Transcriber’s Note: In ebook readers, sidenotes appear in-line, highlighted in light grey. Additional notes are at the end of the book.

THE REIGN OF WILLIAM RUFUS.

London

HENRY FROWDE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE

7 PATERNOSTER ROW

THE

REIGN OF WILLIAM RUFUS

AND THE

ACCESSION OF HENRY THE FIRST.

BY

EDWARD A. FREEMAN,M.A., Hon. D.C.L., LL.D.

HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOLUME II.

Oxford:

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS.

1882.

[All rights reserved.]

CONTENTS.

ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.

VOL. II.

p. 19, [note 3]. This picture of the two natives, most likely churls, carrying the King’s body on the cart, is singularly like the story of Rufus’ own end to which we shall come presently.

[p. 27, l. 5]. I should not have said “a relic,” as I find that the black cross of Scotland is a relic of great fame, as indeed is almost implied in the story.

p. 27, [note 5]. See vol. i. p. 167.

p. 28, [note 5]. Munch (Det Norske Folks Historie, ii. 471–475, for an introduction to which I have to thank Professor Fiske of Cornell University) connects this entry with the account of Magnus’ dealings with Man, spoken of in [p. 138], and with every likelihood supposes an earlier expedition of Magnus in 1093, in which he appeared in both Scotland and Man, and which the writers of the Sagas have confounded with his expedition in 1098. We can thus understand the mention of Godred, who was certainly alive in 1093, and certainly dead in 1098. See also Anderson, Preface to Orkneyinga Saga, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv.

[p. 31, l. 14.] Not “the Breton Count Alan,” at least not the Count of the Bretons, but Alan of Richmond. See [p. 602.]

[p. 49, l. 22], for “south-western” read “north-western.”

p. 62, [note 5]. Mr. Fowler writes to me that “what is left of William of Saint-Calais is under the floor in the part of the chapter-house still used. W. G. has one of his shoes. They began at the west end in burying the bishops in the chapter-house, and gradually worked eastward, ending with Kellow before the bishop’s seat at the east end. Rites of Durham (Surtees Society ed. p. 47) gives the names as they were ‘ingraven upon stone with the figure of the crosse + annexed to every of their said names,’ i.e. on the chapter-house floor, and between ‘Walcherus’ and ‘Ranulphus comes’.

‘Willielmus Episcopus.’

We found further east ‘Will. Secundus Episcopus’ [that is William of Saint Barbara, bishop from 1143–1152]. Wyatt smashed them all more or less.”

p. 81, [note 1]. See [p. 614.]

[p. 88, l. 17.] See below, [p. 103].

p. 93, [note 2]. I presume this is the same king of whom we shall hear a great deal from [p. 137] onwards.

[p. 97, l. 2 from bottom]. I have been unable to fix the exact site of Rhyd-y-gors; but I believe it is to be looked for in Caermarthenshire.

[p. 101, l. 13]. I am also unable to fix the exact site of Yspwys.

[p. 134, l. 7 from bottom], for “Ulf” read “Wulf,” as in vol. i. p. 14. The English spelling is the better, but I suppose I was carried away by Scandinavian associations.

[p. 134, l. 11]. Munch (Det Norske Folks Historie, ii. 511) oddly refers to William of Malmesbury as making the companion of Magnus Barefoot, not a younger Harold, but the Magnus whom we have already heard of as our Harold’s son, as I suppose, by Eadgyth Swanneshals. But William of Malmesbury distinctly says Harold, and I can see nothing about it in the places in the Saga of Magnus and the Orkneyinga Saga to which he refers.

p. 136, l. 4 from bottom, for “Cronan” read [“Crouan.”]

p. 138, [note 1]. This is placed in the year 1098.

[p. 144, l. 1]. I know not by what carelessness I contrived, after referring (see [p. 131]) to Giraldus’ account of the earlier doings of the two Earls in Anglesey, to leave out all mention of his account of Hugh of Shrewsbury’s death, which follows immediately (It. Kamb. ii. 7, vol. vi. p. 129) on the story of the desecration of the church of Llantryfrydog. It agrees on most points very minutely with the narrative of Orderic; but it does not seem to be borrowed from it;

“Accesserant ad insulæ portum ab Orchadum insulis piratæ in navibus longis; quorum adventum ubi comes audivit, statim eis usque in ipsum mare, forti residens equo, animose nimis occurrit. Et ecce navium princeps, cui nomen Magnus, primæ navis in prora cum arcu prostans sagittam direxit. Et quanquam comes a vertice capitis usque ad talum pedis, præter oculos solum, ferro fideliter esset indutus, tamen dextro percussus in lumine, perforato cerebro, in mare corruit moribundus. Quem cum sic corruentem victor ab alto despiceret, superbe in victum et insolenter invectus, dixisse memoratur lingua Danica, ‘Leit loupe,’ quod Latine sonat Sine salire. Et ab hac in posterum hora potestas Anglorum in Monia cessavit.”

The only difference between this story and Orderic’s is that, while Orderic makes Magnus mourn when he learns whom he has slain, Giraldus puts into his mouth two good Teutonic words of triumph, which sound a great deal more natural. On the other hand we cannot accept Giraldus’ account of the immediate result of the encounter as regards Anglesey, which quite contradicts the witness of the Welsh writers. His statement however is true in the long run, as Anglesey was delivered again the next year. See [p. 146].

In the Orkneyinga Saga, c. xxix. (p. 55, Anderson), Magnus “takes a psalter and sings during the battle.” Then, by his order, he and the man from Hálogoland shoot at the same time, and hit “Hugh the Proud,” much as in the other versions. He and “Hugh the Proud” are oddly spoken of as “British chiefs.”

[p. 146, l. 17]. See below, pp. [442], [623]; but the words “and of other parts of North Wales” had better be left out.

p. 153, [note 1], for “muentione” read “inuentione.”

[p. 174, l. 4], for “from” read “for.”

[p. 175, l. 3]. I think we must accept this distinct statement as more trustworthy than the flourish of Orderic a few pages later, which I have quoted in p. 178, [note 1]. The present passage, besides its more distinct character, has the force of a correction.

p. 178, [note 3]. Suger is a discreet writer, or one might suspect him of exaggeration in his figures both ways. If we take “milites” in the strict sense of knights, the French numbers seem strangely small, and the English strangely large. But any other sense of “miles” would make the French numbers quite incredible.

p. 181, [note 1]. And by the Loir too; see below, [p. 276].

[p. 190, l. 9 from bottom], “superinducta” is the favourite epithet for her.

p. 201, [note 2]. “Fraterculus” is an odd word; but it most likely points to Geoffrey as being one of the “canonici pueri” of whom we hear sometimes (see below,[ p. 521]). “Frater” did not get its special meaning till the rise of the Friars, and we have seen the word “fratres” applied to the canons of Waltham. One might for a moment think that Geoffrey was a brother of the Bishop’s own, but this is forbidden by the account of his kindred which directly follows.

p. 207, [note 1]. This time, when William and Robert were together at Rouen, can only have been about September, 1096, just after the conference between the brothers spoken of in vol. i. p. 559, and just before Robert set forth on the crusade.

[p. 230, last line], for “he” read “we.”

p. 243, [note 1]. It is rather odd that exactly this same phrase of “callidus senex,” here applied to Robert of Meulan, should be also applied to the old Roger of Beaumont in the story told in vol. i. p. 194. We must remember that our present “callidus senex” had been married, seemingly for the first time, only two years before (see vol. i. p. 551), and that he lived till 1118.

[p. 250, l. 8]. This is doubtless true, but the specially strange guise, described in the passage of William of Malmesbury referred to in the note, was not put on till William of Aquitaine had come back from the crusade. See above, [p. 113].

p. 252, [note 2]. See above, [p. 178], and the correction just above, [p. 175.]

p. 260, [note 3]. See at the end of the chapter, [p. 302], and [note 1].

[p. 290, l. 2 from bottom]. Yet see the piece of Angevin scandal quoted in [p. 609].

[p. 312, l. 10], for “both Rogers, the Duke of Apulia and the young Count of Sicily, to be one day the first and all but the most famous of Sicilian kings,” read “both Rogers, the Duke of Apulia and the Count of Sicily, now drawing near to the end of his stirring life.” The elder Roger was still alive, though he did not live long after.

[p. 343, l. 1]. The abbey of Saint Alban’s was not vacant at this time, see [p. 666]; and for “thirteen” and “twelve” read “twelve” and “eleven,” see [note].

p. 347, [note 2]. Orderic is rather full on the circumstances of the election than on the election itself; see [p. 680].

[p. 359, l. 11], for “thirteen” read “eleven.”

p. 360, [note 1]. It must have been at the same time that Abbot Odo of Chertsey was restored to his abbey. See vol. i. p. 350.

p. 380, [note 4]. We have had one or two other cases of a church tenant like this Eadric or Godric, giving back his lease by way of a benefaction.

[p. 389, l. 18]. The imperial dignity of Matilda is greatly enlarged on by the poet of Draco Normannicus, i. 4. Two lines are,

“Suscipit Henricus sponsam, statimque coronat,
Hoc insigne decus maxima Roma dedit.”

[p. 396, l. 4]. See vol. i. p. 184.

[p. 413, l. 6] from bottom, for “in a neighbour” read “a neighbour in.”

[p. 416, l. 1]. I cannot admit the statement of Flambard’s Durham biographer, who puts his restoration at this point. It is not so much that he had no claim to restoration by the general terms of the treaty, for he might have been specially included in it. But his restoration at this time is quite inconsistent with Orderic’s account of his dealings with the bishopric of Lisieux, which cannot be mere confusion or invention.

[p. 450, l. 3]. After the words “give thanks to the Lord God,” insert “for thou hast now begun to be a free king.”

[p. 454, l. 13 from bottom], for “his” read “the King’s.”

[p. 472, l. 1]. This grant of Northallerton must be the same as the grant mentioned in the charter which I have quoted in p. [535]; cf. pp. [299], [508].

[p. 487, ll. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.] It does not appear that any of the regular assemblies of the year 1101 was held at Windsor. The Whitsun assembly (see [p. 399]) may have been held there, but it is hardly likely. But the mere confirmation of an earlier grant need not have been made in a regular gemót.

[p. 503, l. 13]. For “hanc terram” read “hac terra.”

[p. 508]. Several gifts of Rufus to the Abbey of Gloucester are recorded in the Gloucester Cartulary, i. 68, i. 102, i. 115. This last, which appears again in ii. 293, is a grant to the abbey of the right of catching sturgeons. This cannot have been one of the grants made during his sickness at Gloucester (see vol. i. p. 395), as it is dated from Huntingdon; but in the grant in i. 102, it is expressly said that it was made when the King was “apud Gloucestriam morbo gravi vexatus.” In i. 238, 239, 240, Henry and Stephen confirm gifts of their brother and uncle. The document in ii. 107, which in the index is referred to William Rufus, clearly belongs to the Conqueror, and to the earlier part of his reign, before the death of William Fitz-Osbern in 1071; it refers to the lands of the church of Gloucester which were held by Archbishop Thomas. See N. C. vol. ii. p. 690.

In the Register of Malmesbury (p. 330) there is a singular charter in favour of the Abbey of Malmesbury granted during his stay at Hastings in 1094. It brings in several familiar names great and small, and illustrates the relations between landowners of any kind and the King and his huntsmen;

“Willelmus rex Angliæ O. episcopo et W. Hosato, et C. venatori, et A. falconario, salutem. Sciatis me abbati Godefrido silvas suas ad custodiendum commendasse. Nolo ergo ut aliquis forestarius meus de eis se intromittat. Et Croco venatori præcipio ut de ix. sol. quos super homines suos placitaverat eum et suos clamet quietos. Teste Willelmo episcopo, et F. filio Hamonis, R. capellano, apud Hastinge.”

p. 569, heading, for “Losinga” read “Herbert.”

[p. 585, l. 1]. It is odd that William of Malmesbury should speak of the all-powerful Roger of Salisbury as “alius quidam episcopus;” for we see from the Chronicle (see [p. 587]) that it was no other.

[p. 592, l. 10], for “þaes” read “þæs.”

[p. 600, l. 6 from bottom]. I seem in [p. 30] to have taken “puellæ nostræ” to mean the nuns; but it would rather seem, both here and in the next page, to mean, other girls sent merely for education, like Eadgyth herself.

[p. 605, l. 8 from bottom]. I cannot get rid of a lurking notion that this “Aldredi” should be “Alberici.” But I do not know how Alberic could appear with the title of earl in the time of Waltheof.

[p. 611, l. 9 from bottom]. See M. Paris, ed. Wats, Additamenta, p. 199.

THE REIGN OF WILLIAM RUFUS.

CHAPTER V.

THE WARS OF SCOTLAND, NORTHUMBERLAND, AND WALES.[1]
1093–1098.

THE year of Anselm’s appointment to the archbishopric, Events of the year 1093. that part of the year which passed between the day when the bishop’s staff was forced into his hand and the day when he received consecration from Thomas of Bayeux, was a time full of stirring and memorable events of quite another kind. Relations between England and Scotland. War of 1093. It was now that some of the events of former years were to bring forth fruit. The relations between England and Scotland were of a kind which might lead to open warfare at any moment.[2] This year the open warfare came. And it was a warfare which was far more important in its direct results than mere plundering inroads on either side of the border commonly were. Its results. The direct results of the warfare of this year were in truth the crowning result of causes which had been working for a whole generation. Growth of the English power It was a singular irony of fate which made William the Red in some sort a missionary, not only of the political power of the English kingdom, but of the ascendency of the English blood and speech. He began the later position of England as an European power. He extended the boundaries of the kingdom of England within his own island. and of the English nation under William Rufus. And, more than this, he gave decisive help to a work which wrought one of the greatest of victories, not so much for England as a power as for the English-speaking folk in their English-speaking character. That he gave kings to Scotland was a small matter; that was done by other rulers of England before and after him. What specially marks his reign is that in his day, and largely by his agency, it was ruled that, of the three elements in Northern Britain, British, English, and Scottish or Irish, the English element should have the upper hand. The Scottish kingdom becomes English. It was ruled that the kingdom of Scotland, whatever might be its relations towards the kingdom of England, whether separate or united, whether dependent or independent, whether friendly or hostile, should be itself truly an English kingdom, a kingdom which was for some generations more truly English than the southern England itself.

Summary of Scottish affairs. The Scottish affairs with which we shall have to deal in the present chapter begin with the controversy between William Rufus and Malcolm which led to the death of Malcolm in his last invasion of England. Death of Malcolm; first reign of Donald. 1093. On this follows that first outburst of the true Scottish nationality which led to the election of Donald, followed by his overthrow and the establishment of Duncan by the power of England. Reign of Duncan. Then, after a short interval, comes the second national uprising, and the restoration of Donald. After a longer interval comes the second overthrow of Donald, and the establishment of the younger Eadgar by the arms of the elder. Second reign of Donald. 1094. Establishment of Eadgar. 1097. The question was now decided in favour of the line of Malcolm and Margaret and of the form of English influence which was represented by that line. And between these two last revolutions we may record, as a kind of episode for which it is not easy to find a place in the general run of any other narrative, Revolt of Robert of Mowbray. 1095. the revolt and overthrow of the great earl of Northern England which forms at least a poetical sequence to the overthrow of Malcolm. Between the second establishment and the second overthrow of Donald, I propose to tell, in its chronological order, the tale of the slayers of Malcolm, of Earl Robert of Mowbray and his kinsman Morel. There is little doubt that their revolt was connected with movements in Normandy also; but it would have been hard to describe it in a chapter in which Anselm is the chief actor. It comes better in its moral and geographical relation towards the affairs of Scotland.

But Scotland was not the only land within the four seas of Britain with which the kingdom of England has much to do, especially in the way of fighting, within the few years of this memorable reign. Affairs of Wales. The affairs of Wales are still more constantly coming before our eyes. While the Red King is on the throne, Welsh warfare supplies, year after year, no small part of the events which the chronicler of England has to record. The Welsh history of this time is one of deep interest on many grounds. But it is specially important as giving us an example of a third type of conquest in our own island, a conquest differing widely both from the English Conquest of Britain and from the Norman Conquest of England. Comparison between Wales and Scotland. Nor do the affairs of Wales fail to supply us with some instructive contrasts as compared with the affairs of Scotland. Scotland and the other dominions of the Scottish king seem throughout this time to act as a whole, at least as regards England. The land is conquered, or it wins back its freedom; it receives foreign influences, or it casts them out; but it seems to do all these things as a whole. The union was perhaps very much on the surface, but the events of this time bring whatever there was of union to the front. Disunion in Wales. The British story, on the other hand, is the story of disunion in its strongest form. Alike in victory and in defeat, all is local and personal; common action on the part of the whole nation seems impossible. The result of English dealings with Wales during these years may be summed up as immediate loss and final success, as defeat in detail leading to substantial conquest. Effects of the reign on the union of Britain. It is to this reign more than to any other that we may trace up the beginning of the chain of events which has gradually welded together England, Scotland, and Wales, into the thoroughly united island of Great Britain. The remote causes begin far earlier; now we begin to enter on the actual story itself. And from that story we may perhaps draw another lesson. Its causes. Three nations, differing in blood and speech, once parted by bitter enmities, have been worked together into one political whole, while still keeping so much of old diversity as is really healthy, so much as hinders a dull and lifeless uniformity, so much as sometimes kindles to wholesome rivalry in a common cause. But this has been because the facts of geography allowed and almost compelled their union; it has been because the nature of the old enmities was such as did not hinder union. England, Scotland, and Wales, have at various times done one another a good deal of mischief; there has been no time when any one of the three held either of the others in abiding Turkish bondage. But these very facts may teach us that the same result cannot be looked for in a land where the undying laws of nature and the events of past history alike forbid it. Such union cannot be where the boundaries of land and water on the map, where the memory of abiding Turkish bondage in days not long passed by, join to hinder the same process of welding together which has so happily taken place among the three nations of the isle of Britain. Comparison with Ireland and Normandy. William the Red did much for the final union of Britain, because nature favoured that union. He brought Normandy under the same rule as England, but only for the two lands to be again parted asunder, because nature forbad their union. And if it be true that from the rocks of Saint David’s he looked out on the dim outline of distant Ireland, he did well to turn away from the prospect, to bluster and threaten, it may be, but to keep the practical exercise of his warfare and his policy for other lands. He did well to keep it, as far as the island world was concerned, for those lands which, as the event has shown, nature did not forbid to be, in course of ages, fully united with his kingdom.

§ 1. The Last Year of Malcolm.
1093.

We should be glad of a clearer account than we have of the immediate causes which led to the open breach between William and Malcolm in the year which followed the restoration of Carlisle. Complaints made by Malcolm. It is certain that Malcolm complained through an embassy that the King of the English had failed to carry out the provisions of the treaty made two years before. Nothing is more likely; it was not the manner of William Rufus to carry out his treaties with other princes, any more than his promises to his subjects. Both alike, being parts of his everyday duty, and not lighted up with the rays of chivalrous honour, were reckoned by him under the head of those promises which no man can carry out. But we should be well pleased to know whether the alleged breach of treaty had anything to do with William’s Cumbrian conquest. Effects on Scotland of the restoration of Carlisle. The strengthening of Carlisle, the annexation of its district, could in no case have been agreeable to the King of Scots. And if, as there seems every reason to believe, the land had been held by its late lord Dolfin as a vassal of the Scottish crown, what William had done was a distinct aggression on the rights of that crown. Probable wrong to Scotland. The superiority of the English crown over both Scotland and Cumberland would in no way justify the act; it would have been a wrong done to the Duke of the Normans if the King of the French had annexed Ponthieu and strengthened Saint Valery against Normandy. Other grounds of offence. But we are not told whether this was the ground of offence, or whether William had failed to carry out any of the clauses of the treaty, those for instance which secured to the King of Scots certain payments and possessions in England.[3] What followed may perhaps suggest that, however much the occupation of Carlisle may have rankled in the mind of Malcolm, the formal ground of complaint was something of this last kind. Scottish embassy at Gloucester. March, 1093. Whatever were his wrongs, the Scottish king sent to complain of them, and the answer which he received was one which shows that, at this first stage, Rufus was not disposed to slight the complaint. We are not told the exact date of this first Scottish embassy. It may very well have come during the short season of William’s reformation; his seeming readiness to deal reasonably with the matter, as contrasted with his conduct a few months later, may pass as one of the fruits of his temporary penitence, along with the appointment of Anselm and the promise of good laws. Malcolm summoned to Gloucester. He sent an embassy to Scotland, inviting or summoning the Scottish King to Gloucester, and giving hostages for his safety. This looks very much as if the ground of complaint was the refusal of some of the rights which had been promised to Malcolm whenever he came to the English court. The Scottish King agreed to come on these terms. William, in his present frame of mind, was seemingly anxious to do all honour to the prince with whom he was dealing. Eadgar sent to bring him. The Scottish ambassadors were sent back to bring their king, and with them, as the most fitting of mediators, was sent the man who had himself for a moment been a king, the brother-in-law of Malcolm, the favoured guest of William, the Ætheling Eadgar.[4]

Eadgar in favour with William. We last heard of Eadgar somewhat more than a year before, when Robert left England in anger, and Eadgar went with him.[5] This seems to imply that the relations between William and Eadgar were at that moment unfriendly. We have no account of Eadgar’s return to England; but the duty on which he was now sent implies that he was now not only in William’s formal favour, but in his real confidence. His mission to Scotland. He who had lately been Malcolm’s representative in a conference with William now acts as William’s representative in a conference with Malcolm. Eadgar, like his friend Duke Robert, was clearly one of those men who can act better on behalf of others than on behalf of themselves.[6] In his present mission he seems to have acquitted himself to William’s full satisfaction; the King of Scots was persuaded to come to the English court. If his coming did not prove specially lucky either to himself or to the over-lord to whom he came, that was at all events not the fault of Eadgar.

Events of the year 1093. While Eadgar was away on his mission to Scotland, he left behind him a busy state of things in England. His embassy came in the midst of the long delays between Anselm’s first nomination and his investiture, enthronement, and consecration. It came in the time when William of Eu was plotting,[7] and when, as we shall presently see, seeming conquest was going on throughout Wales. Meeting at Gloucester. August 24, 1093. The place and day for which Malcolm was summoned to the King’s court was Gloucester on the feast of Saint Bartholomew. This can hardly have been a forestalling of the regular Christmas Gemót, for which, by the rule of the last reign, Gloucester was the proper place. But this year, like most years when William Rufus was in England, was a year of meetings. This cannot be the meeting at which Anselm was invested and did homage, for that, as we have seen, was at Winchester.[8] But, if Winchester was near to the New Forest, Gloucester was near to the Forest of Dean, and would on that account not be without its attractions for the Red King.[9] Or it may well be that the presence of the King at Gloucester, both now and earlier in the year, may have been caused by the convenience of that city for assemblies in which action against the Britons might have to be discussed.[10] Malcolm sets forth. August, 1093. Malcolm accordingly set forth, “with mickle worship,” in the beginning of August as it would seem, to go to the court of the over-lord by the Severn.

He stops at Durham. On his way he tarried to take part in a great ecclesiastical ceremony, his share in which was not without a political meaning. Rebuilding of the abbey. The Bishop of Durham, William of Saint-Calais, now again the King’s chief counsellor, already his partisan in the opening strife with Anselm,[11] was ready to begin his great work of rebuilding Saint Cuthberht’s abbey. The church of Ealdhun, which had escaped the flames on the day of Robert of Comines,[12] could not really have been ruinous beyond repair; but, after the fashion of the time, it was doomed to make way for a building, built not only on a vaster scale, but in an improved form of art surpassing every contemporary building.[13] Malcolm lays a foundation stone. August 11, 1093. Of the mighty pile which still stands, the glory of the Northern Romanesque, King Malcolm now laid one of the foundation-stones, along with Bishop William and Prior Turgot.[14] The invitation to take part in such a work was clearly meant as a mark of honour and friendship on both sides. But it must surely have meant more. The King of Scots could not on any showing have claimed any authority at Durham. But he was something more than a mere foreign visitor. As ecclesiastical geography was understood at Durham, Malcolm was no stranger there; he was rather quite at home. At York he might have been told that the whole of his dominions owed spiritual allegiance to that metropolis. But the Bishops of Durham, practically the only suffragans of the see of York and suffragans almost on a level with their metropolitan, were at no time specially zealous for the rights of the Northern Primate. Much of Malcolm’s dominions in Durham diocese. But, as they drew the ecclesiastical map, a great part of Malcolm’s dominions, his earldom of Lothian, his Castle of the Maidens, perhaps even lands beyond those borders, all came within their own immediate spiritual charge. To the counsellor of King William Malcolm came as the highest vassal of the English crown; to the Bishop of Durham he came as the highest layman in his own diocese. As such, he was fittingly asked to take a share in a work which concerned the kingdom and the church of which he was one of the chief members. Import of the ceremony. His consent, besides being a mark of friendship alike towards King William and Bishop William, was doubtless taken as an acknowledgement that he belonged to the temporal realm of the one and to the spiritual fold of the other. And if Malcolm had learned any of the subtleties of some of his contemporaries and of some of his successors, he might have comforted himself with the thought that, whatever the laying of the stone implied, it was laid only by the Earl of Lothian and not by the King of Scots.

From Durham and its ceremonies Malcolm, Earl and King, went on to the court of the over-lord at Gloucester. Malcolm at Gloucester. August 24, 1093. He had evidently come disposed to make the best of matters, as William himself had been during his time of sickness and penitence. But now in August Rufus was himself again; he had repented of his repentance; he was more than ever puffed up with pride and with the feeling of his own power. Rufus refuses to see Malcolm. Out of mere insolence, it would seem, in defiance of the advice of his counsellors who wished for peace, he refused to have any speech with, or even to see, the royal vassal and guest who had made such a journey to come to his presence.[15] Whatever passed between the kings must have passed by way of message through third parties. Dispute between the kings. In one account we read generally that Rufus would do nothing of what he had promised to Malcolm.[16] In another version we are told, with all the precision of legal language, that William Question of “doing right.” demanded that Malcolm should “do right” to him by the judgement of the barons of England only, while Malcolm maintained that he was bound by ancient custom to “do right” only on the borders of the two kingdoms, where the kings of Scots were wont to “do right” to the kings of the English, and that by the judgement of the great men of both kingdoms.[17] The meaning of these words is plainly open to dispute, and it has naturally given rise to not a little.[18] Probable pretensions of Rufus. Their most natural meaning seems to be that William wished to deal with the kingdom of Scotland as with an ordinary fief. Such a claim would have been against all precedent, and it would be specially dangerous when William Rufus was king and when Randolf Flambard was his minister. On the other hand, Malcolm in no way denies the superiority of the English crown; he stands simply on the ground of ancient custom. He is ready to “do right,” a process clearly to be done by an inferior to a superior; but he will do it only as by ancient custom it was wont to be done. Because a kingdom acknowledged the external superiority of another kingdom, it did not at all follow that its king was bound to submit himself to the judgement of the barons of the superior kingdom. The original commendation had been made, not only by the King of Scots, but by the whole Scottish people,[19] and their king might fairly claim that he should have the advice and help of his own Wise Men in making answer to any charge that was brought against him. This is one of the cases in which the use of technical language, without any full explanation of the circumstances, really makes a matter darker; and we must perhaps be content to leave the exact point at issue unsettled. William in the wrong. But it is plain from the English Chronicle that William was in the wrong; he refused to do something for Malcolm which he had promised to do. The obligations of a treaty sat lightly on the Red King; but on one point his honour was pledged. Malcolm had come under a safe-conduct—​the sending of hostages, if nothing else, shows it. William observes his safe-conduct. And a safe-conduct from Rufus might always be trusted. We cannot say that the two kings parted in wrath, seeing they did not meet at all. But Malcolm naturally went away in great wrath, and he left Rufus behind him in great wrath also. He reached his own kingdom in safety; what he did with the hostages we are not told.[20]

Edwᵈ. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

Map illustrating the
NORTHUMBRIAN CAMPAIGNS
A.D. 1093–95.

