but the mills and tanneries of Falaise have their share in the historic interest of the place. The mills play no inconsiderable part in the [Sidenote: The Tanneries of Falaise.] records of the Norman Exchequer,[511] and the tanneries at once suggest the name of the greatest son of Normandy. In every form which the story has taken in history or legend, the mother of the Conqueror appears as the [Sidenote: William the son of a Tanner’s daughter.] daughter of a tanner of Falaise, plying his unsavoury craft on the spot where it has continued to be plied through so many ages. The conquered English indeed strove to claim the Norman Duke as their own, by representing his mother as a descendant of their own royal house.[512] But, even in this version, the traditional trade of her father [Sidenote: English legend of the birth of William.] is not forgotten. The daughter of the hero Eadmund disgraced herself by a marriage or an intrigue with her father’s tanner, to whom in process of time she bore three daughters. The pair were banished from England, and took refuge on the opposite coast. In the course of their wanderings they came to beg alms at the gate of Duke Richard the Good. The Prince discovered the lofty birth of the mother, and took the whole family into his favour. The youngest daughter became the mistress of his son Robert, and of them sprang the mighty William, great-grandson of Eadmund Ironside no less than of Richard the Fearless.

Such a tale is of course valuable only as illustrating the universal tendency of conquered nations to try to alleviate the shame and grief of conquest by striving to believe that their tyrants are at least their countrymen. The story of William’s English origin clearly comes from the same mint as the story in which Egyptian vanity gave out that Kambysês was Egyptian by his maternal origin,[513] as the story which saw in Alexander himself a scion of the royal house of Persia.[514] It seems however to preserve one grain of truth in the midst of so much that is mythical. It represents the connexion between Robert and his mistress as having begun before he ascended the ducal throne. There can be little doubt that this was the case, though the story is generally told as if Robert had been already Duke [Sidenote: Story of Herleva.] of the Normans. But it is more likely that Robert was as yet only Count of the Hiesmois, and, as such, Lord of Falaise, when his eye was first caught by the beauty of Arlette, or rather Herleva, the daughter of Fulbert the Tanner. Some say he first saw her engaged in the dance,[515] others when she was busied in the more homely work of washing linen in the beck which flows by her father’s tannery at the foot of the castle.[516] The prince himself, a mere stripling, saw and loved her. He sought her of her father, who, after some reluctance, gave up his child to his lord, by the advice, according to one account, of a holy hermit his brother.[517] She was led the same evening to the castle; the poetical chroniclers are rich in details of her behaviour.[518] She became the cherished mistress of Robert, and her empire over his heart was, we are told, not disturbed by another connexion, lawful or unlawful.[519] [Sidenote: Advancement of her family.] After the example of former princes, Robert in after times raised the kinsfolk of his mistress to high honours. Half the nobility of Normandy had sprung from the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, so now Fulbert the Tanner, the father of Herleva, was raised to the post of ducal chamberlain,[520] and her brother Walter was placed in some office which, in after times, gave him close access to the person of his princely nephew.[521] After Robert’s death, [Sidenote: Her marriage with Herlwin of Conteville.] Herleva obtained an honourable marriage, and became, by her husband Herlwin of Conteville,[522] the mother of two sons who will fill no small space in our history. But her union with the Duke produced but one son, perhaps but [Sidenote: Legends of omens.] one child.[523] That child however was one whose future greatness was, so we are told, prefigured by omens and prodigies from the moment of his birth, and even from the moment of his conception. On the night of her first visit to the castle, Herleva dreamed that a tree arose from her body which overshadowed all Normandy and all England.[524] At the moment of his birth, the babe seized the straw on the chamber floor with so vigorous a grasp that all who saw the sight knew that he would become a mighty conqueror, who would never let go anything that he had once laid [Sidenote: Birth of William. 1027–1028.] his hand upon.[525] Leaving tales like these apart, it is certain that William, the bastard son of Robert and Herleva, was born at Falaise, perhaps in the year in which the great Cnut made his famous pilgrimage to the threshold of the Apostles.[526]

[Sidenote: Question of the succession: state of the Ducal family.]

Before Robert undertook so perilous an enterprise, it was clearly needful for him to regulate the succession to the Duchy. The reigning prince had neither brother nor legitimate child. The heir, according to modern notions of heirship, was a churchman, Robert, Archbishop of [Sidenote: Robert Archbishop of Rouen. 989–1037.] Rouen. This Prelate we have already seen in rebellion against his namesake the Duke,[527] probably on account of this very claim to the succession. He was one of the children of Richard the Fearless, legitimated and made capable of ecclesiastical honours by the late marriage of his parents. Indeed, according to one account, the marriage of Richard and Gunnor was contracted expressly to take away the canonical objections which were raised against the appointment of a bastard to the metropolitan see.[528] Archbishop Robert was thus an uncle of Duke Robert and a great-uncle of the child William. Besides his Archbishoprick, he held the County of Evreux as a lay fee. Like the more famous Odo of Bayeux, he drew a marked distinction between his ecclesiastical and his temporal character. As Count of Evreux, he had a wife, Herleva by name,[529] and was the father of children of whom we shall hear again in our history. In his latter days, his spiritual character became more prominent; he repented of his misdeeds, gave great alms to the poor, and began the rebuilding of the metropolitan church.[530] There were also two princes whose connexion with the ducal house was by legitimate, though only female, descent. One was [Sidenote: Guy of Burgundy;] Guy of Burgundy, a nephew of Duke Robert, being grandson of Richard the Good through his daughter [Sidenote: Alan of Britanny;] Adeliza.[531] The other was Robert’s cousin, Count Alan of Britanny, the son of Hadwisa daughter of Richard the Fearless.[532] Nearer in blood, but of more doubtful legitimacy, were Robert’s own half-brothers, the sons of Richard [Sidenote: Malger;] the Good by Papia. These were the churchman Malger, who afterwards succeeded Archbishop Robert in the [Sidenote: William of Arques;] see of Rouen,[533] and William, who held the County and [Sidenote: Nicholas.] castle of Arques near Dieppe.[534] There was also the monk Nicholas, the young, and no doubt illegitimate, son of [Sidenote: No candidate free from objection.] Richard the Third.[535] None of these were promising candidates for the ducal crown. Robert, the lineal heir, might be looked on as disqualified by his profession; Alan and Guy were strangers, and could claim only through females; the nearer kinsmen were of spurious or doubtful birth, and some of them were liable also to the same objection as Robert. Had any strong opposition existed, William of Arques would probably have been found the best card to play; but there was no candidate whose claims were absolutely without cavil; there was none round whom national feeling could instinctively centre; there was none who was clearly marked out, either by birth or by merit, as the natural leader of the Norman people. This state of things must be borne in mind, in order to understand the fact, otherwise so extraordinary, that Robert was able to secure the succession to a son who was at once bastard and minor. There were strong objections against young William; but there were objections equally strong against [Sidenote: Unpopularity of William’s succession.] every other possible candidate. Under these circumstances it was possible for William to succeed; but it followed, almost as a matter of course, that the early years of his reign were disturbed by constant rebellions. William’s succession was deeply offensive to many of his subjects, especially to that large portion of the Norman nobility who had any kind of connexion with the ducal house. From the time of the child’s birth, there can be little doubt that his father’s intentions in his favour were at least suspected, and the suspicion may well have given rise to some of the rebellions by which Robert’s reign was disturbed.[536]

[Sidenote: The great Norman houses; their connexion with English history.]

At this stage of our narrative it becomes necessary to form some clear conception of the personality and the ancestry of some of the great Norman nobles. Most of them belonged to houses whose fame has not been confined to Normandy. We are now dealing with the fathers of the men, in some cases with the men themselves, who fought round William at Senlac, and among whom he divided the honours and the lands of England. These men became the ancestors of the new nobility of England, and, as their forefathers had changed in Gaul from Northmen into Normans, so now, by a happier application of the same law, they gradually changed from Normans into Englishmen. Many a name famous in English history, many a name whose sound is as familiar to us as any word of our own Teutonic speech, many a name which has long ceased to suggest any thought of foreign origin, is but the name of some Norman village, whose lord, or perhaps some lowlier inhabitant, followed his Duke to the Conquest of England and shared in the plunder of the conquered. But the names which are most familiar to us as names of English lords and gentlemen of Norman descent belong, for the most part, to a sort of second crop, which first grew up to importance on English soil. The great Norman houses whose acts—for the most part whose crimes—become of paramount importance at the time with which we are now dealing, were mostly worn out in a few generations, and they have left but few direct representatives on either side of the sea.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the House of Belesme.]

High among these great houses, the third in rank among the original Norman nobility,[537] stood the house of Belesme, whose present head was William, surnamed Talvas.[538] The domains held by his family, partly of the Crown of France, partly of the Duchy of Normandy, might almost put him on a level with princes rather than with ordinary nobles. The possession from which the family took its name lay within the French territory, and was a fief of the French Crown. But, within the Norman Duchy, the Lords of Belesme were masters of the valley bounded by the hills from which the Orne flows in one direction and the Sarthe in another. Close on the French frontier, they held the strong fortress of Alençon, the key of Normandy on that side. They are called Lords of the city of Seez,[539] and, at the time of which we are speaking, a member of their house filled its episcopal throne.[540] Their domains stretched to Vinoz, a few miles south-east of Falaise, and separated from the town by the forest of Gouffer. Ivo, the first founder of this mighty house, had been one of the faithful guardians of the childhood of Richard the Fearless, and had been enriched by him as the reward of his true service in evil days.[541] But with Ivo the virtue of his race seems to have died out, and his descendants appear in Norman and English history as [Sidenote: Their supposed hereditary wickedness.] monsters of cruelty and perfidy, whose deeds aroused the horror even of that not over scrupulous age. Open robbery and treacherous assassination seem to have been their daily occupations. The second of the line, William of Belesme, had rebelled against Duke Robert, and had defended his fortress of Alençon against him.[542] His eldest son Warren murdered a harmless and unsuspecting friend, and was for this crime, so the men of his age said, openly seized and strangled by the fiend. Of his other sons, Fulk, presuming to ravage the ducal territory, was killed in battle, Robert was taken prisoner by the men of Le Mans and beheaded by way of reprisals for a murder committed by his followers. The surviving heir of the possessions and of the wickedness of his race was his one remaining son William Talvas.[543] This man, we are told, [Sidenote: William Talvas; his crimes.] being displeased by the piety and good manners of his first wife Hildeburgis, hired ruffians to murder her on her way to church.[544] At his second wedding-feast he put out the eyes, and cut off the nose and ears, of an unsuspecting guest.[545] This was William the son of Geroy, one of a house whose name we shall often meet again in connexion with the famous Abbeys of Bec and Saint Evroul. A local war ensued, in which William Talvas suffered an inadequate punishment for his crimes in the constant devastation of his lands. At last a more appropriate avenger arose from his own house. The hereditary wickedness of his line passed on to his daughter Mabel and his son Arnulf. Mabel, the wife of Roger of Montgomery, will be a prominent character in our story for many years. Arnulf rebelled against his father, and left him to die wretchedly in exile. An act of wanton rapacity was presently punished by a supernatural avenger; Arnulf, like his uncle Warren, was strangled by a dæmon in his bed.[546] Such was the character of the family whose chief, first in power and in crime among the nobility of Normandy, stood forth, as the story goes, as the mouthpiece of that nobility, to express the feelings with which the descendants of the comrades of Rolf, the descendants of Richard the Fearless, even the descendants of the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, looked on the possible promotion of the Tanner’s grandson to be their lord.

[Sidenote: William Talvas curses young William.]

William Talvas, says the tale, in the days of his prosperity, was one day in the streets of Falaise, a town where the close neighbourhood of his possessions doubtless made him well known. The babe William, the son of the Duke and Herleva, was being nursed in the house of his maternal grandfather. A burgher, meeting the baron, bade him step in and see the son of his lord. William Talvas entered the house and looked on the babe. He then cursed him, saying that, by that child and his descendants, himself and his descendants would be brought to shame.[547] A curse from the mouth of William Talvas might almost be looked on as a blessing, and the form of the prediction was such as to come very near to the nature of a panegyric. It is indeed the highest praise of the babe who then lay in his cradle, that he did something to bring to shame, something to bring under the restraints of law and justice, men like the hoary sinner who instinctively saw in him the destined enemy of his kind. But the words, when uttered, would be meant and understood simply as a protest against the insult which was preparing for the aristocratic pride of the great Norman houses. Possibly indeed the tale, like other tales of the kind, may have been devised after the event; still it would mark none the less truly the feelings with which a man like William Talvas, boasting of a descent from the original conquerors of the land, looked on the unworthy sovereign whom destiny seemed to be providing for them.

[Sidenote: Robert announces his intention of pilgrimage. 1034–5.]

Duke Robert however was bent on his purpose. He gathered an assembly of the great men of his Duchy, among whom the presence of Archbishop Robert, perhaps as being a possible competitor for the succession, is specially mentioned.[548] The Duke set forth his intention of visiting the Holy Sepulchre, and told his hearers, that, aware of the dangers of such a journey, he wished to settle the succession to the Duchy before he set out. The voice of the Assembly bade him stay at home and continue to discharge the duties of government in person, especially at a time when there was no one successor or representative to whom they could be entrusted with any chance of the general good will. It was of course desirable to stave off the question. Robert might yet have legitimate heirs; or, in the failure of that hope, the Norman chiefs might gradually come to an agreement in favour of some other candidate. Let the Duke stay at home and guard his Duchy against the pretensions of the Breton and the Burgundian.[549] But Robert would brook no delay in the accomplishment of his pious purpose; he would go at [Sidenote: He proposes William as his successor.] once to the Holy Land; he would settle the succession before he went. He brought forward the young William, and acknowledged him as his son. He was little, he told them, but he would grow; he was one of their own stock, brought up among them.[550] His overlord the King of the French had engaged to acknowledge and protect him.[551] He called on them to accept, to choose—the never-ceasing mixture of elective and hereditary claims appears here as everywhere—the child as their future Lord, as his successor in the Duchy, should he never return from the distant land to which he was bound.[552] The Normans were in a manner entrapped. There can be no doubt that nothing could be further from the wishes of the majority of the Assembly than to agree to the Duke’s proposal; but there was nothing else to be done. If Robert could not be prevailed on to stay at home, some settlement must be made; and, little as any of them liked the prospect of the rule of the young Bastard, there was no other candidate in whose favour all parties could come to an agreement [Sidenote: William’s succession accepted.] on the spot. Unwillingly then the Norman nobility consented; they accepted the only proposal which was before them; they swore the usual oaths, and did homage to the son of Herleva as their future sovereign.[553] The kinsmen of Gunnor, the descendants of the comrades of Rolf, became the men of the Tanner’s grandson, and he himself was received as the man of King Henry at Paris.[554] As far as forms went, no form was wanting which could make William’s succession indisputably lawful. Duke Robert then set forth on the pilgrimage from which he never returned. Within a few months, his short life and [Sidenote: William succeeds his father in the Duchy. 1035.] reign came to an end at Nikaia.[555] Thus, in the same year which beheld the great Empire of Cnut parted among his sons, did William, the seven years old grandson of the Tanner Fulbert, find himself on the seat of Rolf and Richard the Fearless, charged with the mission to keep down, as his infant hands best might, the turbulent spirits who had been unwillingly beguiled into acknowledging him as their sovereign.

[Sidenote: Necessary evils of a minority.]

Anarchy at once broke forth; all the evils which attend a minority in a rude age were at once poured forth upon the unhappy Duchy. We see the wisdom with which the custom of our own and of most contemporary lands provided that the government of men should be entrusted to those only who had themselves at least reached man’s estate. In England the exceptional minorities of the sons of Eadmund and of Eadgar had been calamitous, but they were nothing to compare to the minority of William of Normandy. In England the custom of regular national assemblies, the habit of submitting all matters to a fair vote, the recognition of the Law as supreme over every man, hindered the state from falling into utter dissolution, even in those perilous times. The personal reign of Æthelred proved far weaker than the administration which Dunstan carried on in his name in his early years. But in Normandy, where constitutional ideas had found so imperfect a developement as compared with England, there was nothing of this kind to fall back upon. Nothing but the personal genius of a determined and vigorous Prince could keep that fierce nobility in any measure of order. With the accession of an infant there at once ceased to be any power to protect or to punish. “Woe [Sidenote: Childhood of William.] to the land whose King is a child” is the apt quotation of an historian of the next age.[556] The developement of the young Duke both in mind and body was undoubtedly precocious; but his early maturity was mainly owing to the stern discipline of that terrible childhood. It was in those years that he learned the arts which made Normandy, France, and England bow before him; but, at the age of seven years, William himself was no more capable than Æthelred of personally wielding the rod of rule. The child had good and faithful guardians, guardians perhaps no less well disposed to fulfil their trust towards him than Dunstan had been towards the children of Eadgar. But there was no one man in Normandy to whom every Norman could look up as every Englishman had looked up to the mighty Primate, and the bowl and the dagger soon deprived the young Prince of the support of his wisest and truest counsellors. The minority of William was truly a time when every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And what seemed right in the eyes of the nobles of Normandy was commonly [Sidenote: Utter anarchy of the time.] rebellion against their sovereign, ruthless oppression of those beneath them, and endless deadly feuds with one another. We have already seen some specimens of their crimes in the doings of the house of Belesme. That house is indeed always spoken of as exceptionally wicked; but a state of things in which such deeds could be done, and could go unpunished, must have come very nearly to a complete break-up of society. The general pictures which we find given us of the time are fearful beyond expression. Through the withdrawal of all controlling power, every landowner became a petty sovereign, and began to exercise all the sovereign rights of slaughter and devastation. [Sidenote: Building of castles.] The land soon bristled with castles. The mound crowned with the square donjon rose as the defence or the terror of every lordship.[557] This castle-building [Sidenote: Building of castles.] is now spoken of in Normandy with a condemnation nearly as strong as that with which it was spoken of in England, when, a few years after this time, the practice was introduced into England by the Norman favourites of Eadward.[558] But there is a characteristic difference in the tone of the two complaints. The English complaint always is that the Frenchmen built castles and oppressed the poor folk,[559] or that they did all possible evil and shame to their English neighbours.[560] The Norman complaint, though not wholly silent as to the oppression of the humbler ranks,[561] yet dwells mainly on the castle-building as a sign of rebellion against the authority of the Prince, and as an occasion of warfare between baron and baron. And it would have been well for the reputation of the Norman nobles of that age if they had confined themselves to open warfare with one another and open rebellion against their sovereign. [Sidenote: Frequency of assassinations.] But they sank below the common morality of their own age; private murder was as familiar to them as open war. The house of Belesme had a bad preeminence in this as in other crimes; but, if they had a preeminence, they were far from having a monopoly. Probably no period of the same length in the history of Christendom contains the record of so many foul deeds of slaughter and mutilation as the early years of the reign of William. And they were constantly practised, not only against avowed and armed enemies, but against unarmed and unsuspecting guests. Some of the tales may be inventions or exaggerations; but the days in which such tales could even be invented must have been full of deeds of horror. Isolated cases of similar crimes may doubtless be found in any age; but this period is remarkable alike for the abundance of crimes, for the rank of the criminals, and for the impunity which they enjoyed. To control these men was the duty laid upon the almost infant years of William, a duty with which nothing short of his own full and matured powers might seem fit to grapple. Yet over all these difficulties the genius of the [Sidenote: Effects of William’s government in Normandy.] great Duke was at last triumphant. His hand brought order out of the chaos, and changed a land wasted by rebellion and intestine warfare into one of the most prosperous regions of Europe, a land flourishing as no Norman ruler had seen it flourish before. When we think of the days in which William spent his youth, of the men against whom his early years were destined to be one continued struggle, we shall be less inclined to lift up our hands in horror at his later crimes than to dwell with admiration on the large share of higher and better qualities which, among all his evil deeds, clave to him to his dying day.

§ 2. _From the Accession of William to the Battle of Val-ès-dunes._ 1035–1047.

[Sidenote: Guardians of William.]

We have seen among what kind of men the young Duke of the Normans had to pass the first years of his life and sovereignty. But his father, in leaving his one lamb among so many wolves, had at least provided him with trustworthy [Sidenote: Alan of Britanny.] guardians. Alan of Britanny, a possible competitor for the Duchy, a neighbouring prince with whom Duke Robert had so lately been at war,[562] was disarmed when his overlord committed his son to his faith as kinsman and vassal, and even invested him with some measure of authority in Normandy itself.[563] The immediate care of the young Duke’s person was given to one Thurcytel or Thorold, names which point to a genuine Scandinavian descent in their bearer, and which would make us look to the Bessin as the probable place of his birth.[564] Other [Sidenote: Osbern.] guardians of high rank were the Seneschal Osbern, and Count Gilbert, both of them connected in the usual way with the ducal family. Osbern was the son of Herfast, a brother of the Duchess Gunnor; he was also married to a daughter of Rudolf of Ivry, the son of Asperleng and Sprota, the savage suppressor of the great [Sidenote: Gilbert.] peasant revolt.[565] Gilbert’s connexion was still closer. He was illustrious alike in his forefathers and in his descendants. He sprang of the ducal blood of Normandy, and of his blood sprang the great houses of Clare and Pembroke in England. His father Godfrey was one of those natural children of Richard the Fearless who did not share the promotion of the offspring of Gunnor.[566] He was lord of the border fortress of Eu, renowned in Norman history as early as the days of Rolf;[567] he was lord too of the pleasant valley of the Risle, separated only by one wooded hill from the more memorable valley which is hallowed by the names of Herlwin, Lanfranc, and Anselm. [Sidenote: Alan poisoned. 1039–1040.] All these worthy men paid the penalty of their fidelity. Count Alan died of poison, while he was besieging the castle of Montgomery, the stronghold of a house which we shall often have again to mention. He died at Vinmoutier, and was buried in the abbey of Fécamp. Breton slander afterwards threw the guilt of this crime upon the Duke himself,[568] the person who had least to gain by it. Norman slander threw it on Alan’s own subjects;[569] but one can hardly doubt that, if the poisoned bowl was administered at all, it was administered by some one or [Sidenote: Murder of Gilbert.] other of the rebellious Norman nobles.[570] Count Gilbert was murdered by assassins employed by Ralph of Wacey, son of Archbishop Robert.[571] The sons of the murdered man fled to Flanders, and took refuge with the common protector of banished men, Count Baldwin. The lands of Gilbert were divided among various claimants; the County of Eu seems to have passed into the hands of his uncle William;[572] but his famous castle of Brionne fell to the lot of Guy of Burgundy, of whom, and of whose possession of the fortress, we shall hear much as we go on.[573]

[Sidenote: Castle and house of Montgomery.]

Another still more criminal attempt directly introduces us for the first time to another of the great Norman houses, and one whose name has been more abiding than any other. I have just before mentioned Count Alan’s siege of the castle of Montgomery. The name of that castle, a hill fortress in the diocese of Lisieux, enjoys a peculiar privilege above all others in Norman geography. Other spots in Normandy have given their names to Norman houses, and those Norman houses have transferred those names to English castles and English towns and villages. But there is only one shire in Great Britain which has had the name of a Norman house impressed [Sidenote: Roger of Montgomery and his five sons.] upon it for ever. Roger, the present Lord of Montgomery, was, at the time of Duke Robert’s death, in banishment at Paris.[574] His five sons remained in Normandy, and were among the foremost disturbers of the peace of the country.[575] But one of the five, Hugh, had a son, named, like his [Sidenote: The younger Roger.] grandfather, Roger, who bore a better character and was destined to a higher fate. He had, through his mother, a connexion of the usual kind with the ducal house. Weva, a sister of Gunnor, was the wife of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, the son of Torf,[576] and her daughter Joscelina was the wife of Hugh of Montgomery, and the mother of the younger Roger.[577] On this Roger, William Talvas, in his old age, [Sidenote: His wife Mabel, daughter of William Talvas.] bestowed the hand of his daughter Mabel, who transferred the name, the honours, and the hereditary wickedness of the house of Belesme to her sons of the house of Montgomery.[578] Mabel, small in stature, talkative, and cruel, guilty of fearful crimes and destined to a fearful doom,[579] fills a place in history fully equal to that filled by her husband. Of him we shall hear again as literally the foremost among the conquerors of England; we shall see him enriched with English estates and honours, bearing the lofty titles of Earl of Arundel and Shrewsbury, and, once at least, adorned with the loftier title which had been borne by Æthelred and [Sidenote: 1087.] Leofric. Once, and that while engaged in rebellion against his prince, he flits before us for a moment as Roger Earl of the Mercians.[580] A munificent friend of monks both in England and in Normandy, he has left behind him a different reputation from that of either his father, his wife, or his sons. In one of those sons we shall see the name of his maternal ancestors revive, and, with their name, a double portion of their wickedness.

But we have as yet to deal with the house of Montgomery [Sidenote: Attempt of William of Montgomery on Duke William at Vaudreuil.] only in its least honourable aspect. William, son of the elder, and uncle of the younger, Roger, stands charged with an attempt, aimed no longer at guardians or tutors, but at the person of the young Duke himself. William was staying with his guardian Osbern at Vaudreuil, a castle on an island in the Eure, said to have been the place of captivity of the famous Fredegunda in Merowingian times.[581] Thorold, it would seem, had been already murdered, but his assassins are spoken of only in general terms.[582] But Osbern still watched over his young lord day [Sidenote: Murder of Osbern; escape of the Duke.] and night. While at Vaudreuil he was butchered by William of Montgomery in the very bedchamber of the Duke, and the young prince owed his own safety on this, and on many other occasions, to the zealous care of his maternal uncle Walter. Many a time did this faithful kinsman carry him from palace and castle to find a lurking-place from those who sought his life in the cottages of the poor.[583] The blood of Osbern was soon avenged; a faithful servant of the murdered Seneschal presently did to William of Montgomery as William of Montgomery had done to Osbern.[584] In the state of things in Normandy at that moment crime could be punished only by crime. The remembrance of the faithful Osbern lived also in the memory of the Prince whose childhood he had so well [Sidenote: Friendship of the Duke with William Fitz-Osbern.] guarded. His son William grew up from his youth as the familiar friend and counsellor of his namesake the Duke. This is that famous William Fitz-Osbern who lived to be, next to the Duke himself, the prime agent in the Conquest of England, who won, far more than the Duke himself, the hatred of the conquered people, and who at last perished in a mad enterprise after a crown and a wife in Flanders.

The next enemy was Roger of Toesny, whom we have already heard of as a premature Crusader, the savage foe [Sidenote: Rebellion and death of Roger of Toesny.] of the Infidels of Spain.[585] Disappointed in his dream of a Kingdom in the Iberian peninsula, he returned to his native land to find it under the sway of the son of the Tanner’s daughter. The proud soul of the descendant of Malahulc scorned submission to such a lord; “A bastard is not fit to rule over me and the other Normans.”[586] He refused all allegiance, and began to ravage the lands of his neighbours. The one who suffered most was Humfrey de Vetulis, a son of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, and of Weva the sister of Gunnor. He sent his son Roger of Beaumont against the aggressor. A battle followed, in which Roger of Toesny and his two sons were killed, and Robert of Grantmesnil received a mortal wound.[587] This fight was fought rather in defence of private property than in the assertion of any public principle. But the country gained by the destruction of so inveterate an enemy of peace as Roger of Toesny. And here, as at every step of this stage of our narrative, we become acquainted with men whose names are to figure in the later portion of [Sidenote: Houses of Grantmesnil and Beaumont.] our history. Robert of Grantmesnil was the father of Hugh of Grantmesnil, who had no small share in the conquest of England and the division of its spoil. Roger of Beaumont became the patriarch of the first house of the Earls of Leicester. One of his descendants played an honourable part in the great struggle between King and Primate in the latter half of the twelfth century;[588] and his honours passed by female succession to that great deliverer who made the title of Earl of Leicester the most glorious in the whole peerage of England.[589]

[Sidenote: Ralph of Wacey chosen as the Duke’s guardian.]

By this time William was getting beyond the years of childhood, and he was beginning to display those extraordinary powers of mind and body with which nature had endowed him. He could now in some measure exercise a will of his own. He still needed a guardian, but, according to the principles of Roman Law, he had a right to a voice in determining who that guardian should be. He summoned the chief men of his Duchy, and, by their advice, he chose as his own tutor and as Captain-General of the armies of Normandy,[590] Ralph the son of Archbishop Robert. The choice seems a strange one, as Ralph was no other than the murderer of William’s former guardian Count Gilbert.[591] But it may have been thought politic for the young Duke to strengthen his hands by an alliance with a former enemy, and to make, as in the case of Count Alan of Britanny, a practical appeal to the honour of a possible rival. The appointment of Ralph seems in fact to have had that effect. A time of comparative internal quiet now followed. But there still were traitors in the land. Many, we are told, of the Norman nobles, even of those who professed the firmest fidelity to the Duke, and were loaded by him with the highest honours, still continued to plot against him in secret.[592] For a while they no longer revolted openly on their own account; but there was a potentate hard by whose ear was ever open to their suggestions, and who was ever ready to help them in any plots against their sovereign and their country.

[Sidenote: Relations between Normandy and France hitherto friendly.]

From this point a new chapter opens in the relations between Normandy and France. We have seen that, ever since the Commendation made by Richard the Fearless to Hugh the Great,[593] the relations between the Norman Princes and the Dukes and Kings of Paris had been invariably [Sidenote: 945.] [Sidenote: 987.] friendly.[594] It was to Norman help that the Parisian dynasty in a great measure owed its rise to royalty;[595] it [Sidenote: 1031.] was to Norman help that the reigning King of the French owed his restoration to his throne.[596] Henry of Paris, made King by the help of Robert, had received Robert’s son as his vassal,[597] and had promised to afford him the protection due from a righteous overlord to a faithful vassal. But we [Sidenote: Return to ill-feeling from the accession of William.] now, from the accession of William, begin to see signs of something like a return on the French side to the old state of feeling in the days when the Normans were still looked on as heathen intruders, and their Duke was held to be Duke only of the Pirates.[598] We find the French applying contemptuous epithets to the Norman people,[599] and we find the King of the French ready to seize every opportunity for enriching himself at the expense of the Norman Duke.

[Sidenote: Causes of this change of feeling.]

It is not easy at first sight to explain this return to a state of things which seemed to have passed away for more than a generation. Still we must not forget that any prince reigning at Paris could hardly fail to look with a grudging eye on the practically independent power which cut him off from the mouth of his own river. The great feudatory at Rouen seemed, in a way in which no other feudatory seemed, to shut up his overlord in a kind of prison. The wealth and greatness and prosperity of Normandy might seem, both historically and geographically, to be something actually taken away from the possessions of France. This feeling would apply to Normandy in a way in which it did not apply to the other great fiefs of Flanders and Aquitaine. And the feeling would on every ground be stronger in the mind of a King reigning at Paris than in that of a King reigning at Laôn. To a French King at Paris the Normans were the nearest and the most powerful of all neighbours, those whose presence must have made itself far more constantly felt than that of any other power in Gaul. Hitherto this inherent feeling of jealousy had been kept in check by the close hereditary connexion between the two states. The league established between Richard and Hugh had hitherto been kept unbroken by their descendants. But the main original object of that league, mutual support against the Carolingian King at Laôn, had ceased to exist when the Parisian Duke assumed the royal dignity. Since that time, the league could have rested on little more than an hereditary sentiment between the Norman and French princes, which probably was never very deeply shared by their subjects on either side. And now that sentiment was giving way to the earlier and more instinctive feeling which pointed out the Rouen Duchy as the natural enemy of the Parisian Kingdom. It had once been convenient to forget, it was now equally convenient to remember, that the original grant to Rolf had been made at the immediate expense, not of the King of Laôn but of the Duke of Paris.[600] Under these changed circumstances, the old feeling, dormant for a time, seems to have again awakened in all its strength. And now that Normandy held out temptations to every aggressor, now that Norman nobles did not scruple to invite aid from any quarter against a prince [Sidenote: Ingratitude of King Henry.] whose years were the best witness of his innocence, every feeling of justice and generosity seems to have vanished from the mind of King Henry. The King who owed his Crown to the unbought fidelity of Duke Robert did not scruple to despoil the helpless boy whom his benefactor had [Sidenote: Dispute about Tillières.] entrusted to his protection. The border fortress of Tillières formed the first pretext. That famous creation of Richard the Good had been raised as a bulwark, not against the King, but against the troublesome Count of Chartres.[601] But Odo had found it convenient to surrender the disputed territory of Dreux to the Crown;[602] the Arve therefore now became the boundary between Normandy and the royal domain. Tillières was accordingly declared to be a standing menace to Paris, whose retention was inconsistent with any friendly relations between King and Duke.[603] The loyal party in Normandy thought it better to yield than to expose their young Duke to fresh jeopardy.[604] But the actual commander of the fortress was of another mind. [Sidenote: Gilbert Crispin besieged in Tillières.] Tillières had been entrusted by Duke Robert to Gilbert Crispin, the ancestor of a race by whom, after its restoration to Normandy, the border fortress was held for several generations.[605] He scorned to agree to a surrender which he looked on as dangerous and disgraceful;[606] he shut himself up in the castle with a strong force, and there endured a siege at the hands of the King. Besides his own subjects, Henry had a large body of Normans in the besieging host.[607] It is not clear whether these were Normans of the disaffected party, or whether the Duke’s own adherents, when they had once pledged themselves to surrender the castle, deemed it expedient to display this excess of zeal against a comrade who had carried his loyalty to the extreme of [Sidenote: Tillières surrendered and burned.] disobedience. It is certain that it was only in deference to orders given in the Duke’s name, and which seem to imply the Duke’s personal presence,[608] that the gallant Gilbert at last surrendered his trust. The fortress of which Normandy had been so proud was handed over to the French King, and was at once given to the flames, to the sorrow of every true Norman heart.[609] The King pledged himself, as one of the conditions of the surrender, not to restore the fortress for four years.[610] But, if the Norman writers may be trusted, he grossly belied his faith. His somewhat unreasonable demand had been granted, and no further provocation seems to have been given on the Norman side. But, now that the protecting fortress [Sidenote: Henry invades Normandy and restores Tillières.] was dismantled, Henry ventured on an actual invasion. He retired for a while; but he soon returned and crossed the border. He passed through the County of Hiesmes, the old appanage of Duke Robert; from the valley of the Dive he passed into the valley of the Orne, and burned the Duke’s own town of Argentan. He then returned laden with booty, and, on his way back, in defiance of his engagements, he restored and garrisoned the dismantled fortress of Tillières.[611] The border fortress, so long the cherished defence of Normandy, now became the sharpest thorn in her side.

It is impossible to doubt that this devastation of the County of Hiesmes was made by special agreement with the man who was most bound to defend it. The commander of the district was Thurstan surnamed Goz, the son of Ansfrid the Dane.[612] In this description, so long after the first occupation of the country, we must recognize a son of a follower of Harold Blaatand,[613] not a son of an original companion of Rolf. And a son of a follower of Harold Blaatand must have been by this time a man advanced in life. But neither his age and office, nor his Scandinavian [Sidenote: Treason of Thurstan Goz.] descent and name, hindered Thurstan from playing into the hands of the French invaders. Seeing that the Duke had been thus compelled to yield to the King, Thurstan [Sidenote: He garrisons Falaise Castle against the Duke.] looked upon the moment as one propitious for revolt. He took some of the King’s soldiers into his pay, and with their help he garrisoned the castle of Falaise against the Duke.[614] Young William’s indignation was naturally great. To select that particular spot as a centre of rebellion was not only a flagrant act of disloyalty, but the grossest of personal insults. Acting under the guidance of his guardian Ralph of Wacey, he summoned all loyal Normans to his standard, and advanced to the siege of his [Sidenote: The castle besieged and taken by the Duke and Ralph of Wacey.] birthplace. The castle was attacked by storm, a fact which shows that the town was loyal, proud as it well might be of numbering among its sons not only a sovereign, but a sovereign who was beginning to be renowned even in his boyhood. It was only on the side of the town that the castle could be assaulted in this way. William himself could hardly have swarmed up the steep cliffs which looked down upon the dwelling of his grandfather, nor could he, like the English invader four centuries later, command the fortress by artillery planted on the opposite heights. By dint of sheer personal strength and courage, the gallant Normans assaulted the massive walls of the Norman fortress, in the heart of the Norman land, which French hirelings, in the pay of a Norman traitor, were defending against the prince to whom that fortress owes a renown which can never pass away. Their attacks made a breach, perhaps not in the donjon itself, but at any rate in its external defences; night alone, we are told, put an end to the combat, and saved Thurstan and his party from all the horrors of a storm. But the rebel chief now saw that his hopes were vain; he sought a parley with the Duke, and was allowed to go away unhurt on condition of perpetual banishment from Normandy. [Sidenote: Thurstan’s descendants, the Earls of Chester.] Thurstan’s son, Richard, Viscount of Avranches, proved a loyal servant to William, and in the end procured the pardon of his father.[615] The son of the loyal Richard, the grandson of the rebel Thurstan, finds a place in English history by the name of Hugh the Wolf, the first of the mighty but short-lived line of the Counts Palatine of Chester.[616]

[Sidenote: Developement of Williams’s character.]

The young Duke’s great qualities were now fast displaying themselves. At the earliest age which the rules of chivalry allowed, he received the ensigns of knighthood from King Henry, and his subjects now began, not without reason, to look forward to a season of peace and order under his rule.[617] We hardly need the exaggerated talk of his extravagant panegyrist to feel sure that William, at an unusually early age, taught men to see in him the born ruler. We hear, not only of his grace and skill in every warlike exercise, not only of his wisdom in the choice of his counsellors, but of his personally practising every virtue that becomes a man and a prince. William, we are told, was fervent in his devotions, righteous in his judgements, and he dealt out a justice as strict as that of Godwine or Harold upon all disturbers of the public peace.[618] All this we can well believe. Of all these virtues he retained many traces to the last. A long career of ambition, craft, and despotic rule, never utterly seared his conscience, never brought him down to the level of those tyrants who neither fear God nor regard man. And in the fresh and generous days of youth, we can well believe that one so highly gifted, and who as yet had so little temptation to abuse his gifts, must have shone forth before all men as the very model of every princely virtue. In one important point however, the public acts of William, or of those who acted in his name, hardly bear out the language of his [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical appointments abused by the Norman Dukes.] panegyrists. His first ecclesiastical appointments were quite unworthy of the prince who was, somewhat later in life, to learn to appreciate and to reward the virtues of Lanfranc and Anselm. The two greatest preferments of the Norman Church fell vacant during this period, and the way in which they were filled illustrates a not uncommon practice of the Norman princes which had few or no parallels in England. There have been few instances in England in any age of great spiritual preferments being perverted into means of maintenance for cadets or bastards of the royal house. In Normandy, at least since the days of Richard the Fearless, the practice had been shamefully common, and in the early days of William the scandal still continued.