The silly pride shown by William Rufus at Gloucester led to a series of events of the highest importance both as to the relations between England and Scotland, and as to the internal affairs of the northern kingdom. Malcolm’s last invasion of England. As soon as Malcolm reached Scotland, he gathered together his forces, and began his fifth, and, as it happened, his last, invasion of England. He entered the earldom of Northumberland, and harried after his usual fashion as far as some point which, there is no reason to doubt, was in the near neighbourhood of Alnwick. He draws near to Alnwick. We may fairly accept the tradition which carries him to the spot known as Malcolm’s Cross, where a commemorative rood once stood, and where the ruins of a Romanesque chapel may still be seen. The spot is on high ground overlooking the river Alne, while on the opposite side of the stream a lower height is crowned by the town of Alnwick castle. Alnwick, and by such remains of its famous castle as modern innovation has spared. The neighbourhood of Alnwick and the Percies. that castle, the fame of the historic house which once held it, has caused every place and every act into which the name of Alnwick or of Percy can be dragged to be surrounded by an atmosphere of legend. The first Percy at Alnwick. 1309. It needs some little effort to take in the fact that, as the Percies of history have long passed away from Alnwick, so in the days of Malcolm some centuries had to pass before the Percies of history reached Alnwick. It needs some further effort to take in the further fact that the true Percy, The true Percies. the Percy of Domesday, the Percy of Yorkshire, never had anything to do with Alnwick or with Northumberland at all. And it perhaps needs a further effort again to take in the fact that it is by no means clear whether in the days of Malcolm there was any castle of Alnwick in being. One may guess that the site had been fortified at some earlier time; The Vescies at Alnwick. but the known history of Alnwick, castle and abbey, begins with the works of the elder lords of Alnwick, the house of Vescy, in the next century.[21] Of that date a noble gateway has still been spared, which may 1174. well have looked on the captivity of the Scottish William in the days of Henry the Second, but which assuredly did not look on the death of Malcolm in the days of the Red King. The height to which Malcolm’s harryings reached may have looked down on some earlier fortress beyond the Alne, or it may simply have looked down on the town of Alnwick, which was doubtless already in being. But whatever was there at that time in the way of artificial defence, there were stout hearts and a wary leader ready to meet the king who was invading England for the fifth time.

English feeling about Malcolm. It is certainly strange that in not a few English writers, generally indeed those who are parted from the event by some distance of time and place, the overthrow of the invaders which now followed is told with a certain feeling for the invader and with a certain feeling against those who overthrew him. Malcolm perhaps drew to himself some share of the national and religious halo which gathered round his wife, while there was nothing attractive, either on national or on personal grounds, in the men who at that time stood forth as the champions of England. Yet it must have been the “good men” of two years past[22] who now went forth under the cunning guidance of Earl Robert of Mowbray. By some ambush or other stratagem, that skilful captain led his forces on the Scottish King unawares, under circumstances which are not detailed, but which have led even English writers to speak of the attack as treacherous.[23] Death of Malcolm. November 13, 1093. Malcolm was killed; and with him died his son and expected heir Eadward. They fell on the day of Saint Brice, ninety-one years after the great slaughter of the Danes which has made that day memorable in the kalendar of England.[24] Malcolm slain by Morel. The actual slayer of Malcolm was his gossip Morel, Earl Robert’s nephew and steward, guardian of the rock and fortress of Bamburgh. From him it would seem that Alnwick, or perhaps rather the dale between Alnwick and Malcolm’s Cross, took the name of Moreldene.[25] Morel was, it was noticed, the gossip, the compater, of Malcolm, as William Malet was of Harold;[26] and it seems almost to be implied, by writers far away from Alnwick, that this spiritual affinity made the slaughter of the invader a crime.

Burial of Malcolm at Tynemouth. The body of Malcolm, like the bodies of Harold and Waltheof, received a first burial and a later translation. It was first borne to the church of Saint Oswine at Tynemouth, a place which was growing into great reputation under the special favour of Earl Robert. History of Tynemouth. Through his bounty the walls of a new minster were rising within his fortress which crowned the rocky height on the left bank of the mouth of the great Northumbrian river. That fortress and that minster will again play a memorable part in the chequered history of their founder. But the church of Saint Oswine, the martyred King of Deira, did not owe its first origin to Robert of Mowbray or to any other stranger.[27] Martyrdom of King Oswine. The body of the sainted king, slain by the practice of the Bretwalda Oswin, was laid in a church which was said to have been first built of wood by the Bretwalda Eadwine, and then rebuilt of stone by the sainted Bretwalda Oswald. First church of Tynemouth. The position of Tynemouth marked it out as a special point for attack and defence in the days of the Danish invasions; but, after the havoc which they caused, the holy place had been neglected and forgotten. Invention of Saint Oswine. March 15, 1065. In the days of Earl Tostig and Bishop Æthelwine the pious care of the Earl’s wife Judith had led to the invention of the martyr’s relics, and to the beginning of a new church. Of that Tostig begins the new church. church Tostig laid the foundations in the year of his fall, but men of another speech were to finish it. The unfinished church was granted by Earl Waltheof to the monks of the newly restored house of Jarrow, and his gift was confirmed by the Norman Earl Alberic. Tynemouth granted to Jarrow by Waltheof. A gift to Jarrow proved, as events turned out, to be the same thing as a gift to Durham; but, before the change of foundation at Durham, the monks of Jarrow had removed the relics of Saint Oswine from Tynemouth to their own church. Earl Robert grants Tynemouth to Saint Alban’s. With the reign of Earl Robert a change came. Out of devotion, and at the heavenly bidding, as was believed at Saint Alban’s—​out of a quarrel with Bishop William, as was believed at Durham—​but at all events out of a feeling for the memory of Oswine which showed that he had learned some reverence for the worthies of the land in which he had settled—​Earl Robert deprived the church of Durham of this possession, and refounded Tynemouth as a cell to the distant abbey of Saint Alban. Death of Abbot Paul. 1093. Abbot Paul came in person to take possession, in defiance of all protests on behalf of Durham, where it was believed that his death which soon followed was the punishment of this wrong. Translation of Saint Oswine. August 23, 1103. Saint Oswine himself was not translated back to Tynemouth till the power of Robert of Mowbray had passed away. But the church on the rock became famous, and it fills a considerable place in the local history of Saint Alban’s. There, in the chosen sanctuary of his conqueror, the body of Malcolm lay for awhile. Malcolm translated to Dunfermline. He was afterwards moved to his own Dunfermline[28] , where the pillars of his minster, in their deep channellings, bear witness to an abiding tie, at least of the artistic kind, between the royal abbey of Scotland and the great church of Northern England of which a Scottish king laid the foundation-stone.

But, if English writers in later times, and even men who wrote at the time in distant parts of England, found some flowers to strew on the tomb of the husband of the saintly daughter of the old kingly line, no such feelings were shared by those who had seen Malcolm and his invading host at their own doors. Local estimate of Malcolm’s death. The chronicler who wrote nearest to the spot stops, as he records the death of Malcolm, to mark the judgement of God which cut off the merciless enemy of England. He stops to reckon up all the times that Malcolm had laid waste the fields of Northumberland, and had carried away the folk of Northumberland into bondage.[29] He tells with glee how the invading host utterly vanished; how they were either cut down by the sword of the avenger, or swept away by the floods of Alne, swollen by the winter’s rain beyond its wonted depth and strength.[30] He records the burial at Tynemouth; but he takes care to tell how none of the Scottish host was left to bury the Scottish king, but how the charity of two men of the land bore him on a wain to the place of burial.[31] And he adds the moral, equally applicable to all ambitious kings, that he who had deprived so many of life and goods and freedom now, by God’s just judgement, lost his life and his goods together.[32]

The invading king was dead, and with him the son whom he had designed to wear his crown after him was dead also. The saintly wife of Malcolm and mother of Eadward was soon to follow her husband and her son. Character of Margaret. Of the true holiness of Margaret, of her zeal, not only for a formal devotion, but for all that is morally right, none can doubt.[33] A woman evidently of great natural gifts and of a cultivation unusual in her time, she deeply impressed all whom she came across, her own husband most of all. Malcolm’s devotion to her. To Malcolm his Margaret was indeed a pearl of great price, to be cherished, almost to be worshipped, as already a saint on earth. She taught him to share her devotions, till men wondered at such piety in a man of this world.[34] It is touching to read how the unlettered king loved to look with wonder on the books in which his queen delighted; how those which she delighted in more than others he would cherish and kiss like holy relics, how he would have them adorned with gold and gems, and would then bring them back to his wife in their new splendour, as sacred offerings.[35] Her prayers, her fasts, her never-failing bounty to the poor, stand out in her biography even more conspicuously than her gifts to churches, to distant Iona among them.[36] Margaret’s education of her children. It is perhaps a rarer merit that the influence of her personal example hindered the slightest approach to foul or profane speech in her presence,[37] and that her careful education of her children handed on her virtues to another generation. For Margaret was not one of those who sought for their own soul’s health in neglecting the most obvious duties of the state of life to which God had called them. In the petty and selfish devotion of her great-uncle she had no share; called to be wife, mother, and queen, it was by doing her duty as wife, mother, and queen that she won her claim to a higher saintship than that of Æthelthryth at Ely or of Eadgyth at Wilton. The witness of Margaret is in her children, children many of whom bore the great and kingly names of her own house. The careful training which the Conqueror gave to his children showed its fruits in his daughters only; the teaching of Margaret lived in her sons as well. Her sons; Eadward died with his father; but in Eadgar and Alexander and the more renowned David, she gave three kings to Scotland, of whom the two latter were kings indeed, while all three inherited the gentleness and piety of their mother, along with the virtue so rare among the princes of that day, the strictest purity of personal life.[38] David; David, son-in-law of Waltheof, who gave Scotland worthy heirs to succeed him, surely ranks higher on the roll of royal saints than Eadward, son-in-law of Godwine, who left England to the chances of a disputed succession. One child only of this goodly stock is spoken of as falling away from the bright example of his parent.[39] Eadmund. Yet Eadmund, alone of the children of Margaret, lived to become a cloistered monk; and he was perhaps deemed degenerate only because he fell back on the character of a Scottish patriot of an older type.

Had Margaret confined her cares to bringing up her own children in strict piety and virtue, one of her sons would in all likelihood have mounted his father’s throne immediately after the bloody day of Alnwick. Margaret’s reforms. But in Malcolm’s kingdom she came, in her own eyes at least, as the representative of a higher morality, a purer religion, and a more advanced civilization, and she felt specially called on to play the part of a reformer. State of religion in Scotland. The ecclesiastical condition of Scotland was by no means perfect, according to the standard which Margaret had brought with her. The Scots still kept Easter at a wrong time; they said mass in some way which at Durham was deemed barbarous;[40] they cared not for the Lord’s day; and they are said to have neglected the most ordinary Christian rules in the matter of marriage. They took to wife, after Jewish models, the widows of their brothers, and even, after old Teutonic models, the widows of their fathers. All these evils, ecclesiastical and moral, Margaret set herself zealously to root out. Councils were gathered to work the needful reforms, and Malcolm acts as his wife’s interpreter. Margaret found her husband an useful interpreter. For the king who had been placed on the Scottish throne by the will of Eadward and the arms of Siward naturally spoke the English tongue as readily as that of his own people.[41] But Margaret was a queen as well as a saint; and she either took a personal pleasure in the pomp of royalty or else she deemed royal state to be wholesome in its effects on the minds of the barbarous people. She increases the pomp of the Scottish court. The King of Scots was taught to show himself in more gorgeous apparel, to ride with a greater and more stately train, than his forefathers had been wont to do. But the righteous queen knew something of the evils which might come of a king’s great and stately following, and she took care that the train of King Malcolm should not, like the train of King William, pass among the fields and households of his people like a blight or a pestilence[42] . That Margaret should innovate in the direction of state and ceremony was not wonderful. Her early associations. Daughter of kings, kinswoman, perhaps daughter, of Cæsars, she had, in her childhood and youth, seen something of many lands. She may have seen the crown of Saint Stephen, still in its freshness, on the brow of a Magyar king, and the crown of Charles and Otto on the brow of an Imperial kinsman. She had assuredly seen King Eadward, King Harold, and King William, in all the glory of the crown to which her husband’s crown owed homage. And we may be sure that the kingly state of Scotland was mean besides that of Germany, of England, and even of Hungary. Margaret might well think it a duty to herself and to her husband to raise him in outward things nearer to a level with his brother kings both of the island and of the mainland. Feeling of the Scots. But the policy of such a course, among such a people as the Scots of that age, may well be doubted. A fierce race, hard to control at any time, may well have had no great love for an outward show of kingship, which would be taken, and rightly, as the sign of a growth of the kingly power such as agreed neither with their customs nor with their wishes.

English influence in Scotland. Margaret moreover was a stranger in Scotland. One can well believe that the native Scots were already beginning to be jealous of English influence in any shape. Before Margaret came, they must have felt that the English element in the triple dominion was growing into greater importance than their own. Lothian was becoming greater than the true Scottish land beyond the Scots’-water. Fife, it may well be, was already becoming as Lothian. Malcolm himself had been placed on the throne by English arms; he had become the man of two kings who were politically English, though they held England as a conquered realm. His five invasions of England must have been quite needful to keep up even Malcolm’s character among his own people. Scottish feeling towards Margaret. And his English queen, bringing in English ways, trying to turn Scotland into another England, stopping good old Scottish customs and good old Scottish licence, tricking out the King of Albanach in some new devised foreign garb, English, Norman, German, or Hungarian, must have been looked at in her own time, by the Scots of her own day, with very different feelings towards the living queen from those with which they soon learned to look towards the national saint. English and Norman settlers. She came too with her English following, and her English following was only the first wave of many which came to strengthen the English element which was already strong in the land. While Malcolm and Margaret reigned, Scotland, the land which had sheltered Margaret and her house in their days of banishment, stood open to receive, and its king’s court stood open to welcome, every comer from the south. Native Englishmen flying from Norman oppression and Norman plunder,—​Normans who thought that their share in the plunder of England was too small—​men of both races, of both tongues, of every class and rank among the two races,—​all found a settlement across the Scottish border. The King spoke English; the Queen most likely spoke French also; Englishmen and Normans alike seemed civilizing elements among the people whom Margaret had to polish and to convert. Both Normans and English kept Easter at the right time, and neither Normans nor English thought of marrying their step-mothers. Scotland and the court of Scotland were crowded with English and Norman knights, with English and Norman clerks. They got benefices, temporal and spiritual, in the Scottish land. They may have converted; they may have civilized; but conversion and civilization are processes which are not always specially delighted in by those who are to be converted and civilized. Anyhow they were strangers, brought into the land by kingly favour, to flourish, as men would naturally deem, at the cost of the sons of the soil. Jealousy of the native Scots. The national spirit of the Scottish people arose; the jealousy of the strangers established in the land waxed stronger and stronger. It might be in some measure kept down as long as novelty was embodied in the persons of the warrior king and the holy queen. As soon as they were gone, the pent-up torrent burst forth in its full strength.

The news of Malcolm’s death brought to Margaret. November 17, 1093. The first to bring the news of the death of her husband and son to the ears of Margaret was another of her sons, the future King Eadgar. As the tale reached Peterborough, Worcester, and Saint Evroul, the Queen, when she heard the tidings, became as one dead at heart; she settled her temporal affairs; she gave gifts to the poor; then she entered the church with her chaplain; she communicated at the mass which he sang; she prayed that her soul might pass away, and her prayer was granted.[43] English version of her death. This is a version which has already received a legendary element. It is not, strictly speaking, miraculous, but is on the way to become so. A person, seemingly in health, is made to die in answer to prayer on the receipt of ill news. The tale, as told by an eye-witness, is different. The Queen had long been expecting death; for half a year she had never mounted a horse, and had but seldom left her bed.[44] On the fourth day after her husband’s death, feeling somewhat stronger, Turgot’s version. she went into her private oratory; she heard mass, and communicated. Her sickness increased; she was taken back to her bed, holding and kissing a relic known as the Black Cross of Scotland,[45] and waiting for her end. She prayed and repeated the fifty-first psalm,[46] with the cross in her hand. The agony was already near when Eadgar came from the war. She was able to ask after his father and brother. Fearing to distress his mother yet more, Eadgar said that they were well.[47] Margaret conjured him as her son, and by the cross which she had in her hand, to speak the truth. He then told her the grievous tale. She murmured not, nor sinned with her lips.[48] She could even give thanks for her sorrows, sent, as she deemed, to cleanse her from her sins.[49] As one who had just partaken of the holy rite, she began the prayer which follows communion, and, as she prayed, her soul left the world. The deadly paleness passed away from her face, and she lay, red and white, as one sleeping.[50] Her burial at Dunfermline. The place of her death was Edinburgh, the castle of maidens;[51] her body was borne to Dunfermline and buried there, before the altar of the church of the Holy Trinity of her own rearing.[52]

We read the touching tale with different feelings from those with which it was heard at the moment by Scots who clave to old Scottish ways, good or bad. We have even hints that the funeral of the sainted queen could not go from Edinburgh to Dunfermline without danger. Scottish feeling towards her. It needed either a miracle or the natural phænomena of the country to enable the body of the English lady to be carried out of one gate of the Castle of the Maidens, while the champions of the old times of Scotland were thundering at another.[53] Such a story may be legendary in its details, but it is clearly no legend, but true tradition, as regards the national feeling of the times which it describes. Scotland, at the time of Malcolm’s death, was still torn by local and dynastic factions;[54] but all parties in the old Scottish realm were agreed on one point. A Scottish king to be chosen. They would have no more innovations from England or from Normandy; they would have no more English or Norman strangers to eat up their land in their own sight. They would have no son of Margaret, no son even of Malcolm, to reign over them; they would again have a king of the true stock of Albanach, who should reign after the old ways of Albanach and none other. The settled English element south of the Scots’-water would be weak against such a movement as this; or indeed it may be that the men of Lothian were no more eager to be reformed after Margaret’s fashion than the men of Scotland and Strathclyde. Election of Donald. Such a king as was needed was soon found in the person of Donald Bane, Donald the Red—​Scotland had her Rufus as well as England—​the brother of the late king and son of that Duncan who had been cut off in his youth in the civil war between his house and the house of Macbeth.[55] He was at once raised to the Scottish crown as the representative of Scottish nationality. He drives out the English. His first act was emphatic; “he drave out all the English that ere with the King Malcolm were.”[56]

Meaning of the words. This is of course no more to be understood of a general driving out of the settled English inhabitants of Lothian than the massacre of Saint Brice is to be understood of a general slaughter of the settled Danish inhabitants of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.[57] The driving out was confined to the newly come English, who filled the court of Malcolm and Margaret, and who doubtless kept, or seemed to keep, many a true-born Scot from the favour of his king. For these there was to be no longer a place in the Scottish realm or in the other dominions of its sovereign. They had to go and seek shelter in their own land. The language of our guides suggests that they were mainly English in the strictest sense; though we cannot but fancy that some Normans or other strangers may have crept in among them.[58] One thing is certain; among the English that ere with the King Malcolm were his own children by his English wife held a place. Margaret’s children driven out. Of his sons Eadmund and Æthelred we cannot speak with certainty; but Eadgar, Alexander, and David, had to flee, and the Scottish story describes their uncle the Ætheling Eadgar as in some way helping their escape. He did it, we are told, by stealth, that he might not kindle any suspicion in the Norman King of England.[59] Action of the elder Eadgar. It is hard to see what Eadgar, who could not have been in Scotland at the time of his sister’s death, could have done for her children till they were at least within the English border, and there is nothing to make us think that Eadgar had in any way lost that full favour with William Rufus which he had enjoyed at the beginning of the year. But the mere use of his name witnesses to the belief that he who could do so little for himself was able to do a good deal for others. In this story he is said to have sheltered his sister’s daughters as well as her sons. Malcolm’s daughters; More trustworthy accounts say that Eadgyth and Mary had already been sent by their parents to be brought up in the abbey of Romsey, where their aunt Christina was a nun.[60] Mary; Mary in time married the younger Eustace of Boulogne, and was the mother of a Queen of the English, that valiant Matilda who strove so well to keep the English crown for her husband Stephen.[61] Eadgyth or Matilda; Eadgyth, in her loftier destiny, will meet us again under the new name which she had to share with her niece and to hand on to an Imperial daughter.[62] The second Queen Matilda of our story, the good Queen Maud of tradition, had been designed to be the bride of the Breton Count Alan.[63] That was not to be her fate; neither was it to be her fate to embrace the holy calling which her aunt Christina strove to force upon her. her sojourn at Romsey. For the present she remained unprofessed, loathing the veil which her aunt ever and anon put upon her head, to shield her, as she said, from Norman outrage.[64] When Christina’s back was turned, the lively girl tore the veil from her head and trampled on it.[65] Malcolm at Romsey. Her father too, on some visit to England—​could he have turned aside to Romsey before or after his memorable visit to Gloucester?—​saw the veil on her head with anger; he had not designed her for that, but for the bridal of Count Alan. Her relations with Henry. It seems plain that her marriage with Henry was a marriage of old affection on both sides, and one version even makes the Ætheling seek for her as his wife in her father’s lifetime. Tale of Eadgyth and William Rufus. One version, strange indeed, but perhaps the more likely to have some truth in it because of its strangeness, gives her an unlooked-for lover. We are told that, for once, in the person of Eadgyth of Scotland, female charms kindled in the heart of the Red King a passion which in his case might be called virtuous.[66] He came to Romsey with a body of his knights; the wily abbess, dreading his purpose, caused Eadgyth to put on the veil. She then drew the King into the cloister to see her roses and other flowers; but he caught a glimpse of the nuns as they passed by; he saw the veil on the head of Eadgyth, and turned away. She was then twelve years old. Presently her father came; he saw her veiled; he tore the veil from her head, he trampled it under his feet, and took away his daughter. Such a tale must be taken for what it is worth; but the picture of William Rufus contemplating either maidens or roses at least puts him in a light in which we do not meet him elsewhere.

A series of events now follow which our guides seem to place within the year of Malcolm’s death, but for which room can hardly have been found in the few weeks of it which were still to come. Christmas, 1093–1094. The winter of that year, it will be remembered, was a stirring winter. It saw the consecration of Anselm; it saw the Gemót at Gloucester at which William received the challenge from his brother in Normandy;[67] it saw the first beginnings of fresh disputes between the King and the Archbishop.[68] Events of 1094. The next year was the year of William’s second Norman expedition, and it is clear that his absence from England had an influence on the affairs of Scotland, as it undoubtedly had on those of Wales. Order of Scottish events. The election of Donald and the driving out of the English from Scotland may have followed as swiftly on the deaths of Malcolm and Margaret as the election of Harold followed on the death of Eadward or the election of Henry on the death of William Rufus. But we can hardly find room for an English expedition to Scotland, for the establishment of a new king, and for a domestic revolution limiting his powers, between the driving out of the English and the last day of the year. One is inclined to think that the Gemót of Gloucester saw a discussion of the affairs of Scotland as well as of the affairs of Normandy, and that the results of that discussion, direct consequences as they were of the death of Malcolm and the election of Donald, were set down under the year in which the chain of events began, though some of them must, almost in the nature of things, have really happened in the year which followed.

Gemót of Gloucester. Christmas, 1093–1094. I am inclined therefore to think that it must have been at the Christmas assembly which decreed the war with Robert that a claimant appeared to demand the Scottish crown at the hands of the southern over-lord. This was Duncan, the son of Malcolm and Ingebiorg. Duncan claims the Scottish crown. He was in truth the eldest of Malcolm’s children, and, though, under the influence of a new set of ideas, it became usual to speak of him as a kind of Ishmael, he was most likely as lawful an heir to the Scottish throne as any of the three kings who were sons of the English saint.[69] In itself the succession of Duncan would have seemed an intermediate course between the succession of Donald and the succession of Margaret’s son Eadgar. But Duncan, given years ago as a hostage to William the Great,[70] had long been a follower of William the Red. Duncan’s Norman education. He lived in his court, and did him faithful service as his man and his knight. He must have been unknown in Scotland, and his feelings and habits must have been those of a Norman rather than those of a Scot. He represented neither the old Scottish traditions which were embodied in Donald nor yet the new foreign reformation which was embodied in Margaret and her sons. It was no wonder then that no party in his father’s kingdom thought of his claims at his father’s death. He receives the crown from William. But he now came to the King’s court; he set forth the usurpation of his uncle Donald and his own rights; he demanded the crown of his father, and did homage for it to the Monarch of Britain.[71] The event is singularly like the earlier event which had placed Duncan’s own father on the Scottish throne; 1054. it is still more like the later event which gave Scotland a momentary king in Edward Balliol. 1332. The King’s designs on Normandy hindered him from either marching himself to the help of Duncan or sending any part of the regular forces of his kingdom. He wins it by the help of Norman and English volunteers. 1094. But Duncan was allowed to get together a body of volunteers, English and French—​doubtless of any nation that he could find—​at whose head he marched into Scotland. He overthrew his uncle Donald, and took possession of the throne by the help of his new allies.[72] Details are lacking; the Scots must have been overthrown for a moment by some sudden attack. Second revolution; the foreigners driven out. What follows is instructive. The reign of Duncan, as a king surrounded by a Norman and English following, was but for a moment. May? 1094. But there was clearly no feeling in Scotland against allowing him to reign, if he were willing to reign as a national Scot. The people, startled for a moment, took heart again. A new movement broke forth; the King was surrounded, and the foreigners who accompanied him were this time, not driven out, but slaughtered. He himself escaped with a few only.[73] But, this work once done, the son of Malcolm was not less willingly received than his brother. Donald was not restored; but Duncan was accepted as King of Scots on condition of his allowing no English or French settlers within his realm.[74]

We may perhaps suspect that this national movement in Scotland was timed so as to grasp the favourable moment when the King of the English, with the mass of his forces, was beyond the sea. This is more clearly marked in the next revolution, which took place towards the end of the year. While King William was still in Normandy, while the Welsh were in triumphant revolt, a powerful confederacy was formed against Duncan. Donald now leagued himself with Malpeter, the Mormaor of Mærne, the representative of the old party of Macbeth, and also with Eadmund, son of Malcolm and Margaret. This last, their only degenerate son, as he is called, joined with his uncle against his half-brother. He was lured, it is said, by the promise of half the kingdom.[75] Death of Duncan and restoration of Donald. November? 1094. Duncan was slain, by treachery, we are told, and Donald began a second reign.[76] This revolution was perhaps among the causes which brought William back from Normandy.[77] But both English and Welsh affairs were in a state which forbade any immediate intervention in Scotland. William had to put up with the insults which he had received, the driving out of his subjects and the slaughter of the king to whom he had given the kingdom. Second reign of Donald. 1094–1097. Donald was allowed to reign without disturbance for three years.

§ 2. The Revolt of Robert of Mowbray.
1095–1096.

Events contemporary with Donald’s second reign. The three years of Donald’s second reign were contemporary with much that we have already told, with the whole dispute between William and Anselm, with the preaching of the crusade, with the acquisition of Normandy. They were contemporary with stirring events in Wales which we shall speak of in another section. And they were contemporary with events in England which, as I have said, have a kind of connexion with the fate of Malcolm which makes it seem on the whole most natural to speak of them at this point. We will now therefore go on to the chief English event of the year which followed the second accession of Donald, namely the revolt of Robert Earl of Northumberland.