It must be remembered that the Prelates of Normandy, [Sidenote: Position of the Norman Prelates.] like the Prelates of the other great fiefs of the French Crown, were, in every sense, the subjects of the Princes within whose immediate dominions they found themselves. Here was one great point of difference between the condition of France and the condition of Germany. In Germany all the great churchmen, in every part of the country, held immediately of the Emperor. Every Bishop was therefore reckoned as a Prince. The episcopal city also commonly became a Free City of the Empire, and, as such, a commonwealth enjoying practical independence. [Sidenote: Their subjection to the Ducal authority.] No such oases of ecclesiastical or municipal privilege interrupted the continuous dominion of a Norman or Aquitanian Duke. The Metropolitan of Rouen or of Bourdeaux might be either the loyal subject or the refractory vassal of his immediate Prince; but in no case was he a coordinate sovereign, owning no superior except in the common overlord. It is only among the Bishops within the Crown lands, those who, in the extemporized jurisprudence of a later age, sat as Peers of France, alongside of the great Dukes and Counts, that the slightest signs of any such hierarchical independence can be discerned. At an earlier age we have indeed seen the metropolitan see of Rheims holding a position which faintly approached that of Mainz or Köln;[619] but even Rheims had now considerably fallen from its ancient greatness, and no such claims to princely authority were at any time put forward by the proudest Prelate of Rouen or Bayeux. It was as Count of Evreux, rather than as Primate of Normandy, that Archbishop Robert had been able to make himself so troublesome to [Sidenote: Death of Archbishop Robert. 1037.] his nephew and sovereign. That turbulent Prelate, after an episcopate of forty-eight years, had amended his ways, and had at last vacated both County and Archbishoprick by death.[620] In his temporal capacity he was succeeded by a son and a grandson, after whom the County of Evreux passed by an heiress to the house of Montfort, giving the Count-Primate the honour of being, through female descendants, a forefather of the great Simon.[621] The vacancy of the Archbishoprick placed the greatest spiritual preferment in the Duchy at the disposal of the young Duke. The choice of the new Primate was as little directed by considerations of ecclesiastical merit as that of his predecessor, and it proved in every way unfortunate. At the [Sidenote: Malger, Archbishop of Rouen. 1037–1055.] head of the Norman Church William’s counsellors placed his uncle Malger, one of the sons of Richard the Good by Papia.[622] We shall presently find him displaying no very priestly qualities, and the only act of his life which could be attributed to Christian or ecclesiastical zeal was one which wounded the Duke himself in the tenderest point. [Sidenote: ODO, Bishop of Bayeux. 1048–1098.] So too, when, some years later, the great see of Bayeux fell vacant, William bestowed it on his half-brother Odo, the son of Herleva by her husband Herlwin of Conteville.[623] Odo, like Hugh of Rheims in earlier times,[624] must have been a mere boy at the time of his appointment;[625] but he held the see of Bayeux for fifty years,[626] and, during most part of that time, his name was famous and terrible on both sides of the Channel. The character which he left [Sidenote: His character in England,] behind him was a singularly contradictory one.[627] In England he was remembered only as the foremost among the conquerors and oppressors of the land, the man who gained for himself a larger share of English hatred than William [Sidenote: 1086]. himself, the man whose career of wrong was at last cut short by his royal brother, who, stern and unscrupulous as he was, at least took no pleasure in deeds of wanton oppression. Of Odo’s boundless ambition and love of enterprise there is no doubt. The one quality led him to aspire to the Papal throne;[628] the other led him first to forsake his diocese to rule as an Earl in England, and then to forsake it again to follow his nephew Duke Robert to the first Crusade. That he was no strict observer of ecclesiastical rules in his own person is shown by the fact that he left behind him a son, on whom however he at least bestowed the ecclesiastical name of John.[629] Still Norman [Sidenote: and in Normandy.] ecclesiastical history sets Odo before us in a somewhat fairer light than that in which we see him in English secular history. He at least possessed the episcopal virtue of munificence, and, whatever were the defects of his own conduct, he seems to have been an encourager of learning and good conversation in others. He was bountiful to all, specially to those of his own spiritual household. He [Sidenote: His works at Bayeux. Cathedral consecrated, 1077.] rebuilt his own church at Bayeux, where parts of his work still remain. The lower part of the lofty towers of the western front, the dim and solemn crypt beneath the choir, of that stately and varied cathedral, are relics of the church reared by its most famous Bishop. These precious fragments, severe but far from rude in style, form a striking contrast to the gorgeous arcades which in the next century supplanted Odo’s nave, and to the soaring choir and apse raised by a still later age. Besides renewing the fabric, he increased the number of the clergy of his church, and founded or enriched a monastery in the outskirts of the city, in honour of Saint Vigor, a canonized predecessor in the see of Bayeux.[630] The name of Odo is one which will be constantly recurring in this history, from the day when his Bishop’s staff and warrior’s mace were so successfully wielded against the defenders of England, till the day when he went forth to wield the same weapons against the misbelievers of the East, and found on his road a tomb, far from the heavy pillars and massive arches of his own Bayeux, among the light and gorgeous enrichments with which the art of the conquered Saracen knew how to adorn the palaces and churches of the Norman lords of Palermo.[631]

But, though the appointments of Malger and Odo might bode but little good for the cause of ecclesiastical reformation, it is certain that a great movement was at this time [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical movement in Normandy; foundation of monasteries.] going on in the interior of the Norman Church. The middle of the eleventh century was, in Normandy, the most fruitful æra of the foundation of monasteries. The movement in that direction, which had begun under Richard the Fearless, had continued under Richard the Good, and it seems to have reached its height under Robert and William. A Norman noble of that age thought that his estate lacked its chief ornament, if he failed to plant a colony of monks in some corner of his possessions.[632] No doubt the fashion of founding monasteries became, in this case, as in other cases earlier and later, little more than a mere fashion. Many a man must have founded a religious house, not from any special devotion or any special liberality, but simply because it was the regular thing for a man in his position to do.[633] And, as an age of founding monasteries must also be an age in which men are unusually eager to enter the monastic profession, we may infer that many men took that profession on them out of mere imitation or prevalent impulse, without any real [Sidenote: Character of the monastic reformations in various ages.] personal call to the monastic life. Still, though movements of this sort may end in becoming a mere fashion, they never are a mere fashion at their beginning. The Norman Benedictine movement in the eleventh century, the English Cistercian movement in the twelfth century, the still greater movement of the Friars in the thirteenth century—we may add the revulsion in favour of the Seculars in the fourteenth century, and the great Jesuit movement in the sixteenth—all alike point to times when all classes of men were dissatisfied with the existing state of the Church, and were filled with a general desire for its reformation. The evil in every case was that the monastic reformations were never more than temporary. Some new foundations were created, perhaps even some old ones were reformed; the newly kindled fire burned with great fervour for a generation or two; a crop of saints arose, with their due supply of legends and miracles. But presently love again waxed cold; the new foundations fell away like the elder ones, and the next age saw its new order arise, to run the same course of primitive poverty and primitive holiness, degenerating into wealth, indolence, and corruption. Still there is a peculiar charm in contemplating the early years, the infant struggles, the simple and fervent devotion, of one of these religious brotherhoods [Sidenote: Two monasteries claiming special notice, Bec and Saint Evroul.] in the days of its first purity. And, among the countless monasteries which arose in Normandy at this time, there are two which claim some special notice at the hands of an historian whose chief aim is to connect the history of Normandy with that of England. The famous Abbey [Sidenote: Three Archbishops of Canterbury from Bec;] of Bec became the most renowned school of the learning of the time, and, among the other famous men whom it sent forth, it gave three Primates to the throne of Augustine. Thence came Lanfranc, the right hand man of the [Sidenote: LANFRANC, 1070–1089.] Conqueror—the scholar whose learning drew hearers from all Christendom, and before whose logic the heretic stood abashed—the courtier who could win the favour of Kings without stooping to any base compliance with their will—the ruler whose crozier completed the conquest which the ducal sword only began, and who knew how to win the love of the conquered, even while rivetting their fetters. [Sidenote: ANSELM, 1093–1109.] Thence too came also the man of simple faith and holiness, the man who, a stranger in a strange land, could feel his heart beat for the poor and the oppressed, the man who braved the wrath of the most terrible of Kings in the cause at once of ecclesiastical discipline and of moral righteousness. Such are the truest claims of Anselm to the reverence of later ages, but it must not be forgotten that, if Bec sent forth in Lanfranc the great reformer of ecclesiastical discipline, it sent forth also in his successor the father of the whole dogmatic theology of later times. [Sidenote: Theobald, 1139–1161.] The third Metropolitan who found his way from Bec to Canterbury cannot compete with the fame of either of his great predecessors; yet Theobald lives in history as the first to discern the native powers of one whose renown presently came to outshine the renown of Lanfranc and Anselm. The early patron of Thomas the burgher’s son of London may fairly claim some reflected share of the glory which surrounds the name of Thomas the Chancellor of England, the Primate and the Martyr of Canterbury. [Sidenote: Ouche or Saint Evroul.] By the side of the house which sent forth men like these the name of the other Norman monastery of which I speak may seem comparatively obscure. Yet the Abbey of Ouche or Saint Evroul has its own claim on our respect. It was the spot which beheld the composition of the record from which we draw our main knowledge of the times following [Sidenote: The home of Orderic Vital.] those with which we have immediately to deal; it was the home of the man in whom, perhaps more than in any other, the characters of Norman and Englishman were inseparably mingled. There the historian wrote, who, though the son of a French father, the denizen of a Norman monastery, still clave to England as his country and gloried in his English birth[634]—the historian who could at once admire the greatness of the Conqueror and sympathize with the wrongs of his victims, who, amid all the conventional reviling which Norman loyalty prescribed, could still see and acknowledge with genuine admiration the virtues and the greatness even of the perjured Harold.[635] To have merely produced a chronicler may seem faint praise beside the fame of producing men whose career has had a lasting influence on the human mind; yet, even beside the long bead-roll of the worthies of Bec, some thought may well be extended to the house where Orderic recorded the minutest details of the lives alike of the saints and of the warriors of his time.

[Sidenote: Early history of Bec.]

The tale of the early days of Bec is one of the most captivating in the whole range of monastic history or monastic legend. It has a character of its own. The origin of Bec differs from that of those earlier monasteries which gradually grew up around the dwelling-place or the burial-place of some revered Bishop or saintly hermit. It differs again from the origin of those monasteries of its own age which were the creation of some one external founder. Or rather it united the two characters in one. It gradually rose to greatness from very small beginnings; but, gradual as the process was, it took place within the lifetime of one man. And that man was at once its founder and its first ruler. The part of Cuthberht at Lindisfarne, the parts of William and of Lanfranc at Caen, [Sidenote: Herlwin, founder of Bec, born 994.] were all united in Herlwin, Knight, Founder, and Abbot. This famous man passed thirty-seven years of his life as a man of the world, a Norman gentleman and soldier. His father Ansgod boasted of a descent from the first [Sidenote: His descent] Danes who occupied Neustria,[636] that is to say, from the original companions of Rolf as distinguished from the later settlers under Harold Blaatand.[637] And this descent agrees with the geographical position of his estates, which lay, though on the left bank of the Seine, yet on the right bank of the Dive, within the limits of the original grant of Charles the Simple.[638] On the spindle side he boasted of a still higher ancestry; his mother Heloise is said, on what authority it is not very clear, to have been a near [Sidenote: and early life.] kinswoman of the reigning house of Flanders.[639] He was a vassal of Count Gilbert of Brionne, the faithful guardian of William, in the neighbourhood of whose castle his own estates lay. He had proved his faithfulness to his immediate lord by many services of various kinds, and he had won the favour, not only of Count Gilbert but of their common sovereign Duke Robert. On one occasion, an injury received from the Count had caused him to forsake [Sidenote: His virtues.] his service. But presently the Count was engaged in a more dangerous warfare with Ingelram, Count of Ponthieu. Herlwin with his followers came at a critical moment to Gilbert’s help, and the Count restored all, and more than all, that he had taken away from one who so well knew how to return good for evil.[640] At another time Gilbert sent Herlwin to the ducal court on an errand of which his conscience disapproved;[641] he failed to execute the unjust commission; in revenge the Count ravaged the lands of Herlwin and did great damage to their poor occupiers.[642] Herlwin went to the Count, and made light of his own injury, but prayed that in any case the losses of the poor might be made good to them. Such a man was already a saint in practice, if not in profession; and we have no right to assume that, in this carrying out of Christian principles into daily life, Herlwin stood alone among the gallant gentlemen of Normandy. But the misfortune always was that men like Herlwin, who were designed to leaven the world by their virtues, were in that age open to so many temptations to forsake the world [Sidenote: He contemplates monastic retirement.] altogether. Herlwin began to feel himself out of place in the secular world of Normandy, full, as it was in those days, of strife and bloodshed, where every man sought to win justice for himself by his own sword. But he was hardly more out of place in the Norman ecclesiastical world, where priests not only married freely, but bore arms and lived the life of heathen Danes,[643] and where even monks used their fists in a way which would hardly have been becoming in laymen.[644] The faith of Herlwin nearly failed him when he saw the disorder of one famous monastery; but he was comforted by accidentally beholding the devotions of one godly brother, who spent the whole night in secret prayer. He was thus convinced that the salt of the earth had not as yet wholly lost its savour.[645]

[Sidenote: Herlwin begins his foundation at Burneville. 1034.]

Herlwin now, at the age of forty, retired from the world, and received the habit of religion from Herbert, Bishop of Lisieux.[646] Count Gilbert released him from his service, and seemingly released his lands from all feudal dependence on himself.[647] Herlwin then began the foundation of a monastery on his own estate of Burneville near Brionne.[648] A few devotees soon gathered round him. They lived a hard life, Herlwin himself joining them in tilling the ground, and in raising with his own hands the church and the other buildings needed by the infant brotherhood.[649] The [Sidenote: He becomes Priest and Abbot. 1037.] church, when finished, was consecrated by Bishop Herbert, who at the same time ordained Herlwin a priest, and gave him the usual benediction as Abbot of the new society.[650] About the same time he for the first time learned to read, and that to such good purpose that he gradually became mighty in the Scriptures, and that without ever neglecting the daily toil which his austere discipline imposed upon himself.[651] His mother Heloise also, struck by the example of her son, gave up her dower-lands, and became a sort of serving sister to the brotherhood, washing their clothes, and doing for them other menial services.[652] But after a while it was found that the site of Burneville was unsuited for a religious establishment; it seems not to have been well supplied with the two great monastic necessities of wood [Sidenote: He removes the monastery to Bec.] and water.[653] Herlwin therefore determined to remove his infant colony to a spot better suited to his purpose, a spot to which his own name has ever since been inseparably attached. A wooded hill divides the valley of the Risle, with the town and castle of Brionne, from another valley watered by a small stream, or, in the old Teutonic speech of the Normans, a _beck_.[654] That stream gave its name to the most famous of Norman religious houses, and to this day the name of Bec is never uttered to denote that spot without the distinguishing addition of the name of Herlwin. [Sidenote: Present condition of the spot.] The hills are still thickly wooded; the beck still flows, through rich meadows and under trees planted by the water-side, by the walls of what once was the renowned monastery to which it gave its name. But of the days of Herlwin no trace remains besides these imperishable works of nature. A tall tower, of rich and fanciful design, one of the latest works of mediæval skill, still attracts the traveller from a distance; but of the mighty minster itself all traces, save a few small fragments, have perished.[655] The monastic buildings, like those of so many other monasteries in Normandy and elsewhere in Gaul, had been rebuilt in the worst days of art, and they are now applied to the degrading purposes of a receptacle of French cavalry. The gateway also remains, but it is, like the rest of the buildings, of a date far later than the days of Herlwin. The truest memorial of that illustrious Abbey is now to be found in the parish church of the neighbouring village. In that lowly shelter is still preserved the effigy with which after times had marked the resting-place of the Founder. Such are all the traces which now remain of the house which once owned Lanfranc and Anselm as its inmates.

[Sidenote: Herlwin’s government as Abbot.]

In this valley it was that Herlwin finally fixed his infant settlement, devoting to it his own small possessions in the valley itself, and obtaining from Count Gilbert a grant of the adjoining wood, one of the most precious possessions of the lordship of Brionne.[656] There Herlwin built his first church, and added a wooden cloister, which he afterwards exchanged for one of stone.[657] There he ruled his house in peace and wisdom, his knowledge of the outer world, and especially his familiarity with the laws of Normandy, standing him, we are told, in good stead.[658] Bec seemed destined to the ordinary lot of a monastic house—to a short succession of men of primitive zeal and primitive virtue, followed by a period of worldly prosperity, leading to its usual results of coldness and laxity. And such doubtless would have been its fate, the glory of Bec would have been as transitory as that of other monastic houses, but for the appearance of [Sidenote: Effects of the admission of Lanfranc.] one illustrious man, who came to be enrolled as a private member of the brotherhood, and who gave Bec for a while a special and honourable character with which hardly any other monastery in Christendom could compare. Abbot [Sidenote: Herlwin’s death. 1078.] Herlwin survived his first conversion forty-four years;[659] his first humble church was pulled down and rebuilt, and [Sidenote: The church consecrated by Lanfranc. 1077.] the new fabric was hallowed in his presence by one whom he had himself received to the monastic order, one who had made Bec the light of the world, and who then returned to his old home in all the greatness of the Patriarch of the nations beyond the sea.[660] If the first origin of the house was owing to the simple devotion of its founder and Abbot Herlwin, its lasting fame and splendour were no less owing to the varied learning and soaring genius of its renowned Prior Lanfranc.

[Sidenote: Origin and character of Lanfranc.]