Conspiracy against William Rufus. It is not the least strange among the strange events of this reign that the only rebellion against William Rufus within his kingdom, after that which immediately followed his accession, was directly occasioned by one of the few good deeds which are recorded of him. The King did a simple act of justice; one of his greatest nobles at once openly rebelled, and the open rebellion of one brought to light the hidden conspiracy of many more. We may be sure that there had long been a good deal of lurking discontent which was waiting for even a slight opportunity to break forth into a flame. The conspiracy was devised among men of the highest rank and power, some of them near of kindred to the King; and the open rebel was certainly the foremost man of his own generation in the kingdom. There were in the days of Rufus grounds enough for discontent and revolt among any class, and there were special grounds which specially touched the men of highest rank. They are said to have been offended by the King’s general harshness, and, above all, by the strictness of his hunting-code.[78] The head and author of the seditious movement was the stern guardian of the northern frontier of the kingdom, Robert of Mowbray Earl of Northumberland. He is said to have been specially puffed up to rebellion by his successes against Malcolm and his Scots.[79] But, great as he deemed himself, he held that he might become greater by a powerful alliance. The gloomy Earl, with whom speech and laughter were so rare, thought to help his projects by taking a wife. Robert of Mowbray marries Matilda of Laigle. He married Matilda of Laigle, the daughter of that Richer who died so worthily beneath the keep of Sainte-Susanne,[80] the sister of that Gilbert whom we have seen foremost in the work of slaughter among the seditious citizens of Rouen.[81] Her mother Judith was the sister of Earl Hugh of Chester; and Robert seems to have entangled his new uncle in his rebellious schemes. His dealings with the Earl of Chester and the Bishop of Durham. One would have thought that Bishop William of Durham had had enough of rebellion. He was now as high in the King’s favour and counsels as any man in the realm. He was, or at least had been, on bad terms with his neighbour Earl Robert;[82] and it is hard to see what can have been his temptation to join in any seditious movement. Yet we know that there were churchmen concerned in the conspiracy;[83] it is certain that Bishop William lost the King’s favour about this time; and there seems little doubt that he was at least suspected of being in league with the Earl. Other conspirators. Others concerned are said to have been Philip of Montgomery, son of the late Earl of Shrewsbury,[84] Roger of Lacy, great in Herefordshire and in several other shires,[85] and one nearer to the royal house than all, William of Eu. William of Eu, the late stirrer up of strife between the King and his brother. Conspiracy in favour of Stephen of Aumale. The object of the conspiracy was said to be to put the King to death, and to give the crown to Stephen of Aumale, the son of Adelaide, whole sister of the Conqueror, by her third husband, Odo Count of Champagne and lord of Holderness.[86]

In short, the two men who had been the first to put castles into the King’s hands in Normandy were now plotting against him in England. Stephen of Aumale was to receive the English crown at the bidding of William of Eu. No general support for the plot. Such a conspiracy as this must have been merely the device of a few discontented nobles; it could have met with no broad ground of general support among men of any class. No doubt many men of all ranks and of all races would have been well pleased to get rid of William; but there must surely have been few who seriously hoped to set up Stephen of Aumale as his successor. No ground for Stephen’s claim. By a solemn treaty only five years old, the reigning Duke of the Normans was marked out as the successor to the English crown.[87] And if that arrangement was held to be set aside by later warfare between the brothers, there was nothing to bar the natural claims of Henry. Neither Norman nor English feeling could have endured that the man who was at once Norman and English should be set aside for a stranger from Champagne. Neither Norman nor English feeling could have endured that all the sons of the Conqueror should be set aside in favour of the son of his sister. Truly men of any rank or any race had good reason to revolt against William Rufus. But this was like the revolt of the Earls in the days of the elder William,[88] a purely personal and selfish revolt, which called forth no sympathy, Norman or English. Still a large party was ready to revolt on any occasion. And the occasion was presently found.

It was found, as far as Earl Robert was concerned, in a wanton breach of common right and of the law of nations, which it was assumed that the King would treat as an act of defiance against his authority. Four Norwegian trading ships had peacefully anchored in some Northumbrian haven. Earl Robert plunders the Norwegian ships. Earl Robert, his nephew Morel, and their followers, wantonly plundered the ships, and took away their whole cargoes. And the tale is told as if the act of plunder was meant directly as an act of rebellion against the King, whose peace was certainly broken in the most outrageous way.[89] The merchants complain to the King. The merchants, despoiled of all that they had, made their way to the King and laid before him their complaint against the Earl of the Northumbrians.[90] Had such an act been done by any of William’s own following, the injured men would most likely have met with no redress. But plunder done by anybody else on his own account was an outrage on the royal authority—​one might perhaps say an encroachment on the royal monopoly of oppression—​with which the Red King was not minded to put up. William straightway sent the strictest and sternest orders to Earl Robert to restore at once all that had been taken from the Norwegian merchants. Robert refuses redress. The Earl scornfully took no notice. The King then asked the amount of the merchants’ losses, and made it good to them from his own hoard. He is summoned to the King’s court. He then summoned the Earl to his court; but he refused to come.[91]

Such is the story which reached the cloister of Saint Evroul, a story altogether likely in itself, and which well fits in with and explains the entries in our own Chronicle. These bring us into the thick of the regular assemblies of this year of assemblies. The gathering at Rockingham dealt wholly with the affairs of Anselm; Gemót of Winchester. March 25, 1095. to the regular Easter assembly at Winchester which so soon followed it, Earl Robert, though specially summoned, refused to come. The King was very wroth against him, and sent word that, if he did not wish to be altogether put out of the King’s peace, he must come to the court to be held at Pentecost.[92] Signs in the heavens seem to have foretold that something was coming. The falling stars. April 4. It was now, on the night of the feast of Easter and again ten days later, that a crowd of stars was seen to fall from heaven, not one or two, but so thickly that no man could tell them.[93] If the stars fought against Malcolm on the day of Saint Brice, it was only in their courses, and no chronicler has recorded the fact. But it looks as if this special Easter shower, of which we have elsewhere heard other meanings,[94] was by some at least held to portend the fall of the great earl of the North. Messages between the King and Robert. The time between Easter and Pentecost, the time so busily occupied in another range of subjects by the coming of Cardinal Walter and the acknowledgement of Pope Urban,[95] was no less busily occupied by an exchange of messages between the King and his undutiful subject. Robert, like Godwine two-and-forty years before, demanded hostages and a safe-conduct, before he would risk himself before the Assembly.[96] This the King refused; Robert, arraigned on a definite charge of open robbery, had no such claim to hostages as Godwine, as King Malcolm, or even as his own neighbour Bishop William. Whitsun Gemót. Windsor, May 13, 1095. The Whitsun-feast was held; the King was at Windsor—​not at Westminster—​and all his Witan with him. Anselm was there, to be received into the King’s favour, and to engage to observe the customs of the realm.[97] But the Earl of the Northumbrians was not there.[98] The two accounts fit in perfectly without contradiction or difficulty. One gives us the cause of the special summons of Earl Robert to the Gemót; the other gives us its exact date and form.

The King’s march. Rufus, thus defied, at once took to arms. It would seem that he did not wholly rely on his mercenaries, but called out the national force of the kingdom.[99] He was again the King of the English, marching at the head of his people. He was marching against the rebel fortresses of the North, as he had once marched against Tunbridge, Pevensey, and Rochester. His motives. But these great preparations were not made simply to avenge the wrongs of the Norwegian merchants. Their wrongs were the outward occasion, and that was all. The refusal of Earl Robert to come to the King’s court was the counterpart of the more general refusal of the Norman nobles to come to the Easter Assembly seven years earlier.[100] The King knew, or had good reason to suspect, that there was again a wide-spread conspiracy afloat to deprive him of his crown and life. Of this conspiracy the open disobedience of Earl Robert was simply the first outward sign; the affair of the Norwegian merchants had merely brought matters to a head. Rufus may even have made use of their wrongs as a pretext for proving Robert’s doubtful loyalty. Robert was as yet the only open rebel. When the King drew the sword, he met with no resistance anywhere save where the Earl of the Northumbrians was in possession. Robert’s accomplices remained accomplices and conspirators; they did not dare to risk the chances of open rebellion. The Earl may have thought that the strength which had twice overcome a King of Scots might defy a King of the English also.[101] Robert resists. At all events, Robert of Mowbray withstood the King in arms, and a stirring and varied campaign followed.

It appears however from an incidental notice that Earl Robert and his fellows by no means trusted only to movements within the realm. Help expected from Normandy. It is certainly strange that a conspiracy in which William of Eu could be even suspected of taking a part should have found any support in Normandy; yet in those times men changed sides so easily that it is not impossible that he might have been again intriguing with Duke Robert himself. It is still more likely that some intrigue was going on, not with the Norman Duke but with the enemies of Rufus in Normandy as well as in England. It is certain that an invasion of south-eastern England was at this time daily dreaded;[102] and it is perhaps more likely that William of Eu, Stephen of Aumale, and the rest, were planning an expedition at their own risk than that Duke Robert was designing anything with the regular forces of Normandy. The invasion was plainly looked on as a serious danger; but there is no reason to think that it ever took place. The King thought it needful to take special means for guarding the coast. The King marches to Nottingham. He had gone on his northern march as far as Nottingham, accompanied not only, as we might expect, by many of his nobles, but what we might less have looked for, by both the archbishops and by the Cardinal Bishop of Albano.[103] Anselm’s command in Kent. One might almost think that some special news was brought to the King at this point; for it was now that Anselm, in this his short season of renewed favour with the King, was sent back to guard his city and diocese. He received the trust from the King’s own mouth; he went back to Canterbury, whither a writ from the King followed him bidding him stay in care of the city, ready at any moment, when news should be brought from the threatened havens, at once to gather together horse and foot for the defence of the land.[104] Anselm went back to his metropolis, and there stayed, as we have seen, ready to discharge these unusual duties, which, as the expected invasion never came, did not in the end involve any military action on his part.

Meanwhile the King went on, taking with him the Archbishop of York, who at Nottingham was already in his own province and diocese. The King draws near to Northumberland. When the march had gone on somewhat further, when the King and his host were drawing near to the borders of the Northumbrian earldom, that is, we may suppose, when they were near the banks of the Tyne, an incident happened which showed that the enemies of Rufus had other schemes besides those of open warfare either at home or abroad.[105] Gilbert of Clare or of Tunbridge, of whom we have already heard as a rebel in earlier days,[106] and who seems now to be looked on as a traitor in the King’s camp, calls the King aside, and, to his amazement, falls at his feet and craves his pardon for his offences. Confession of Gilbert of Clare. Let the King promise him forgiveness, and he will do something which shall deliver him from a great danger.[107] Rufus wonders and hesitates, but, after a little debate in his own mind, he promises the pardon that is asked for. Gilbert then warns the King not to enter a certain wood—​have we again the tale of the hunting-party as the scene of assassination?[108] He was himself one of a body who had plotted the King’s death, and a party of them were now in the wood ready to slay him. He told the King their number and names;[109] but the story reads as if no immediate action was taken against them. The conspirators are baulked of their prey, and the King’s host marches on to attack the fortresses of the rebel Earl.[110]

Defence of Robert’s fortresses. Robert of Mowbray had made good preparations for defence. The main body of his followers, among them the men highest in rank and most trusted in valour, guarded the great frontier fortress of his earldom, The New Castle. the New Castle which Duke Robert had reared to guard the way to the further north by the old line of the Ælian Bridge.[111] Placed opposite the scene of Walcher’s slaughter at Gateshead,[112] it rose above the Tyne with far more of the usual position of a fortress than would be dreamed by one who merely passes so strangely near to it on the modern railway, or who lights almost by chance on gateway and castle imbedded in the streets of the modern town. The gateway, even the keep as it now stands, are both of later date than the time of our story. But the days of Monkchester were passed; the New Castle was already a place of arms, a strong post standing right in the way of the King’s advance against the rebellious land. Lower down the tidal stream, beyond the relics—​they were then still something more than relics—​of the great Roman rampart which left its name at Wallknol, at Wallcar, and at Wallsend[113]—​fast by the mouth of the estuary whose shores and whose waters are now so thickly set with the works of modern industry—​the Tynemouth. Earl’s castle of Tynemouth at once sheltered the rising monastery of Saint Oswine and guarded the approach to the river and to all to which the river led. Tynemouth was held by the Earl’s brother; Bamburgh. Robert himself, far to the north, kept the great stronghold of all, the old seat of Northumbrian power, which frowns over land and sea from the basaltic rock of Bamburgh. The King’s first attack was lucky; we have no details; but we read that the New Castle was taken, and that all the men that were in it were kept in ward. Taking of the New Castle. The choicest men of Earl Robert’s following were thus in the King’s hands; the inland centre of his power was lost; but he and his brother still held out in their fastnesses by the Ocean.

Tynemouth and Bamburgh both stood long sieges. The strong site of the monastic stronghold enabled it to bear up for two months, while the fortress of Ida remained, as far as any strictly military operation was concerned, untaken during the whole war. Siege of Tynemouth. Tynemouth, which had so lately seen the burial of Malcolm, had now to endure the assaults of the royal force in the cause of Malcolm’s chief enemy. The holy place of Saint Oswine was strong alike by nature and art. Description of the site. At the mouth of the great Northumbrian river, on that bank of it which lay within Robert’s earldom, two headlands, divided by a small bay, stand forth boldly to meet the waves of the German Ocean. In later times the fortified precinct took in both points. Both came within the wall and ditch which cut off the peninsulas from the mainland. The castle of Tynemouth, strictly so called, covered the southern height immediately above the river. The northern promontory was crowned by the church and the monastic buildings, themselves sheltered by a vast gatehouse, which itself grew into a castle. Such, there is reason to believe, was the arrangement in the days of Malcolm and William. The castle of Robert of Mowbray rose sheer above the estuary, on its left bank. To the north, on the other headland, protected by a smaller fortress, stood the church and monastery which were growing up at his bidding, a tribute paid by the conquerors to the ancient worthies of the land. The monastic peninsula. The peninsula crowned by the monastic stronghold stretches forth into the waters, like a miniature of that which is at once the oldest and the newest Syracuse, since the art of man joined the island of Ortygia to the mainland of Sicily. While the neck is strengthened by works of defence, the rocky headland rises boldly from the waves on two sides. To the south the ground rises more gently above the bay between the two peninsulas, the bay to which the monastery above it gave the name of the Prior’s haven. The town which grew up in after times sprang up directly to the west of the approach to the northern headland; it now spreads itself on all sides save only on the two headlands themselves. Taking of Tynemouth. July? 1095. The first attack must have been made from the older site of the town; the small fortress, that most likely which guarded the neck of the monastic headland, was taken. The main castle to the south fell at the end of two months, and the Earl’s brother and the knights who defended it shared the fate of the defenders of the New Castle.

And now came the hardest struggle of all, the struggle for the old home of Ida and Bebbe. The castle of Bamburgh. Bebbanburh, Bamburgh—​the royal city of Bernicia, which its founder had fenced first with a hedge and then with a wall or earthwork—​the city small but strong, with its steep height approached only by steps[114]—​though its main purpose was military and not religious, contained within its walls a sanctuary and a relic as worshipful as aught that was sheltered by Tynemouth or Jarrow or Durham itself. The relic of Saint Oswald. The ancient church of Bamburgh was honoured by the presence of the wonder-working hand of the martyred Bretwalda Oswald. That relic had in earlier days helped, along with the prayers of Aidan, to save Bamburgh from the fires of Penda; we are not told whether it was by the favour of the martyr that the elder Waltheof sheltered himself within the impregnable walls, while his valiant son marched forth to victory. The city, the small city which took in the space only of a few fields, had doubtless by this time given way to the Norman fortress, strengthened by all the arts which the Norman had brought with him. The castle precincts, in their widest extent, clearly cover the whole of the ancient site; at the south-western end they are still approached by steps which doubtless represent those which in the days of the old Northumbrian chronicler were the only means of mounting the height. At Bamburgh, as elsewhere, we are met by the never-failing difficulty which besets the student of the castles of that age. Can any of the work at Bamburgh which bears the impress of Norman art be safely assigned to the eleventh century? The keep. Or must we give up all to the twelfth, and believe that no part of the great centre of the building, the keep “huge and square,” was already in being when Robert of Mowbray defied the Red King from his rock? On such a point it is dangerous to be over-positive. The surrounding walls are of all dates down to the basest modern imitations; the chapel which guarded the relic of Saint Oswald, standing apart in the great court with its eastern apse overlooking the sea, was clearly, when perfect, no mean work of the next age. But whatever was the character or the material of the defences of Robert’s day, they were doubtless as strong as any skill within the Northumbrian earldom could make them. There, from the castle raised on the land side on the bulwarks of the rock out of which its walls and bastions grow, rising on the sea side over deep and shifting hills of sand, the eye might take in the long indented coast, the sea dotted with islands of which many play a part in the sacred story of northern England,[115]—​Farn and its fellows hard by, hallowed by the abode and death of Saint Cuthberht—​Holy Island itself further to the north-west, the landscape bounded in the far distance by the border hills of the two British kingdoms, beyond which Malcolm no longer stood ready to ravage the pastures of Northumberland. Robert defends Bamburgh against the King. Within that ancient fortress, rich with so many earlier associations, the proud and gloomy Earl now kept his ground, adding a new and stirring page to the long history of Bamburgh. His brother and his best knights were the King’s prisoners; but, strong on his rocky height, the Earl of the Northumbrians, heedless of the lesson of seven years earlier, dared to bid defiance to the King of the English and to the whole strength of his kingdom.

Strength of the position. And in truth the event proved that the rebellious daring of Robert of Mowbray had better grounds than the daring of those who had held Rochester and Pevensey, Tynemouth and the New Castle, against their sovereign. The well of the purest water, hollowed out on the highest point of the rock, and then, or at some later day, taken in within the massive walls of the huge keep, made Robert safe from all such dangers as threatened the Ætheling Henry when he held out on the rock of Saint Michael.[116] Direct attacks fail. All the power and skill of the Red King was brought to bear upon the ancient stronghold; but all was in vain; the castle of Bebbe was not to be taken by any open attack. William therefore took to slower means of warfare. Making of the Malvoisin. He made one of those towers which were so often made in such cases, to act as a check on the besieged castle, to form in fact an imperfect kind of blockade. This tower must have stood on the land side, to cut off all hope of help from any friendly quarter. It therefore could not have stood very far from the site of the present village; and in the fields nearly south of the castle some faint traces of earthworks seem not unlikely to mark the site of the tower to which the King gave the significant name of Malvoisin. Its effects. The new work is described as exercising all the energies of the royal army, and as striking such fear into the hearts of the besieged that many of Robert’s party now forsook him and entered the King’s service. Alleged despair of Robert. We are even told that the fierce Earl looked out from the height of Bamburgh in all fear and sadness, crying out to his accomplices by name to be mindful of the traitorous oaths which they had sworn to him. The King and his friends were merry as they heard, and none of those who were appealed to, tormented as they were with fear and shame, went back to share the Earl’s waning fortunes. Be this as it may, as far as open force went, Bamburgh and its lord remained unsubdued. The castle still not taken. To bring either of them under his power, the King and his followers were fain to have recourse to false promises and cruel threats.

The Evil Neighbour of Bamburgh was built; it was well stocked with guards, arms, and victuals. But Bamburgh itself was not taken any the more. William did not in this case, as he did in some of his continental enterprises, throw up the whole undertaking, because he did not succeed in the first or second attack. So to have done would have been pretty much the same as throwing up his crown; it would have been to unteach the great lesson of his reign, and to declare that the Earl of the Northumbrians was stronger than the King of the English. He might turn away in wilfulness from this or that Norman or Cenomannian fortress which he had attacked in wilfulness; but he knew the art of reigning better than to leave Bamburgh in the possession of a rebel earl. The King goes away. The work was to go on; but he was so far tired of it that he left it to be done by others. When the Malvoisin was well strengthened, the King turned away, and appeared no more before Bamburgh during the rest of the campaign.

Michaelmas, 1095. When Rufus left Bamburgh, he went southward; he then went to the war in Wales, and left the garrison of the Malvoisin to keep watch over their besieged neighbour. It may be left to casuists in chivalry to judge whether the knightly king approved of the means which were now taken in order to entrap the besieged earl. Robert entrapped by a false message. The garrison of the New Castle, doubtless not without the knowledge of the garrison of the Malvoisin, sent a false message to Robert, saying that, if he came thither privily, he would be received into the castle. The Earl, naturally well pleased at such a prospect of winning back his lost stronghold, set forth by night for the New Castle at the head of thirty knights. The men from the Malvoisin watched and followed him, and sent to the men of the New Castle to say that he was on the way. Knowing nothing of what was going on, Earl Robert drew near to the New Castle on a Sunday, expecting, it would seem, to be received there with welcome. His hopes were vain; he was taken, and the more part of his followers also were taken, killed, or wounded. He flees to Tynemouth. The version which goes most into detail says that, when he saw that he was betrayed by the garrison of the New Castle, he fled, with a part at least of his following, to his own monastery at Tynemouth. It is not easy to see how this could be, unless he was able either to win back the small fortress on the neck of the monastic peninsula, or else to climb up from the seaside at some less steep or less strongly defended point of the height. But the tale is so told that there must be at least some kernel of truth in it. He is besieged in the monastery, We read that the Earl stood something like a siege in his own monastery. He was able, with his small party, to defend himself in it for six days, and to kill and wound many of his assailants. At last, on the sixth day, he himself received a severe wound in the leg; the whole of his followers were taken, some of them also as wounded men. The Earl, himself among the latter, contrived to drag himself to the church of his own rearing, where still lay the body of the Scottish King whom some looked on as his victim. If claims of sanctuary were thought of, they were not allowed, and one who had turned the consecrated precinct into a castle had perhaps little claim to plead such privileges, even within his own foundation. taken, and imprisoned. Earl Robert was dragged away from his own church, and was kept in prison to await the King’s pleasure.

Bamburgh defended by Matilda of Laigle. A tale of twenty years back now repeats itself in our story. A strong castle is again defended by a valiant bride. As Norwich, after the revolt and flight of Ralph of Wader, was defended by Emma of Breteuil, so Bamburgh, after the revolt and capture of Robert of Mowbray, was defended by Matilda of Laigle. Married just as the revolt broke out, she had had, we are told, but little taste of joyful or peaceful wedlock; but she was at least zealous in the cause of her husband. She had Morel to her counsellor and captain, and the two held out in the ancient stronghold against all attacks. November, 1095. It was now winter, and King William had come back from Snowdon, not covered with much glory. He felt no mind to renew the siege of Bamburgh in his own person; but he bade that the captive Earl should be taken thither, and led before the walls, with the threat to his wife and nephew that, if the castle was not at once given up, the eyes of its lord should be then and there seared out in their sight. She yields to save her husband’s eyes. To this threat Matilda and Morel yielded, and the gates of the unconquered fortress were thrown open to the King’s forces. The valiant Countess thus saved her husband’s eyes; but his eyes were all that she could save. Robert was sent back to prison at Windsor, to live in bonds, at least for a season, and in no case to return to the rights and duties of an earl or a husband. Later history of Robert; two versions. But there are two widely different stories as to his later fate. The local history of Saint Alban’s told how one who, however guilty towards others, was at least a benefactor to that house, was allowed to spend his remaining days as a monk within its walls. At Saint Evroul a widely different tale was believed. It was there recorded by the contemporary writer that Robert survived his capture thirty years, but that the whole of that time was passed in hopeless imprisonment. If so, he must have been looked on as dangerous by the calm prudence of Henry no less than by the wrath or the revenge of Rufus. The story indeed runs that his imprisonment was deemed so irrevocable that it was held to amount to a civil death. The once proud Earl of Northumberland was counted to have passed away from among men as much as if the grave had closed over him alongside of Malcolm in his own Tynemouth. Later history of Matilda; her second marriage and divorce. By a special permission from Pope Paschal, Matilda was allowed to marry again, as though she had been his widow and not his wife. Nigel of Albini became her second husband; but, after the death of her brother Gilbert of Laigle, he thought he could better himself by marriage in another quarter. His marriage with Matilda was declared void, not on the ground that Robert was alive, but because of some kindred, real or alleged, between Robert and Nigel. The papal dispensation must have been badly drawn, if it did not provide for the lesser irregularity as well as for the greater. Of Matilda we hear no more; Nigel took him another wife of the house of Gournay. Gerard had by that time died on his way to the crusade;[117] his widow Eadgyth had married again, and their son Hugh was lord of Gournay. Their daughter, who inherited the name of Gundrada from her mother’s mother, took the place of the forsaken Matilda, who was thus left in a strange plight, as the widow, so to speak, of two living husbands.

Morel turns King’s evidence. Meanwhile her partner in the defence of Bamburgh, Morel, the nephew and steward of the fallen Earl, made his peace with the King by naming all who had any share in the late conspiracy. Not a few men of high rank, clerical and lay, were accused by him.[118] The time of the Midwinter Gemót drew nigh, at which the offenders would regularly be brought for trial. The King’s prisons were full,[119] and he determined that the gaol delivery should be a striking and a solemn one. Christmas Gemót of 1095–1096. The Assembly of that Christmas-tide was to be a Mickle Gemót indeed, a Gemót like those which had gathered in King Eadward’s day beneath the walls of London and in King William’s day upon the plain of Salisbury. A summons of special urgency went forth, bidding all men who held any land of the King, if they wished to be deemed worthy of the King’s peace, to come to his court at the appointed time.[120] The call was answered. The appointed place of meeting was Windsor, and there the Assembly came together. But the business to be done needed a longer time than the usual twelve days of Christmas, and the gathering was greater than the royal castle and its courts could hold. Adjourned from Windsor to Salisbury. January 13, 1096. The work began at Windsor; but an adjournment was needed, and on the octave of the Epiphany in the opening year we find the King and his Witan at Salisbury.[121] The wide fields which had seen the great review and the great homage in the days of the elder William could alone hold the crowd which came together to share in the great court of doom which was now holden by the younger.

Constitutional importance of the meeting. The Gemót of this winter, and specially the strict general summons sent forth by the King, are of high constitutional importance. They show how, even under such a king as Rufus, the old constitutional forms went on. They show how great is the error of those who dream that the Norman kingship in England was as thorough a despotism in form as it undoubtedly was in substance. Continuance of the old forms. In the eleventh century, as in the sixteenth, the whole future of English history turned on the fact that constitutional forms still went on, that assemblies were still brought together, even if they came together for little more than to register the edicts of the King.[122] So now Rufus himself, when about to make a great display of kingly power, specially summons no small part of the nation to take a share in his acts. Import of the summons. On the one hand, the need of the summons shows that, unless at some specially exciting moment, men did not flock eagerly to such gatherings.[123] On the other hand, the fact of the summons shows that kings then knew, that Rufus himself knew, that the gathering of such an assembly was both a sign and a source, not of weakness but of strength, on the part of the kingly power.[124] But in the form of the summons we may see that the assembly, though still large, is gradually narrowing. Tenants-in-chief only summoned. The summons goes, not to all freemen, not to all land-owners, but only to the King’s tenants-in-chief. Their great number. These, it must be remembered, were a very large body, including land-owners on every scale, from the greatest to the smallest. And it must be further remembered that in this body a vast majority of the influential members were strangers by birth, but that a great numerical proportion, most likely a numerical majority, were natives. The King’s thegn, who had kept a scrap of his old estate, was as much a member of the court as Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury or Earl Walter of Buckingham, though he was not so likely to be listened to in any debate that might arise as Earl Hugh or Earl Walter was. Still the special summons to the King’s tenants-in-chief marks a change; it marks the growth of the new ideas. The immediate reason was doubtless to be found in the main object for which the Assembly came together. The main work of the earlier Gemót of Salisbury was that all men in the realm, of whatever lord they held, should become the men of the King. Comparison with the Conqueror’s Gemót at Salisbury. William the Great therefore summoned the men of other lords, who had not up to that moment been his own men, who owed obedience to him as head of the kingdom, but who was not bound to him by any more personal tie. He summoned them in order that they might bind themselves to him by that personal tie, that they might become his men as well as his subjects. But the main work of the present Gemót was to sit in judgement on a crowd of offenders, of various ranks and orders, but all of whom were likely to be tenants-in-chief of the King. According to the notions which were coming in, the right court for their trial was the court of their peers, their fellow tenants-in-chief. The King, who could summon whom he would, who sometimes summoned few and sometimes many, this time, for this special purpose, summoned the whole body of his tenants-in-chief, great and small, and summoned no others. Effects of the practice of summons. But, as every summons tends practically to the exclusion of those who are not summoned, this summons of a particular class marks a stage in the process by which the Assembly shrank up from the crowd which decreed the restoration of Godwine to a House of Lords of the reign of Henry the Eighth.[125] Still the actual gathering, even of the summoned members only, must have been very great. Action of the Assembly. When it came together, the Assembly must have followed the same law as all other assemblies of that age. Practically it decreed as the King willed; only a few of the great men were likely to say anything to guide the King’s will; the mass of the assembly were not likely to do more than to make the King’s acts their own by crying Yea, Yea. We must however remember that they had not the slightest temptation to cry Nay, Nay. No general sympathy with the accused. The mass of the inhabitants of the land, Norman and English alike, were not likely to have the faintest sympathy with any one who really had a share in the late treason. The only question was whether any were accused who had no share in it. In the case of those who were charged only with conspiracy and not with open revolt, this might easily be. Otherwise the Red King, in the vengeance which he now took, did no more than justice, as justice was deemed in his day. But his justice was far sharper than the justice of the old kings, far sharper than the justice of his father. And the tone in which the story is told implies that men at the time felt that it was so.

Sickness of the Bishop of Durham. One of the great men of the realm, who, whether guilty or not, seems to have been at least suspected, died, while the Assembly was in session, before any formal charge had been brought against him. Before the Bishop of Durham came to Windsor, it was known in his own diocese that he had not long to live. Portents foretelling his death. One of his knights, Boso by name, had, while lying under a dangerous sickness, been favoured with trances and visions, which told him much that was comforting about the monks of Durham, and much that was fearful about other folk. He saw the old inhabitants of the land, he saw the new French settlers, above all, he saw the priests’ wives—​these seem to be looked on as three classes of offenders, gradually increasing in blackness—​suffering each a grievous doom.[126] His visions about the Bishop himself might perhaps point to an intermediate destiny; at all events they were understood as implying his speedy death.[127] His work at Durham. 1083. 1093. His work perhaps was done. Thirteen years before he had filled the church of Durham with monks;[128] three years before he had begun the great work of its rebuilding; and, by pressing it on with almost incredible speed, he had carried it on so far as to set an example of unsurpassed grandeur in its own style, an example which his own monks could not follow, but which Randolf Flambard could.[129] He is summoned to take his trial. William of Saint-Calais came to the Gemót, and was summoned by the King to appear to take his trial.[130] He pleaded sickness as his excuse for not appearing. Rufus declared, with his usual oath, that the excuse was a feigned one.[131] He sickens and dies. December 25, 1095-January 1, 1096. It was however thoroughly real. Bishop William was sick, and sick unto death. He was smitten on the day of the Nativity, and died on the day of the Circumcision.[132] His death-bed. He was comforted in his sickness by the presence and exhortations of several of his brother bishops who had come together for the business of the Assembly. There was Anselm whom he had withstood at Rockingham; there was his own metropolitan Thomas; there was Walkelin of Winchester; there was John of Bath, born, like himself and Anselm, beyond the bounds either of England or of Normandy. Debate as to his burying-place. These prelates debated concerning the place of his burial. They argued that he who had done such great things for Saint Cuthberht’s abbey should be buried in the place of highest honour within its walls. He himself declined any such place. He would be no party to any breach of Saint Cuthberht’s own rule, which forbade that any man should be buried within his minster.[133] The bishops therefore ruled that he should be buried in the chapter-house, so that his monks, when they came together, should have the tomb of their founder ever before their eyes.[134] So it was; He is buried in the chapter-house. he was borne to Durham, and there laid in the place which the bishops had chosen for him, among the tears and wailings of the brotherhood which he had founded, any one of whom, we are told, would gladly have died for him.[135]

This touching picture of the death which ended the varied life of William of Saint-Calais comes as an episode in the middle of the stern doings of the Gemót of Windsor and Salisbury. The Red King did not bear the sword in vain. Sentences of the Gemót. Yet, if his justice was sharp towards those whom it did smite, it was certainly somewhat capricious, or at least guided by expediency, with regard to those whom it smote and those whom it failed to smite. Some of the offenders were men of the highest rank, some even, it is implied, of the rank of Earl. But these powerful rebels, ashamed and weakened by the fall of their brother of Northumberland, were now deemed fitting objects of mercy. By the advice of the Wise Men, they were spared a public trial;[136] but some of them were made to pay a heavy price for being left safe in life, limb, and estate. Hugh of Shrewsbury buys his pardon. One is mentioned by name. Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury, who was at least suspected of a share in the plot, was dealt with privately by the King as his father had been at Arundel.[137] He bought his restoration to favour at the high price of three thousand pounds.[138] Roger of Lacy. Roger of Lacy lost his lands and was banished, as he would have been in the days of King Eadward, and his possessions were given to his loyal brother Hugh. But heavier penalties, unknown in King Eadward’s days, were in store for others of the conspirators, including one of the loftiest descent. January 13, 1097. At the adjourned meeting at Salisbury, Geoffrey of Baynard, bearing a name famous in London city, appealed no less a man than William of Eu of treason against the King, of conspiring to slay him, and to give his crown to Stephen of Champagne.[139] Combat of Geoffrey of Baynard and William of Eu. The charge was denied, and, as both parties were Frenchmen, the trial was, by the law of the Conqueror, referred to the wager of battle. The judicial combat which followed is memorable in the history of the time, and forms one of the landmarks in our early jurisprudence.

Defeat of William of Eu. On the plain of Salisbury the combatants met, and William of Eu was overthrown.[140] By the laws of the combat his defeat was full evidence of his guilt. But what was to be his punishment? Save the case of the beheading of Waltheof, there was no precedent in the ordinary jurisprudence either of England or of Normandy for any sentence harsher than banishment, forfeiture, and imprisonment.[141] The older English precedents went for banishment and forfeiture. The precedents of Normandy and of Norman rule in England went for imprisonment, such an imprisonment, it might be, as that of Robert of Mowbray. For the course actually taken there was no precedent in either land, unless it were the dealings of Harold the son of Cnut with the Ætheling Ælfred.[142] Sentence of mutilation on William of Eu. The punishment decreed was that of bodily mutilation. Urged by Hugh of Chester. It is said that this course was proposed by Earl Hugh of Chester, and that on a singular ground. William of Eu was the husband of the Earl’s sister—​her name is not mentioned. He had neglected his wife, while he had three children by a mistress.[143] If this was to be ground for the loss of eyes or limbs, the brothers of the Countess Ermentrude would have had a right to demand that the portly person of Earl Hugh should be cut down to a shapeless trunk.[144] Feeling with regard to mutilation. Mutilation, it should be remembered, was a familiar punishment, a punishment which in that generation aroused no horror when the persons so dealt with were held to be real criminals.[145] But, with that common inconsistency which reverses the sound rule of smiting the leaders and sparing the commons, mutilation, death, or any heavy punishment, seems always to have aroused horror, or at least amazement, when it was inflicted on any criminal of lofty rank. Such things had been done in the isle of Britain and out of it, but hardly by the solemn sentence of the King of the English at the head of his Witan. But now William of Eu was blinded, and underwent a fouler mutilation as well.[146] His sentence was seemingly carried out at Salisbury, perhaps in sight of the assembly. Are we to infer that any show of indignation was called forth by the bloody sight, when we read directly afterwards that some of the lord of Eu’s fellow-sufferers were taken to London, and were blinded or otherwise mutilated there?[147]

Story of Arnulf of Hesdin. If we may trust a tale to be found in one of those secondary writers who often preserve scraps of truth, another accused man appealed to the wager of battle with better luck than William of Eu. This was Arnulf of Hesdin, a man whose name is familiar enough to us in Domesday, though it does not call up any distinct personal idea like the King’s unlucky kinsman.[148] He is set before us as a man of great bodily stature, brave and active, and in the enjoyment of large possessions, out of which he and his wife Emmeline had made gifts to the abbey of Gloucester.[149] He was charged, unjustly and enviously we are told, with the same crime as the rest.[150] His innocence proved by battle. He defended himself by his champion, who proved his lord’s innocence by overthrowing a man of the King’s who was matched against him.[151] But Arnulf was so stirred up with wrath and grief at the unjust charge, that, notwithstanding the King’s entreaties to stay, he threw up all the lands that he held of him, and left England for ever.[152] He goes to the Crusade, Before the end of the year, the Crusade offered him worthy occupation elsewhere. He marched with the Christian host as far as Antioch; he there fell sick, and declined all medical help; none should heal him save Him for whose sake he had gone on pilgrimage. and dies. Arnulf, professing the opposite doctrine to Asa of Judah, fared no better than that king. Antioch was the last stage reached by the armed pilgrim of Hesdin.[153]

Confiscation of lands. Arnulf, according to this story, became landless, as far as England was concerned, by his own act. Others underwent the same loss by sentence, it seems, of the Assembly. Count Odo of Champagne and many others lost their lands.[154] In one case only does death seem to have been inflicted. William of Alderi is condemned to death. William of Alderi, cousin and steward of William of Eu, was, as the Chronicle tells us, “hanged on rood.”[155] This somewhat startling formula doubtless means nothing but ordinary hanging; but it seemingly marks hanging of any kind as something which was not ordinary. As to the guilt or innocence of William of Alderi we have contradictory accounts. One weighty authority declares him to have been a sharer in the plot.[156] Others class him among many brave and guiltless men who were ruined by the charges brought by Morel and by Geoffrey of Baynard.[157] Guilty or innocent, he was, we are told, a man of high birth, goodly presence, and lofty spirit.[158] He was moreover the King’s gossip, bound to him by the same tie which bound Morel to Malcolm. We thus incidentally learn that there were those whom William Rufus had held at the font, and for whose Christian faith and Christian life he had pledged himself. But the spiritual kindred went for nothing with the Red King. The King refuses to spare him. Many of the great men are said to have earnestly begged for the life of William of Alderi, and to have striven to move the King’s greed by a mighty bribe. The Conqueror had refused Harold’s weight in gold as the price of his Christian burial; his son refused three times the weight of William of Alderi, both in gold and in silver, as the price of his life.[159] Why Rufus was so bent on his death does not appear; but nothing could move him. It marks the way in which the King’s will practically ordered everything, even in so great an assembly of the realm as that which had now come together, that William of Alderi was condemned and hanged without any attempt to rescue him, though many believed him to be guiltless, and though powerful men were eager to save him. His pious end. When hope was gone, he made an ending at once as pious and, according to the ideas of other ages, more manly than the ending of Waltheof. He confessed his sins to Bishop Osmund, and was, seemingly at his own asking, scourged in the new-built minster and the other churches of the city on the waterless hill.[160] Then he gave away his clothes to the poor, and went naked or slightly clad to the place of hanging, staining his limbs with blood by often kneeling on the rough stones.[161] The Bishop and a crowd of people followed him to the place. He then made the most solemn protestations of his innocence. The Bishop sprinkled him with holy water, said the commendatory prayer, and then withdrew.[162] It was not for Osmund of Salisbury, whatever it might have been for Odo of Bayeux or Geoffrey of Coutances, to look on what was next to come. The work of death was then done, and all who beheld wondered that not a groan escaped the victim as death drew near, and not a sigh in the act of dying.[163]

Last days of William of Eu. There was thus a marked difference in the fate of the kinsmen and chief officers of the two leaders, if leaders they both were, in the conspiracy. The steward and cousin of William of Eu was done to death, while his master underwent a fate which to modern ideas seems worse than death. We are not told how long William of Eu lived on in blindness and misery; but his punishment did not involve forfeiture, at all events not corruption of blood; for a few years later we find his son Henry in possession of his county.[164] End of Morel. The steward and nephew of Robert of Mowbray seems to have gained but little by the act which, if it were formally allowed to be loyalty to the King, was likely to be far more commonly looked on as treason to his immediate lord. When he saw that his kinsman and master was condemned to life-long bonds, he left England, and died in banishment, poor and hated of all men.[165]

§ 3. The Conquest and Revolt of Wales.
1093–1097.

Relations with Wales. These years, so rich in events in Scotland and on the English lands nearest to the Scottish border, were at least equally rich in events on the other border of the English kingdom, towards the lands which were still held by the remnant of our British predecessors. Wars with the Welsh may be looked for, as a matter of course, in every reign during this period; but in the reign of William Rufus such wars form a special feature, and the position which they hold is a little singular. Nature of the Welsh wars of Rufus. It is plain from the records of the time, it is still plainer from the results, that this reign was a time of great and lasting advance at the cost of the Britons. It was the time when large parts of Wales were more or less fully brought under the authority of the English crown. Territorial advance and military ill-success. It is still more distinctly the time when Norman adventurers, subjects of the English crown, carved out for themselves, as its vassals, possessions and lordships within the British land. Yet the first impression which we draw from the writers who record the British warfare of this reign is that it was a time of ill success on the English side, especially in those campaigns in which the King himself took a part. The Chronicler records an expedition, and he sends up a wail at its ill luck. Nothing came of it; horses and men not a few were lost; the Welsh escaped to their moors and mountains where no man might come at them. One chief is put to flight in a battle, but the others go on doing mischief all the same.[166] The same story comes almost every year; one would think that the warfare of the Red King with the Welsh was a warfare than which none was ever more bootless. And a historian who aspires to more of critical and philosophical insight sums up the whole British warfare of the reign as a distinct case of failure.[167] Yet it is clear from the result that it was not so. And one passage in the Chronicle seems to give us the key to the whole matter. “When the King saw that he could there further nothing of his will, he came back into this land, and took rede that he might let make castles on the borders.”[168] Effect of the building of castles. An expedition which seemed mere failure, in which many men and horses were lost, while the Welsh escaped to moors and mountains with hardly any loss at all, was really successful in the long run, if it led to the building of a border castle. The Britons fled unhurt to their mountains; but while they lurked in the fastnesses where none might come at them, the most valuable part of their land was taken from them bit by bit. When they came down again from the mountains, they found a castle built, they found so much land as the castle could protect changed into a settlement of strangers. The lands might be harried; the castle might at some favourable moment be broken down; but it was sure to spring up again and again to do its work. The lasting possession of the fertile land had passed away to the invaders; the moors and mountains alone were left to the sons of the soil.

Welsh campaigns of Harold and of William Rufus. The mention of these Welsh wars naturally carries us back to the thought of the great Welsh campaign of a generation earlier. We see how true, from one point of view, was the saying of the next century that none since Harold had known how to deal with the Welsh as Harold had known.[169] As a matter of military success, the failures of William Rufus stand out in marked contrast to the victories of Harold. The Red King had no pillars to set up to mark where he had overcome the Briton in open fight.[170] A single word helps us to at least one part of the cause. Use of horses. Harold, in his victorious campaign, must have undergone some loss of men, but he underwent no loss of horses. He found that the English tactics were not suited for British warfare, and he made his housecarls turn themselves into light-armed Welshmen.[171] But the Norman tactics were still less suited for British warfare than the English. There were places in the moors and mountains which the mailed housecarl might reach, if with difficulty, but which the mounted knight could not reach at all. But William Rufus does not seem to have suited his tactics to the country as Harold had done; the mention of horses suggests that he repeated the old mistake of Ralph the Timid in a worse shape.[172] Immediate defeat and lasting success. As a matter of fighting then, Rufus failed where Harold had succeeded; but as a matter of enduring conquest, the failures of Rufus did more than the successes of Harold. Harold indeed had no general schemes of Welsh conquest. Different objects of Harold and Rufus. He overthrew the Welsh; but, except in the districts which were definitely ceded to England,[173] he made no attempt to occupy Wales. He gave back the land whose people he had overcome to princes of their own blood, bound to him simply by their oath of homage.[174] But wherever Rufus or his lords planted a castle, there was at once a piece of Welsh soil occupied, and a centre made ready for occupying more. The object of Harold in short was simply the defence of England; the object of William Rufus was the conquest of Wales.

Comparison of the conquest of Wales with the English and Norman Conquests. The conquest which now began, that which we may call either the English or the Norman Conquest of Wales, differed widely both from the English Conquest of Britain and from the Norman Conquest of England. It wrought far less change than the landing at Ebbsfleet; it wrought far more change than the landing at Pevensey. The Briton of those lands which in the Red King’s day were still British was gradually conquered; he was gradually brought under English rule and English law; but he was neither exterminated nor enslaved nor wholly assimilated. He still abides in his ancient land, still speaking his ancient tongue. The English or Norman Conquest of Wales was not a national migration, like the English Conquest of Britain. Nor was it a conquest wrought under the guise of an elaborate legal fiction, like the Norman Conquest of England. William Rufus did not ask the people of Wales to receive him as their own lawful king; he did not give himself out to all mankind as the true heir of Gruffydd the son of Llywelyn, defrauded of his rights by perjured usurpers. Europe had passed the stage at which a conquest of the earlier kind was possible; and there was in this case no excuse or opportunity for a conquest of the later kind. William Rufus was not a man to seek, like his father, to justify his acts by legal fictions; nor had he the same room for devising them as his father had. He had doubtless, with the crown of the Old-English kings, inherited their claims to Imperial supremacy over the whole island; he called himself “Monarch of Britain” no less than the kings who had gone before him.[175] But that monarchy gave him no claim to bring the lands of his subordinate princes under his immediate rule. If an invasion of Wales needed any justification in the eyes of William Rufus and his barons, that justification would take the shape of reprisals. We may be sure that there was no moment when the men on the border, either on the English or the Welsh side, could not have brought some complaint against the other side which might have been deemed to justify reprisals by a more scrupulous prince than the Red King. But for men like the Norman adventurers of his day it was enough that a land adjoining to the land which they had made their own lay open to be conquered. Geographical conditions of the conquest. Therein lay another great difference between this conquest and either of the other two conquests with which we have compared it, in the fact that the land to be won lay adjoining to the land which was already won. The Angles and Saxons wholly forsook their old homes beyond the sea, and, if the Normans in England did not in the same way wholly forsake theirs, the sea at least rolled between the old home and the new. But the Norman whose lot was cast on the Welsh frontier of England had nothing to do but to press on from the point where he already was. He had simply to add on the next field to his own field, subject to such resistance as the actual occupiers of the next field might be able to make. From this geographical cause, while the Norman Conquest of England was in no sense an extension of Normandy, the English or Norman Conquest of Wales was in every sense an extension of England. Extension of England by conquest and settlement. The Normans in England did not bring Normandy with them; they had from the very beginning to put on more or less fully the character of Englishmen, and to live according to English law. But the Norman who from England went on into Wales had no thought of putting on the character of a Welshman or of living according to Welsh law. Wherever he settled, he most truly carried England with him, such as England had been made through his own coming. But then for a long time he settled only here and there in the British land. Where he did settle, the speech, the laws, the national life, of the Briton passed away in such sort as the speech, the laws, the national life, of the Englishman never at any moment passed away from England. But alongside of these conquered districts there long remained independent districts, where the natives under their native princes still bade defiance to the invaders. England had already an uniform aspect; it was the old England with certain changes; its laws were the laws of King Eadward with the amendments of King William. Wales, for a long while after the time with which we are now dealing, was as far from uniformity as any land east of the Hadriatic. Various elements in Wales. Here was the castle of the Norman lord, with his following, Norman, English, Flemish, anything but British. Here was the newly-founded town, with its free burghers, again Norman, English, Flemish, anything but British. Here again was a whole district from which the Briton had passed away as thoroughly as he had passed away from Kent or Norfolk, but which the Norman had not taken into his own hands. The Flemings. He had found that it suited his purpose to leave it in the hands of the hardy and industrious Fleming, the last wave of Low-Dutch occupation in the isle of Britain. And alongside of all, there was the still independent Briton, still keeping his moors and mountains, still ready to pour down from them upon the richer lands which had been his fathers’, but which had passed into the stranger’s grasp. Those days have long passed away; for three centuries and more Briton and Englishmen have been willing members of a common state, willing subjects of a common sovereign. But the memory of those days has not passed away; it abides in the most living of all witnesses. Endurance of the Welsh language. England has for ages spoken a single tongue, her own ancient speech, modified by the coming of the conquerors of eight hundred years ago. But in Wales the speech of her conquerors, the speech of England, is still only making its way, slowly and fitfully, against the abiding resistance of that stubborn British tongue which has survived three conquests.[176]

Local nomenclature of Wales. The results of this state of things, where so many contending elements so long stood side by side, are still to be seen on the face of the British land. The local nomenclature of Wales tells a wholly different tale from that of England. Contrast with that of England. In England the nomenclature is everywhere essentially Teutonic; we might say that it is everywhere essentially English; for the names given by the Danes form one class along with those given by the Angles and Saxons, as opposed either to Celtic survivals or to Romance intruders. Both these two last classes are in England mere exceptions to the general law of Teutonic nomenclature. Teutonic and French names. But in Wales, while the great majority of the names are Celtic, the Teutonic names are somewhat more than exceptions. In some districts, as I have already said, they are the all but invariable rule. French names, too, though not very common, are, I think, less rare than in England. Places bearing two names. Nothing is more common than for a place to bear different names, according as English or Welsh is spoken. And these names sometimes translate one another, and sometimes do not. All this is natural in a land where distinct and hostile races so long dwelled side by side, each one a thorn in the side of the others. It marks a kind of conquest different alike from the conquest where the conquered vanish from the soil and from the conquest where they swallow up their conquerors.

The Welsh castles. There is again a visible feature, one so characteristic of the scenery of Wales as to be all but a natural feature, which arises out of the nature of the conquest with which we have now to deal. The traveller who comes back, I will not say from the land of the Grey Leagues, but from that nearer land of Maine with which our tale will soon have so much to do, to one of the hilly districts of England, feels something missing in the landscape, or in the memories called up by the landscape. On the isolated hill, on the bluff which ends the long ridge, he comes instinctively to look for the shattered castle or for the lines which show that the castle once stood there. Lack of castles in England. It is one of the special signs of what English history has been, one of the signs which should make us thankful that it has been what it has been, that in England those bluffs, those island hills, on which the castle or its traces can still be seen, are in truth few and far between. After all that we hear of castles and castle-builders, the castle was, at any moment of English history save the nineteen years of anarchy, a rare thing in England compared to what it was in other lands. Houses in England. Save where there was a town to protect or to keep in obedience, save where there was some special post of military strength that needed to be guarded, the lord of an English lordship, in whichever host his forefather had fought on Senlac, found that a simple manor, sheltered perhaps by some slight defence, served his purpose as well as the threatening tower. Border castles. On all the borderlands it was otherwise; the pele-tower of the north is but the Norman keep on a miniature scale. And, above all, Wales is, as every one knows, pre-eminently the land of castles. Through those districts with which we are specially concerned, castles, great and small, or the ruins or traces of such castles, meet us at every step. It was needful to strengthen every height, to guard every pass, while the moors and mountains, the Asturias or the Tzernagora of the Cymry, still remained unsubdued. The castles are in truth the leading architectural features of the country; the churches, mostly small and plain, might themselves, with their fortified towers, almost count as castles. The Welsh towns. The towns, almost always of English foundation, were mostly small; they were military colonies rather than seats of commerce. As Wales had no immemorial cities like Exeter and Lincoln, so she had no towns which sprang up into greatness in later times, like Bristol, Norwich, and Coventry. Every memorial of former days which we see in the British land reminds us how long warfare remained the daily business alike of the men of that land and of the strangers who had made their way into it at the sword’s point.

Advance before the accession of Rufus. We have seen that neither the days of Eadward nor the days of the elder William were days of peace along the Welsh border. The English frontier had advanced during both reigns. Rhuddlan,[177] Montgomery,[178] Cardiff,[179] had become border fortresses of England. An indefinite tract of North Wales was held by Robert of Rhuddlan;[180] Radnor was an English possession;[181] the followers of Earl Roger of Montgomery had harried as far as the peninsula of Dyfed.[182] The whole land seems to have made some kind of submission to William the Great at the time when he made his pilgrimage to Saint David’s, and set free so many of his captive subjects.[183] Robert of Rhuddlan. But real conquest does not seem to have gone very far beyond the border fortresses, as within the march of the Marquess of Rhuddlan it did not go very far from the coast. In the days of the rebellion we have seen that the hearts of the Cymry rose again, and that they again ventured on offensive warfare with no small effect. They and their Scandinavian allies had broken the power and taken away the life of the man who had so long kept their northern tribes in awe. Rhys ap Tewdwr. In that work we have seen that Rhys ap Tewdwr, the King of Deheubarth, whose dominions took in the greater part of South Wales, had a hand.[184] Under him Cedivor seems to have been the vassal prince of Dyfed. The reign of Cedivor ended in a time of misfortune, ominous of greater misfortunes to come. Saint David’s robbed by pirates. 1091. The shrine of Saint David was robbed. The holy bishop Sulien died, and presently his church and city, the holy place of Saint David, were again sacked by the pagans of the isles.[185] Is this simply a traditional way of speaking of Scandinavian invaders, or were there still any wild wikings who avowedly clave to the faith of Odin? Then Cedivor himself died, and his sons revolted against their over-lord Rhys, but were again overthrown.[186] This was the year of the Red King’s siege of Saint Michael’s Mount, the year of his journey to the North; and one account hints that the movements in Wales as well as in Scotland had a share in bringing him back from the mainland.[187] But it is not till two years later that Welsh warfare began to put on enough of importance for its details to be recorded by English writers.

Edwᵈ. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

Map illustrating the
WELSH WARS OF HENRY AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

Beginning of the Conquest of South Wales. 1093. It seems to have been in the year of Anselm’s appointment, the year of Malcolm’s death, that the conquest of South Wales began in earnest. It seems now to have been for the first time taken up by the King as part of the affairs of his kingdom. But the geography of the campaign shows that a gradual advance must have already begun along the south coast. Our public entries are concerned only with the land stretching nearly due west, from the mountains of Brecknock and Abergavenny to the Land’s End of Saint David’s. This leaves out the sea-land which, with the bold curve of its coast, projects to the south, the land of Morganwg or Glamorgan. Yet it may be taken as a matter of course that this land was not left to be won later than inland Brecheiniog and far distant Dyfed. Legend of the conquest of Glamorgan. The unlucky thing is that, while the conquest of Brecheiniog and Dyfed is recorded in notices which, though meagre enough, are fully trustworthy as far as they go, the conquest of Morganwg, strangely left out in all authentic records, has become the subject of an elaborate romance which has stepped into the empty place of the missing history. The romance is, as usual, the invention of pedigree-makers, working, after their manner, to exalt the glory and increase the antiquity of this and that local family. This is perhaps the meanest of the many forms of falsehood against which the historian has to strive; but it is also one of the strongest and most abiding, and one which is specially strong and abiding on the northern coast of the Bristol Channel.[188]

The legend pieces itself on to that point of the genuine history when the sons of Cedivor were defeated by Rhys ap Tewdwr. Story of Jestin and Einion. A brother of Cedivor, Einion by name, who had been in the service of either the elder or the younger William, and had served the King in his continental wars, now flees to another enemy of Rhys, Jestin son of Gwrgan, described as prince of Gwent and Morganwg.[189] Jestin promises his daughter to Einion with an ample estate, if he can obtain help from England against the common enemy Rhys. This, it is supposed, Einion’s friendship with the King and his knights will enable him to do. Nor was Jestin’s hope disappointed. Story of Robert Fitz-hamon and his knights. No less a man than Robert Fitz-hamon hearkened to the invitation of Einion; he set out at the head of a company of twelve knights and their followers to give help to the prince of Morganwg. Their joint forces overcame Rhys in a battle on the borders of Brecheiniog, and Rhys himself, flying from the field, was taken and beheaded. His kinsmen and followers seem to have been killed or dispersed, and we are told that Robert Fitz-hamon and his companions, being well paid for their services by Jestin, went away towards London. Then Einion demands his reward; but Jestin says that he will not give either his daughter or his land to a traitor. Einion recalls Robert. Then Einion persuades Robert and his companions to come back, and take Jestin’s dominions for themselves. They are of course in no way unwilling; and they are joined by some of Jestin’s Welsh enemies. Jestin is driven out, and his land is partitioned. The rough mountain land is assigned to Einion and his Welsh companions, and Einion also marries Nest the daughter of Jestin. Robert Fitz-hamon and his twelve knights divide the fertile vale of Glamorgan among them. Division of Glamorgan. Each man establishes himself in a lordship and castle, and all do homage to Robert as lord of Glamorgan, holding his chief seat in his castle of Cardiff. Share kept by the children of Jestin. But, while the traitor Einion obtains so sorry a portion, a son of Jestin is admitted to a share in the rich vale, and is allowed to hand on his lordship to his descendants. Another of the family, a grandson of Jestin, Gruffydd son of Rhydderch, refuses to submit, withstands the invaders in arms, contrives to defend Caerleon, and to hand on to his son Caradoc a principality in Gwent, seemingly east of the Usk.