The future Primate of England was one of the most illustrious witnesses to that feature in the Norman character which made the men of that race welcome strangers from every quarter, and which led to the settlement of so many eminent men of various nations, both in Normandy itself and in the conquered lands of Britain and Sicily.[661] In the days of Richard the Good, monks and priests had flocked into Normandy, even from such distant lands as Greece and Armenia, and the Norman Duke had kept up a close intercourse even with the monks of Mount Sinai.[662] The first great teacher of Bec came from a nearer, though [Sidenote: His birth at Pavia. 1005.] still a distant, region. Lanfranc, Prior of Bec, Abbot of Saint Stephen’s, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a native of the Lombard city of Pavia, and was born of a family which, though perhaps not technically noble, was at any rate [Sidenote: His learning;] eminent and honourable.[663] He was full of all the secular learning of the time, and his range of study seems to have taken in the unusual accomplishment of a knowledge of Greek.[664] A knowledge of that tongue was then probably less rare than it became somewhat later, and it is an accomplishment which might be looked for in Italy, even in the northern part of the peninsula, more naturally than [Sidenote: his knowledge of Greek,] in any country north of the Alps. At the time of Lanfranc’s birth and youth, a large part of Southern Italy was still subject to the Eastern Emperors, and the use of the Greek language survived, both in Sicily and on the main land, long after the establishment of the Norman dynasty. A knowledge of that tongue must therefore have been highly expedient for those who were likely to have any intercourse, diplomatic or commercial, with the parts of Italy where it was spoken; still we cannot suppose that its acquirement formed any part of the ordinary course of study [Sidenote: and of Civil Law.] of a Lombard scholar. But the great object of Lanfranc’s study was one specially adapted to the Imperialist city where he was born, the study of the Civil Law. It was an hereditary calling in his family; his father Hanbald had been a lawyer of distinction,[665] and his son more than maintained the credit of his house. As a pleader, he was eminently successful; the veterans of the courts could not resist the eloquence and the learning with which he spoke, and his legal opinions were accepted as decisive by the magistrates of his native city.[666] His father died while Lanfranc was still young, and his honours and offices were offered to his son.[667] Why a man who had such fair prospects at home should have forsaken that home for the distant and barbarous Normandy, it is not easy to guess.[668] We are told only that he heard that Normandy was a land which [Sidenote: He opens a school at Avranches. 1039.] lacked learning, and that its young Duke was disposed to give encouragement to learned men.[669] At all events, early in the period of anarchy which formed the early years of the reign of William, Lanfranc came into Normandy with a following of scholars, and opened a school in the episcopal city of Avranches.[670] The cathedral church of that [Sidenote: 1172.] city beheld in after times the penance by which the greatest successor of William atoned for his share in the death of the most renowned among the successors of Lanfranc. But the glory of Avranches has passed away. From it, alone among the seven episcopal towns of Normandy, minster and Bishoprick have wholly vanished.[671] But, for those few years of the life of Lanfranc, Avranches must have been an intellectual centre without a rival on this side of the Alps. The fame of the great teacher was spread abroad, and scholars flocked to him from all quarters. But as yet his learning was wholly secular; his pursuits were peaceful, but he thought perhaps less of divine things than Herlwin had thought when he rode after Count Gilbert to battle. At last divine grace touched his heart; a sudden conversion made him resolve to embrace the monastic [Sidenote: He becomes a monk at Bec. 1042.] profession. He left Avranches suddenly, without giving any notice to his friends and scholars, and set forth to seek for the poorest and most lowly monastery that could be found, for one which his own fame had never reached.[672] A happy accident led him to Bec, which then fully answered his ideal.[673] Received as a monk by Abbot Herlwin, he strove to hide himself from the world; he even at one time thought of leaving the monastery, and leading a life of utter solitude in the wilderness.[674] But the [Sidenote: He becomes Prior. 1045.] Abbot required him on his obedience to remain, and he was advanced to the dignity of Prior.[675] He had already proved his fitness to command by his readiness to obey. His predecessor in the Priorship, an unlearned man, had bidden him, when reading in the refectory, to shorten the second syllable of _docere_. The great scholar did as he was bid, deeming holy obedience to be something higher than the rules of Donatus.[676] But such necessity was not long laid upon him; such a light as his could not long be hid under a bushel; his fame was again spread abroad, and, with it, the fame of the house in which he sojourned. Clerks and scholars, men of noble birth, even sons of princes, flocked to profit by the instruction of the learned Prior, and enriched the Abbey with costly gifts for his sake.[677] The society increased so fast that the buildings were found to be too small, and the site not healthy enough for so great a multitude.[678] By the persuasion of Lanfranc, Herlwin was induced to change his abode once more, and to raise a third house, larger and more stately than either of its predecessors,[679] but still within the same valley and [Sidenote: His favour with William.] upon the banks of the same beck. At last the name of the Prior of Bec reached the ears of Duke William himself. Lanfranc became his trusted counsellor,[680] and we shall presently find him acting zealously and successfully on his sovereign’s behalf, in pursuit of the object which, next to the Crown of England, was nearest to William’s heart. [Sidenote: He appears at the Synods of Rome and Vercelli. 1049, 1050.] The fame of Lanfranc soon spread beyond the bounds of Normandy; he appeared, as we have already seen, at a succession of synods, as the champion of the received doctrine of the Church.[681] The theological position of Lanfranc I leave to be discussed by others;[682] it is enough to say that, summoned before Pope and Council as a suspected heretic, he came away from Rome and Vercelli with the reputation of the most profound and most orthodox doctor of his time.[683]

[Sidenote: The monastery of Ouche or Saint Evroul.]

The monastery of Ouche or Saint Evroul had, as far as the eleventh century was concerned, an origin of a different kind from that of Bec; but its story is really little more than that of Bec carried back into an earlier age. That is to say, while Bec was altogether a new foundation, Saint Evroul was, like many other religious houses both in England and Normandy, a restoration of an earlier one. In both countries the Scandinavian invaders had destroyed or pillaged countless churches and monasteries. Many of these last, sometimes after complete destruction, sometimes after dragging on a feeble existence during the intermediate time, rose again, like Crowland and Jumièges, in more than their former greatness. But the case of Saint Evroul was a peculiar one. Its temporary fall was owing, not to the devastations of heathen Northmen, but to the wars between Christian [Sidenote: Story of Ebrulf or Evroul. 575.] Normandy and Christian France. The history of its founder, Ebrulf or Evroul, a saint of the sixth century, is, in many respects, a forestalling of the history of Herlwin of Bec.[684] Of noble birth in the city of Bayeux,—perhaps therefore of Saxon, rather than of either Frankish or Gaulish, blood,—high in favour at the court of Hlothar the son of Hlodwig, he lived, even as a layman, the life of a saint.[685] At last he forsook the world; his wife and himself both took monastic vows; but Ebrulf, as Lanfranc had wished to do, presently forsook his monastery for a deeper seclusion. With three companions only, he sought out a lonely spot by the river Charenton, close by the forest of Ouche, on the borders of the dioceses of Lisieux, Evreux, and Seez. There he lived a hermit’s life, adorned, as we are told, by many miracles,[686] and his cell, like the cell of Guthlac at Crowland, became the small beginning of a [Sidenote: Monastery of Saint Evroul; it escapes the Danish ravages;] famous monastery. The secluded site of the house saved it from the ravages of the Northmen, and the votaries of Saint Evroul, with almost unique good luck, remained undisturbed, while Hasting and Rolf were overthrowing so many holy places of their brethren elsewhere.[687] But, during the troubled minority of Richard the Fearless, when King Lewis of Laôn and Duke Hugh of Paris were invading the defenceless Duchy,[688] the monks of Saint Evroul received two seemingly honourable, but, as it [Sidenote: but is pillaged by Hugh the Great. 943.] turned out, highly dangerous, guests. These were Herlwin, Abbot of Saint Peter’s at Orleans, the Chancellor of Hugh the Great, and Ralph of Drangy his Chamberlain.[689] Both, we are told, were men of great piety, but they showed their piety in a strange fashion. Soon after their visit, Duke Hugh gave orders for the ravage of that part of Normandy. His devout officers either despised or scrupled at plunder of a more vulgar kind;[690] they remembered the hospitality of the monks of Saint Evroul, and requited it by carrying off all the ornaments of their church, including, what they most valued, the relics of their founder and other saints. The holy spoil was duly shared among various churches of the Duchy of France,[691] and a large [Sidenote: The monastery forsaken.] body of the monks of Saint Evroul followed the objects of their veneration. A few however remained behind, and the brotherhood still dragged on a feeble existence for some time. At last the house of Saint Evroul was utterly forsaken and forgotten, and miracles were needed to point [Sidenote: The church restored by Restold.] out the spot where it had stood. A pious priest[692] from Beauvais, Restold by name, moved by a divine vision, came and dwelt on the spot, and found benefactors willing to repair the ruined church.[693] At last one special benefactor [Sidenote: Geroy and his family.] arose. Geroy, a man of great valour and piety, was lord of Escalfoy by the forest of Ouche, and of Montreuil near the Dive.[694] Of mingled French and Breton extraction, he had been attached to the fortunes of the elder William of Belesme, probably as a vassal of some of the estates held by him under the Crown of France. In a [Sidenote: c. 1015.] fight against Count Herbert of Maine, when William and all the rest of his followers had fled, Geroy regained the day by his single valour.[695] In return for this exploit, William introduced him at the court of Richard the Good, by whom he was allowed to succeed to the lordships already spoken of.[696] They had been the property of Helgo, a Norman noble, to whose daughter Geroy had been betrothed, but the marriage was hindered by the premature death of the bride.[697] By another wife he had a numerous family, many of whom were distinguished in Norman [Sidenote: William son of Geroy.] history.[698] He was himself succeeded by his second son William who, like his father, was attached to the house of Belesme, and also distinguished himself in the war with Maine.[699] He had however to contend for the possession of his estates against the violence of Count Gilbert of Brionne, a man who, on this as on some other occasions,[700] seems to have failed to carry into his private relations those principles of honourable conduct which in so marked a way distinguished his administration of public affairs. William was a brave soldier and a faithful vassal, ready to undergo any personal loss on behalf of his lord or of his friend.[701] He was also bountiful to the Church, though he strictly maintained the ecclesiastical privileges of his own lordships.[702] Twice he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, once during the height of his prosperity, and once after the great misfortune which clouded his later days. For [Sidenote: Blinded by William Talvas.] he it was whom the fierce Talvas, in defiance of every tie of gratitude, of hospitality, and of feudal honour, blinded and mutilated when he came as a guest to his bridal.[703] The daughter of Talvas too, the cruel Mabel, pursued the house of Geroy throughout life with unrelenting hatred.[704] [Sidenote: He grants Saint Evroul to Bec.] In his old age he became a monk at Bec, a house to which he had already been a benefactor.[705] He had given to Herlwin and his monks the lands of Saint Evroul and the church lately restored by Restold. It now became a cell to the Abbey, inhabited by a small body of monks with Lanfranc at their head.[706] But presently William’s nephews, Hugh and Robert of Grantmesnil,[707] were designing the foundation of a monastery near the lordship on the Oudon from which they took their name. Of these two brothers, Robert became a monk of Saint Evroul; of Hugh we shall hear again in the history both [Sidenote: Restoration of Saint Evroul. 1050.] of Normandy and of England. Their pious uncle approved of the design, but pointed out that the site which they had chosen was lacking in the two great monastic necessaries of wood and water.[708] Let them rather join with him in restoring to its ancient splendour the fallen house of Saint Evroul, placed on a spot suited for every monastic want.[709] Uncle and nephews joined their energies and their purses; the rights of Bec over the church and lands were exchanged for another estate, and the new Saint Evroul arose with the full licence of Duke William, of Archbishop Malger, and of the other Prelates of Normandy. Monks were brought from Jumièges, and a brother of [Sidenote: 1050.] that house, Theodoric by name, became the first Abbot of the new foundation.[710] But the house seems to have been [Sidenote: 1058.] far less fortunate than Bec in its rulers. Theodoric after a while laid aside his office, driven to resignation, it is said, by the cabals of the co-founder Robert of Grantmesnil, who, having made his profession in the house, had obtained [Sidenote: 1059.] the rank of Prior.[711] Robert was chosen to the [Sidenote: 1063.] Abbotship, but, a few years after, he was himself deposed, or driven to resignation, by Duke William,[712] and long controversies followed between him and his successor Osbern.[713]

I have given a sketch of the origin of these two famous monasteries,

## partly because their stories bring before us so many members of the

leading Norman families, but mainly [Sidenote: Connexion of the religious movement in Normandy with the Conquest of England.] as illustrating the great religious movement which was then at work in Normandy, and which was not without its share in bringing about the Conquest of England. When we come to a later stage in our history, we shall see with what art William, and his trusty counsellor Lanfranc, contrived to appeal to the religious feelings of the Normans, to represent the English King as a sinner against the local saints of Normandy, and to represent the Conquest of England as a holy war undertaken to chastise the ungodly. Such a vein of sentiment could hardly have been safely appealed to except at a time when there was a great religious stir in the national mind. One side of this movement is shown in the foundation of so many monasteries, in the zeal with which men gave of their substance for their erection, in the eagerness with which men, often the same men, pressed to become members of the holy brotherhoods. But a still more honourable fruit of the religious mind of Normandy, one however which Normandy only shared with many other parts of Europe, is to be found in the acceptance during this period of the famous Truce of God.

[Sidenote: The Truce of God.]

This extraordinary institution is the most speaking witness, at once to the ferocity of the times, and also to the deep counter feeling which underlaid men’s minds. Clergy and laity alike felt that the state of things which they saw daily before their eyes was a standing sin against God and man, repugnant alike to natural humanity and to the precepts of the Christian religion. States were everywhere so subdivided, governments were everywhere so weak, that, in most parts of Europe, every man who had the needful force at his command simply did that which was right in his own eyes. We cannot doubt that in those parts of Britain where the authority of the English Kings was really established, the evil was smaller than it was in any part of Gaul.[714] Neither can we doubt that in Normandy, during the minority of William, the evil was even greater than it was in other parts of Gaul. But the extreme disorder of that minority was simply an exaggerated form of what might be called the normal state of things throughout the greater part of Western [Sidenote: Private war.] Europe. Every man claimed the right of private war against every other man who was not bound to him by any special tie as his lord or his vassal. And the distinction between private war and mere robbery and murder was not always very sharply drawn. It is clear that, in such a state of things, an utterly unscrupulous man, to whom warfare, however unjust, was a mere trifle, had a decided advantage over his more peaceable neighbours. A few such men as William Talvas might throw a whole province into disorder; and men who were in no way naturally disposed to wrong or violence were necessarily driven to constant warfare in sheer self-defence. The poor and the weak were of course the chief victims; when one gentleman harried the lands of another, the immediate tillers of the earth must have suffered far more severely than their master. It was the tenants of Herlwin, rather than Herlwin himself, who had most bitterly to complain [Sidenote: Undercurrent against the violence of the time.] of the ravages of Count Gilbert.[715] The lower classes then had especial reason to curse the lawlessness of the times; yet we can well believe that there were many men of higher rank, who were dragged into these wretched contests against their own will, and who would have been well pleased to keep their swords sheathed, save when the lawful command of their sovereign required them to be drawn. These two contending feelings can always be traced side by side. Every attempt to put any kind of check on the violence of the times was always received with general good will; and yet the practical result of so many praiseworthy attempts was, after all, something extremely small. The men who were ready to keep the peace, and to observe the rules made to preserve it, were left in a manner at the mercy of those who refused to obey any rule whatsoever. Whatever laws were made to preserve the peace, the peaceable man was still, as before, driven to fight in his own defence. Still the movement in favour of law and order was a very remarkable and a very general one. The call to observe peace towards Christians at home was a call, quite as general, though much more gradual, than the call to wage war against the [Sidenote: Comparison between the Truce of God and the Crusades.] Infidels in other lands. But the call to the Crusade fell in with every side of the temper of the times; the proclamation of the Truce of God fell in with only one, and that its least powerful, side. Good and bad men alike were led by widely different motives to rush to the Holy War. The men who endeavoured to obey the Truce of God must often have found themselves the helpless victims of those who despised it.

A movement on behalf of peace and good will towards [Sidenote: The form taken by the movement necessarily ecclesiastical.] men could not fail in those days to assume an ecclesiastical form. As of old the Amphiktyonic Council, the great religious synod of Greece, strove to put some bounds to the horrors of war as waged between Greek and Greek,[716] so now, in the same spirit, a series of Christian synods strove, by means of ecclesiastical decrees and ecclesiastical censures, to put some bounds to the horrors of war as [Sidenote: Moderation of the reform attempted.] waged between Christian and Christian. And at both times the spiritual power showed its wisdom in not attempting too much. War was not wholly forbidden in either case, for such a precept would have been hopelessly impossible to carry out. But certain extreme measures were to be avoided, certain classes of persons were to be respected, certain holy seasons were to be kept altogether free from warfare. Such at least was the form in which the Truce of God was preached in Normandy. But Normandy was one of the last countries to receive the Truce, and it seems not to have appeared there in its earliest shape. It would rather seem as if the first attempts at its establishment had tried to compass too much, and as if later preachers of peace had been driven to content themselves with a much less close approach to [Sidenote: The Truce first preached in Aquitaine. 1034.] universal brotherhood. The movement began in Aquitaine, and the vague and rhetorical language of our authority would seem to imply that all war, at any rate all private war, was forbidden under pain of ecclesiastical censures.[717] It must not be forgotten that, in that age, it [Sidenote: Difficulty of defining public and private war.] must have been exceedingly difficult to draw the distinction between public and private war. In England indeed, where an efficient constitutional system existed, the distinction was plain. Except when sudden invasion required the immediate action of the local power, no war could be lawful which was not decreed by the King and his Witan. There might be rebellions and civil wars, but there was no recognized private warfare in the continental sense. But in Gaul it would have been impossible to deny the right of war and peace to the great vassals of the Crown, to the sovereigns of Normandy and Aquitaine. And, if the vassals of the Crown might make war on each other, on what principle could the same right be refused to their vassals, to the Lords of Alençon and Brionne? Among the endless links of the feudal chain, it was hard to find the exact point where sovereignty ended and where simple property began. A preacher therefore who denounced private war must have had some difficulty in [Sidenote: Enthusiastic reception of the Truce.] so doing without denouncing war altogether. But the doctrine, hard as it might be to carry out in practice, was rapturously received at its first announcement. As the first preaching of the Crusade was met with one universal cry of “God wills it,” so the Bishops, Abbots, and other preachers of the Truce were met with a like universal cry of Peace, Peace, Peace.[718] Men bound themselves to God and to one another to abstain from all wrong and violence, and they engaged solemnly to renew the obligation every five years.[719] From Aquitaine the movement spread through Burgundy, royal and ducal.[720] But it seems to have been gradually found that the establishment [Sidenote: Relaxation about 1041.] of perfect peace on earth was hopeless. After seven years from the first preaching of peace, we find the requirements of its apostles greatly relaxed. It was found vain to forbid all war, even all private war. All that was now attempted was to forbid violence of every kind from the evening of Wednesday till the morning of Monday.[721] It [Sidenote: Reception of the Truce in Burgundy and Lotharingia.] was in this shape that the Truce was first preached in northern and eastern Gaul. The days of Christ’s supper, of His passion, of His rest in the grave and His resurrection, were all to be kept free from strife and bloodshed. The Burgundian Bishops were zealous in the cause; so especially was Richard, Bishop of Verdun in Lotharingia.[722] But Bishop Gerard of Cambray maintained, on the other [Sidenote: Opposition of Gerard of Cambray.] hand, that the whole affair was no concern of the ecclesiastical power. It was, he argued, the business of temporal rulers to fight, and the business of spiritual men to pray; the pious scheme of his brethren could never be carried out, and the attempt to enforce it could lead only to an increase of false-swearing.[723] This Prelate, in his worldly wisdom, seems to have looked deeper into the hearts of the men of his time than his more hopeful and enthusiastic brethren. At last the new teaching reached Normandy. The luxury of mutual destruction was dear to the Norman mind; for a long time any restraint upon it was strongly resisted, and even the preaching of Bishop Richard himself had for a long time no effect.[724] Miracles were needed to convince so stiff-necked a generation, but at last the apostolic labours of Hagano, the successor of Richard, [Sidenote: The Truce received at the Councils of Caen [1042],] brought even Normandy to a better mind.[725] The young Duke and his counsellors were urgent in behalf of the Truce, and it was at last received by the Clergy and Laity of Normandy in the famous Council held for that purpose at Caen.[726] We are told that it was most carefully observed;[727] but, nearly forty years after, when the long reign of William was drawing towards its end, it had to be [Sidenote: and Lillebonne [1080].] again ordained in another Council at Lillebonne, and all the powers of the State, ecclesiastical and temporal, were called on to help in enforcing its observance.[728]