Estimate of the story. Now how much of this story is to be believed? Jestin is a most shadowy being, of whom personally nothing is recorded. But there is evidence enough for the existence of his descendants, and for their retention of an important lordship in Glamorgan.[190] This may make us inclined to put some faith in the account of the transactions between Jestin, Einion, and Robert Fitz-hamon. Elements of truth. The general outline of the tale is perfectly possible, except the very unlikely story that Robert or any other Norman, when once standing in arms on British or any other ground, simply marched out again after receiving a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. Settlement of Robert Fitz-hamon at Cardiff. That Robert Fitz-hamon did conquer Glamorgan and establish himself at Cardiff cannot be doubted. The settlement of some of his followers is equally historical; but the list of them as given in the legend is untrustworthy, Legendary names in the list. as containing names of families which did not appear in the district till later. That the Normans were invited by a Welsh prince to help him against his enemies, and that they then took his lands to themselves, is quite possible, though the story rests on no certain evidence. That the Norman invaders took the valuable land, the fertile vale, to themselves, and left the rugged mountains to the Britons, is doubtless a true description of the general result, though it is not likely to have been caused by any formal division. The only thing to suggest such a division is the portion which was kept by the descendants of Jestin. But such an anomaly as this last might be accounted for in various ways. The defeat and death of Rhys in Brecheiniog is beyond doubt, and it is not unlikely that Robert Fitz-hamon may have had a hand in it; but at all events the date is utterly wrong.[191] Question of Jestin’s descendants. The most unlikely part of the story is that which describes a grandson of Jestin as founding a principality in that part of Gwent which had already long been an English possession. This story might almost seem to be a confusion with an event of earlier times. We are tempted to think that the Caradoc son of Gruffydd and grandson of Rhydderch, who now settles himself in Gwent, is a mythical repetition of the Caradoc son of Gruffydd and grandson of Rhydderch who destroyed King Eadward’s hunting-seat at Portskewet.[192]

Robert Fitz-hamon; Robert Fitz-hamon, conqueror of Glamorgan—​for of his right to that title there is no doubt—​has his place in the history of this reign and of the early years of the next. other notices of him. We have already heard of him as one of the few faithful among the Normans in England at the time of the great rebellion against the present King.[193] Son or grandson of the famous rebel of Val-ès-dunes,[194] he had an elder brother of his father’s name, who appears, with the title of Dapifer, among the land-owners of eastern England.[195] He holds the lands of Brihtric. He had himself, at one time in the present reign, received those lands which had once been Brihtric’s, which had then been Queen Matilda’s, and which had been afterwards held or claimed by the Ætheling Henry.[196] These made him great in the shires of Gloucester and Somerset, shires from which he might look with a longing eye towards the lands beyond the Severn and the Severn sea. To these, it appears, was added the honour of Gloucester, or rather the lands of Brihtric were made into an honour of Gloucester for his benefit.[197] He marries Earl Roger’s daughter. He married a daughter of Earl Roger, Sibyl by name,[198] and so had the privilege of being brother-in-law to Robert of Bellême. Marriage of his daughter to Robert of Gloucester. His daughter Mabel, heiress of her uncle as well as of her father,[199] became, as we have often had occasion to notice, the wife of King Henry’s son Robert, with whom Gloucester became an earldom. His works at Gloucester and Tewkesbury. He founded the abbey of Tewkesbury, one of the line of great religious houses along the Severn, where his work may still be seen in the vast pillars and mysterious front of his still surviving minster.[200] To the older abbey of Gloucester he was a bountiful benefactor. And the nature of his gifts to these two favoured houses would be almost enough of itself to enable us to set down Robert Fitz-hamon as conqueror of Glamorgan. Grant of Welsh churches to English monasteries. Gloucester and Tewkesbury were enriched at the cost of the churches of Glamorgan, proof enough that he who could thus enrich them had won great possessions in Glamorgan. The holy places of the Briton, Llantwit and Llancarfan, with a crowd of churches of lesser note, supplied the conqueror with an easy means of being bountiful with no cost to himself.[201] So again the mere fact that a man who held such a position as that of Robert Fitz-hamon, one who, though not an earl, ranked by possessions and connexions alongside of earls, plays so small a part as he does in the recorded history of the reign, might almost of itself suggest that he was busy on some enterprise of his own, such as that which legend assigns to him. Conquest of Glamorgan. When the mound by the swift and shallow Taff was crowned by the shell-keep of Cardiff, the progress of invasion was not likely to tarry. The fertile lowlands from the mouth of the Taff to the mouth of the Neath were a natural accession to the lowlands of Gwent which were already won. They were won; they were guarded by a crowd of castles. Building of castles. And the winning of the land, the building of the castles, events about which the genuine local history is strangely silent, were, there is not the slightest reason to doubt, the work of Robert Fitz-hamon and of the men who shared with him in that work.

Distinction between Morganwg and Glamorgan. In strict geographical accuracy the names Morganwg and Glamorgan do not answer to one another.[202] Morganwg in the wider sense is said to have taken in a vast district from the Severn to the Towy, while Glamorgan, said to be called from a prince named Morgan in the tenth century, was less than the present county, taking in only the vale. The distinction between the two was preserved in the style of the lords of “Morgania and Glamorgania.” Extent of Glamorgan. But the country with which we have now to deal may be practically looked on as answering to the present county, somewhat cut short to the west and somewhat lengthened to the east. It takes in the present Monmouthshire between Usk and Rhymny; it does not take in the peninsula of Gower. This last, with the town of Swansea on its isthmus, still forms no part of the diocese of Glamorgan or Llandaff; it marks its formerly distinct character by still belonging to the diocese of Saint David’s. Within this district Robert Fitz-hamon and his successors the Earls of Gloucester held a position like that of the Earl of Chester or the Bishop of Durham. Without bearing their lofty titles, the Lord of Glamorgan practically held, like them, a vassal principality of the crown. Like the other lords marchers, he held most of the powers of kingship within his lordship, and the position of his lordship enabled him to carry out those powers more thoroughly than most of his fellows.[203] Cardiff castle. The chief seat of the lord was at Cardiff on the Taff, where the castle had been, as we have seen, founded in the Conqueror’s day.[204] Bishopric of Llandaff. A little higher up the river was the seat of the bishopric of Glamorgan at Llandaff, with its church, most unlike Le Mans or Durham, nestling by the river at the foot of the hill. Under the chief lord settled several lesser lords, tenants-in-chief, we may almost venture to call them, within Glamorgan, who founded castles and families, and under whom the land was again divided among a crowd of smaller tenants. Some of these lesser lords held within their own lordships powers almost equal to those of the lord of Glamorgan himself. William of London. First perhaps among them was the house founded by William of London, better known under the French form of Londres.[205] The name suggests some thoughts. Who was a William of London in the days of William Rufus? A Norman doubtless, but hardly a Norman of any very lofty rank in his own land. May we follow the analogy of the great bearer of the same name in the next age, and see in him the son of a Rouen citizen settled in London in the very first days of the Conquest, or even in the days of the Confessor? Kidwelly and Ogmore. The house of London spread beyond the bounds of Glamorgan; their chief seat was at Kidwelly; but within the lordship of Fitz-hamon the square keep of Ogmore and the fortified priory of Ewenny, one of the most precious specimens of the Norman minster on the smallest scale, still remain as memorials of their presence. Richard Siward. But the name of Siward—​its first bearer appears in the legend as Richard Siward—​bespeaks English or Danish descent, and we are tempted to see in the colonist of Glamorgan a son or grandson of Thurkill of Warwick.[206] Pagan of Turberville at Coyty. Pagan of Turberville held Coyty, married a Welsh heiress, and became the founder of a house whose feelings became British rather than Norman or English. Aberafan held by the children of Jestin. Aberafan, the fortress at the mouth of the Glamorgan Avon, remained in the hands of the descendants of Jestin, the only native line which, like such Englishmen as Thurkill, Eadward of Salisbury, Coleswegen and Ælfred of Lincoln, abode on its own ground on equal terms with the conquerors. They alone shared the fertile plain with the strangers; the rest of their countrymen, even those who held acknowledged lands and lordships, were confined to the barren hills.[207]

The lords and their castles. These few families have each something in their name and history which entitles them to special notice. A few others were of really equal eminence from the first, and the legend, to make up the full tale of twelve peers, adds on several names of later date. These great lords, and a crowd of smaller land-owners as well, built each man his castle; in Glamorgan the peaceful manor-house, soon to become the rule in England, seems to have been the reform of a much later day. The castles with which we are to deal are of course for the most part castles of the older and simpler type; it was not till long after the times with which we are dealing that Caerphilly, with its mighty gateway-towers, its princely hall, its lake wrought by the hand of man, became the proudest of South-Welsh fortresses, the peer of Caernarvon itself. Caerphilly lies indeed beyond our immediate range, in the land still left to the natives, parted off by hills from Cardiff and from the rich plain which the conquerors kept for themselves. Not a few others of the famous castles of the district belong to times far too late for us. The South-Welsh churches. From the castles the churches also caught a military air, and kept it during the whole time of mediæval architecture. The fortified towers of Glamorgan have the military character less strongly marked than the towers of Pembrokeshire; but it is marked quite strongly enough to strike the English visitor as something altogether in harmony with the endless traces of castles which meet him at every step. He sees at once that a state of things which in England existed only during the first years of the Conquest, or which more truly, unless during the nineteen years of anarchy, never existed at all, went on in the half conquered British land for ages.

Saxon settlements in South-Wales. The leaders in the settlement were of course mainly Norman. It has been acutely remarked that they mostly came, as followers of Robert Fitz-hamon most naturally would come, from the old lands of Brihtric in Gloucestershire and Somerset. They doubtless brought with them an English following, a strictly Saxon invasion of South Wales. Among the Teutonic settlers in this district, it is not easy to distinguish the Saxon from the Fleming. The Flemings in Pembrokeshire. It must always be remembered that, while the Flemish settlement in Pembrokeshire is matter of history, the Flemish settlements in Gower and Glamorgan are merely matters of inference.[208] Foundation of boroughs. The English and Flemish settlers were doubtless the chief inhabitants of the boroughs which now began to arise under the shadow of the castles. Cardiff, Kenfig, Aberafan, and Neath, arose on the coast or on the rivers from which some of them took their names. Cowbridge and Llantrissant lay in the inland part of the vale; the last, a borough mainly British, was the only one which held at all a commanding site among the hills. In later times these towns sank into insignificance—​Kenfig indeed well nigh perished under heaps of sand. But some of them have in later times been called up to a new life by the wonderful development of mineral wealth which has changed the barren hills which were left to the Briton into one of the busiest regions of our whole island.

Ecclesiastical affairs. In ecclesiastical matters the conquest of this district was for awhile chiefly marked, as has been mentioned, by the spoliation of the ancient British foundations, to the behoof of the conqueror’s favourite monasteries at Gloucester and Tewkesbury. Llandaff. The bishopric of Llandaff or Glamorgan kept its place, though it never became, either in the extent of its possessions or in the fabric of its church, at all the peer of Saint David’s. Ewenny. Cistercian foundations. Ewenny arose, if not in the very first days of the conquest, yet within the first or second generation. The Cistercian movement reached this district early. Neath. 1130. The abbey of Neath arose in King Henry’s time, under the patronage of Earl Robert;[209] and in the last year of his life, while the anarchy still raged, the same earl, the most renowned of the lords of Glamorgan, Margam. 1147. found means to found the more famous abbey of Margam.[210]

The conquest of Glamorgan thus stands out as an event which is altogether unrecorded in authentic history, but of which it is not hard to put together a picture from its results. Other parts of the conquest of South Wales are more clearly entered in both British and English annals. Conquest of Brecknock. The mountain land of Brecheiniog must have been occupied early in the reign of Rufus, if not earlier still. Bernard Newmarch. Its conqueror, Bernard of Neufmarché, better known in the English form of Newmarch, has already figured in our story;[211] and he was clearly in possession when William Rufus lay sick and penitent at Gloucester. His followers are then spoken of as the French who inhabited Brecheiniog. By that time then the upper valley of the Usk, from Abergavenny westward, must have been already subdued. The rich land of the holy King Brychan, with his twenty-four sainted daughters—​the church where the worship of one of them turned the people of the land into frenzies which offended the soberer devotion of the Norman[212]—​the rivers full of fish, the lake of marvels, the whole pleasant valley cut off by its hills from the extremes of heat and cold[213]—​all had passed away from British rule. The castle of Brecknock. Bernard had doubtless by this time reared on the hill of Aberhonwy at least some rude forerunner of the castle of Brecknock, the fragments of which still stand, facing the southern mountains, alongside of the massive church of his own priory, the church which he made his far-off offering to Saint Martin of the Place of Battle.[214] Bernard’s gifts to Battle Abbey. We know not whether Bernard had by this time striven to confirm his power on British soil by a marriage which connected him with the noblest blood, alike British and English. His wife Nest. His wife Nest united the blood of Gruffydd with the blood of Ælfgar. We are not told the name or race of her father;[215] but her mother was Nest the daughter of Gruffydd and Ealdgyth, the stepdaughter of Harold, the half-sister of his twin wanderers, the granddaughter of Ælfgar and his perhaps Norman Ælfgifu.[216] Nest thus came on the spindle-side from Godgifu the mirror of English matronhood; but the woman who shamelessly avowed to King Henry that her son was not the son of her husband Bernard hardly walked in the steps of her renowned ancestress.[217] During that memorable Lent, while King William lay sick at Gloucester, the new lord of Brecknock found it needful to gather his strength to withstand an attack from the people whom he had despoiled. Defeat and death of Rhys at Brecknock. 1093. The Britons came together under Rhys the son of Tewdwr, the king of whom we have often heard, and who must have been at this time the most powerful prince of South Wales.[218] He invaded the invaders; and in the very Easter week, while matters were busy between William and Anselm on the one hand, between William and Malcolm on the other hand, a battle took place near Brecknock. There Rhys was killed, by the help, according to the Glamorgan legend, of Robert Fitz-hamon. According to the same legend, Rhys did not fall in open fight, but as a prisoner to whom quarter was refused. Another account describes him as being slain by the treachery of his own men. His death was marked as an epoch in the history of Wales. End of “the kingdom of the Britons.” With him, the native historian writes, fell the kingdom of the Britons, a phrase which an English writer seems to have misunderstood as meaning that after him no Welsh prince bore the kingly title.[219] The overthrow of Rhys led to great movements in other parts of South Wales. Effect of the death of Rhys. We can hardly doubt that, whether Robert Fitz-hamon had a hand in the fight at Brecknock or not, his settlement in Glamorgan was at any rate already begun. But the fall of Rhys laid the lands to the south-west, the lands of Ceredigion and Dyfed, open to invasion; and two sets of invaders were equally ready to make the most of the chance which was now laid open to them. The British enemy came first. Cadwgan harries Dyfed. April 30, 1093. Cadwgan son of Bleddyn, who had once before driven Rhys from his throne,[220] seized the moment of his death to carry a wasting inroad into Dyfed.[221] He was presently followed by invaders who were to do something more than make a wasting inroad. Norman conquest of Ceredigion and Dyfed. July 1, 1093. “About the kalends of July the French for the first time held Dyfed and Ceredigion, and set castles in them, and thence occupied the whole land.”[222]

These words of the British annalist mark a most important stage in the occupation of his country. The campaign of this summer completed the conquest of South Wales, so far as a land could be said to be conquered which was always revolting, and where native chiefs still kept, sometimes by their own strength, sometimes by formal acknowledgement, such parts of the land as the invaders could not or did not care to occupy. But it was now that a land was planted with castles which is still pre-eminently the land of castles; Pembrokeshire. it was now that a land was brought under the power of those who bore rule in England which was itself to become a new England beyond the line of the Briton. Ceredigion, the land of Cardigan, the vale of Teifi with its still abiding beavers,[223] the sites of the castles of Aberystwyth and Cilgerran, of the abbey of Strata Florida and the priory of Saint Dogmael, were added to the dominion of the conquerors. Thence they pressed on to the extreme south-western land, and added Dyfed by a new name to the possessions of the English crown. Tale of Rufus’ threats against Ireland. A tale has been told how the Red King himself made his way to the most western point of all, to the headland of Saint David’s; there, from the treeless rocks, he looked over the sea to the land beyond, which may now and then be seen on a cloudless evening. Then he boasted that, lord as he was of Britain, he would be lord of Ireland too, how he would gather round that headland the fleets of his whole kingdom, and would make of them a bridge by which he might pass over and win the great island for himself. The tale goes on to tell how, when the threatening words were brought to King Murtagh,[224] he asked whether the King of the English had added to his threat the words, “If God will?”[225] The Red King had not used the formula which he hated to hear even from the lips of others,[226] and the Irish prince at once answered that he did not fear the coming of one who meant to come only in his own strength, and not in that of the Most High.[227]

Estimate of the story. The tale is eminently characteristic of William Rufus; yet it sounds somewhat like an echo of the real visit and the real schemes of the great William translated into the boastful language of his son. The Conqueror did visit Saint David’s;[228] he did plan the conquest of Ireland;[229] but it is not likely that he threw the expression of his designs into such a shape as that which William Rufus would have been likely enough to choose. The younger William may have made his way to Saint David’s; but it is not easy to find a time for his coming, either in this year or in any other. Acquisition of Saint David’s. But, whether through his coming or not, Saint David’s itself passed under the obedience of the conquerors. Bishop Wilfrith. We presently find its bishop, a bishop spoken of as a Briton, but bearing the English name of Wilfrith, acting in their full confidence.[230] But the holy place, deep in its hollow, was left to be guarded by its own holiness. No castle of king or earl or sheriff invaded its precincts; the home of its bishop did not, as at Llandaff, take the form of a castle looking down upon the minster, but that of a peaceful palace resting by its side. The conquerors pressed on, through the land of Cemaes and Emlyn and by the hills of Preseleu, till they reached the south-western land, the land of creeks and peninsulas, where the tides of Ocean rise and fall beneath the walls of far inland towns and fortresses. Milford Haven. In those waters the wandering wiking had seen the likeness of his own fiords, and he had left his mark here and there on a holm, a gard, a thorp, a ford, some of them bearing names which seem to go back to the gods of Scandinavian heathendom.[231] The Norman won the land, to hand it over in the next reign to the Flemish settlers, who rooted out whatever traces of the Cymry Northmen and Normans had left. Two of the chief towns, Pembroke and Tenby, kept their British names in corrupt forms.[232] Milford and Haverford would seem to have been already named by the Northmen. The Pembrokeshire castles. On every tempting point overlooking the inland waters, sometimes on points overlooking the Ocean itself, castles arose, some of which grew into the very stateliest of their own class. Tenby, Haverfordwest—​Manorbeer, birthplace of Giraldus[233]—​Caerau, connected with so many famous names of later date[234]—​and a crowd of castles of lesser note, witness the means by which the conquerors knew how to hold down the land which they had won.

At the head of all stands the great fortress which gave its name to a town, a shire, and a long line of earls, and in our own time to a great workshop of the naval strength of the land. Pembroke Castle. Pen bro, the head of the sealand, grew into Pembroke, with its vast castle rising on a peninsula above two arms of the inland sea—​with its stately hall looking down on the waters—​with the deep cave underneath its walls, with the huge mass of the round tower—​with the one hill-side covered by the houses and churches of the town, the other crowned by the long line of the priory of Monkton, with its stern square tower and its now roofless choir. Pembrokeshire buildings. The character of military strength and simplicity, which is stamped in a lesser measure on the churches and houses of Glamorgan, comes out in all its fulness in the churches and houses of Pembrokeshire. Of all this the days of which we are speaking saw the beginnings, but only the beginnings. The castle begun by Arnulf of Montgomery. On the tongue of land between the two creeks a fortress was raised by Arnulf of Montgomery, son of Roger and Mabel, a man of whom we have already heard and shall hear again. But his defences were as yet small and feeble as compared with what was to follow; the first castle of Pembroke was a mere earthwork with a palisade.[235] Second building of Gerald of Windsor. 1105. Arnulf placed his work under the care of a valiant knight named Gerald of Windsor, who afterwards was the beginner of a castle of greater strength on the same spot.[236] His wife Nest. In after times he married a wife of the noblest British blood, yet another Nest, the daughter of Rhys son of Tewdwr, and grandchild through her mother of that Rhiwallon who had received a kingdom at the hands of Harold.[237] Before her marriage she was the mother of one of the sons of King Henry, though assuredly not of the great Earl of Gloucester.[238] In later days, through another marriage, she became the grandmother of Giraldus Cambrensis.

The course of events in North Wales during these years is less easy to mark with exact dates. But it is plain that the death of Robert of Rhuddlan had been only a momentary triumph for the Cymry, and that it had not given any real check to the Norman power. Hugh of Chester in Anglesey. Earl Hugh of Chester, strong on the border of the continental Britons, still held a hand no less firm on their island kinsfolk. Castle of Aberlleiniog. He even pressed on into Anglesey, and there built a castle, most likely at Aberlleiniog on the eastern coast of the island, a spot of which we shall have to speak again more fully in recording a memorable day later in our story. Advance of Earl Roger in Powys. Earl Roger meanwhile, from his capital at Shrewsbury and his strong outpost at his new British Montgomery,[239] pushed on his dominion into Powys. The King at least approved, if he did not at this stage help in the work; Castle of Rhyd-y-gors. the castle of Rhyd-y-gors was built at the royal order by William son of Baldwin.[240]

The conquest of Wales was thus, to all appearance, nearly complete. Seeming conquest of Wales. The two great earls were going on with their old work in the north, while in the south the tide of conquest was advancing with such speed as it had never advanced before. In the south-east Gwent and Morganwg seemed to be firmly held, while in the south-west the torrent of Norman invasion had rushed by a single burst from the hill of Brecknock to the furthest coast of Dyfed. In the south at least the only independent region left was that which lies between the conquest of Robert Fitz-hamon and the conquest of Arnulf of Montgomery. Gower and Caermarthen unsubdued. Gower, with its caves, its sands, its long ridge, where the name of Arthur has made spoil of a monument of unrecorded times—​with its Worm’s Head looking out in defiance at the conquered land beyond the bay—​the whole range too of coast with its sandy estuaries, from the mouth by Llwchr to the mouth by Laugharne—​Kidwelly also, not yet crowned by the gem of South-Welsh castles—​Caermarthen and the whole vale of Towy—​were still unsubdued. Otherwise the Britons might truly say with their chronicler that on the death of Rhys their kingdom passed away from them. 1093–1094. So things slept while Anselm received his archbishopric, while Malcolm pressed on to die at Alnwick, while King William was kept by the winds at Hastings. Effects of William’s absence. But when the king was beyond the sea, when he and the great men of England were busy with Norman affairs—​when Argentan bowed to Robert and Philip and when the brother of the conqueror of Pembroke was a prisoner[241]—​when the great Earl, the father of both of them, had died with the cowl on his head at Shrewsbury—​then the Britons deemed that the hour of deliverance was come. The English Chronicler, though he does not at this stage help us to the names of British men or of British places, paints the general picture in his strongest colours; Revolt of the Welsh. 1094. “The Welshmen gathered themselves together, and on the French that were in Wales or the nighest parts and had ere taken away their lands, they upheaved war, and castles they broke and men they offslew, and as their host waxed, they todealed themselves into more. With some of those deals fought Hugh Earl of Shropshire and put them to flight. And none the less the others all this year never left off from none evil that they might do.”[242]

In this version the Norman or English champion stands clearly forth. We see that Earl Hugh had sharp work upon his hands from the moment that he stepped into his father’s earldom. The British writers give us a clearer sight of the geographical extent of the movement, and they help us to the name of its chief leader. Cadwgan son of Bleddyn. This was Cadwgan son of Bleddyn, whom we last heard of as harrying Dyfed, and who even now seems at least as anxious to make Dyfed a land subject to Gwynedd as to drive Normans, English, or Flemings, out of either. Thus the Britons were, as ever, in the words of the Chronicler, todealed; they were divided into local and dynastic parties. Divisions of the Welsh. Yet, as he puts it, even this division, if it did not give strength, at least delayed subjection. If Earl Hugh or any other leader of a regular force was able to overthrow one deal, another deal was ready all the same to do as much evil as before. But it was in Gwynedd and under Cadwgan that the work began. General revolt of Wales. The Britons could not bear the yoke of the French; they rose, they broke down the castles, and, as men commonly do in such cases, they did by the invaders as the invaders had done by them. It is not very wonderful if, in their hour of victory, they revenged the reavings and slaughters done on them by the French with new reavings and slaughters done on the French themselves.[243] And, as our Chronicler hints, it was not only on the French within Wales, but on those also in the nighest parts that they rose. By this time the whole land had risen; South-Welsh and West-Welsh—​that is now no longer the men of the peninsula of Cornwall, but the men of the peninsula of Dyfed—​were in arms no less than the men of Gwynedd. Invasion of England. Gruffydd and Cadwgan burst into the neighbouring shires, Cheshire, Shropshire, and Herefordshire; they burned towns, carried off plunder, and slew Frenchmen and Englishmen alike.[244] The Saxon, the old enemy, had not become less an enemy, because he had, through his own conquest, become an accomplice in the invasions of his conquerors. Deliverance of Anglesey. Gwynedd was now free; the deliverers crossed into Anglesey; Aberlleiniog castle broken down. they broke down the castle at Aberlleiniog or elsewhere, and put an end for a while to the foreign dominion in the island.[245]

The Britons now seemed to have altogether undone the work of the invaders. It was now time for vigorous action on the other side. The French—​Hugh of Chester, Hugh of Shrewsbury, or any other—​entered Gwynedd with a regular force; but if one deal was put to flight, another, under Cadwgan himself, claims to have overcome the invaders at Yspwys.[246] The path was now open for a march of the Britons to the south. Late in the year a general attack was made on all the castles throughout Ceredigion and Dyfed. Two only held out; Gerald of Windsor successfully defended Pembroke; William the son of Baldwin successfully defended Rhyd-y-gors.[247] Action of Cadwgan in Dyfed. But the warfare of Cadwgan was waged in the interest of Gwynedd, not in that of Dyfed. By a harsh, though possibly prudent policy, he enforced a migration somewhat in the style of an Eastern despot. The men and the cattle of Ceredigion and Dyfed—​we must take so general a statement with those deductions which the laws of possibility imply—​were transported to the safer region, and south-western Wales was made, so far as Cadwgan could make it, a wilderness.[248] Pembroke holds out. Gerald, in his castle among the creeks, was left to lord it over whom he might find, and to feed himself and his followers how he might, in the wasted land. As far as we can see, Gwent, Morganwg, and Brecheiniog, remained in the hands of the conquerors. The rest of the British land, from the isthmus of Gower to the furthest point of Mona, was either free or a wilderness.

Question of a winter campaign. It is almost past belief that William Rufus could have found time for a winter campaign against the Welsh in the few weeks, or rather days, which passed between his return from Normandy at the end of December and his interview with Anselm at Gillingham in the middle of January.[249] December 28,1094-January, 1095. But there was plenty of fighting in the course of the year in Wales and elsewhere. The Britons seem to have kept their independence in the newly liberated districts, while the Norman conquerors of Glamorgan made a successful attack on the intermediate lands which had not yet been subdued. Conquest of Kidwelly, Gower, and Caermarthen. “The French laid waste Gower, Kidwelly, and the vale of Towy;” and we are further told that those lands, as well as Dyfed and Ceredigion, remained waste.[250] But if Normans laid waste, they did not simply lay waste, like the Welsh. What they found it expedient to lay waste for a season they meant to put in order some day for their own advantage. This was no doubt the time when William of London established himself at Kidwelly, and made the first beginnings of castle, church, borough, and haven.[251] It was now too that the way was at least opened for the work of colonization which made Gower a Teutonic land. 1099. According to an authority to which we turn with a certain doubt, the actual settlement dates from five years later. Swansea Castle. The castles of Gower. Castles were built, Abertawy or Swansea guarding its own bay and the approach to the peninsula, Aberllwchr guarding the sandy estuary between the peninsula and the opposite coast to the north, Oystermouth, Penrice, Llanrhidian, on points within the peninsula itself.[252] Alleged West-Saxon settlement of Gower. And in this version the settlement is made, not by Flemings, according to the common tradition, but by West-Saxons brought across the channel from Somerset.[253] It is certain, as has been already said, that there is not the same historical evidence for Flemings in Gower which there is for Flemings in Pembrokeshire. But it is perhaps less important to fix the exact origin of each Teutonic settlement along this coast than to insist on the fact that, as compared with the native Cymry, any two branches of the Nether-Dutch stock, whether Flemish or Saxon, came to very much the same thing.

Along with this territorial advance on the part of the invaders, we hear, from the same somewhat doubtful quarter, of a movement among the invaders themselves which turned to the advantage of the natives. It is characteristic of the outwardly legal nature of the Norman Conquest of England that it gave no opportunity for a character not very rare in less regular invasions, the invading chief who finds it to his interest to separate himself from his own fellows and to place himself at the head of those whom he has helped to subdue. In the conquests both of Wales and of Ireland there was room for such a part to be played, and the story sets before us one of the Norman conquerors of Glamorgan as playing it with some effect. Pagan of Turberville joins the Welsh. The lord of Coyty, Pagan of Turberville, married to a wife of the house of Jestin, took the side of his wife’s countrymen, and, we are told, went so far as to attack Cardiff on their behalf. The result, it is said, was a confirmation of the ancient laws of Wales on the part of the lord of Glamorgan. This, it is added, led many to transfer their dwellings from the disturbed parts of the country to the more settled lands under his rule.[254]

North Wales keeps its independence. Meanwhile in the northern parts of Wales the Britons still kept the independence that they had won by the struggle of the last year. They had got the better of the local powers on their own borders, and the King, busied with the peaceful opposition of Anselm and the armed opposition of Robert of Mowbray, had little time to spare from councils and sieges within his kingdom. Autumn, 1095. At last, towards autumn, while the siege of Bamburgh was going on, after he had himself turned away from it, and left the Evil Neighbour to do its work, William heard a piece of news from the British border which at once stirred him to action. One of the great fortresses of the march had fallen. In vain had Earl Roger made his nest on the rock to which he gave the name of his own Norman home.[255] The Welsh take Montgomery. Montgomery, Tre Baldwin, was in the hands of the Britons, and all Earl Hugh’s men within it were slain.[256] William was wroth at the tidings, and he at once called out the fyrd of his realm, so much of it as was not needed for the lingering leaguer-work in Northumberland.[257] William’s invasion of Wales. Michaelmas, 1095. Soon after Michaelmas he entered Wales at the head of his host. He divided it into parties, and caused them to go thoroughly through the land. He reaches Snowdon. November 1. At last, by the feast of All-hallows, the whole army met together by Snowdon. If merely marching through a country could subdue it, William Rufus had now done a good deal towards the conquest of Gwynedd. But William Rufus was not Harold; the master of continental chivalry could not bring himself to copy Harold’s homely tactics. While the royal army scoured the dales, the Welsh betook them to the moors and mountains where no man might come at them.[258] Harold had found out the way to come at them; but the Red King knew it not. Ill-success of the campaign. All that he could do was to go homeward, when he saw that he there in the winter might do no more.[259] The British annalists, with good right, rejoice as they tell how God their people sheltered in the strong places of their land, and how the King and his host went away empty, having taken nothing.[260]

1096. The next year saw the bloody Gemót at Salisbury; it saw Europe pour forth its forces for the deliverance of Eastern Christendom; it saw the Red King become master of the Norman duchy. Among such cares, William had no time, perhaps he felt no strong call, for another Welsh campaign, either in winter or summer. But the lords of the marches could not be thus idle; with them the only choice was to invade or to be invaded. The year seems to have begun with another gain on the part of the Britons. The Welsh gain Rhyd-y-gors. 1096. William son of Baldwin, who had kept the castle of Rhyd-y-gors safe through all perils up to this time, now died. His spirit did not abide in his garrison; they left the castle empty, a prey to the enemy.[261] The spirit of the Britons, even in the lands which seemed most thoroughly subdued, now rose. Within the bounds of the present Glamorgan the favourable composition of the last year seems to have kept men quiet; but the lands to the east, parts of which had been so long under English rule, were now encouraged to strike another blow for independence. Revolt of Gwent and Brecknock. The natives were in arms along the whole line of the Usk; Brecheiniog, Gwent, and Gwenllwg, the land between Usk and Wye and the land between Usk and Rhymny, threw off, as their own writers say, the yoke of the French.[262] The marchers had now to act in earnest. English feeling towards the war. Our own Chronicler says mournfully how “the head men that this land held ofttimes sent the fyrd into Wales, and many men with that sorely harassed, and man there sped not, but man-marring and fee-spilling.”[263] We see that the old duty of every man to fight for the land when called on had come to awaken some of the feelings which attach to a conscription. Men were, we may believe, ready for a campaign in Normandy or Maine, where plunder was to be had, and where there was most likely still some satisfaction felt in fighting against French-speaking enemies, even under French-speaking captains. To drive back Malcolm would come home to every man’s heart as a national duty; to dispose of Malcolm’s crown under the leadership of an English Ætheling might call up long-forgotten feelings of national pride. But who could be tempted by the prospect of a march to Snowdon, even in the fairest weather? What interest had the men of perhaps far-off English shires in rivetting the dominion of a Norman lord on the men of Brecknock or Pembroke? No doubt every Englishman was ready to drive back the Briton from Shropshire and Herefordshire; but it was an irksome and bootless work to go and attack him in his own land, a land from which even conquerors could draw so little gain. Even to win back Gwent, the conquest of Harold, was an enterprise which would lead mainly to man-marring and fee-spilling. Vain attempt to recover Gwent. Into Gwent however they were marched; but nothing was done; the land was not subdued; the army was even attacked on its retreat, and after great slaughter put to flight.[264] A second greater attempt came to nothing more. The grandsons of Cadwgan, Gruffydd and Ivor, attacked this army too on its return, and cut it also off at Aberllech.[265]

The British chronicler here makes a comment which fully explains the final issue of these wars. The Normans or English, whichever we are to call the hosts of England under the Red King, had thus for three years met with nothing but defeat. Yet they had in truth won the land. “The folk stayed in their homes, trusting fearlessly, though the castles were yet whole, and the castlemen in them.”[266] Effects of the castle-building. The fortresses might be hemmed in for a moment; but, as long as they stood whole with the castlemen in them, the newly won freedom of the open country was liable to be upset at any moment. In Gwent and Brecheiniog at least the natives might for the moment stay fearlessly in their homes; they might at some favourable point surprise and cut to pieces the armies that were sent against them; they might withdraw to moors and mountains when the invading force was too strong for them; but, as long as the castles stood firm, the real grasp of the stranger on the land was not loosened. How long a castle could stand out we see by the example of this very year’s campaign. Pembroke castle holds out. All the castles of Dyfed and Ceredigion had been destroyed two years before, save Pembroke and Rhyd-y-gors; and Rhyd-y-gors was now in the hands of the Britons. Pembroke, the castle of earth and wood, the outpost cut off from all help, still stood through the whole of these two years, the one representative of Norman dominion in the whole region of which it had become the head. No wonder that the Britons, victorious everywhere else, resolved on one great attack on this still unconquered stronghold of the enemy. The Welsh attack Pembroke. 1096. A host led by several chieftains of the house of Cadwgan, Uhtred son of Edwin,--one whom we should rather have looked for in Northumberland,--and Howel son of Goronwy, set forth and fought against Pembroke. Gerald of Windsor was hard pressed. One night, fifteen of his knights, despairing of resistance, made their escape from the castle in a boat. Resistance of Gerald of Windsor. Their esquires were more faithful, and Gerald at once gave them the arms of knighthood, and also granted—​or professed to grant to them—​the fiefs of their recreant lords.[267] His devices. We read too how Gerald, to hide his real plight from the enemy, betook himself to some of those simple devices of which we hear in so many times and places. He had four swine in the castle; he cut them in pieces, and threw them over to the besiegers.[268] The next day he wrote or caused letters to be written sealed with his seal, saying that there was no need to trouble Earl Arnulf—​he is made to bear the title—​for any help for four months to come. His dealings with Bishop Wilfrith. These letters he took care should be found near a neighbouring house of Bishop Wilfrith of Saint David’s, as if they had been lost by their bearer.[269] They were read out in the Welsh army. The Britons, we are told, having no mind for a four months’ siege, marched away.[270] They claim to have marched away without loss, with much booty, especially with all the cattle belonging to the castle.[271] Offensive action of Gerald. 1097. But the castle was not taken; it stood there to do its work; and early in the next year Gerald was harrying in his turn as far as the borders of Saint David’s.[272] Friendship for the Bishop perhaps kept him from harrying the holy soil of Dewisland itself.

This year, the King, as he had done two years before, deemed the affairs of Wales to call for his own presence, and for a greater effort on his part than ever. He had come back from taking possession of the mortgaged land of Normandy; Easter, 1097. he had held the Easter Assembly at Windsor somewhat after the regular time.[273] At that Assembly Welsh affairs must have formed a subject of discussion, as the King presently set out for Wales with a great host. This was the time when the knights sent by the Archbishop were deemed so unfit for their duty.[274] William’s second Welsh campaign. The King’s coming appears to have led to a seeming, perhaps a pretended, submission. Led by native guides, he passed through the whole country,[275] Seeming conquest. and he clearly believed that he had brought Wales to a state of peace. So he deemed when he came back to hold the Whitsun Assembly, the assembly in which Anselm for the first time that year craved leave to go to the Pope.[276] But he was called back by a fresh revolt. Fresh revolt. The Welsh, in the emphatic phrase of our Chronicler, “bowed from the King.”[277] They had once bowed to him; now they bowed from him; they cast away his authority; perhaps they formally defied him in the strict feudal sense; certainly they defied him in the more general sense which that word has now come to bear. And now, for the first time in these wars, the English Chronicler gives us the name of a Welsh leader, a name which from British sources has long been familiar to us. Cadwgan. “They chose them many elders of themselves; one of them was Cadwgan hight, that of them the worthiest was; he was brother’s son of Gruffydd the King.”[278] The name of the great prince who had ruled all Wales, who had won the battle by the Severn,[279] who had put Earl Ralph to flight[280] and burned Hereford town and minster,[281] the prince whom it needed all the strength and all the arts of Harold to overthrow, was still famous even among Englishmen. The nephew of Gruffydd had this time too to dread no such tactics as had worn down his uncle on his own soil. William’s third campaign. June-August, 1097. King William set forth with a host of horse as well as of foot, vowing to put to death every male of the rebel nation.[282] Again the pomp and pride of Norman chivalry was shivered against the natural defences of the land which was so rashly attacked. The Britons seem, by their own account, to have made the war a religious one; perhaps, like the Irish king, they deemed that higher powers would fight for them against the blasphemer. The King’s ill-success. Strengthened by prayers, fastings, and other pious exercises, the Welsh took to their woods and rocks and mountains, while the Red King’s host marched and rode bootlessly through the valleys and plains.[283] “Mickle he lost in men and in horses, and eke in many other things.”[284] This state of things went on from midsummer to August.[285] Then the King came back to hold two assemblies at unusual times, in the second of which he and Anselm met for the last time.[286] And now it was that he took that wise resolution which I have quoted above.[287] He determines to build castles. October, 1097. As invasions by mounted knights led to nothing but losing both the knights and their horses, he would build castles on the borders. This Harold, who knew so much better than William Rufus how to carry on a Welsh campaign, had not done. But then the objects of Harold and the objects of William Rufus were not the same.

We should have been well pleased to know what was the immediate result of the resolve for the building of the border-castles. What were the fortresses which were built, as surely some must have been built, in obedience to it? This is the last entry which connects Rufus personally with Welsh affairs. But we can hardly help connecting this resolve with the building, a little time later, of several fortresses in the lands threatened by the Welsh, specially of one, the greatest of them all. Action of Robert of Bellême. 1098–1102. In the next year one part of the British land becomes the scene of a series of events of far-reaching interest and importance, but also of a local interest quite as great in its own way. We shall then see that, if the Red King did not do much in the way of building border-castles himself, much was done by others, of course with his approval, most likely by his order. Our next year’s tale brings Robert of Bellême to the Welsh border, and, where he was lord, castle-building went on with all vigour.

Affairs of Scotland. But before we enter on a branch of our story which touches all parts of the British islands, and many lands beyond the British islands, it may be well to take up the thread of our Scottish narrative at a point where the affairs of Scotland and those of Wales seem again to be brought into some measure of connexion. The year which saw that wise resolution of the Red King with regard to the Welsh castles, a resolution which really meant the final union of Wales with the English realm, saw also the end of those revolutions whose final result was, not the union of Scotland with the English realm—​that was not to come about till long after, and by other means—​but the extension of English influence within the kingdom of Scotland till it might be looked on as in truth a second English realm.

§ 4. The Establishment of Eadgar in Scotland.
1097–1098.

Decree for action in Scotland. August, 1097. It must have been at one of the later assemblies of the year which we have now reached, most likely at the August gathering,[288] that the resolution was taken for vigorous action in Scotland. The King himself had had enough of Welsh warfare; he must have been already looking forward to those French and Cenomannian campaigns which form the main feature of the next year; he was in the middle of his final dispute with Anselm. But William Rufus seems always to have been well pleased to set others in motion, even on enterprises in which he did not share himself. Designs of the Ætheling Eadgar. So he gladly hearkened to the proposals of the Ætheling Eadgar for an expedition into Scotland. Its object was to overthrow the usurper Donald, as the chosen of Dunfermline was deemed at Winchester, to restore the line of Malcolm and Margaret, and to bring the Scottish kingdom once more into its due obedience to the over-lord in England.

Relations between Eadgar and the King. Our last certain notice of Eadgar sets him before us as enjoying the fullest confidence on the part of the reigning King, as sent by him on the important errand of negotiating with Malcolm and bringing him to William’s court at Gloucester.[289] Story of Godwine and Ordgar. One hardly knows what to make of the tale which describes him as awakening a certain amount of suspicion in the King’s mind later in the same year;[290] but that, either before or after this time, he was in some such danger appears from another tale in the details of which there may or may not be a legendary element, but which undoubtedly brings before us real persons and a real state of things. To this tale I have already referred elsewhere, as having that kind of interest which belongs to every story in which we see any one of those who are recorded in the Great Survey as mere names stand forth as a living man, playing his part in the world of living men. However obscure the man, however small his deeds, there is always an interest in finding any part of the dry bones of Domesday clothed with flesh and blood. And the interest becomes higher when the man thus called forth out of darkness is a man of native English birth, and the father of one whom England may well be glad to reckon among her worthies.[291]

Eadgar accused by Ordgar. The story runs then that a knight of English birth, Ordgar by name, seeking favour with the King, brought a charge against the English Ætheling. He told William that Eadgar, trusting to his own descent from ancient kings, was seeking to deprive the reigning king of his crown. William hearkened to the accuser, and some grievous doom—​would it have been the doom of William of Eu?--was in store for Eadgar, if his guilt—​his ambition or patriotism—​could be proved. The ordeal and the battle. But how was the charge to be proved or disproved? By Old-English law the appeal to the judgement of God in doubtful cases was by the ordeal; and, as between Englishman and Englishman, this rule had not been changed by the laws of the Conqueror.[292] But we can well believe that Englishmen who were admitted to a place in the Red King’s court had largely put on the ideas and feelings of Normans. They would doubtless look down on the ancient practice of their fathers, and they would be more inclined to follow the fashion of their Norman companions in better liking the more chivalrous test of the wager of battle. It seems in the present story to be taken for granted that the trial will be by wager of battle. But who will do battle for Eadgar, when the royal favour is so clearly shown on behalf of Eadgar’s accuser? The Ætheling was sad at heart, forsaken, as it seemed, of all men. Godwine volunteers to fight for Eadgar. But at last one stepped forward who was ready to dare the risk on behalf of a man to whom he was bound by a double tie. As an Englishman he was stirred to come to the help of the descendant of the ancient kings, and he was further bound to Eadgar by the special tie which binds a man to his lord. He was a knight of noble English descent, known as Godwine of Winchester. Notices of him in Domesday. We know him in Domesday as a tenant of the Ætheling for lands in Hertfordshire, and the Survey further suggests that he may have had a private grudge against the opposite champion. There were lands in Oxfordshire which were held by an Ordgar, and which had been held by a Godwine. Duel of Godwine and Ordgar. The matter is to be decided by the hand-to-hand fight of the two English knights. For they so far cleave to the customs of their fathers that they fight on foot and deal handstrokes with their swords. Ordgar comes forth in splendid armour, surrounded by a crowd of courtiers.[293] Godwine has nothing to trust to but his sword and his good cause. But there was at least no attempt made to hinder a fair fight—​so to do would have been altogether foreign to the spirit of the chivalrous king. The herald and the umpire do their duty;[294] the knights take their oath to forbear the use of all weapons but those which were needed in the knightly duel. A long and hard fight follows, the ups and downs of which are described with Homeric minuteness. Victory of Godwine, and acquittal of Eadgar. Ordgar at last, sorely wounded, is pressed to the ground, with the foot of the victorious Godwine upon him.[295] As a last resource, he strives, but in vain, to stab Godwine with a knife which, in breach of his oath, he had treacherously hidden in his boot.[296] Godwine snatches the knife from him; Ordgar confesses the falsehood of his charge, and presently dies of his wounds.[297] Godwine now becomes an object of universal honour, and receives from the King the lands of the slain Ordgar, while Eadgar rises higher than ever in the King’s favour.

Estimate of the story. I see no reason to doubt the main outline of this story, which rests on the evidence of undesigned coincidences. Men of no special renown, about whom there was no temptation to invent fables, are made to act in a way which exactly agrees with what we know from the surest of witnesses to have been their real position. Without pledging ourselves to the details of the combat, which have a slightly legendary sound, we may surely believe that we have here the record of a real wager of battle, like those which happened at no great distance of time in the cases of William of Eu and Arnulf of Hesdin. Its general truth. Englishmen under Rufus. We may surely believe that Eadgar was wrongfully accused, and that Godwine cleared his lord in the duel. We see then that in the Red King’s day there was nothing to hinder men of Old-English birth, exceptionally lucky men doubtless, from holding an honourable rank and a high place in royal favour. But we learn also, as we might expect to find, that such Englishmen found that it suited their purposes to adopt Norman fashions. Robert son of Godwine. Of Godwine we hear no more; but his son, as I have noticed elsewhere, bears, according to a very common rule, the Norman name of Robert.[298] Had we chanced to hear of him without hearing the name of his father, we might not have known that the hero and martyr was a man of our own blood.

The Eadgars march to Scotland. September, 1097. We now follow the Ætheling to a warfare in which Robert the son of Godwine is his companion. Eadgar set out about Michaelmas to place his nephew and namesake on the Scottish throne. He had a bright comet and a shower of falling stars to light him on his way.[299] But Donald was hardly of importance enough for the heavenly powers to foretell his fall; The comet. the shining and departure of the comet was rather understood to mark the approaching day when Anselm, the light of England, turned away from our land and left darkness behind him.[300] The force of the Ætheling seems to have been of much the same kind as the force which Duncan had led on the same errand three years before. He went with the King’s approval and support, but certainly without the King’s personal help, perhaps without any part of the royal army.[301] That army, as we have lately seen, was just then coming together for another errand.[302]

Vision of the younger Eadgar. The host then marched northward. On the way, we are told, the younger Eadgar was honoured by a vision of Saint Cuthberht, who bade him take his banner from the abbey at Durham—​the abbey now without a bishop—​and he should have victory in the battle.[303] The banner was borne before the army; the fight in which it was unfurled was long and hard; but the valour of the men who fought under its folds was not to be withstood. Exploits of Robert son of Godwine. Without binding ourselves to details which may well be legendary, we may believe that Robert son of Godwine was foremost in the fight, and that the victory in which Defeat and blinding of Donald. Donald was the second time overthrown was largely owing to his personal prowess.[304] Little mercy was shown to the vanquished; Donald spent the rest of his days blinded and a prisoner;[305] Fate of Eadmund; he becomes a monk at Montacute. his confederate Eadmund lived to become somewhat of a saint. He put on the garb of Clugny in the priory of Montacute, at the foot of that hill of Saint Michael where the castle of Robert of Mortain now covered the spot which had beheld the finding of England’s Holy Cross.[306] But as that house did not arise till some years later, at the bidding of Count William the son of Robert,[307] we may gather that Eadmund spent the intermediate time in some harsher captivity. When he died, he was buried, at his own request, in chains, as a sign of penitence for his share in his half-brother’s death.[308]

Eadgar King of Scots. The younger Eadgar now reigned over Scotland as the sworn liegeman of King William of England.[309] The elder Eadgar went back to England, to end there a year of heavy time, a year of evil weather, Character of the year 1098. a year in which men could neither till the earth nor gather in its tilth, and when the folk was utterly bowed down by unrighteous gelds.[310] His valiant comrade abode for a while in the dominions of the Scottish King. Eadgar was grateful to all who had helped him in heaven or in earth. The battle had been won by Saint Cuthberht and Robert son of Godwine. Saint Cuthberht, in the person of the monks of his abbey, received the lands of Coldingham, the seat in ancient times of a house of nuns famous in the days of Danish warfare.[311] Eadgar’s gifts to Durham and to Robert son of Godwine. A little later—​for it was when Durham had again a bishop—​he received, in the person of his own successor, the greater gift of the town of Berwick.[312] Robert, by the leave of his own sovereign, received a fief in the same land of Lothian, and began the building of a castle. Action of Eadgar, Robert, and Randolf Flambard; after 1099. But, while King Eadgar went to do service to his over-lord in England, the bishop—​it was already Randolf Flambard—​and the barons of the bishopric, whom Robert’s fortress seems in some way to have offended, attacked it and made its lord a prisoner.[313] King Eadgar came back with letters from his over-lord, ordering the release of their common subject. The Bishop and his barons obeyed; but the King of Scots withdrew his gift of Berwick from the bishopric, as a punishment for the wrong done to the man to whom he owed his crown.[314]

Eadgar and Robert go to the Crusade. Robert the son of Godwine was presently called to a nobler work. His lord the Ætheling went to the Holy War. Eadgar was not one of those who marched first of all with the two Roberts of Normandy and Flanders. He was one of that second party who set forth about the time of the siege of Antioch, 1099. and joined the Norman Duke in his ignoble retreat at Laodikeia.[315] Robert the son of Godwine, if he stayed in Britain long enough to have any dealings with Flambard in his character of Bishop of Durham, must have set out later still. He could have had no share in the leaguer of Nikaia or of Antioch; most likely he had no share in the rescue of the Holy City. Robert in Palestine. He could hardly have reached Syria till Jerusalem was again a Christian kingdom under its second king. Godfrey, the mirror of Christian knighthood, was gone. His successor was his less worthy brother Baldwin, he who had told the dream of his calling to Dame Isabel in the hall of Conches.[316] But there was still work to be done; the land which had been won had to be defended. King Baldwin was besieged in Rama by the misbelievers.[317] 1103. The King, attended by five knights only, made a sally to cut his way through the besiegers. His exploits and death. The valiant Englishman rode in front of him, cutting down the infidels on each side with his sword. As Robert pressed too fiercely on, his sword fell from his hand; he stooped to grasp it again; he was overpowered by numbers, and was carried off a prisoner.[318] He was led to the Egyptian Babylon; he was offered his choice of death or apostasy; he clave to his faith; placed as a mark in the market-place, like the East-Anglian Eadmund, he died beneath the arrows of his merciless captors.[319] Such men could England, even in her darkest day, send forth for the relief and defence of Christendom in the Eastern world. Modern parallels and contrasts. Such men she could send forth even in the days of our fathers, to draw the sword for right in the haven of Pylos or beneath the akropolis of Athens. Now the men who go forth from England to the same quarter of the world seem to share more of the spirit of another Robert who, a century later, went forth from the same shire as the son of Godwine on another errand. In our own story we come across no renegade or traitor save the single name of Hugh of Jaugy.[320] But in the course of the twelfth century we see the forerunners of a class of men whose names stain the annals of our own time. Robert of Saint Alban’s. The glory of Robert son of Godwine is balanced by the shame of Robert of Saint Alban’s, English by birth and blood, the apostate Templar who joined the host of Saladin and mocked the last agonies of the defenders of the Holy City.[321] Of the earlier Robert our century has seen the true successors in the honoured names of Gordon and Church and Hastings. Of the later Robert it has seen the successor in the Englishman who sells his soul and his sword to keep down the yoke of the barbarian on the necks of his Christian brethren. It has seen him in the Greek who sells his soul and his glib tongue to argue in the councils of Europe against the deliverance of his own people.

Reign of Eadgar in Scotland. 1097–1107. With the accession of Eadgar to the Scottish crown the direct connexion between English and Scottish affairs comes to an end, as far as concerns the period with which we have immediately to do. Eadgar reigned in peace, as far as his own kingdom was concerned, for ten years, earning the doubtful praise of being in all things like to his remote uncle the Confessor.[322] At his death the Scottish dominions were divided between his two more energetic brothers. Alexander. 1107–1124. Alexander took the kingdom; David, by a revival of an ancient custom,[323] held as an appanage that part of Strathclyde or Cumberland which still belonged to the Scottish crown. Friendship of the Scottish kings for England. Both princes maintained strict friendship with England, and both sought wives in England. Alexander married a natural daughter of King Henry, Sibyl by name;[324] the wife of David was, more significantly, the widowed daughter of Waltheof.[325] Alexander had to strive against revolts in the North,[326] and his reign marks a great period in the ecclesiastical history of Scotland. Turgot and Eadmer. It is the time in which we meet with the familiar names of Turgot and Eadmer, the one as bishop, the other as bishop-elect, of the first see in Scotland.[327] The influence of the reign of Eadgar told wholly in favour of the process by which Scotland was becoming an English kingdom. The reign of Alexander told perhaps less directly in favour of things specially English,[328] but it worked strongly towards the more general object of bringing Scotland into the common circle of western Christendom. Effects of the reign of David. 1124–1153. The succession of David reunited the Scottish dominions, and his vigorous rule of twenty-nine years brought to perfection all that his parents had begun. That famous prince was bound to England by every tie of descent, habit, and affinity. His English position; Brother of her Queen, uncle of her Imperial Lady,[329] David was an English earl in a stricter sense than any king of Scots who had gone before him. his earldoms. He was not only Earl of Lothian, which was becoming fast incorporated with Scotland—​or more truly was fast incorporating Scotland with itself—​nor yet only of Northumberland and Cumberland, with which the same process might easily have been carried out.[330] He was Earl also of distant and isolated Huntingdon, an earldom which could not be held except on the same terms as its fellows of Leicester or Warwick. English influence in Scotland. Under David, the great reformer, the great civilizer, but at the same time the king who made the earlier life of Scotland a thing of the past, all that was English, all that was Norman, was welcomed in the land which was now truly a northern England. His invasion of England. If David, like his father, appeared as an invader of England, if, in so doing, he made England feel that he had subjects who were still far from being either English or Norman,[331] he did so only as a benevolent mediator in the affairs of England, as the champion of the claims of one of his nieces against the claims of the other. The Scottish kings of the second series. With the three sons of Malcolm and Margaret begins the line of those whom we may call the second series of Scottish kings, those who still came in the direct line of old Scottish royalty, but under whom Scotland was a disciple of England, and on the whole friendly to England. They stand distinguished alike from the purely Celtic kings who went before them, and from the kings, Norman or English as we may choose to call them by natural descent, who were politically more hostile to England than the old Malcolms and Kenneths. Eadgar and Alexander died childless; the later kings were all of the stock of David. The English or Norman candidates for the Scottish crown. Of that stock—​and thereby of the stock of Waltheof and Siward and their forefathers of whatever species—​came that motley group who in after days wrangled for David’s crown. Bruce, Balliol, Hastings, Comyn, all came by female descent of the line of David and Matilda. In every other aspect all of them were simply English nobles of the time. It is an odd destiny by which, according as they supported or withstood the rights of their own prince over the kingdom which they claimed, some of them have won the name of Scottish traitors and others the name of Scottish patriots.

§ 5. The Expedition of Magnus. 1098.

Events of the year 1098. The events of the year which followed the last revolution in Scotland amount to a general stirring of all the lands which could in ordinary times have any influence on the affairs of England. Their wide geographical range. We shall see in the next chapter that it was the busiest of times in the Gaulish mainland, where the designs of Rufus, now undisputed master of Normandy, spread far beyond anything that had been dreamed of by any earlier holder of the Norman duchy. For warfare or for alliance, the range of our story during this most stirring year stretches from the fiords of Norway to the gorges of the Pyrenees. In the present section we have to look to the northern side of this tangled drama, and to take the specially British aspect of it as our centre. A mighty undertaking, which moved the whole of north-western Europe, which touched England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the smaller islands which lie between and around them, comes home to us mainly as it touches that one among those islands which might almost pass for a part of the mainland of southern Britain. Magnus of Norway. The great warfare of Magnus of Norway mainly concerns our story so far as it almost casually became a part of warfare in Wales, and specially of warfare in Anglesey. Anglesey the centre of the story. And, as regards England itself, the most important aspect of a movement which stirred every northern land was that it indirectly lifted one man who was already great beyond endurance in Normandy and its border lands into a place of greatness even less endurable in England and its border lands. The Earls of Shrewsbury. We have to tell a tale spreading over many lands and seas, a tale full of personal pictures and personal exploits. To Englishmen of the last years of the eleventh century and the first years of the twelfth, its most practical aspect was that it took away Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury and set his brother Robert in his place.