The men who laboured to put even this small check on the violence of the times are worthy of eternal honour, and it is probable that the institution of the Truce of God really did something for a while to lessen the frightful anarchy into which Normandy had fallen. But we can hardly doubt that a far more effectual check was supplied by the increasing strength of William’s government, as he drew nearer to manhood, and more and more fully displayed the stern and vigorous determination of his character. But neither the one nor the other could avail wholly to preserve Normandy for some years to come [Sidenote: Wide spread conspiracy against William. 1047.] either from civil war or from foreign invasion. A far more deeply spread conspiracy than any that we have as yet heard of was now formed against the Duke. We have now reached one of the great epochs in the life of the Conqueror; we shall soon have to tell of his first battle and his first victory. Within a few years after the proclamation of the Truce of God, not this or that isolated Baron, but the whole of the most Norman part of Normandy [Sidenote: Intrigues of Guy of Burgundy.] rose in open revolt against its sovereign. The prime mover in the rebellion was Guy of Burgundy.[729] He [Sidenote: His friendship with the Duke, and his large possessions.] had been brought up with the Duke as his friend and kinsman,[730] and he had received large possessions from his bounty. Among other broad lands, he held Vernon, the border fortress on the Seine, so often taken and retaken in the wars between France and Normandy. He held also Brionne, the castle on the Risle, lately the home of William’s faithful guardian Count Gilbert.[731] But the old jealousy was never lulled to sleep; the sway of the Bastard was insupportable, and, the greater the qualities that William displayed, the more insupportable was it doubtless felt to be. William had now reached manhood. After such a discipline as he had gone through, his nineteen years of life had given him all the caution and experience of a far more advanced age. He was as ready and as able to show himself a born leader of men as Cnut had been at the same time of life.[732] The turbulent spirits of Normandy began to feel that they had found a master; unless a blow were struck in time, the days of anarchy and licence, the days of castle-building and oppression, would [Sidenote: He plots with the lords of the Bessin and Côtentin.] soon be over. Guy of Brionne therefore found many ready listeners, especially among the great lords of the true Norman land west of the Dive. He, the lawful heir of their Dukes, no bastard, no tanner’s grandson, but sprung of a lawful marriage between the princely houses of Burgundy and Normandy, claimed the Duchy as his right by birth.[733] But, if the lords of the Bessin and the [Sidenote: Scheme for a division of the Duchy.] Côtentin would aid him in dispossessing the Bastard, he would willingly share the land with them.[734] This most probably means that he would content himself with the more purely French parts of the Duchy, the original grant to Rolf, and would leave the Barons of the later settlements in the enjoyment of independence. We can thus understand, what at first sight seems puzzling, why the cause of Guy was taken up with such zeal. Otherwise it is hard to see why the chiefs of any part of Normandy, and, above all, the chiefs of this more strictly Scandinavian part, should cast aside a prince who was at any rate a native Norman, in favour of one whose connexion with Normandy was only by the spindle side, and who must have seemed [Sidenote: Geographical division of Parties;] in their eyes little better than a Frenchman. We can thus also understand the geographical division of parties during the war which followed. William is faithfully supported by the French districts to the East; by Rouen and the [Sidenote: Rouen and the French lands loyal to William.] whole land to the right of the Dive. These are the districts which the division between Guy and the confederate Lords would have given to the Burgundian prince, and which no doubt armed zealously against any such arrangement. To them the overthrow of William’s authority meant their own handing over to a foreign ruler. But to [Sidenote: Bayeux and the Danish lands join the rebellion.] the inhabitants, at any rate to the great lords, of the Lower Normandy, the Scandinavian land, it would seem that the struggle against the ducal power was simply a struggle for renewed independence. We are told that the sympathies of the mass of the people, even in the Bessin and the Côtentin, lay with William.[735] This is quite possible. The peasant revolt may well have left behind it some root of abiding bitterness, bitterness which would show itself far more strongly against the immediate lords of the soil than against the distant sovereign, who is, in such cases, always looked to as a possible protector. But the great lords of the western districts joined eagerly in the rebellion; and the smaller gentry, willingly or unwillingly, followed their banners. The descendants of the second colony of Rolf,[736] of the colonies of William Longsword and Harold Blaatand, drew the sword against the domination of the districts which, even a hundred years before, had become French.[737] Saxon Bayeux and Danish Coutances rose against Romanized Rouen and Evreux. We know not whether the old speech and the old worship may not still have lingered in some out-of-the-way corners; it is certain that the difference in feeling between the two districts was still living and working, just as the outward difference is still to this day stamped on their inhabitants. [Sidenote: Rebel leaders;] The foremost men of western Normandy at once attached themselves to Guy, and joined zealously in his plans. First in the revolt was Nigel or Neal of Saint Saviour, Viscount[738] of Coutances, the son of the chief who had, forty-six [Sidenote: Neal of Saint Saviour.] years before, beaten back the host of Æthelred.[739] The elder Neal had died, full of years, during the days of anarchy,[740] and his son was destined to an equally long possession of his honours. In the very heart of his peninsula stood his castle by the Ouve, already consecrated by a small college of Canons, the foundation of his grandfather Roger, soon to give way to his own famous Abbey of Saint Saviour.[741] This point formed the natural centre of the whole conspiracy. From that castle, Neal, the ruler of the Côtentin, commanded the whole of that varied region, its rich meads, its hills and valleys, its rocks and marshes, the dreary _landes_ by the great minster of Lessay, the cliffs which look down on the fortress of Cæsar, and which had stood as beacons to guide the sails of Harold Blaatand to the rescue.[742] The Viscount of Saint Saviour now became the chief leader of the rebellion, won over by the promises and gifts of Guy, who did not scruple to rob his mother of her possessions, and to bestow them on his ally.[743] With Neal [Sidenote: Randolf, Viscount of Bayeux.] stood Randolf, Viscount of Bayeux, who, from his castle of Brichessart, held the same sway over the Saxons of the Bessin which Neal held over the Danes of the Côtentin.[744] [Sidenote: Hamon Dentatus.] In the same company was Hamon, lord of Thorigny, lord too of the steep of Creuilly, where a vast fabric of later times has displaced his ancient donjon, and where the adjoining church bears witness to the splendour and bounty of the generation immediately following his own.[745] Some personal peculiarity entitled him to bear, in the language of our Latin chroniclers, one of the most glorious cognomina of old Rome, and Hamon _Dentatus_ became the forefather of men famous in British as well as in Norman history.[746] One loyal chronicler, in his zeal, speaks of the rebel by the strange name of Antichrist;[747] but, as in the case of Thurstan of Falaise, the stain was wiped out in the next generation. His son, Robert Fitz-Hamon, was destined to set the seal to the work of Offa and of Harold, to press down the yoke for ever upon the necks of the southern Cymry, and to surround his princely fortress of Cardiff with the lowlier castles of his twelve homagers of [Sidenote: Grimbald of Plessis.] the land of Morganwg. Hardly less famous was a third Baron from the Saxon land, Grimbald of Plessis, whose ancestors and whose descendants have won no renown, but whose own name still remains impressed upon his fortress, and whose sister’s son became the forefather of a mighty house in England. Of her stock came William of Albini, who, like the Tudor of later days, won the love of a widowed Queen, and whose name still lives among his works in the fortresses of Arundel and Castle Rising.[748] By the help of these men the claims of the Burgundian became widely acknowledged. They swore to support his rights, and to deprive the Bastard of the Duchy which he had invaded, whether by force of arms or by the baser acts [Sidenote: Preparations for the revolt.] of treachery. They put their castles into a state of thorough defence; they stored them for a campaign or a siege,[749] and made ready for the most extensive and thoroughly organized revolt which the troubled reign of the young Duke had yet beheld.

The revolt began, as an earlier revolt had begun,[750] with a treacherous attempt to seize or murder the Duke, in which Grimbald seems to have been the immediate agent.[751] [Sidenote: Attempt to seize William at Valonges.] The opportunity was tempting, as William was now at a point in Neal’s own Viscounty, at no great distance from his own castle. He was at Valognes, the old town so rich in Roman remains, and the rich and fanciful outline of whose Gothic cupola is one of the most striking objects in the architecture of the district. Perhaps some scent of the coming danger had reached him, and he had ventured into the enemy’s country in order to search out matters for himself. But, in any case, he did not neglect the chosen amusement to which he and his race were given up, even beyond other men of their time. Several days had been spent in the employment of William’s favourite weapon the bow[752] against either savage or harmless victims. At [Sidenote: William warned by his fool.] last, one night, when all his party, except his immediate household, had left him, while he was yet in his first sleep, Gallet his fool, like his uncle Walter at an earlier stage of his life,[753] burst into his room, staff in hand, and aroused him. If he did not arise and flee for his life, he would never leave the Côtentin a living man. The Duke arose, [Sidenote: His escape.] half dressed in haste, leaped on his horse, seemingly alone, and rode for his life all that night. A bright moon guided him, and he pressed on till he reached the estuary formed by the rivers Ouve and Vire. There the ebbing tide supplied a ford, which was afterwards known as the Duke’s Way. William crossed in safety, and landed in the district of Bayeux, near the church of Saint Clement. He entered the building, and prayed for God’s help on his way. His natural course would now have been to strike for Bayeux; but the city was in the hands of his enemies; he determined therefore to keep the line between Bayeux and the sea, and thus to take his chance of reaching the loyal districts. As the sun rose, he drew near to the church and castle of Rye,[754] the dwelling-place of a faithful vassal named Hubert. The Lord of Rye was standing at his own gate, between the church and the mound on which his castle was raised.[755] William was still urging on [Sidenote: His reception by Hubert of Rye.] his foaming horse past the gate; but Hubert knew and stopped his sovereign, and asked the cause of this headlong ride. He heard that the Duke was flying for his life before his enemies. He welcomed his prince to his house, he set him on a fresh horse, he bade his three sons ride by his side, and never leave him till he was safely lodged [Sidenote: He reaches Falaise.] in his own castle of Falaise.[756] The command of their father was faithfully executed by his loyal sons. We are not surprised to hear that the house of Rye rose high in William’s favour; and we can hardly grudge them their share in the lands of England, when we find that Eudes the son of Hubert, the King’s _Dapifer_ and Sheriff of Essex, was not only the founder of the great house of Saint John at Colchester, but won a purer fame as one of the very few Normans in high authority who knew how to win the love and confidence of the conquered English.[757]

[Sidenote: Progress of the rebellion.]

The Bessin and the Côtentin were now in open rebellion. We are told that men cursed the rebels, and wished well to the Duke in their hearts. But the revolted Barons had for the time the upper hand. They seized on the ducal revenues within their districts, and robbed and slew many who still clave to their allegiance. The dominion of the male line of Rolf, the very existence of Normandy as an united state, seemed in jeopardy. William did not venture to meet his enemies with the forces of the districts which [Sidenote: He seeks help of the King of the French.] still remained faithful. He was driven to seek for foreign aid, and he sought it in a quarter where one would think that nothing short of despair could have led him to think of seeking for it. He craved help of one who was indeed bound to grant it by every official and by every personal tie, but who had hitherto acted towards William only as a faithless enemy, ready to grasp at any advantage, however mean and treacherous. The Duke of the Normans, driven to such humiliation by the intrigues of an ungrateful kinsman, crossed the French border, and made his suit to his [Sidenote: Henry comes to his help in person.] Lord King Henry at Poissy.[758] He met with favour in the eyes of his suzerain; a French army, with the King at its head, was soon ready to march to the support of Duke William against his rebels. It is hard to see why Henry, whose whole earlier and later conduct is of so opposite a kind, stood forth for this once faithfully to discharge the duties of an honourable overlord towards an injured [Sidenote: His probable motives.] vassal. One would have thought that a revolt which, above all others, tended to the dismemberment of Normandy would have been hailed by Henry as exactly falling in with the interests of the suzerain power. Instead of the one strong and united state which had hitherto cut him off from the whole coast from Britanny to Ponthieu, there was now a chance of the establishment of two or three small principalities, each insignificant in itself, and all probably hostile to one another. Such states would run a fair risk of being recovered one by one by their overlord. Henry had himself in past years encroached on the Norman territory, and he had not scrupled to give encouragement to Norman traitors against their own sovereign. Yet the common interest of princes may have led him to see that it was bad policy to abet open rebellion, and he may have doubted whether the aggrandizement of the mutinous Barons of the Bessin and the Côtentin would be any real gain to France. Such neighbours might prove far more turbulent as vassals, and might not be much more easy to subdue as enemies, than the comparatively firm and orderly government of the Dukes of Rouen. At all events French aid was freely granted to the princely suppliant.[759] The King set forth at the head of his army to join the troops which William had gathered from the loyal districts, and to share with them in a decisive encounter with the rebel forces.

[Sidenote: BATTLE OF VAL-ÈS-DUNES, 1047;]

The French and the loyal Normans joined their forces some miles to the east of Caen, in the neighbourhood of the memorable field of Val-ès-dunes. The spot is not one specially attractive in itself; it is not one of those spots which seem marked out by the hand of nature as specially designed to become the scene of great historical events. But we shall see that, for the purposes of the particular battle which was fought there, no ground could have been better suited. Nor, at first sight, does the fight of Val-ès-dunes, an engagement of cavalry between two Norman factions, seem to have any claim to a place among the [Sidenote: its importance in the life of William.] great battles of history. But Val-ès-dunes was the first pitched battle of the Conqueror; it was the field on which he first won a right to that lofty title, and the lessons which he learned there stood him in good stead on a far more awful day. And, more than this, it was there that William conquered his own land and his own people, and by that earlier conquest both schooled and strengthened himself for his mightier conquest beyond the sea. Normandy had first to be firmly grasped, and her fierce Barons to be brought under the yoke, before the hand of William could be stretched forth to fix its grasp on England, and to press the yoke upon the necks of her people. In a word, the strife with Randolf and Neal and their revolted provinces was the needful forerunner of the strife with Harold and his Kingdom. The tourney of Norman horsemen upon the open slope of Val-ès-dunes was William’s school of fence for the sterner clashing of axe and spear upon the palisaded heights of Senlac.

[Sidenote: Val-ès-dunes a battle between Romanized and Teutonic Normandy.]

And there is another aspect in which the two battles have a common feature. Val-ès-dunes, no less than Senlac, was a struggle between the Roman and the Teuton. The fact was not indeed forced in the same way upon men’s minds by the outward contrast of language, of tactics, of every badge of national difference. Still it is none the less true that, at Val-ès-dunes, the old Scandinavian blood of Normandy found its match, and more than its match, in the power of France and of the French portions of the Norman Duchy. Danish Coutances and Saxon Bayeux were brought face to face with Romanized [Sidenote: District which supported William.] Rouen and Evreux and with royal Paris itself. From all the lands east of the Dive men flocked to the Ducal standard. The episcopal cities of Lisieux and Evreux, along with primatial Rouen, sent forth their loyal burghers, and the men of the surrounding districts pressed no less eagerly to the muster. They came, according to the old division, which the suppression of the peasant revolt had not wholly broken up, arranged in companies which still retained the name of _communes_, suggesting the freedom which they had perhaps not wholly lost.[760] From beyond the Seine came the troops of Caux, and from the south of the Duchy came the men of Auge, and of Duke Robert’s County of Hiesmes. And who can doubt that foremost among them all were the burghers of William’s own Falaise, zealous on behalf of a Prince who was also their own immediate countryman? But the whole west of Normandy, the land where the old Norman speech and spirit had longest lingered, was arrayed on the side of the rebels. Except the contingent of his own birthplace and its neighbourhood, no part of the Duke’s force seems to have come from the lands west of the Dive; all else came from the old domain of Rolf, the oldest, but, then as now, not the most Norman Normandy.[761]

[Sidenote: Description of the field of battle.]

The field of battle lies just within the hostile country.[762] South-east of Caen, in continuation of the high ground of Allemagne[763] immediately south of the town, stretches a long, broad, and slightly elevated plain, sloping gently towards the east.[764] It hardly deserves to be called a hill, and the indentations with which its sides are broken hardly deserve to be called valleys.[765] Several villages and churches, Secqueville, Bellengreville, Billy, Chicheboville, form the boundaries of the field, but the plain itself is open and without any remarkable feature. A ridge somewhat higher than the rest of the ground, known as Mount Saint Lawrence, is the only conspicuous point of the plain itself, and this marks the western boundary of the actual battle-ground. The little stream of the Muance, a tributary of the Orne, bounds the plain to the south-east.[766] To the north lies the high ground of Argences, over which William advanced with the troops of the loyal districts. The French auxiliaries, approaching from the south by way of Mezidon, first reached the little village of Valmeray, where a ruined tower of later date marks the site of the church of Saint Brice in which King Henry heard mass [Sidenote: Junction of the Ducal and French forces.] before the battle.[767] Meanwhile the Duke’s forces crossed the Muance at the ford of Berengier,[768] and at once joined the French. King and Duke now ranged their troops in the order in which it was most natural to meet an enemy advancing from the west. The Normans, who had come from the north, formed the right wing, while the French, coming from the south, naturally formed the left.[769] There was pitched the royal standard, on which we are told that the presumption of the upstart house of Paris had dared to emblazon the eagle of Julius and Charles.[770] King Henry and Duke William, each baton in hand,[771] were now marshalling their troops, and the battle seemed about to begin, when, if we may trust our only detailed narrative of that day’s fight, one side was cheered and the other dispirited by an unlooked for incident.

Ralph of Tesson was lord of the forest of Cingueleiz, [Sidenote: Ralph of Tesson joins the Duke.] the forest some way to the south of Caen, between the rivers Orne and Lise, and his chief seat was at Harcourt Thury. He was a lord of great power, and his contingent is said to have mustered no less than a hundred and twenty knights with their banners and tokens.[772] He had no ground of offence against the Duke; yet he had joined in the conspiracy, and had sworn on the saints at Bayeux to smite William wherever he found him.[773] But his heart smote him when he found himself standing face to face against his lord in open battle. His knights too pressed around him, and reminded him of his homage and plighted faith, and how he who fought against his natural lord had no right to fief or honour.[774] On the other hand the Viscounts Neal and Randolf pressed him to stand firmly by them, and promised great rewards as the price of his adherence. For a while he stood doubtful, keeping his troop apart from either army. We are told that the King and the Duke marked them as they stood, and that William told Henry that he knew them for the men of Ralph of Tesson, that their leader had no grudge against him, and that he believed that they would all soon be on his side. Presently the arguments of his own knights prevailed with Ralph; he bade them halt, and he himself spurred across the field, shouting as his war-cry the name of his lordship of Thury.[775] He rode up to the Duke, he struck him with his glove, and so performed his oath to smite William wherever he found him.[776] The Duke welcomed the returning penitent, and Ralph rode back to his men. His detachment stood aside for a space till the two hosts were engaged in the thick of the battle. He then watched his opportunity, and made a vigorous charge on the side of the Duke.