The winter of 1097. We must now look back to the moment, late in the last year, when the Welsh seemed to have completely won back their freedom, except in Glamorgan and at the single point covered by the unconquered fortress of Pembroke.[332] It is startling to find in our next notice that the Britons, without any mention of any fresh loss, are beginning to stand on the defensive, and to seek out as it were a last shelter. The war of Anglesey. 1098. The war is now shifted to a quarter of which we have hitherto heard less than of some other parts of Wales, and it becomes connected with movements in other parts of the world which carry us back a generation. The island off the north-west corner of Wales, that Mona or Mevania to which half-forgotten English conquests had given the name of Anglesey,[333] became now, as in the days of Roman invasion, the chief—​at the time it may have seemed the last—​stronghold of British resistance. The island, parted from the British mainland by the narrow strait—​the Hellespont—​of Menai, lying within sight of the fortress of Robert of Rhuddlan at Dwyganwy, seems for the last four years to have been left untouched by any Norman invader. Schemes of Cadwgan and Gruffydd. But now we read that the princes of Gwynedd, Cadwgan son of Bleddyn, their worthiest elder, and Gruffydd the slayer of Robert, with the general assent of the Britons of the north, agree in council, as one of their own chroniclers puts it, to save Mona.[334] This form of words seems to imply less trust in their own resources than we might have looked for in the elders of the Britons after their late successes. If Mona needed to be saved, one would think that they must already have found that there was little real chance of saving Gwynedd or Dyfed. And the way by which they sought to save Mona was hardly a wise one, though it was one which might have been defended by many precedents. The Welsh take wikings from Ireland into pay. Just as Gruffydd had done ten years before, they took into their pay a fleet of pirates from Ireland, wikings doubtless from the Scandinavian settlements, whom one Welsh writer, perhaps more from habit than as meaning his words to be taken in their full force, speaks of as heathens.[335] With these allies, and with the main body of their own forces, the British leaders withdrew into Anglesey.

The two Earls Hugh, of Chester and Shrewsbury. The news of this alliance was thought serious enough to call for vigorous action on the part of the two earls of the border. Both now bore the same name. Hugh of Avranches still ruled at Chester—​we last heard of him as counselling the cruel punishment of William of Eu; Hugh of Montgomery was drawing near to the end of his short dominion over Shropshire. The Scandinavian writers couple the two Hughs together, and they distinguish the elder by the well-earned surname of Hugh the Fat, and the younger by that of Hugh the Proud.[336] They gathered their forces, Norman and English, and crossed over to Anglesey. The first step towards the occupation of the island was the usual Norman means, the building of a castle. In this case they had not to build for the first time, but to build up afresh what the Welsh had destroyed in the moment of victory. It will be remembered that, four years before, the Britons in their great revolt had won back Anglesey and broken down the castle.[337] Rebuilding of the castle of Aberlleiniog. There seems no reason to doubt that the site of the old work was the site of the new, and that that site marks at once the landing-place of the two earls and the scene of the fall of one of them. It lies on the eastern side of the island, quite free from the strait, and nearly due west from the scene of the Marquess Robert’s death at Dwyganwy.[338] It lies about half way between the priory of Penmon—​the head of Mona—​parts of whose simple and venerable church must be nearly contemporary with our times,[339] and the great fortress of later days at Beaumaris, the head of the island shire. A small expanse of flat and marshy ground marks the spot where the small stream of Lleiniog, mere brook as it is, makes its independent way into the sea. Traces of the castle. On its left bank the careful enquirer will find, what he will certainly not see at a glance, a castle-mound with its ditches, now, after the usual senseless and provoking fashion, masked with trees. But he who makes his way within will find, not only the mound, but the square tower crowning it, though he will hardly deem this last to be a work of the two earls. In front of the castle, immediately above the sea, a slight natural height seems to have been improved by art into a smaller mound. The earthworks at least the earls doubtless found ready to their hand, whether they had been thrown up in the earlier invasion of the island, or whether the invaders had then taken advantage of mounds thrown up by men of earlier times. Here we have beyond doubt the remains of the castle of Aberlleiniog, the castle which Hugh the Fat and Hugh the Proud designed to hold Anglesey in check.[340] But it was not only to the craft of the engineer that the two Hughs trusted. The earls bribe the wikings. The earls of the Red King’s day had learned to practise the special arts of their master. The wikings were bribed with the gold of England to betray the cause of their British allies, and they gave the earls valuable help in making good their entrance into Anglesey.[341]

Cadwgan and Gruffydd flee to Ireland. It was in strange contrast with the vigour which for several years had been shown by the Welsh leaders, and with the success which had commonly waited on their arms, but quite in harmony with their last action of all, when Cadwgan and Gruffydd, seeing the turn which things had taken, threw up the common cause altogether and fled to Ireland to secure their own safety.[342] Anglesey was now left to the mercy of the two earls. The character for gentleness which Hugh of Shrewsbury bears, and which he may have deserved in the government of his own earldom, brought no lessening of suffering to British enemies. Wherever the two Hughs marched, men were slaughtered, or were, in modern eyes at least, worse than slaughtered. Cruel treatment of the Welsh captives. They were blinded, deprived of hands and feet, or made to undergo the other mutilations usual at the time.[343] In some cases at least the earls trampled on every privilege of holy places and holy persons. Desecration of the church of Saint Tyfrydog. It may be deemed a lesser matter that one of them caused his hounds to pass a night in the church of Saint Tyfrydog, and found them all mad in the morning.[344] The privileges of the Church could not shelter even her human and priestly servants. One special victim was an aged priest, who is said to have taken a leading part in the war by the advice which he gave to the Welsh. Mutilation of Cenred. His name Cenred bespeaks English birth; the form of the name is Mercian; if he had passed from the earldom of either Hugh to the side of the Welsh, he would naturally be looked on as a traitor, and his treason would explain the excessive harshness with which he was treated. The old man was dragged out of a church; besides more shameful suffering, one eye was torn out, and his tongue was also cut out.[345] This last form of mutilation seems to have been confined to himself, and it may have been meant as specially befitting one who had used that dangerous member to give counsel to the enemy. Restoration of his speech. And now, according to our story, happened one of those signs and wonders which were at the time naturally deemed miraculous, but for which modern times have supplied, if not an explanation, at least a parallel. Cenred fared like the victims of Gelimer of old, like the victims of Djezzar in modern times; three days after the loss of his tongue, his speech came back to him.[346] Four days later again, so men deemed at Worcester, came vengeance on one at least of the two earls for the cruel deed which they had wrought on him.[347]

Expedition of Magnus Barefoot. If wikings from Ireland had betrayed the cause of the Britons, a far mightier wiking was now afloat, if not to give help to the Britons, at least to act as a minister of wrath upon their enemies. The tale of Stamfordbridge seems to come over again on the western, instead of the eastern, side of the British islands. For a grandson of Harold Hardrada shows himself at the head of a power almost equalling that of his grandfather; he brings a grandson of Godwine in his train, he overcomes two Mercian earls, and finds his own doom, not indeed in Yorkshire, but in Ireland. But the enterprise which recalls so many points in the enterprise of two-and-thirty years earlier was not in any strict sense an invasion of England. Character of his reign. 1093–1103. Magnus, the son of that peaceful Olaf of whom we have heard in the Conqueror’s day,[348] now reigned in Norway in the spirit of his grandfather rather than in that of his father. His surnames. He bore various surnames, as the Tall and the Lover-of-Strife; but his name has gone down in history with the special epithet of Magnus Barefoot—​more strictly it would seem Bare-leg—​a name which is said to have been given to him as one of the results of the enterprise of which we have now to speak. 1093–1098. After showing himself for five years as a mighty warrior in his own peninsula, Magnus set forth to bring more western lands under his obedience. He professes friendship for England. Against England he professed to have no designs, and the little that we casually hear of him in connexion with England seems to imply friendly relations. His son Sigurd, afterwards famous as the Crusader, was the child of an English captive. Her name of Thora witnesses to her Scandinavian descent;[349] but her captivity could not have been the work of the arms of Magnus. His treasure at Lincoln. Either now or at some later time, he entrusted a great treasure, twenty thousand pounds of silver, to the keeping of a rich citizen of Lincoln,[350] a sign of the high place which was still held by the city of the Danish Lawmen, and of the connexion which its citizens still kept up with the kingdoms of the North.[351]

Harold son of Harold in his fleet. But, peaceful as might be the professions of Magnus toward England, there was one in his fleet whose presence could not fail to call up thoughts of deeds which had been done, or which might again be done, on English ground. We learn from one of the most casual of notices that Magnus had with him a man who, if the course of things had gone otherwise a generation earlier, might then himself have been the wearer of the English crown, who would at least have stood nearer to it than either the Ætheling of the blood of Cerdic or the Ætheling of the blood of Rolf. It could hardly have been without an object that the grandson of Harold the son of Sigurd brought with him the son of Harold the son of Godwine. Strange indeed was the fate of the twin sons of the doubly widowed Ealdgyth.[352] Each flashes across our sight for a moment, and only for a moment. Ulf we have seen the prisoner of the Conqueror; we have seen him sent forth by the Conqueror’s son to go in freedom and honour, but to go we know not whither.[353] And now, for once in the course of a life which must have been a chequered one, we hear the name of his brother. Some ship in the fleet of Magnus bore, as its guest or as its captain, Harold the son of Harold King of the English.[354] Whence he came, whither he went, before and after that one voyage to the shores of Britain, we know not. Grandson of Godwine, grandson of Ælfgar, begotten, but not born, to the kingship of England, the child of the widow did not see the light in the City of the Legions till his father had found his cairn upon the rocks of Hastings, perhaps his tomb before the altar at Waltham. What friendly hand saved him, when his brother came into the Conqueror’s power, we know not, any more than we know the later fortunes of his mother. But now the younger Harold came, the guest of one whose grandfather had felt the might, as his father had felt the mild-heartedness, of the elder Harold.[355] His voyage brought him not near to either the most glorious or the most mournful memories of his father. The fleet of Magnus kept aloof alike from the shores of Yorkshire and from the shores of Sussex. But the younger Harold came to look for a moment on the land where his mother had dwelled as a queen, and which his father had filled with the trophies of his conquest.[356] He came to see the British shores lined with English warriors, but to see them under the rule of the Norman leaders who had divided between them so great a part of the earldom of his mother’s house, and the elder of whom reigned as all but a king in the city of his own birth. Son and nephew of the three who died on Senlac, he saw from the Norwegian ship the fall of the son of the man who led the charge which first broke down the English palisade upon that hill of doom.[357] And then, his name once spoken, he passes away into utter darkness. Of Ulf, the knight of the Norman duke, of Harold the comrade of the Norwegian king, we have no tale to tell save that they were such.

Magnus’ designs on Ireland. One version of our tale speaks of Ireland as the main object of the expedition of Magnus, as it certainly was the object of his last expedition some years later. His alleged Irish marriage. He had, it is said, married the daughter of an Irish king, but his father-in-law had failed to carry out the marriage-contract.[358] There is nothing of this in the Norwegian account, which speaks only of a later marriage between Sigurd son of Magnus Irish marriage of his son Sigurd. and a daughter of King Murtagh.[359] But it seems clear from a comparison of the various accounts that Magnus did, at some stage of the present voyage, make an attack on Ireland; it seems reasonable therefore to suppose that Irish enterprise formed part of his scheme from the beginning.[360] His voyage among the islands. Our own narrative is more concerned with his course along the shores of our own island, in which however he seems to have barely touched Britain itself, in either its Scottish or its English regions. His exploits lay among the smaller islands of the British seas, most of which had at that moment more to do with Ireland than with either England or Scotland. It is not easy to call up from among many conflicting statements an exact picture of the state of things at the time. Dominion of Godred Cronan. In the interval between the expedition of Harold Hardrada and the expedition of his grandson, Godred the son of Harold, surnamed Cronan, he whom we have heard of at Stamford bridge,[361] 1075–1091. had raised up a considerable dominion of which Man was the centre. 1078. He ruled over Dublin and the greater part of Leinster, and over the Sudereys or Hebrides; and, if the chronicle of his own island may be believed, he drove the Scots to a singular treaty, the object of which must have been to hinder Scotland from becoming a naval power.[362] We may guess that some of the piratical adventurers of whom we have heard once or twice in our Welsh notices, as for instance in the story of Robert of Rhuddlan and again in the tale which we have just told, were in truth subjects of Godred. But the dominion of Godred was one of those powers which seem as it were casually founded, and which seldom long outlive the reign of their founder. His Irish dominion did not last even so long as his own life. Godred driven out of Dublin. 1094. After seventeen years of possession, he was driven out of Dublin by Murtagh, and in the next year he died, leaving three sons, Lagman, Harold, and Olaf, of whom Lagman succeeded to his island dominion. His death. 1095. His sons, Lagman and Harold. In the Manx version of the tale, Lagman, disturbed by a rebellion of his brother Harold, took a frightful revenge by inflicting on him the usual cruel mutilations. Then, smitten with remorse, he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and died there.[363] The chief men of the Sudereys, hearing of his death, asked King Murtagh for a ruler during the minority of Olaf. Donald sent by Murtagh to the Sudereys. This would almost look as if Murtagh had not only driven Godred out of Ireland, but had established some kind of supremacy over Man itself. But the ruler sent, Donald by name, proved a tyrant, and was driven out.[364] Ingemund sent by Magnus. Then we are told that Magnus himself sent one Ingemund to take the crown of the Isles, that the chief men came together in Lewis to make him king but that his outrages on their wives and daughters made them change their purpose. Instead of crowning him, they burned him in his house, and slew all his followers with fire and sword.[365] Civil war in Man. Directly after, we read of a civil war in the isle of Man itself, in which the leaders of both parties were killed.[366] The Norwegian story tells us nothing of all this; it conceives Godred as still living at the time of the expedition of Magnus, and Lagman as acting under his father.[367] The Manx version, though confused in its chronology and mixed up with some legendary details, gives the more intelligible story of the two. We see a time of confusion in Man, Ireland, and the Sudereys, which the Norwegian King tries to turn to his own advantage. The slaughter of his candidate for the island crown might have been looked on as ground for war by princes more scrupulous in such matters than Magnus Barefoot.

Signs and wonders. A King of the Northmen could hardly set out on a great enterprise without signs and wonders; but the signs and wonders which marked the expedition of Magnus are of a different kind from those which marked the expedition of Harold Hardrada. Or rather, one of the two elements which we see in the tale of Harold had, in the thirty years which had passed, waxed strong enough to drive out the other. In the days of Harold the omens and visions still savour of the old times of Scandinavian heathendom. Saint Olaf indeed appears in his character of a Christian martyr, to remind us that we are reading the deeds of baptized men; but the general tone is that of the worshippers of Thor and Odin.[368] But the tale which is now told of Magnus is a mere piece of every-day mediæval hagiology. It reminds us of some of the tales which are told of William the Great and of others.[369] Legend of Magnus and Saint Olaf. Magnus, great-nephew of Saint Olaf, is seized with an irreverent longing to test the truth of the boast that the body of his martyred kinsman had not seen corruption. The body, first buried in a sandhill near Nidaros or Trondhjem, was soon, like those of our own Harold and Waltheof, translated to a worthier place in the great church of Nidaros. Its incorruption had been already proved, and in their new place the holy remains wrought wonders of healing and deliverance.[370] But now, heedless of the remonstrances of the bishop and his clergy, Magnus bade that the shrine should be opened, that he might see whether it was even as the tale went. He saw and believed; and he not only believed but trembled. He rushed out of the church, smitten with sudden fear. In the night the martyr appeared to him and gave him his choice of two forms of punishment. He must either lose his kingdom and his life within thirty days, or else he must set forth from Norway and never see the land again. His fleet. Magnus gathered together his wise men; he told them the vision, and by their advice, he chose the second alternative, by far the less terrible to a king of the seas.[371] He set forth, but it was on an errand of conquest, at the head of a fleet of a hundred and sixty ships, a number far less than that of the mighty armada which had come together at the bidding of his grandfather.[372]

The teller of this tale has either misplaced the date of the real or supposed vision, or else he has mixed up the present voyage of Magnus with a later one. Magnus certainly saw Norway again after that one of his expeditions which alone directly touches English history. Magnus at Orkney. He first sailed to the Orkneys, where the brother earls, the sons of Thorfinn and Ingebiorg, the half-brothers of Duncan of Scotland, still reigned.[373] Their reign now ended. He seizes the earls. On what ground we are not told, Paul and Erling, the allies of his grandfather, were dealt with by Magnus as enemies. They were made prisoners, and were sent to Norway, where they afterwards died.[374] He gives the earldom to Sigurd. His own young son Sigurd was established in the rule of the earldom, with a council to advise him.[375] Magnus then sailed among the Sudereys, plundering, burning, and slaying. Magnus among the Sudereys; His minstrels and sagamen boast of his doings in this way in the islands of Lewis, Uist, Skye, Mull, and Islay. But he spared—​the new faith of the Northmen prevailed thus far—​the holy island of Saint Columba, all whose inhabitants were freely received to his peace.[376] in Cantire; The only part of the isle of Britain itself which he seems to have touched was the long peninsula of Cantire, which might pass rather for another island than for part of the mainland, and which in truth formed a part of the insular realm. Thence, we are told, he plundered such parts of the Irish and Scottish coasts as lay within reach.[377] his dealings with Galloway. We read also in other versions that he made the men of Galloway become hewers of wood for fortresses to be raised, perhaps along their own shores.[378] His fruitless design on Ireland. We read too that at this stage he designed a more deliberately planned attack on Ireland, but that he shrank from carrying it out when he saw how strongly the Irish coasts were guarded.[379] He occupies Man. His next point was Man, which one narrator of his exploits strangely describes him as finding forsaken, and as peopling with inhabitants, from what quarter we are not told.[380] The local chronicler tells us, doubtless with far greater truth, that he landed on the island of Saint Patrick,--Holm Peel, the place of the famous castle and cathedral church—​that he was pleased with the land, and built fortresses therein, meaning—​so at least it was believed in Man—​to make the island his own dwelling-place.[381] His designs. Man, once established as the seat of a great Northern empire, would certainly have been a standing menace to all the regions and races of the British islands. But the dominion of Magnus over Man was not handed on to any successor of his own house, and during the few years which he still lived, he did not make Man the centre of his power.

Version of Orderic. We now come near to that point in the expedition which brings it immediately within the range of our present history. The writer who gives us most detail deems the exploits of Magnus so great that he lashes himself up to his highest flight of classical rhetoric. He paints the Norwegian king as the conqueror of the Kyklades—​not those Kyklades of the Ægæan which his grandfather may well enough have visited, but the other Kyklades in the great sea, lying as it were outside the world.[382] To match this unlooked-for definition of the Western islands, the winds which filled the sails of Magnus are honoured with unusual names; and, by a sad relapse into paganism Amphitritê seems to be called up as a special guardian of the English shore.[383] Of the two islands which bore the name of Mevania, both of which had obeyed the Bretwalda Eadwine, Magnus was already master of one; he now drew near to the other. He approaches Anglesey. We are told that he sent a small part of his fleet, consisting of six ships, to some unnamed point of the more strictly English shore, bearing a red shield as a sign that their purposes were peaceful.[384] Preparations for resistance. But the people of Britain of all races seem to have put little faith in the peaceful purposes of the Northmen. A vast host, French and English, presently came together from all parts of the dominions of the two Mercian earls. The meeting-place is said to have been at Dwyganwy on the peninsula opposite Anglesey, the scene of the fall of Robert of Rhuddlan.[385] The fleet off Aberlleiniog. But there can be no doubt that the scene of the tale which we have to tell lies on the opposite shore of Anglesey, and seemingly hard by the newly restored castle of Aberlleiniog. Most likely the sea then came in further over the low and marshy ground, and nearer to the castle-mound, than it does now. Both the earls were on the spot; the younger Hugh of Shrewsbury had been the first to come, and he had had to wait some days for his allies. At last the Norwegian ships were seen at sea near the coast, and the inhabitants were running to and fro for fear. By this time the forces of Hugh of Chester must have come up; but it is Hugh of Shrewsbury, the younger and more active of the pair, who plays the chief part in the story. He mounted his horse, and rode backwards and forwards along the shore, bringing his followers together, lest the invaders should land and overcome them piecemeal.[386] In his zeal he rode so near to the water as to come within reach of the advancing tide and within bow-shot of the Norwegian ships. Two archers on the ship of King Magnus spied him out, and took aim. His body was so well guarded by his coat of mail that it was his face only that supplied a mark for the archers. Of these one was King Magnus himself; the other was a warrior from Halagoland, the most northern part of the strictly Norwegian shore. The arrow shot by the King’s comrade struck and turned aside from the nose-piece of the Earl’s helmet. The shaft sent by the King’s own hand went yet more truly to its mark; it pierced the eye of Hugh and went through his head. Hugh the Proud sank, and perished amid the advancing waves.[387] He died by a stroke like that by which the elder Harold fell on Senlac; and we could almost wish that it had been the hand of the younger Harold that sent the shaft.

Norwegian and Welsh versions. That shaft was, according to the monk of Saint Evroul, sent by the hand of Magnus, but by the special instigation of the devil. To the minstrels of Norway the death of Earl Hugh seemed a worthy exploit. They sang, not of a single shot, but of a fierce battle, in which the Norwegian king, lord of the islands, met the Welsh earls[388] face to face. They told how the arrows rattled on the coats of mail, and how the King’s own arrow overthrew Earl Hugh the Proud by the waters of Anglesey.[389] The British chronicler too tells us, if not of the fierce struggle described by the Northern poet, yet of arrows shot on both sides, alike from the ships and by the defenders of the land.[390] All agree that it was by the royal hand that the Earl fell. But it is only from Saint Evroul that we hear that Magnus shot Hugh unwittingly, and that he mourned when he knew who it was whom he had slain. Peace between Magnus and Hugh of Chester. It is added that he at once made full peace with the surviving Earl Hugh of Chester, declaring that he had no hostile purposes against England, but that he only wished to wage war with Ireland, and to assert his dominion over the islands.[391] The body of Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury was sought for with pains by Normans and English, and was found at last, as the tide went back.[392] The only gentle one among the sons of Mabel[393]—​gentle, we may easily believe, to all but the Britons, perhaps cruel to them only under the evil influence of his elder namesake—​was mourned by all, Burial of Hugh of Shrewsbury. and was buried the seventeenth day after his death in the cloister of his father’s abbey at Shrewsbury.[394]

The words which we have just seen put into the mouth of Magnus are words of doubtful meaning, and they might imply a claim to Anglesey, as well as to the other islands. Designs of Magnus on Anglesey. That Magnus came thither with purposes of conquest we may set down as certain; it is less clear whether those purposes were carried out, even for a moment. In Norway it was believed that the overthrow of Earl Hugh put the King of the Northmen in possession of Anglesey, which is strangely spoken of as a third of the British land.[395] In Man it was said that Magnus, having slain one earl and put another to flight, occupied Anglesey, but that he was persuaded by the Welsh, on the payment of a heavy ransom, to leave the island and sail back to Man.[396] Certain it is that, if Magnus took any real possession of Anglesey, it was a momentary possession indeed. According to the British chroniclers, he sailed away at once, so that his coming and the death of one of the earls did not really hinder the joint work of the two. Anglesey and North Wales subdued by Hugh. For a moment Anglesey, and with it seemingly the greater part of North Wales, was brought more thoroughly than ever under Norman or English rule. The phrase by which the Welsh writer sets forth the result has a strange sound; but it does not badly describe the final work of these endless wars. The French, he says, made the people become Saxons.[397] But for the present this work was done only for a moment. In the course of the next year, Anglesey was again, neither in French nor in Saxon, but in British hands.[398]

We shall hear again of Magnus in the revolutions both of Anglesey and of other parts of North Wales. For the present, satisfied with the glory of having carried the Norwegian arms further south in the British islands than any of his predecessors had done,[399] he seems to have sailed, first to Man and then to Ireland. There he made a truce with Murtagh, and, at a later time, he married the daughter of the Irish king to his own son Sigurd. Sigurd’s kingdom. This youth was now entrusted with the rule of all the Orkneys and Hebrides, and that with the kingly title.[400] Of his kingdom Cantire formed a part; the peninsula had been formally taken possession of by the Norwegian king. Occupation of Cantire. This was done by a symbolic rite, which well expressed the dominion of a king of the seas over the land. Magnus was drawn in a ship across the isthmus which joins Cantire to the mainland. Dealings of Magnus with Scotland. The occupation of Cantire was, according to the Norwegian writer, the result of a treaty with Malcolm King of Scots;[401] but the expedition of Magnus took place during the reign of Eadgar. Magnus then went back to Norway, to receive his surname from the dress of the islanders, the use of which he and his followers brought into their own land. He then occupied himself for a while with Scandinavian affairs, till his restless spirit again brought him within the range of our story.

§ 6. The establishment of Robert of Bellême in England.
1098.

Of the two earls who had crossed over to Anglesey to meet with such singular ups and downs of fortune, it was the elder who came back alive. Hugh of Chester, Hugh the Fat, had still to rule for a few years longer till he died a monk at Saint Werburh’s. Effects of the death of Hugh of Shrewsbury. But the short-lived reign of Hugh the Proud at Shrewsbury and Arundel had come to an end, and his death led to important changes in all those parts of England with which he had had to deal, but above all in his own earldom on the Welsh border. Robert of Bellême Earl of Shrewsbury. 1098. A large part of that district, a district the most important of all in a military point of view, passed under the rule of the man who was at once the most merciless of oppressors and the most skilful of military engineers. The Red King and his minister had now an opportunity of carrying out their doctrines with regard to the redemption of lands on a grand scale. The King was doubtless ready to be the heir of Earl Hugh, as of all other men; but, as in the case of other men, he was willing to allow the next kinsman to redeem the inheritance, if he offered a becoming price. He buys his brother’s possessions. So now, when Robert of Bellême claimed the earldom and lands of his deceased brother, he obtained a grant of them on a payment of three thousand pounds.[402] This was nearly half the sum for which William Rufus had made himself master of all Normandy; but it was perhaps not too great a price to pay for the great earldom of Shropshire with its endless castles and lordships, for Arundel and Chichester and the other South-Saxon lands of Roger of Montgomery, and for the rest of his possessions scattered over many English shires. Extent of his estates. Robert of Bellême, specially so called as the son of his mother, but who was no less Robert of Montgomery as the son of his father, and who now became no less Robert of Arundel and of Shrewsbury, thus joined together in his own person three inheritances, any one of which alone might have set him among princes. Doubtful policy of the grant. One might doubt whether William the Conqueror would have been tempted by any price to allow the accumulation of such vast powers in the hands of one man, and that a man whose homage was not due to himself only. But with William the Red the services and the payments of Robert of Bellême together outweighed any thought of the policy which might have led him rather to bestow the vacant earldom and other lands on some other among the sons of Earl Roger. Robert was now at the height of his power and his fame—​such fame as his was—​beyond the sea. Position of Robert on the continent. We shall read in the next chapter of his doings in Maine this very year, the doings of which he now received the reward. To the Norman heritage of his father, to the marchlands which he had inherited from his mother, to the lands which mother and son had snatched from so many Norman and Cenomannian holders, Robert now added all that his father had received from the Conqueror’s grant among the conquered English, and all that his father had won for himself among the half-conquered Welsh.