[Sidenote: Character of the battle; a mere combat of cavalry.]

Such an auspicious reinforcement might well stir up the spirits of the young Duke and his followers. Every man was eager for battle. A fierce combat of cavalry began. We have heard of the infantry of the communes as appearing at the ducal muster, but we hear nothing of them in the battle. We hear nothing of the Norman archers, who were to win so terrible a renown upon a later field. All is one vast tourney, mounted knights charging one another with shield, sword, and lance. The first great battle of William, like the first great battle of Alexander,[777] was truly a battle of chivalry in every sense of the word, a hand to hand personal fight between mounted nobles on either side. On pressed the Duke, sword in hand, seeking out the perjured Viscounts,[778] and shouting the war-cry of Normandy, “_Dex aie_.”[779] On the same side rose the shout of “_Montjoye-Saint-Denys_,” the national war-cry of the French Kingdom. From the rebel host arose the names of various local saints, patrons of the castles and churches of the revolted leaders, Saint Sever, Saint Amand, and others of less renown.[780] On the rebel left rode the men of the Bessin, on the right those of the Côtentin. The men of the peninsula thus came face to face with the [Sidenote: Personal exertions of King Henry.] royal troops; the King of the French, as in the old days of Lewis and Harold,[781] had to meet in close fight with the fiercest and most unconquerable warriors of the Norman name. And well and bravely did King Henry do his duty on that one day of his life. Even in the Norman picture, it is around the King, rather than around the Duke, that the main storm of battle is made to centre. The knights now met on each side, lance to lance, and, when their lances were shivered, sword to sword. There was no difference of tactics, no contrast between one weapon and another; the fight of Val-ès-dunes was the sheer physical encounter of horse and man, the mere trial of personal strength and personal skill in knightly exercises. The King, as in such a fight any man of common courage must do, exposed himself freely to danger; but, as far as his personal adventures went, the royal share in the battle was somewhat unlucky. Once, if not twice, the King of the French, the overlord of Normandy, was hurled from his horse by the thrust of a Norman lance. A knight of the Côtentin first overthrew him by a sudden charge. The exploit was long remembered in the rhymes of his warlike province,[782] but the hero of it purchased his renown with his life. The King was unhurt, but the report of such an accident might easily spread confusion among his army. Like more renowned warriors before and after, like Eadmund at Sherstone,[783] like William at Senlac, it was needful that he should show himself to his followers, and wipe out the misfortune by fresh exploits. Henry was therefore soon again in the thickest of the fight; but, less fortunate than either Eadmund or William, the like mishap befell him a second time.[784] The King presently encountered one of the three great chiefs of the rebellion; another thrust, dealt by the lance of Hamon, again laid Henry on the ground; but a well timed stroke from a French knight more than avenged this second overthrow; the Lord of Thorigny was carried off dead on his shield like an old Spartan.[785]

The King honoured his valiant adversary, and, by his express order, Hamon was buried with all fitting splendour before the Church of Our Lady at Esquai on the Orne.[786]

The King is thus made decidedly the most prominent figure in the picture, and, somewhat inglorious as were Henry’s personal experiences that day, it is to him and his Frenchmen that the Norman poet does not scruple to attribute the victory.[787] The fight appears throughout as [Sidenote: Exploits and good fortune of William.] a fight between Normans and Frenchmen.[788] But the Duke of the Normans himself was not idle. If his royal ally was personally unlucky, it was on this day that William began that career of personal success, of good fortune in the mere tug of battle, which, till the clouded evening of his life, was as conspicuous as the higher triumphs of his military genius and his political craft. Men loved to tell how the young Duke slew with his own hand the beloved vassal of Randolf, Hardrez, the choicest warrior of Bayeux;[789] how the veteran champion, in the pride of his might, rode defiant in the front rank; how the Duke rode straight at him, not justing with his lance as in a mimic tourney, but smiting hand to hand with the sword. The poet rises to an almost Homeric flight, when he tells us how William smote the rebel below the chin, how he drove the sharp steel between the throat and the chest, how the body fell beneath his stroke and the soul passed away.[790]

[Sidenote: Randolf loses heart and flees.]

The fortune of the day was now distinctly turning against the rebels; but, had all of them displayed equal courage, the issue of the struggle might still have been unfavourable to King and Duke. Neal of Saint Saviour still fought among the foremost of the men of his peninsula, but the heart of his accomplice from Bayeux began to fail him. Randolf had seen his most cherished vassal fall by the hand of his young sovereign; his heart quailed lest the like fate should be his own; he feared lest Neal had fled; he feared that he was betrayed to the enemy; he repented that he had ever put on his helmet; it was sad to be taken captive, it was a still worse doom to be slain. The battle ceased to give him any pleasure;[791] he gave way before every charge; he wandered in front and in rear; at last he lost heart altogether; he dropped his lance and his shield, he stretched forth his neck,[792] and rode [Sidenote: Neal continues the fight to the last.] for his life. The cowards, we are told, followed him; but Neal still continued the fight, giving and taking blows till his strength failed him. The French pressed upon him; their numbers increased, the numbers of the Normans lessened; some of his followers had fled, others lay dead and dying around him. At last the mighty lord of the Côtentin saw that all hope was lost. On the rising ground of Saint Lawrence the last blow seems to have been struck. The spot was afterwards marked by a commemorative chapel, which was destroyed by the Huguenots in the religious wars. On its site it doubtless was that the valiant Neal at last turned and left the field, seemingly the last man of the whole rebel army.

[Sidenote: Rout of the Rebels.]

The rout now became general. The example of Randolf drew after it far more followers than the example of Neal. The rebels rode for their lives in small parties, the troops of the King and the Duke following hard upon them, and smiting them from the rear. From the ridge of Saint Lawrence they rode westward, to reach the friendly land of Bayeux;[793] they rode by the Abbey of Fontenay and the quarries of Allemagne; but the flood of the Orne checked their course; men and horses were swept away by the stream, or were slaughtered by the pursuers in the attempt to cross; the mills of Borbillon, we are told, were stopped by the dead bodies.[794]

[Sidenote: Completeness of the victory.]

The victory was a decisive one, and it was one which proved no less decisive in its lasting results than it had been [Sidenote: The French auxiliaries return.] as a mere success on the field of battle. King Henry, who had done his work well and faithfully, now went back to his own land, and left William to complete the reduction of his revolted subjects. One of them, the original author of the plot, still offered him a long and vigorous resistance. Of the conduct of Guy of Burgundy in the field we hear nothing, except an incidental mention of a wound which he received there.[795] Indeed, since the appearance of his three great Norman adherents, the [Sidenote: Escape of Guy.] Burgundian prince has nearly dropped out of sight.[796] He now reappears, to receive from the Norman writers a vast out-pouring of scorn on account of his flight from the field,[797] though it does not appear to have been in any way more ignominious than the flight of the mass of his Norman allies. At any rate he was not borne away in the indiscriminate rush of his comrades towards the Orne. He escaped, with a large body of companions,[798] in quite the opposite direction, to his own castle of Brionne on the [Sidenote: He defends himself at Brionne.] Risle. There he took up a position of defence, and was speedily followed and besieged by Duke William. The castle of Brionne of those days was not the hill fortress, the shell of a donjon of that or of the next age, which now looks down upon the town and valley beneath. The stronghold of Count Guy had natural defences, but they were defences of another kind. The town itself seems to have been strongly fortified; but the point of defence which was most relied on at Brionne was the fortified hall of stone which stood on an island in the river.[799] William had, before now, by one vigorous assault, brought his own native Falaise to surrender;[800] but, though we are expressly told that the stream was everywhere fordable, the island fortress seems to have been deemed proof against any attacks [Sidenote: Siege of Brionne 1047–1050?] of this kind. A regular siege alone could reduce it, and William was driven to practise all the devices of the military art of his day against his rebellious cousin. He built a castle, this time very possibly of wood, on each side of the river, and thus cut off the besieged from their supplies of provisions.[801] Constant assaults on the beleaguered castle are spoken of, but their aim seems to have been mainly to frighten the besieged rather than to produce any more practical effect;[802] hunger was the sure and slow means on which William relied to bring Guy to reason. The siege was clearly a long one, though it is hardly possible to believe, on the incidental statement of a single authority, that it was spread over a space of three years.[803] [Sidenote: Surrender of Brionne.] At last the endurance of Guy and his companions gave way, and he sent messengers praying for mercy. The Duke required the surrender of the castle; but touched, we are told, by the tie of kindred blood, he bade Guy [Sidenote: William’s clemency to the vanquished.] remain in his court.[804] Nor was the Duke’s hand, on the whole, heavy on the other offenders. No man was put to death, though William’s panegyrist holds that death [Sidenote: Rarity of political executions.] was the fitting punishment for their offences.[805] But in those days, both in Normandy and elsewhere, the legal execution of a state criminal was an event which seldom happened. Men’s lives were recklessly wasted in the endless warfare of the times, and there were men, as we have seen, who did not shrink from private murder, even in its basest form.[806] But the formal hanging or beheading of a noble prisoner, so common in later times, was, in the eleventh century, distinctly an unusual sight.[807] And, strange as it may sound, there was a sense in which [Sidenote: William’s ordinary treatment of enemies.] William the Conqueror was not a man of blood. He would sacrifice any number of lives to his boundless ambition; he did not scruple to condemn his enemies to cruel personal mutilations; he would keep men for years, as a mere measure of security, in the horrible prison-houses of those days; but the extinction of human life in cold blood was something from which he shrank. His biographer exultingly points out this feature in his character, and his recorded acts do not belie his praise.[808] Once only did he swerve from this rule, when he sent the noble Waltheof to the scaffold. And, as that act stands out conspicuously from its contrast to his ordinary conduct, so it is the act from which it is impossible not to date the decline of his high fortune. And, at the time of his first great victory, William was of an age which is commonly disposed to be generous, and none of the worse features of his character had hitherto come to the surface. With one exception only, no very hard punishments were inflicted on the conquered [Sidenote: Destruction of the castles.] rebels. The mass of the rebellious Barons paid fines, gave hostages, and had to submit to the destruction of the castles which they had raised without the ducal licence.[809] To this, and to other measures of the same kind, it is owing that such small traces of the Norman castles of the eleventh century now remain. Neal of Saint Saviour had to retire for a time to Britanny, but his exile must have been short, as we find him, seemingly in the very next year, again in office and in the ducal favour. He survived his restoration forty-four years;[810] he lived to repay at Senlac the old wrong done by Englishmen to his father’s province; but, almost alone among the great Norman chiefs, he received [Sidenote: Guy returns to Burgundy.] no share in the spoils of England. As for Guy, he presently left the country of his own free will. His sojourn at William’s court must have been little else than an honourable imprisonment, and it would seem that he now found little respect or sympathy in Normandy.[811] He returned to his native land, the Burgundian Palatinate, and there, we are told, spent the rest of his days in plotting against his brother, the reigning Count William.[812] [Sidenote: Fate of Grimbald.] One criminal only was reserved for a harsher fate. Grimbald was taken to Rouen, and there kept in prison—such as prisons were in those days—and in fetters. He was looked on as the foulest traitor of all; he it was whom the Duke charged with the personal attempt on his life at Valognes.[813] Grimbald confessed the crime, and named as his accomplice a knight named Salle the son of Hugh. The accused denied the charge, and challenged Grimbald to the judicial combat. Before the appointed day of battle came, Grimbald was found dead in his prison. He was buried with his fetters on his legs, his lands were confiscated, and part of them was given to the church of Bayeux. Plessis became a domain of the see, and other portions of the estates of Grimbald became the corpses of various prebends in the cathedral church.[814]

[Sidenote: Establishment of William’s power in Normandy.]

The power of William was now on the whole firmly established. He had still to repel many attacks from hostile neighbours, and we shall have yet to record one more considerable revolt within the Norman territory. But the Norman Barons now knew that they had a master.[815] For some years to come, internal discord, strictly so called, underwent a sort of lull to a degree most remarkable in such an age. Under the firm and equal government of her great Duke, Normandy began to recover from her years of anarchy, and to rise to a higher degree of prosperity than she had ever yet attained to.[816] [Sidenote: Effect of the struggle.] The Duchy became, more completely than it had ever been before, a member of the European and of the Capetian [Sidenote: The supremacy of the French element confirmed.] commonwealth. The Capetian King indeed soon learned again to look with a grudging eye on his northern neighbour; but the general result of the struggle must have been to make Normandy still more French than before. The French and the Scandinavian elements had met face to face, and the French element had had the upper hand. Frenchmen and French Normans had overthrown the stout Saxons of the Bessin and the fierce Danes of the Côtentin. The distinction between the two parts of Normandy is still one which even the passing traveller may remark; but, from the day of Val-ès-dunes, it ceased to manifest itself in the great outward expressions of language and political feeling. The struggle which began during the minority of Richard the Fearless was now finally decided at the close of the minority of William the Bastard. The Count of Rouen had overcome Saxons and Danes within his own dominions, and he was about to weld them into his most trustworthy weapons wherewith to overcome Saxons and Danes beyond the sea. The omen of the fight against Neal and Hamon might well have recurred to the mind of William, when Neal himself and the son of Hamon marched forth at his side from the camp at Hastings, and went on to complete the conquest of England at Exeter and York.

§ 3. _From the Battle of Val-ès-dunes to William’s Visit to England._ 1047–1051.

William was thus at peace at home; his next war was indeed one of his own seeking, but it was one from which he could not have shrunk without breaking through every [Sidenote: The Counts of Anjou; their connexion with Norman and English history.] tie alike of gratitude and of feudal duty. This is the first time that I have had directly to mention a power, which had been, for more than a hundred years, steadily growing up to the south of Normandy, and which was to exercise a most important influence on the future history of Normandy and, through Normandy, on that of England. I mean the dynasty of the Counts of Anjou. That [Sidenote: 1154.] house, the house which mounted the throne of England in the person of a great-grandson of William, produced a succession of princes to whose personal qualities it must mainly have been owing that their dominions fill the place which they do fill in French and in European history. [Sidenote: Characteristics of Angevin history.] Anjou holds a peculiar position among the great fiefs of France. It was a singular destiny which gave so marked a character, and so conspicuous a history, to a country which seems in no way marked out for separate existence by any geographical or national distinction. Normandy, Britanny, Flanders, Aquitaine, Ducal Burgundy, all had a being of their own; they were fiefs of the Crown of France, but they were in no sense French provinces. But Anjou was at most an outpost on the Loire, a border district of France and Aquitaine; beyond this position it had nothing specially to distinguish it from any other part of the great [Sidenote: Saxon occupation. 464.] Parisian Duchy.[817] A momentary Saxon occupation in the fifth century[818] cannot be supposed to have left behind it any such abiding traces as were certainly left by the settlement of the same people at Bayeux, perhaps even by their less famous settlement at Seez.[819] It was wholly to the energy and the marked character of its individual rulers that Anjou owes its distinct and prominent place among the principalities of Gaul. The restless spirit of the race showed itself sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, but there was no Count of Anjou who could be called a fool, a coward, or a _fainéant_. The history or legends of the family which was to rise to such greatness laid claim [Sidenote: Ingelgar, first Count. 870?] to no very remote or illustrious pedigree.[820] The first Count of Anjou, who held a part only of the later County,[821] was invested with that dignity either by Charles the Bald or by his son Lewis the Stammerer.[822] He bore the name of Ingelgar, and he seems to be the first member of the family who can be unhesitatingly set down as historical. His grandfather, [Sidenote: Peasant origin of the family.] Torquatius or Tortulfus, was, according to the legend, a peasant, and seems to have sprung from that Breton race of which his descendants became the most persevering enemies. It must have been a later version of the tale which invented for him a Roman name and a Roman descent.[823] [Sidenote: Torquatius and Tertullus.] The son of Torquatius, Tertullus, rose, we are told, to importance at the court of Charles, and founded the [Sidenote: Historical value of these tales.] greatness of his house.[824] Whatever may be the amount of strictly historical truth preserved in these stories, they are, in one point of view, of no small historical value. Like the similar story of the origin of Godwine, they point to a belief, which can hardly have been ill-founded, that, in Gaul in the ninth century and in England in the eleventh, ignoble birth did not disqualify a man from rising to the highest dignities, or from founding a dynasty of Princes or even of Kings.[825] But, when we reach Ingelgar, we seem to stand on more distinctly historical ground. He held Amboise in Touraine as an allodial possession,[826] and he was, as we have seen, invested with the Countship of Anjou on the hither side of the Mayenne. But it is plain that no detailed account of his actions, or of those of his immediate successors, was preserved.[827] [Sidenote: Fulk the Red. 888.] His son Fulk the Red received from Charles the Simple the remaining portion of the County of Anjou, that beyond the Mayenne, and he vigorously defended his enlarged dominions against the attacks of Northmen and Bretons.[828] [Sidenote: Fulk the Good. 938.] This Romulus was appropriately succeeded by a Numa, Fulk the Good, renowned for his piety, his almsdeeds, his just and peaceful government, and for being the traditional author of the proverb that an unlettered King is but [Sidenote: Geoffrey Grisegonelle. 958.] a crowned ass.[829] His son, Geoffrey Grisegonelle,[830] renewed the warlike fame of his house; he fought with his neighbours of Britanny and Aquitaine; and he is said to [Sidenote: 978.] have borne an important share in the wars between King Lothar and the Emperor Otto the Second.[831] After [Sidenote: Fulk Nerra. 987.] him came his son Fulk,[832] surnamed Nerra or the Black, renowned as a warrior and still more renowned as a pilgrim, and who is the first prince of his house whose name has found its way into the general history of France. He overthrew his brother-in-law Conan of Britanny in one or [Sidenote: 992.] more pitched battles, which French, as well as Breton and [Sidenote: His war with Odo of Chartres.] Angevin, writers thought worthy of record. He was also engaged in a war with his neighbour Odo the Second, Count of Blois and Chartres, the grandson of the famous Theobald, a war which passed on as an inheritance to the next generation, and which proved the origin of the first entanglements between Normandy and Anjou.[833] It sounds like an incursion from another hemisphere, when we read how Aldebert, Count of Perigueux, Perigueux with its cupolas and its Roman tower, far away in the heart of Aquitaine, appeared as an ally of the Angevin [Sidenote: Fulk gains and loses Tours. 990.] Count. He took Tours and gave it to Fulk, but the citizens were ill disposed to their new master, and Odo [Sidenote: Battle of Pontlevois. 1016.] recovered it after a short time. Later in his reign, Fulk defeated Odo in a great battle at Pontlevois in the territory [Sidenote: 1031.] of Touraine, and afterwards gained or recovered Saumur. We have already met with him in the character of a mediator between contending candidates for the Crown of France,[834] and he appears also in the less honourable light of an assassin, who removed a courtier of King Robert who stood in the way of the plans of his own termagant niece Queen Constance.[835] We hear also heavy complaints of him as a violator of ecclesiastical rule, by setting up the usurped authority of the See of Rome against the rights [Sidenote: His pilgrimages. 1028, 1035.] of the independent metropolitans of Gaul.[836] But he is perhaps best known for his two pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre, for the ready ingenuity which he displayed on his first journey, and for the extreme of penitential humiliation by which he edified all men on the second.[837] Less happy in his private than in his public career, he was troubled in his last years by a rebellion of his son;[838] he was charged, truly or falsely, with the murder of one wife, and with driving another from him by ill-treatment.[839] A reign of unusual length made him, during a few years, a contemporary of the Great William, and at last he left his dominions to a son under whom Normans and Angevins met for the first time in open warfare.

[Sidenote: Geoffrey Martel. 1040.]

This son, Geoffrey by name, rejoiced in the surname of Martel, which he bestowed upon himself to express the heavy blows which, like the victor of Tours, he dealt around upon all his enemies.[840] He began his career in his father’s lifetime. A dispute for the possession of the County of Saintonge led to a war between him and William the Sixth or the Fat, Duke of Aquitaine and [Sidenote: He imprisons William of Aquitaine. April 22, 1033.] Count of Poitou.[841] Geoffrey was successful; he took the Aquitanian prince prisoner, and kept him in close bondage, till his wife Eustacia ransomed him at a heavy price. According to one version, the ransom consisted only of gold and silver, the spoil or contribution of the monasteries of his Duchy. Others however assert that it was nothing short of the cession of Bourdeaux and other cities, and an engagement to pay tribute for the rest of his dominions. Three days after this hard bought deliverance, William died. Immediately afterwards, or, according to some accounts, in the course of the year before, Geoffrey married Agnes, the step-mother of his victim, the widow of William’s father, William the Fifth or the Great. The marriage was, on some ground or other, branded as incestuous, and it was this imprisonment of William and [Sidenote: Geoffrey rebels against his father. 1033.] this marriage with Agnes which, we are told, gave rise in some way to Geoffrey’s rebellion against his father and to the discord between Fulk and his second wife Hildegardis the mother of Geoffrey.

The imprisonment of William of Aquitaine evidently made a deep impression upon men’s minds at the time; but it was the standing war with the house of Chartres which brought Anjou into direct collision with Normandy, and thereby, at a somewhat later time, into connexion [Sidenote: Last days of Odo of Chartres.] with England. The last energies of Odo were mainly directed to objects remote from Anjou, and even from Chartres and Blois. He was one of the party which opposed the succession of King Henry, and in so doing he must have crossed the policy of Henry’s great champion [Sidenote: His war with King Henry. 1034.] Duke Robert. In a war which followed with the King Odo was unsuccessful,[842] but his mind was now set upon greater things. Already Count of Champagne, he aimed [Sidenote: His attempt on the Kingdom of Burgundy. 1033.] at restoring the great frontier state between the Eastern and the Western Franks, at reigning as King of Burgundy, of Lotharingia, perhaps of Italy. After meeting [Sidenote: His defeat and death at Bar. 1037.] for a while with some measure of success, he was at last defeated and slain by Duke Gozelo, the father of Godfrey of whom we have already heard,[843] in a battle near Bar in the Upper Lotharingia.[844] His great schemes died with him. His sons were only Counts and not Kings, and their father’s dominions were divided between them. The [Sidenote: His sons Stephen and Theobald.] sons of both of them obtained settlements in England, and a grandson of one figures largely in English history. Stephen reigned in Champagne; his son Odo married a sister of the Conqueror, and was one of the objects of his brother-in-law’s bounty in England.[845] Theobald inherited Blois and Chartres. His son Stephen married [Sidenote: Their wars with King Henry and with Geoffrey.] William’s daughter Adela, and thereby became father of a King of the English. But at present we have to deal with Count Theobald as a vassal of France at variance with his overlord, as a neighbour of Anjou inheriting the hereditary enmity of his forefathers. Touraine, part of which was already possessed by Geoffrey,[846] and, above all, the metropolitan city of Tours, were ever the great objects of Angevin ambition. It was a stroke of policy on the part of Henry, when he formally deprived the rebel Theobald of [Sidenote: Geoffrey receives Tours as a grant from Henry, and imprisons Theobald. 1044.] that famous city, and bestowed it by a royal grant on the Count of Anjou.[847] Geoffrey was not slow to press a claim at once fresh and most plausible. He advanced on the city to assert his rights by force. Saint Martin, we are specially told, favoured the enterprise.[848] The brothers resisted in vain. Stephen was put to flight; Theobald was taken prisoner, and was compelled, like William of Aquitaine, to obtain his freedom by the surrender of the city.[849]

Both French and Angevin writers agree in describing Geoffrey as taking possession of Tours with the full consent of King Henry. Yet, in the first glimpse of Angevin affairs given us by our Norman authorities, the relations between the King of the French and the Count of Anjou are set forth in an exactly opposite light. Geoffrey is [Sidenote: William helps King Henry against Geoffrey. 1048.] engaged in a rebellious war against Henry, and the Duke of the Normans appears simply to discharge his feudal duty to his lord, and to return the obligation incurred by the King’s prompt and effectual help at Val-ès-dunes.[850] These two accounts are in no way inconsistent; in the space of four years the relations between the King and so dangerous a vassal as Geoffrey may very well have changed. Henry may well have found that it was not sound policy to foster the growth of one whose blows might easily be extended from Counts to Kings. The campaign which followed is dwelt on at great length by our Norman authorities and is cut significantly short by the Angevins. [Sidenote: Personal exploits of William.] In its course, we are told, William gained the highest reputation. The troops of Normandy surpassed in number the united contingents of the King and of all his other vassals.[851] The Duke’s courage and conduct were preeminent, and they won him the first place in the King’s counsels.[852] But on one point Henry had to remonstrate with his valiant ally. He was forced, says the panegyrist, to warn both William himself and the chief Norman leaders against the needless exposure of so precious a life.[853] William at no time of his life ever shrank from danger, and we may be sure that, at this time of his life especially, he thoroughly enjoyed the practice of war in all its forms. But William’s impulses were already under the control of his reason. He knew, no doubt, as well as any man, that to plunge himself into needless dangers, and to run the risk of hairbreadth scapes, was no part of the real duty of a prince or a general. But he also knew that it was mainly by exploits of this kind that he must dazzle the minds of his own generation, and so obtain that influence over men which was needful for the great schemes of his life.[854] In any other point of view, one would say that it was unworthy of William’s policy to win the reputation of a knight-errant at the expense of making for himself a lasting and dangerous enemy in the Count of Anjou.

[Sidenote: Position of Maine under Geoffrey.]

The undisputed dominions of the two princes nowhere touched each other. But between them lay a country closely connected both with Normandy and with Anjou, and over which both William and Geoffrey asserted rights. This was the County of Maine, a district which was always said to have formed part of the later acquisitions of Rolf,[855] but of which the Norman Dukes had never taken practical possession. The history of the Cenomannian city and province will be more fittingly sketched at another stage of William’s [Sidenote: Count Herbert. 1015.] career; it is enough to say here that Geoffrey was now practical sovereign of Maine, in the character of protector, [Sidenote: Hugh. 1036.] guardian, or conqueror of the young Count Hugh, the son of the famous Herbert, surnamed _Wake-the-dog_.[856] William and Geoffrey thus became immediate neighbours, and Geoffrey, with the craft of his house, knew how to strike a blow [Sidenote: The fortresses of Domfront and Alençon.] where William was weakest. Two chief fortresses guarded the frontier between Maine and Normandy. Each commanded its own valley, its own approach into the heart of the Norman territory; each watched over a stream flowing from Norman into Cenomannian ground. These were Domfront towards the western, and Alençon towards the eastern, portion of the frontier. Domfront commanded the region watered by the Mayenne and its tributaries, while Alençon was the key of the valley of the Sarthe, the keeper of the path which led straight to the minster of Seez and to the donjon of Falaise. Of these two strongholds, Alençon stood on Norman, Domfront on Cenomannian soil.[857] But Norman writers maintained that Domfront, no less than Alençon, was of right a Norman possession, both fortresses alike having been reared by the licence of Richard the [Sidenote: Disloyalty of Alençon.] Good.[858] But even Alençon, whatever may have been its origin, was at this time far from being a sound member of the Norman body-politic. As a lordship of William Talvas, it shared in the ambiguous character, half Norman, half French, which attached to all the border possessions of the house of Belesme. And, as events presently showed, its inhabitants shared most fully in the spirit in which the Lord of Alençon had cursed the Bastard in his cradle.[859] We are told also that the citizens both of Alençon and of Domfront disliked the rule of William, on account of the strict justice which he administered and the checks which he put on their marauding practices.[860] This complaint sounds rather as if it came from turbulent barons than from burghers; yet it is quite possible that the burghers of a frontier town, especially on a frontier which was very doubtful and ill defined, may have indulged in those breaches of the peace which it was William’s greatest praise, both in Normandy and in England, to chastise without mercy. [Sidenote: Alençon garrisoned by Geoffrey.] At any rate, the people of Alençon were thoroughly disloyal to Normandy, and they willingly received the Angevin Count and his garrison.[861] William returned the blow of [Sidenote: William marches ta Domfront;] Geoffrey’s hammer in kind. Leaving Alençon for a while to itself, he crossed the frontier, Angevin or Cenomannian as we may choose to call it, and laid siege to Domfront. [Sidenote: his exploits on the way.] On his march he found that treason was not wholly extinguished, even among his own troops. He had gone on a foraging or plundering party with fifty horse;[862] a traitor, a Norman noble, sent word of his whereabout to the defenders of the town, who sent forth, we are told, three hundred horse and seven hundred foot to attack the Duke unexpectedly. It sounds like romance when we read that William at once charged and overthrew the horseman nearest to him, that the rest were seized with a sudden panic and took to flight, that the Duke and his little band chased them to the gates of Domfront, and that William carried off one prisoner with his own hands.[863] Such stories are no doubt greatly exaggerated; the details may often be pure invention; but, as contemporary exaggerations and inventions, they show the kind of merit which Normans then looked for in their rulers, and they show the kind of exploit of which William himself was thought capable. [Sidenote: Traitors in the Norman camp.] And the perfectly casual mention of the traitor in the Norman camp is instructive in another way. We have here no doubt merely an example of what often happened, and the way in which treason is spoken of as an everyday matter sets vividly before us the difficulties with which William, even now after the victory of Val-ès-dunes, had still to contend at every step.[864]

[Sidenote: Siege of Domfront.]

William now laid siege to Domfront. The town was strong both by its fortifications and by its natural position. The spirit of the citizens was high, and they were further strengthened by the presence of a chosen body of Angevin troops sent by Count Geoffrey. An assault was hopeless where two steep and narrow paths were the only ways by which the fortress could be approached even on foot.[865] William surrounded it with four towers,[866] and the Norman army sat down before it. The Duke was foremost in every attack, in every ambush, in every night march to cut off the approach of those who sought to bring either messages or provisions to the besieged town.[867] Yet we are told that he found himself so safe in the enemy’s country that he often enjoyed the sports of hunting and hawking, for which the neighbouring woods afforded special opportunities.[868] [Sidenote: 1048–1049.] The siege had continued for some time in this way, and it was now seemingly winter,[869] when news was brought that Count Geoffrey was advancing with a large [Sidenote: Geoffrey comes to relieve Domfront.] force to the relief of the town. A tale of knight-errantry follows, the main substance of which, coming as it does from a contemporary writer, we have no ground for disbelieving, even though some details may have been heightened to enhance the glory of William. The story is worthy of attention as showing that, amid all the apparent rudeness of the times, some germs of the later follies of chivalry had already begun to show themselves. As the Angevin army [Sidenote: Messages between William and Geoffrey. Early example of knight-errantry.] approached, William sent a message to Geoffrey by the hands of two of his chosen friends, two youths who had grown up along with him, and who were destined to share with him in all his greatest dangers and greatest successes. Both were men who lived to be famous in English history, Roger of Montgomery, the son-in-law of the terrible Talvas,[870] and William, the son of that Osbern who had lost his life through his faithfulness to his master.[871] These two trusty companions were sent to see Count Geoffrey, and to get from him an explanation of his purpose. Geoffrey told them that, at daybreak the next morning, he would come and beat up William’s quarters before Domfront. There should be no mistake about his person; he would be known by such a dress, such a shield,[872] such a coloured horse. The Norman messengers answered that he need not trouble himself to come so far as the Norman quarters; he whom he sought would come and visit him nearer home. Duke William would be ready for battle, with such a horse, such a dress, such manner of weapons.[873] The Normans appeared the next morning, eager for fight, [Sidenote: Geoffrey decamps.] and their Duke the most eager among them.[874] But no enemy was there to await them; before the Normans came in sight, the Count of Anjou and his host had decamped. Geoffrey doubtless, like some later generals, retired only for strategical reasons; but the Norman writers can see no nobler motive for his conduct than his being seized with a sudden panic.[875] Here, and throughout the war, the lions stand in need of a painter, or rather their painters suddenly refuse to do their duty. We have no Angevin account of the siege of Domfront to set against our evidently highly coloured Norman picture.

[Sidenote: William marches suddenly to Alençon, and besieges the town.]

The whole country now lay open for William to harry; but he knew better than to waste time and energy on mere useless ravages.[876] He determined rather to strike another sudden blow. Leaving a force before Domfront, he marched all night, through the enemy’s country, along the course of the Mayenne, passing by Mehendin, Pointel, and Saint-Samson.[877] He thus suddenly appeared before Alençon with the morning light.[878] A bridge over the Sarthe, strongly fortified with a ditch and a palisade, divided the Norman from the Cenomannian territory.[879] This bridge now served as a barrier against a Duke of the Normans attacking his own town from the Cenomannian [Sidenote: Insults offered to William at Alençon.] side. The defenders of the bridge, whether Angevins or disaffected Normans, received the Duke with the grossest personal insult. They spread out skins and leather jerkins, and beat them, shouting, “Hides, hides for the Tanner.”[880] The Duke of the Normans had acted a merciful and generous part towards the rebels of Val-ès-dunes and Brionne; but the grandson of Fulbert of Falaise could not endure the jeers thus thrown on his descent by the spindle side. Anything like a personal insult is commonly far more unpardonable in princely eyes than a real injury. The one act of cruelty which [Sidenote: 1296.] stains the reign of our great Edward is the slaughter of the inhabitants of Berwick in revenge for a jesting and not very intelligible ballad sung against him from the walls.[881] So now William swore, according to his fashion, by the Splendour of God,[882] that the men who thus mocked him should be dealt with like a tree whose branches are cut off by the pollarding-knife.[883] He kept his word. A vigorous assault was made upon the bridge. Houses were unroofed, and the timbers were thrown into the fosse.[884] Fire was set to the mass; the wood was dry, the flame spread, the palisades and gates were burned down, and [Sidenote: He takes the town, and mutilates his prisoners.] William was master of the bridge, and with it of the town of Alençon. The castle still held out. The Conqueror, faithful to his fearful oath, now gave the first of that long list of instances of indifference to human suffering which have won for him a worse name than many parts of his character really deserve. Thirty-two of the offenders were brought before him; their hands and feet were cut off,[885] and the dismembered limbs were thrown over the walls of the castle, as a speaking menace to its defenders.[886] The threat did its work; the garrison surrendered, bargaining only for safety for life and limb.[887] Alençon, tower and town, was thus taken so speedily that William’s panegyrist says that he might renew the boast of Cæsar, “I came; I saw; I conquered.”[888] Leaving [Sidenote: Domfront surrenders.] a garrison in Alençon, the Duke hastened back to Domfront, the fame of his conquest and of his cruelty going before him. The man before whom Alençon had fallen, before whom the Hammer of Anjou had fled without striking a blow, had become an enemy too fearful for the men of Domfront to face.[889] They surrendered on terms somewhat more favourable than those which had been granted to the defenders of the castle of Alençon; they were allowed to retain their arms as well as their lives and limbs.[890] William entered Domfront, and displayed the banner of Normandy over the donjon.[891] The town henceforth became a standing menace on the side of Normandy against Maine, and it formed, together with Alençon, the main defence of the southern frontier of the Duchy. If William undertook the war to discharge his feudal duty towards King Henry, he certainly did not lose the opportunity for permanently strengthening his own dominions. In fact, in our Norman accounts, the King of the French has long ago slipped away from the scene, and the Count of Chartres has vanished along with him. William and Geoffrey remain the only figures [Sidenote: William fortifies Ambières.] in the foreground. The Duke, having secured his frontier, marched, seemingly without resistance, into the undoubted territory of Maine; he there fortified a castle at Ambières, and returned in triumph to Rouen.[892]

The men of Alençon had jeered at the grandson of the Tanner; but the sovereign who so sternly chastised their jests was determined to show that the baseness of his mother’s origin in no way hindered him from promoting his kinsmen on the mother’s side. If one grandson of Fulbert wore the ducal crown of Normandy, another already wore the mitre of Bayeux; and another great promotion, almost equivalent to adoption into the ducal [Sidenote: William the Warling;] house, was now to be bestowed upon a third. The county of Mortain—Moritolium in the Diocese of Avranches[893]—was now held by William, surnamed Warling, son of Malger, a son of Richard the Fearless and Gunnor.[894] [Sidenote: his connexion with the ducal family.] He was therefore a first cousin of William’s father, a descendant of the ducal stock as legitimate as any other branch of it. We have not heard his name in the accounts of any of the former disturbances; but it is clear that he might, like so many others, have felt himself aggrieved by the accession of the Bastard. Among [Sidenote: Robert the Bigod.] the knights in Count William’s service was one, so the story runs, who bore a name hitherto unknown to history, though not unknown to legend and fanciful etymology, but a name which was to become more glorious on English ground than the names of Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery. The sons of Robert the Bigod[895] were to rule where Harold now held his Earldom, and his remote descendant was to win a place in English history worthy of Harold himself, as the man who wrested the freedom of England from the greatest of England’s later Kings.[896] The patriarch of that great house was now a knight so poor that he craved leave of his lord to leave his service, and to seek his fortune among his countrymen who were carving out for themselves lordships and principalities in Apulia. The Count bade him stay where he was; within eighty days he, Robert the Bigod, would be able, there in Normandy, to lay his hands on whatever good things [Sidenote: He charges William with treason.] it pleased him. In such a speech treason plainly lurked; and Robert, whether out of duty to his sovereign or in the hope of winning favour with a more powerful master, determined that the matter should come to the ears of the Duke. The Bigod was a kinsman of Richard of Avranches, the son of Thurstan the rebel of Falaise,[897] and Richard was now high in favour at the court of William. By his means Robert obtained an introduction to the Duke,[898] and told him of the treasonable words of the Count of Mortain. William accordingly sent for his cousin, and charged him with plotting against the state. He had, the Duke told him, determined again to disturb the peace of the country, and again to bring about the reign of licence. But, while he, Duke William, lived, the peace which Normandy so much needed should, by God’s help, never be disturbed again.[899] Count [Sidenote: William the Warling goes to Apulia.] William must at once leave the country, and not return to it during the lifetime of his namesake the Duke. The proud Lord of Mortain was thus driven to do what his poor knight had thought of doing. He went to the wars in Apulia in humble guise enough, attended by a [Sidenote: Robert, Count of Mortain.] single esquire. The Duke at once bestowed the vacant County of Mortain on his half-brother Robert, the son of Herlwin and Herleva. Of him we shall hear again in the tale of the Conquest of England. Thus, says our informant, did William pluck down the proud kindred of his father and lift up the lowly kindred of his mother.[900]

[Sidenote: Estimate of William’s conduct.]

This affair of William of Mortain is one of which we may well wish for further explanation. We are hardly in a position to judge of the truth or falsehood of the charge brought by Robert the Bigod against his lord.[901] We have no statement from the other side; we have no defence from the Count of Mortain; all that we are told is that, when arraigned before the Duke, he neither confessed nor denied the charge.[902] We need not doubt that William was honestly anxious to preserve his Duchy from internal disturbances. But in this case his justice, if justice it was, fell so sharply and speedily as to have very much the look of interested oppression. It was impossible to avoid the suspicion that William the Warling was sacrificed to the Duke’s wish to make a provision for his half-brother. We are not surprised to find that the charge of having despoiled and banished his cousin on frivolous pretences was brought up against William by his enemies in later times, and was not forgotten by historians in the next generation.[903]

The energy of William had thus, for the time, [Sidenote: Prosperous condition of Normandy. 1049–1054.] thoroughly quelled all his foes, and his Duchy seems for some years to have enjoyed as large a share of peace and prosperity as any state could enjoy in those troubled times. The young Duke was at last firmly settled in the ducal seat, and he now began to think of strengthening himself by a marriage into the family of some neighbouring prince. And he seems to have already made up his mind in favour of the woman who retained [Sidenote: William seeks Matilda of Flanders in marriage.] his love during the remainder of their joint lives, Matilda,[904] the daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders. He must have been in treaty for her hand very soon after the Angevin war, as the marriage was forbidden by a decree [Sidenote: 1049.] of the Council of Rheims.[905] But the marriage itself did [Sidenote: 1053.] not take place till several years later, and the negotiation opened so many questions, and was connected with so many later events, that I reserve the whole subject of [Sidenote: William’s objects, Duchy, Wife, and Kingdom, all pursued in the like spirit.] William’s marriage for a later chapter. William had to struggle through as many difficulties to obtain undisputed possession of his wife as he had to obtain undisputed possession of either his Duchy or his Kingdom. And he struggled after all three with the same deliberate energy, ever waiting his time, taking advantage of every opportunity, never baffled by any momentary repulse. His struggle for Normandy was now, for the time, over; he had fairly conquered his own Duchy, and he had now only to defend it. His struggle for Matilda had already begun; a struggle almost as hard as the other, though one which was to be fought, not with bow and spear, but with the weapons of legal and canonical disputation. Whether he had already begun to lift up his eyes to the succession of his childless cousin, whether he had already formed the hope that the grandson of the despised Tanner might fill, not only the ducal chair of Normandy, but the Imperial throne of Britain, is a question to which we can give no certain answer. But there can be little doubt that, soon after this time, the idea was forcibly brought before his mind. And, with characteristic pertinacity, when he had once dreamed of the prize, he never slackened in its pursuit till he could at last call it his own.

[Sidenote: Condition of England. 1051–1052.]

Normandy was now at rest, enjoying the rest of hard-won peace and prosperity. England was also at rest, if we may call it rest to lie prostrate in a state of feverish stillness. She rested, as a nation rests whose hopes are crushed, whose leaders are torn from her, which sees for the moment no chance of any doom but hopeless submission [Sidenote: William’s visit to England. 1051.] to the stranger. It was at this crisis in the history of the two lands that the Duke of the Normans appeared as a guest at the court of England.[906] Visits of mere friendship and courtesy among sovereign princes were rare in those days. The rulers of the earth seldom met, save when a superior lord required the homage of a princely vassal, or when Princes came together, at the summons of the temporal or the spiritual chief of Christendom, to discuss the common affairs of nations and churches. Such visits as those which William and Eustace of Boulogne paid at this time to Eadward were, in England at least, altogether novelties. And they were novelties which were not likely [Sidenote: Estimate of William in English eyes.] to be acceptable to the national English mind. We may be sure that every patriotic Englishman looked with an evil eye on any French-speaking prince who made his way to the English court. Men would hardly be inclined to draw the distinction which justice required to be drawn between Eustace of Boulogne and William of Rouen. And yet, under any other circumstances, England, or any other land, might have been proud to welcome such a guest as the already illustrious Duke. Under unparalleled difficulties he had displayed unrivalled powers; he had shone alike in camp and in council; he had triumphed over every enemy; he had used victory with moderation; he was fast raising his Duchy to a high place among European states, and he was fast winning for himself the highest personal place among European Princes. Already, at the age of twenty-three, the Duke of the Normans might have disputed the palm of personal merit even with the great prince who then filled the throne of the world. He had, on a narrower field, displayed qualities which fairly put him on a level with Henry himself. But, in English eyes, William was simply the most powerful, and therefore the most dangerous, of the greedy Frenchmen who every day flocked in greater numbers to the court of the English King. William came with a great following; he tarried awhile in his cousin’s company; he went away loaded with gifts and honours.[907] [Sidenote: Eadward’s alleged promise of the Crown to William probably made at this time.] And we can hardly doubt that he also went away encouraged by some kind of promise, or at any rate by some kind of implied hope, of succeeding to the Kingdom which [Sidenote: General appearance of things favourable to William.] he now visited as a stranger. There was indeed everything to raise the hope in his breast. He landed in England; he journeyed to the court of England; his course lay through what were in truth the most purely English parts of England; but the sons of the soil lay crushed without a chief. On the throne sat a King of his own kin, English in nothing but in the long succession of glorious ancestors of whom he showed himself so unworthy. His heart was Norman; his speech was French; men of foreign birth were alone welcome at his court; men of foreign birth were predominant [Sidenote: Norman predominance in England.] in his councils. The highest places of the Church were already filled by Norman Prelates. The Norman Primate of all England, the choicest favourite of the King, the man at whose bidding he was ready to believe that black was white, would doubtless be the first to welcome his native sovereign to his province and diocese. The great city which was fast becoming the capital of England, the city beneath whose walls Eadward had fixed his chosen dwelling, had been made to own the spiritual rule of another Norman priest. A short journey, a hunting-party or a pilgrimage, would bring King and Duke within the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of a third Norman, the unworthy stranger who disgraced the episcopal throne of Dorchester. Among the temporal chiefs of the Kingdom there was already one French Earl, kinsman alike of William and of Eadward, who would not fail in showing honour to the most renowned of his speech and kindred. Norman Stallers, Treasurers, personal officers of every kind, swarmed around the person of the King. Norman Thegns were already scattered through the land, and were already filling the land with those threatening castles, of which the wise policy of William had destroyed so many within his own dominions. Robert the son of Wymarc, Richard the son of Scrob, and the whole herd of strangers who were fattening on English soil, would flock to pay their duty to a more exalted countryman who came on the same errand as themselves. They would tell him with delight.and pride how the insolence of the natives had been crushed, how the wrongs of Count Eustace had been avenged, and how the rebel leaders had been driven to flee from justice. They would speak of England as a land which Norman influences had already conquered, and which needed only one exertion of the strong will and the strong hand to enable the Norman to take formal possession. The land was fast becoming their own. Some wild tribes, in parts of the island to which William’s journey was not likely to extend, might still remain under aged chieftains of English or Danish birth. But even these rude men had been found, whether through fear or policy, ready to fall in with the plans of the Norman faction, and to range themselves against the champions of the national cause. And the richest and most civilized parts of the land, the very parts which had been so lately held by the sturdiest champions of Norman innovations, had now become one great field for Normans of every class to settle in. From Kent to Hereford they might enrich themselves with the lands and largesses which a gracious King was never weary of showering upon them. That King was childless; he had no heir apparent or presumptive near to him;[908] he had had a brother, but that brother had been done to death by English traitors, with the fallen captain of traitors at their [Sidenote: Lack of direct heirs in the royal house.] head. Not a single near kinsman of the royal house could be found in England. The only surviving male descendant of Æthelred was the banished son of Eadmund, who, far away in his Hungarian refuge, perhaps hardly occurred to the minds of Norman courtiers. William was Eadward’s kinsman; it was convenient to forget that, though he was Eadward’s kinsman, yet not a single drop of royal or English blood flowed in his veins. It was convenient to forget that, even among men of foreign birth, there were those who were sprung, by female descent at least, from the kingly stock of England. Ralph of Hereford was the undoubted grandson of Æthelred, but the claims of the timid Earl of the Magesætas could hardly be pressed against those of the renowned Duke of the Normans. It [Sidenote: Constitutional aspect of the promise.] was convenient to forget that, by English Law, mere descent gave no right, and that, if it had given any right, William had no claim by descent to plead. It was easy to dwell simply on the nearness by blood, on the nearness by mutual good offices, which existed between the English King and the Norman Duke. There was everything to suggest the thought of the succession to William’s own mind; there was everything to suggest it to the foreign counsellors who stood around the throne of Eadward. Probably William, Eadward, and Eadward’s counsellors were alike ignorant or careless of the English Constitution. They did not, or they would not, remember that the Kingdom was not a private estate, to be passed from man to man either according to the caprice of a testator or according to the laws of strict descent. They did not remember that no man could hold the English Crown in any way but as the free gift of the English people. The English people would seem to them to be a conquered race, whose formal consent, if it needed to be asked at all, could be as easily extorted as it had been by Swend and Cnut. If they dared to refuse, they might surely be overcome by the Norman no less easily than they had been overcome by the Dane. It would probably seem to them that the chances were all in favour of William’s being able to succeed quietly as the heir or legatee of Eadward. If those chances failed, it would still be open to him to make his entry by arms as the avenger of the blood of Ælfred and his companions.

[Sidenote: No direct evidence on the point.]

The moment was thus in every way favourable for suggesting to William on the one hand, to Eadward on the other, the idea of an arrangement by which William should succeed to the English Crown on Eadward’s death. We have no direct evidence that any such arrangement took place at this time, but all the probabilities of the story lead irresistibly to the belief that such was the case. The purely English writers are silent, but then they are silent as to any bequest or arrangement in William’s favour at any time. They tell us nothing as to the nature of his claim to the Crown; they record his invasion, but they record nothing as to its motives.[909] The Norman writers, on the other hand, so full of Eadward’s promise to William, nowhere connect it with William’s visit to England, which one only among them speaks of at all.[910] But Norman writers, Norman records, the general consent of the age, confirmed rather than confuted [Sidenote: Negative evidence of the English writers.] by the significant silence of the English writers, all lead us to believe that, at some time or other, some kind of promise of the succession was made by Eadward to William. The case of Eadward’s promise is like the case of Harold’s oath. No English writer mentions either; but the silence of the English writers confirms rather than disproves the fact of both. All those Norman calumnies which they could deny, the English writers do most emphatically deny.[911] The fact then that they never formally deny the reports, which they must have heard, that Harold swore an oath to William, that Eadward made a promise in favour of William, may be accepted as the strongest proof that some kind of oath was sworn, that some kind [Sidenote: _Some_ promise of Eadward, and _some_ oath of Harold, historical, but the Norman details untrustworhy.] of promise was made. Had either Eadward’s promise or Harold’s oath been a pure Norman invention, William could never have paraded both in the way that he did in the eyes of Europe; he could never have turned them to the behoof of his cause in the way that he so successfully did. I admit then some promise of Eadward, some oath of Harold. But that is all. The details, Eadward and some oath of Harold, historical, but the Norman details untrustworthy. as they are given by the various Norman writers, are so different, so utterly contradictory, that we can say nothing, on their showing, as to the time, place, or circumstances of either event. We are left with the bare fact, and for anything beyond it we must look to the probabilities of the case. The oath of Harold I shall discuss at the proper time; at present we are concerned with the bequest of the English Crown said to have been made by Eadward in favour of William.

Every one who has grasped the true nature of the English Constitution, as it stood in the eleventh century, [Sidenote: No power of bequest in the King, only of recommendation.] will fully understand that, strictly speaking, any bequest of the kind was altogether beyond the power of an English King. The Law of England gave the King no power to dispose of a Crown which he held solely by the free choice of the Witan of the land. All that Eadward could constitutionally do was to pledge himself to make in William’s favour that recommendation to the Witan which the Witan were bound to consider, though not [Sidenote: Eadward’s change of purpose; his final recommendation of Harold.] necessarily to consent to.[912] That, when the time came, Eadward did make such a recommendation, and did not make it in favour of William, we know for certain. The last will of Eadward, so far as such an expression can be allowed, was undoubtedly in favour of Harold. We shall see, as we go on, that there is the strongest reason to believe that Eadward at one time designed his namesake the Ætheling as his successor. It is even possible that his thoughts were at one time directed towards his nephew Ralph of Hereford. In a weak prince like Eadward changes of purpose of this kind are in no way wonderful. And in truth the changes in the condition of the country were such that a wiser King than Eadward might well have changed his purpose more than once between the visit of William and his own death. Now there is not the slightest sign of any intention on behalf of William during the later years of Eadward; first the Ætheling, and then the great Earl, are the persons marked out in turn for the succession. And yet, as we have seen, it is impossible not to believe that some promise was, at some time or other, made in William’s favour. The details of the Norman stories are [Sidenote: Impossibility of the Norman accounts.] indeed utterly incredible.[913] The version which is least grotesquely absurd represents Eadward as promising the Crown to his dear cousin and companion William, when they were both boys or youths living together in Normandy. It is enough to upset this tale, taken literally, if we remember that Eadward, who is here represented as the familiar and equal companion of the boy William, was, when he left Normandy, nearly forty years old, some five and twenty years older than his cousin. He is moreover made to dispose of a Crown which was not yet his, and which he afterwards assumed with a good deal of unwillingness. Yet this story is distinctly less absurd than the other versions. It is even possible that William or his advisers may have begun to look on the succession to the English Crown as a matter within the scope of their policy, from the time when the English embassy came to bring the King-elect Eadward from Normandy to his own Kingdom.[914] It is a far wilder story which describes Archbishop Robert as going over to announce to William the decree of the English Witan in his favour, a decree confirmed by the oaths of the Earls Leofric, Siward, and—Godwine! But even this story is less marvellous than that which represents Harold himself, at a time when he was the first man in England, and when his own designs on the Crown must have been perfectly well known, as sent by Eadward into Normandy to announce to the Duke the bequest which the King had made in his favour. All these stories are simply incredible; they are simply instances of that same daring power of invention by virtue of which Dudo of Saint Quintin describes William Longsword and Richard the Fearless as reigning over half the world,[915] by virtue of which Guy of Amiens describes Robert the Devil [Sidenote: William’s visit the only opportunity for the promise.] as the actual conqueror of England.[916] Yet some promise must be accepted, and some time and some place must be found for it. What time and place are so obvious William’s visit the only opportunity for the promise. as the time and place when Eadward and William, once and once only during their joint reigns, met together face to face? Every earlier and every later time seems utterly impossible; this time alone seems possible and probable. At the moment everything would tend to suggest the idea both to the King and to the Duke. The predominance of the Norman faction, the actual presence of the Norman Duke, the renown of his exploits sounding through all Europe, the lack of any acknowledged English heir, the absence of any acknowledged English leader, all suggested the scheme, all seemed [Sidenote: Later circumstances unfavourable to William.] to make it possible. Everything at that moment tended in favour of William’s succession; every later event, every later change of circumstances, tended in favour of the succession of any one rather than of William. At that moment the Norman party were in the full swing of power. Before another year had passed, the cause of England had once more triumphed; Eadward had Englishmen around him; he gradually learned to attach himself to men of his own race, and to give to the sons of Godwine that confidence and affection which he never gave to Godwine himself. He either forgot his promise to William, or else he allowed himself to be convinced that such a promise was unlawful to make and impossible to fulfil. But William never forgot it. We may be sure that, from that time, the Crown of England was the great object of all his hopes, all his thoughts, all his policy. Even in his marriage it may not have been left quite out of sight. The marriage of William and Matilda was undoubtedly a marriage of the truest affection. But it was no less undoubtedly a marriage which was prompted by many considerations of policy. And, among other inducements, William may well have remembered that his intended bride sprang by direct, if [Sidenote: Matilda’s descent from Ælfred.] only by female, descent from the stock of the great Ælfred.[917] His children therefore would have the blood of ancient English royalty in their veins. Such a descent would of course give neither William, nor Matilda, nor their children, any real claim; but it was a pretension one degree less absurd than a pretension grounded on the fact that Eadward’s mother was William’s great-aunt. [Sidenote: Nature of William’s claims.] And William knew as well as any man that, in politics, a chain is not always of the strength only of its weakest link. He knew that a skilful combination of fallacious arguments often has more practical effect on men’s mind than a single conclusive argument. He contrived, in the end, by skilfully weaving together a mass of assertions not one of which really proved his point, to persuade a large part of Europe that he was the true heir of Eadward, kept out of his inheritance by a perjured usurper. That all these schemes and pretensions date from the time of William’s visit to Eadward, that the Norman Duke left the English court invested, in his own eyes and in those of his followers, with the lawful heirship of the English Crown, is a fact which seems to admit of as little doubt as any fact which cannot be proved by direct evidence.[918]

[Sidenote: William’s visit an important stage in the history.]

In short, it marks one of the most important stages of our history, when “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.”[919] From that day onwards, we feel that we have been brought nearer, by one of the longest stages of our journey, to the fight of Senlac and the coronation of Westminster.

[Sidenote: Lack of details.]

William then visited England at the moment while Godwine was sheltered at the court of Bruges, while Harold was planning vengeance at the court of Dublin, while Eadgyth was musing on the vanity of earthly things in her cell at Wherwell. He therefore met none of the family who were most steadily hostile to all his projects. But we ask in vain, Did he meet the stout warrior Siward? Did he meet the mediator Leofric? Did he meet the Primate who was, fifteen years later, to place the Crown on his own brow, or that more stout-hearted Primate who either refused or was deemed unworthy to bear any part in that great ceremony? And we cannot but ask, Did he meet the now aged Lady, through whom came all his connexion with England or English royalty, the wife and mother of so many kings, the victim of so many spoliations? With what grace could Eadward bring his kinsman into the presence of the parent through whom alone William could call him kinsman, but between whom and himself there had been so little love? At all events, if Eadward was now for a season set free from the presence of his wife, he was soon set free for ever from the [Sidenote: Death of Emma. March 6, 1052.] presence of his mother. Early in the next year died Ælfgifu-Emma, the Old Lady, the mother of Eadward King and of Harthacnut, and her body lay in the Old Minster by Cnut King.[920]

The course of our story has thus brought us once more to the shores of our own island. In our next Chapter we shall have to begin the picture of the bright, if brief, regeneration of England. We shall have to listen to the spirit-stirring tale, how the champions of England came back from banishment, how the heart of England rose to welcome her friends and to take vengeance on her enemies, how for fourteen years England was England once again under the rule of the noblest of her own sons.

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