His new position in England. The establishment of Robert of Bellême in England marks an epoch in our story. Though we have already so often heard of him, not only in continental affairs but in the affairs of our own island, he had not yet, as far as we can see, held any English possessions at all; certainly he had none which put him on a level with the great Norman land-owners. From this time he is something more than merely one among them; he at once begins to play the part of the foremost among them, foremost alike in power and in ambition. His namesake, Robert of Mortain and of Cornwall, had held as great a number of English acres, and his death had handed over the vast heritage to his son. Comparison with the Counts of Mortain. But neither of the Counts of Mortain had any personal gifts which could win for them the personal position which was held by Robert of Bellême. The father was sluggish; the son was turbulent; neither of them was the peer of the great captain and engineer who was now to lord it over the British march. Nor did the nature and position of his estates give to the grandson of Herleva the same advantages which belonged to the son of Mabel. The one was, bating the title of Earl, as great in Cornwall as the other was in Shropshire; but the lord of Cornwall might, if he chose, sleep idly, while the lord of Shropshire was driven to constant action against a restless enemy. Each had a great position in Sussex; but the position of the lord of Arundel and Chichester was practically higher than that of the lord of Pevensey. The vast scattered possessions held by the Count of Mortain throughout England added more to his wealth than to his political power. Comparison of Robert of Bellême and Hugh of Chester. Earl Hugh of Chester was in his own earldom even greater than Robert was in his; but Earl Hugh was growing old, and ambitious as he was, he seems to have kept his ambition within certain geographical bounds, in those regions of Normandy and of Britain which destiny seemed to have set before him. Unique position of Robert. There can be no doubt that, at this moment, Robert of Bellême held a position in England which he shared with no rival in the island, and which was backed by a power beyond sea which put him rather on a level with sovereign dukes and counts than with ordinary nobles.

Effects of his coming. To the men of the borderland, of whatever race, the change of masters was a frightful one. To the settled inhabitants, Norman and English, it must have been like yet another foreign conquest. The change is marked in the change of name; the surname of the new lord comes from the lands of his mother which lay beyond the bounds either of England or of Normandy. Hugh of Montgomery is exchanged for Robert of Bellême. Robert a stranger in England. The new master from the march of Normandy and Maine must, twenty-nine years after the conquest of Shropshire, have seemed a stranger, not only to Englishmen, but to Normans of the first settlement, still more so to men who were of Norman parentage but of English birth. In its personal aspect the change of lords must have been a matter of shuddering. The rule of Earl Roger had been tolerable; the four years of Earl Hugh we have seen spoken of as a reign of special mildness, at least for his own people. But now they had a lord of another kind. English and Welsh, we are told, had smiled at the tales of the deeds of Robert in other lands; Cruelty of the new earl. they listened to them as to the song of the bard or the gleeman, deeming that, if such things were done, they were at least done far away from themselves. But now they found in their own persons that those tales were true, when, in the strong words of a writer of those times, they were flayed alive by the iron claws of Earl Robert.[403] The Earl himself, great as he was in power and wealth, was only puffed up by what he had to hanker after yet more. His spoliations. He spared no man, of whatever race or order, whose lands lay conveniently to his hand, nor did he scruple to take away from the saints themselves what the men of the elder time had given to them.[404]

But Robert of Bellême was something more than an ordinary plunderer; he was a man of genius in his way; whatever he either inherited or seized on was sure to be strengthened by the best engineering skill of his time.[405] His skill in castle-building. In the gradual work of planting both England and Normandy with castles he had no small share; and his skill is nowhere more to be admired than in the way in which he adapted his designs to the varying circumstances of different places. He built at Bridgenorth and he built at Gisors; there is little that is alike in the two fortresses, because there is little that is alike in the position of the two points which those fortresses severally had to defend. The former, Robert of Bellême’s great creation on English ground, held a most important place in the defences of the middle course of the Severn. His defence of Shropshire. The Welsh wars of this reign had brought that whole line of country into renewed importance. If the power of England under her Norman masters was stretching further and further over the British lands, that very advance laid the English lands more and more open to passing and occasional British ravages. The experience of such warfare within the English border was quite fresh. 1094. When Robert of Bellême took his earldom, four years only had passed since Shropshire and Herefordshire had been laid waste,[406] just as in the old days when Gruffydd smote the Saxon at Rhyd-y-Groes.[407] The new Earl of Shropshire therefore found it needful to strengthen the whole line of defences of the Severn. Early history of the Shropshire fortresses. Strong as was the capital of his earldom on its peninsular height, it was well to have, in the rear of Shrewsbury, another great fortress on a lower point of the river, a point whose importance is witnessed by its name; it is emphatically the Bridge. The whole region had been carefully fortified, perhaps in earlier days still, certainly in the days when the Dane as well as the Briton had to be guarded against. 896. In the last campaign of Ælfred, the Danes, finding it expedient to leave the neighbourhood of London, had marched across the whole breadth of England from Thames to Severn, and had wrought a work beside that river at Quatbridge.[408] Æthelflæd fortifies Bridge (north). 912. Sixteen years later, the victorious Lady, the guardian of the Mercian land, had timbered the burh at Bridge. At a somewhat lower point, the enemy against whom Ælfred and his daughter had to strive has left his memory in the name of Danesford. The Bridge was the site of the chosen stronghold of Robert of Bellême. But when his discerning eye marked the spot for a great military centre, he did but do afresh what had been already done by the native guardian of England. The fortress of Robert of Bellême was but a calling into fresh being, a strengthening with new works, of the older fortress of Æthelflæd.[409]

Edwᵈ. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

Map illustrating the
SHROPSHIRE CAMPAIGN.
A.D. 1102.

It is somewhat singular that in the line of defence traced by Robert’s father so commanding a site as that of the Bridge did not hold the first place. The strong place of Roger of Montgomery lies between three and four miles lower down the river. Older mound of Quatford. There, on the left, the English, side of the Severn, we meet with the first—​first to one going up the stream—​of our present group of fortresses. A bold height, of no very great positive elevation, marks the position of the church and mound of Quatford, standing side by side, as is so often seen both in our own island and beyond sea. The mound is a natural height rising close above the river, ditched and scarped as was needed, but raised only slightly above its original height. Quatford Castle. This elder fortification, the dwelling-place of some English thegn of the old time, seems to have given way, either before or after the coming of the Norman, to a stronghold a little way further up the river, which still bears the name of Quatford Castle. A sandstone hill, standing isolated, near to the river but not immediately on its banks, was, like the smaller and older post, improved and raised into a castle mound, perhaps by Earl Roger himself, perhaps by some earlier holder. Earl Roger’s house. There the Survey records his new house and his borough; and we may fairly see his work in the well which still remains bored deep in the heart of the rock.[410] In the days of King Eadward the lordship of Eardington had been held by Saint Mildburh of Wenlock. His chapel. But, if Earl Roger, who passes for the refounder of that house,[411] did any wrong to its patroness, he may be held to have atoned for it by the collegiate chapel which he raised at Quatford. It was founded at the request of his wife, not the proud and cruel Mabel, but her pious and gentle successor Adeliza. A pleasing legend is told of the origin of the chapel and of the house, a legend which, if it contains any kernel of truth, points to Earl Roger as having been the first to occupy Quatford Castle as a dwelling, and which may account for the restoration of the far more tempting site of the old fortress of the Lady being left to be the work of his son.[412]

The new rule now began, and the home of Roger and Adeliza was forsaken by Earl Robert for the far stronger point higher up the river, and on the opposite, the right or Welsh bank.[413] Robert of Bellême removes to Bridge (north). Here, in contrast to the mere fords at other points, to Quatford itself and to the Danesford above it, stood the bridge which still forms so marked a feature, and which had given the spot its name. Bridge then, the stronghold of Æthelflæd, became the stronghold of Robert of Bellême; and now, perhaps from its position with regard to his father’s dwelling at Quatford, it came to be specially distinguished as Bridgenorth. A steep cliff overhangs the river at a point where the opposite ground is high, where the stream is far wider than it again becomes lower down, and where the channel is divided by an island, such as those by which the Danes loved to anchor, whether in the Seine or in the Severn. Oldbury. And, as the Danes are recorded to have wrought a work in clear distinction from the burh which the Lady afterwards timbered, we are tempted to see that work in a mound not far from the bridge, and on the same side as the river, but not rising immediately above the river’s banks. A natural height has been ditched, scarped, and raised to a level somewhat lower than that of the cliff immediately above the stream, the cliff which was chosen for the fortress, first of the Lady and then of the rebel Earl. It is plainly in opposition to this last that the place had, before the time of Domesday, received the name of Oldbury, which is still borne by the parish in which it stands.[414] The cliff itself, the site of the castle and town of Bridgenorth, has a peninsular shape so strongly marked that it is hard to believe that the river runs on one side of it only, and that Bridgenorth and Oldbury are divided, not by a stream, but by a dry valley, in those days doubtless not dry, but marshy. Oldbury and Bridgenorth. The sites of the older and the newer fortress still look on one another, though the older has again become only a grassy mound, while the younger grew into a fortress, parish, and town, and still remains a parliamentary borough.

The position of the great fortress of the oppressor is a noble one. The mere height of the cliff at Bridgenorth is so much lower than many of the surrounding hills of that lovely region that it makes less show than might have been looked for in the general view. But, as we stand close under it on the other side of the river, we feel that Bridgenorth needs only buildings of equal majesty on its height to make it rank with Lincoln, with Le Mans, almost with Laon itself. But against the proud minsters of those cities Bridgenorth has nothing to set in its general view save two church towers, one of them modern, whose ugliness is not relieved by the fact that it represents the castle church, the college of Bridgenorth, transferred thither by Robert of Bellême, when he moved castle, church, and everything from their older home at Quatford. Bridgenorth castle; But Bridgenorth still keeps one object of surpassing interest in our present story, that which is of a truth the very cradle and kernel of the place, the shattered keep of Robert of Bellême. Robert’s keep. There we have the good luck which we enjoy but seldom in examining the military remains of this age, the strongholds of the men of the Conquest and their immediate successors. Most commonly we light on little more than the mere site, or the works of earlier or of later times; it is only now and then that we actually see, in however imperfect a state, some piece of genuine masonry belonging to the time with which we are dealing. This satisfaction we have in no small measure at Bridgenorth. There is the square keep of the terrible founder of the fortress, broken down, riven asunder by some explosion in the warfare of later times—​what is left of it driven to overhang its base like the tower of Caerphilly or the Muro Torto of Rome—​but still keeping its main and distinctive features, still showing, in its flat pilasters, its double-splayed windows,[415] the traces of its double-sloped roof with the deep gutter,[416] what that stern, hard, tower was when the Devil of Bellême first called it into being. We can just trace the gateway which the keep commanded between the inner and outer courts of the castle, and we can see the ruins of the advanced building which sheltered the actual entrance of the keep itself. The square tower, so characteristic of Norman military work, is after all so rare in this its earlier form that every such fragment as this of Bridgenorth calls for most attentive study. Here we see the highest advances in the art of defence, as practised by the man whose name makes us shudder through almost every page of our story. At Bridgenorth nature had done almost everything. The tall and steep cliff called for nothing to be done in the way of mounds and ditches. It was enough to fence in the height—​that the Lady had doubtless done after the fashion of her age—​and to raise the keep—​the distinctive feature of Earl Robert’s age—​as the last shelter in case of attack from the land side. The churches and town of Bridgenorth. We can trace the inner and outer courts, the latter containing the unsightly church which represents the college within the castle. The other church stands nearly on a level with the castle, parted from the castle hill by a dip which takes the form of a steep road--Cartway is the name it still keeps—​leading down from the town to the river. Few stronger or more striking sites of its own scale could have been found. The Castle by the Bridge is not a mountain fortress; far higher hills than the hill of Bridgenorth or the hill of Quatford come within the general view. But the stronghold of Æthelflæd and Robert served better than any loftier point could have done for its own immediate work. No other point could have served so well to guard the most important point of the river, and to shelter the older borders of England against any desperate attempt of the Britons to carry their endless warfare far within her later borders. The group of fortresses. The whole group, Bridgenorth, Oldbury, the two Quatfords, are a succession of strongholds which form a whole. All are within sight of one another, though it might be hard to find a point which directly commands all four at once. Burf Castle. A little further inland, on the Quatford side of the river, a broad hill, fenced in by a slight earthwork, and known as Burf Castle, commands the widest and most striking view of all, the round back of the Wrekin, the sharp rise and fall of the Titterstone, with a boundless view over the lower country to the north-east. This is undoubtedly the site of an early stronghold, which may have played its part in the days of the Lady or in the old time before her. But there is no sign that it entered into the military reckoning of Roger of Montgomery or of Robert of Bellême.

The great engineering works at Bridgenorth seem to have occupied the mind of Earl Robert during the whole of the few remaining years of his English career. We shall find that they were not fully finished four years later. Robert builds the castle of Careghova. At the same time, while he fenced in Bridgenorth in the rear of the capital of his earldom, he raised another stronghold in advance of it, within the later Welsh border, at Careghova, immediately on Offa’s Dyke.[417] And he was at the same time extending his possessions in a more peaceful region, where no inroads of Britons or Northmen were to be feared. His Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire estates. On the borders of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire stood a chief seat of one who, in the extent of his possessions, ranked as one of the foremost men in England. This was Roger of Bully, who took his name from a Norman lordship in the land of Braye, lying west of what was to be the New Castle of King Henry, on the high ground which overlooks the forest of Saint-Saen, the home of the faithful Helias. Roger of Bully. The name of Roger of Bully—​the spellings of the name are endless—​is less commonly mentioned in our tale than we might have looked for. He was a great land-owner in Yorkshire; he was one of the greatest land-owners in Nottinghamshire, and he held considerable estates in other parts of England. He had supplanted two English earls in their special homes; he sat by the hearth of Eadwine and by the hearth of Waltheof; in another spot, the holdings of ten English thegns had been rolled together into a single lordship to enrich the fortunate stranger.[418] His Yorkshire estates. Among his Yorkshire estates he held the exceptionally favoured lands of Sprotburgh and Barnburgh, which had remained untouched in the general harrying of Northumberland.[419] He seems to have won the special favour of the greatest ladies of the Conqueror’s court; if he held the hall of Hallam, the hall of Waltheof, it was by the gift of Waltheof’s widow Judith;[420] and an estate which he held in distant Devonshire is set down as the gift of Queen Matilda herself.[421] Yet this man, who holds so great a place in the Survey, plays no visible part in history; he lives only in the record of Domesday and in his still abiding work in a minster and a castle of his own rearing. Just within the borders of Yorkshire, at no great distance from the shires both of Nottingham and Lincoln, Roger had occupied an English dwelling-place, entered in the Survey as Dadesley, but which afterwards grew into greater note by the name of Tickhill.[422] Position of Tickhill. Like many other dwelling-places of English lords, Dadesley or Tickhill must have been chosen simply as a convenient centre for the estates of its owner. It is no natural stronghold; the post seems to have no special military advantages; it crowns no steep, it commands no river, it bars the entrance to no valley. The castle. A low hill of sandstone was improved by art into one of the usual mounds, and it had been in King Eadward’s day the possession of Ælfsige and Siward. The mound, as in other places, was in after time taught to bear a polygonal keep, and its sides were themselves strengthened by masonry. The keep, of which the foundations only are left, was of later date than the days with which we are concerned. And we may fully believe that parts at least of the circuit wall of the castle, and still more, that the elder parts of the gatehouse, with a face of ornaments and sculptures which almost remind us of the work of the great Emperor’s day at Lorsch, are due to the taste, such as it was, of the first Norman lord of Tickhill.

The nomenclature of the lands of Roger of Bully has been singularly shifting. Dadesley gave way to Tickhill. But Tickhill is not the only name borne by Roger’s stronghold. It not uncommonly takes the name of a more certain memorial of him which lies only a few miles off, but within the bounds of another shire. The priory of Blyth, founded 1088. In the year of the first rebellion of the Red King’s reign, Roger of Bully had founded a monastery dependent on the abbey of the Holy Trinity at Rouen. It was reared on a point of his possessions known as Blyth, lying within the borders of Nottinghamshire, and near a river which joins the old historic stream of the Idle.[423] The nave of Roger’s church still stands; there is no mistaking the distinguishing marks of the earliest Norman style, even in a building whose loftiness and narrowness have more in common with later forms of art.[424] Blyth became at least as famous as Tickhill. Name of Blyth and Tickhill used indiscriminately. The castle, with the honour of which it formed the head, is called by both names, and we shall find as we go on that the same incident in our story is placed by some of our authorities at Blyth and by others at Tickhill.[425] Death of Roger of Bully. Roger, founder of both castle and monastery, seems to have died about the time when Robert of Bellême was strengthening himself at Bridgenorth and Careghova. His lands went at once to swell the possessions of the terrible Earl. On some plea of kindred, Robert demanded them of the King. The lands of Roger of Bully granted to Robert of Bellême. William was as ready to grant him the lands of Blyth and Hallam as he had been to grant him the earldom of Shropshire and the other possessions of his father. But he was no more inclined than he was then to grant anything without a consideration. Earl Robert was allowed to redeem the heritage of his kinsman, but to redeem it only on payment of a great sum.[426] Impolicy of the grant. We may again doubt whether William the Great would have allowed such a redemption, even in the days when he had fallen into covetousness and greediness he loved withal. With the Conqueror neither greediness nor anything else ever came before policy. He whose policy it had been to separate Norman and English estates in the second generation, who had taken care that no son of his own chosen friend should hold Breteuil and Hereford in a single hand,[427] would surely never have allowed any one man to have reached the gigantic height of wealth and power which was now reached by Robert of Bellême. Greatness of Robert of Bellême. The gathering together of such vast possessions in Normandy and England in the hands of one who had some pretensions to rank as a prince beyond the bounds of Normandy and England almost amounted to a direct challenge to their owner to dispute the great lesson of Rochester, and to see whether there was not at least one subject in England whom the King of England could not control.

That question had yet to be tried, and to be tried in the person of the new lord of Tickhill. But it was not raised during the short remnant of the days of William the Red. The two powers of evil contrived to pull together in friendly guise as long as the days of unlaw and unright lasted. And the longer those days lasted, the blacker and the bitterer they grew. The greater the power and wealth which was gathered together in the hands of Robert of Bellême, the greater, we are told, was the pride and cruelty of that son of Belial.[428] He may by this time have grown weary of oppression in the familiar scenes of his evil deeds on both sides of the sea. The death of Robert of Bully opened to him a new and wide human hunting-ground in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. But his hold on all that he had within our island was fated to be short. We are drawing near to the end of the reign and the life of William Rufus, and, when the reign and life of William Rufus were over, the English power of Robert of Bellême did not last long.

But before we come to the last days of the Red King in his island kingdom, we must again cross the sea, to follow the warlike campaigns of his latest days, to trace out the wide-reaching schemes of dominion which filled his restless soul, his fitful energy in beginning enterprises, his strange waywardness in leaving them half done. And now will come the living contrast between unright, as embodied in William Rufus, and right, as embodied this time, not in a man of the church and the cloister, but in a man of his own order, a layman, a prince, a soldier. We have had one chapter where the main interest has gathered round Anselm of Aosta; we are now coming to another in which the main interest will gather round Helias of La Flèche.

CHAPTER VI.

THE LAST WARS OF WILLIAM RUFUS.[429]
1097–1099.

THE latter years of the reign of the Red King, Character of the last years of Rufus. 1097–1100. beginning from the departure of Anselm, are far richer in foreign than in domestic events. Even within the isle of Britain we have, as we have already seen, chiefly to deal with the lands which lie beyond the actual English kingdom. Scotland has received a king at the bidding of the over-lord in England. A deep plan has been laid for the better subjugation of the seemingly unconquerable Welsh. A Norwegian king has slain an earl of England in strife on the shore of a Welsh island. But within England itself the greatest event which we have had to record has been the immediate result of that distant strife in the succession to an English earldom. When Robert of Bellême became the most powerful subject in England, it was undoubtedly an event of no small importance both at the moment and in its results. It added perceptibly to the evils even of the reign of unlaw. Still it was not in itself an event on the same scale as the rebellion of Odo or the rebellion of Robert of Mowbray, or as the beginning or the ending of the dealings between Anselm and the King. Little to record at home, and much abroad. And the same character of the time goes on to the end. There is in England itself nothing to record besides the great architectural works of the King, a few ecclesiastical deaths and appointments, and those natural portents and phænomena which are characteristic of the whole time, and which come thicker upon us as we draw nearer to the end. Beyond sea, on the other hand, this time of less than three years is the most stirring time of the whole reign. King of England, over-lord of Scotland, not in form Duke of the Normans, but master of Normandy as his brother never was, the Red King goes on to greater schemes. Rufus seems to have been always puffed up by success, but never cast down by bad luck. His personal failure in Wales was really a marked contrast to the success of Eadgar in Scotland. Temper and schemes of Rufus. But Rufus seems to have had the happy gift of plucking out of all states of things whatever tended to gratify his pride, and of forgetting all that looked the other way. He, or others in his name, had set up a king at Dunfermline. This was enough to make him put out of sight all thought that he had in his own person marched to Snowdon and taken nothing by his march. He felt himself more than ever Monarch of Britain, King of kings within his own island. We can believe that it rankled in his soul that, outside that island, he was less than a king. The lord of Normandy had in any case a formal over-lord in the French King, and William Rufus was lord of Normandy only by an anomalous and temporary title. He held the duchy only as a merchant holds a pledge. We can well understand how such a man would chafe at the thought that he had anywhere even a nominal superior. Such an one as William deemed himself was dishonoured by being, even in the most nominal way, the man of such an one as Philip. His designs on France. And the noblest way of escaping from the acknowledgement of a superior was by himself taking that superior’s place. The Monarch of Britain would be also Monarch of Gaul, of so much at least of Gaul as in any sense admitted the over-lordship of Paris. The lord of Winchester and Rouen would be lord of Paris also. William wished for a war with France, and a war with France could at any moment be had. The eternal question of the Vexin stood always awaiting its solution.

Wars with France and Maine. But a war with France was not the only war which William Rufus had now to wage on the Gaulish mainland. He had to strive against a noble city, a valiant people, ruled by a prince worthy of his city and his people. Besides striving with France and Philip, he had to strive against Maine, he had to strive against Helias. The war with France was doubtless the object with which he crossed the sea; but mischief had long been brewing in the troublesome land to the south of Normandy, and about the time when the French war began, the standing Cenomannian difficulty grew into open war also. William had thus two wars to wage at once. These two wars, with France and with Maine, are told in our narratives as if they were altogether distinct, and had no bearing on one another. Yet the two were going on at the same time at no great distance from one another, and some of the chief actors on one side were flitting to and fro between the two. Beginning of war. 1097–1098. It is hard to say in which region the first actual fighting took place. In both it must have begun in the winter after Anselm had gone on one errand into Burgundy and Eadgar on another into Scotland. William crosses the sea. It was then that King William crossed the sea also, with the object doubtless of making war on France. The Cenomannian war was thrown in as something incidental. The war with Maine has in itself, as a tale, by far the greater charm of the two. But it is needless to say that far higher interests were, or might have been, at stake in the war with France. Of the wide-reaching schemes of William Rufus, and of their remarkable position among those things which might have been but which were not, I have spoken at some length elsewhere.[430] But it is only in its latest stage that the war showed even any likelihood of growing beyond the scale of a border struggle. It was, in profession at least, a war for the Vexin, and it was in the Vexin that it was mainly waged.

Comparison of the two wars. The result of the war was widely different in the two cases. We may sum it up by saying that Maine was subdued and that France was not. Maine was at least held to be subdued. In the first Cenomannian war the capital was taken; the prince was made a prisoner; so much of the land as was really attacked was subdued. In the second war the capital was taken and the prince was driven out. But against France no real advantage at all seems to have been gained. To modern ideas this difference may seem no wonderful result of the difference between the invasion of a county and the invasion of a kingdom. Comparative position of France and Maine. But in the eleventh century the resources of Maine could not have been very greatly inferior to the resources of France. In one sense indeed the resources of Maine were by far the greater of the two, Helias and Philip. inasmuch as Helias reigned at Le Mans and Philip reigned at Paris. But in truth the comparison between a county and a kingdom is not a fair one. The France of those days was not a kingdom; it was simply that small part of a great kingdom which was held to obey—​which under Philip certainly did not obey—​the nominal king of the whole. The king was simply that one among the princes of the kingdom who always claimed, and who sometimes received, the homage of the others. Advantage of the kingly dignity. We must never underrate the vast moral advantage which the king drew from his kingly dignity;[431] but, on the other hand, we must not be thereby led to overrate the material strength of the king’s actual dominion. Supposing that the resources of Maine and of France had been positively equal, if Helias had the advantage over Philip that the one was Helias and that the other was Philip, this advantage was far more than counterbalanced by the fact that Philip was a king while Helias was only a count. That he was a count of doubtful title, always threatened by a neighbour more powerful than himself, was of course a further incidental disadvantage; but the essential difference is inherent in the position of the two princes and their dominions. The king, even though the king was Philip, was a king, and men had scruples about personally attacking one who was at once their own lord on earth and the anointed of the Lord of Heaven. William Rufus doubtless had no such scruples about that or about any matter; but such scruples had been felt by his father; they were to be felt in times to come by Henry of Le Mans and of Anjou, of Normandy and of England.[432] Such scruples would not be felt by Normans withstanding French aggression on their own land; we may remember how a lance from the Côtentin had laid Philip’s father on the ground at Val-ès-dunes.[433] They would not be felt by native Englishmen, to whom Normandy, France, and Maine, were all alike foreign and hostile lands. But we may suspect that there was many a knight in William’s host who, when he went forth to invade the lands of the lord of his lord in an utterly unprovoked quarrel, did not go forth with quite so light a heart as that with which he went forth to win back for his lord a land of which his lord had some shadow of ground for professing that he had been robbed by one of his own men.

Maine then was, in a sense, conquered; France was not conquered in any sense. Le Mans was taken; Paris was hardly threatened. And this, we may believe, was at least partly owing to the fact that Le Mans was only the city of a count, while Paris was the city of a king. Both lands had a champion in whom we may feel a personal interest. Lewis son of Philip. While we follow the steps of an old acquaintance in Count Helias, we gladly watch the beginnings of a new acquaintance, not indeed in King Philip himself, but in his gallant son the Lord Lewis.[434] He has his special biographer, and we only wish that the minute detail in which we can read his actions in dealing with the immediate vassals of the French duchy had been extended to the greater though shorter strife which he had to wage against the sovereign of Normandy and England.

It is not easy to tell the story of these two wars in exact chronological order. Beginning of the war of Maine. January, 1098. The early part of the French war is told without any dates, while we know when the actual fighting began in Maine. This was in the January which followed William’s crossing to the continent, the January of the year in which Earl Hugh was killed in Anglesey. Whether there was any fighting on the French border earlier than that we cannot tell. For a later stage of the French war we have dates, and its dated stage clearly follows the end of the first Cenomannian war. If we go back to the causes of the two struggles, it is equally hard to find the beginning. In both cases there was a standing quarrel, which might have broken out into war at any time. But the French war has a certain right to precedence, inasmuch as it was doubtless rather to attack France than to attack Maine that William Rufus crossed the sea. It may therefore be our best course, first to trace out the earlier undated part of the French war down to the point where there is a clear break in the story. We may then follow the fortunes of Le Mans and Maine, till we reach the later dated part of the French war which followed their first momentary conquest.

§ 1. The Beginnings of the French War.
1097–1098.

King Philip; Of Philip King of the French, the fourth king of the house of Paris, we have often heard already, and from what we have heard we shall hardly expect him to take any leading part either in war or in council. his adulterous marriage with Bertrada of Montfort. He is chiefly memorable for his adulterous marriage with Bertrada of Montfort, the wife of Fulk Rechin of Anjou. He had got rid of his first wife, the daughter of Count Florence of Friesland and step-daughter of that Count Robert of Flanders who bore the Frisian name. He puts away his first wife. The mother of his son Lewis and his daughter Constance was put away by Philip on some plea of kindred, and was shut up in the castle of Montreuil.[435] Some years later Bertrada became her successor. Of her and Fulk we shall hear again in our Cenomannian story; she was in some sort given to Fulk as the price of Cenomannian bondage. But, as Fulk had at least one wife living, the validity of the marriage might have been fairly called in question. Philip and Bertrada; If the scandal of the time may be trusted, Bertrada, wearying of Fulk, and fearing that he might deal by her as he had dealt by others, offered herself to King Philip to supply the place which he had made vacant.[436] She won his heart, so far as he had any, and she seems to have been the only thing that he really cared for. But she who had been a countess at Angers would not be less than queen at Paris, and a ceremony of marriage was gone through. More than one prelate was charged with the uncanonical deed. their alleged marriage by Odo. 1092. The version which most concerns us is that which tells how, when no prelate in France would thus profane the sacraments of the Church, the King looked beyond the border, and found one less scrupulous in the person of the Bishop of Bayeux. The churches of Mantes, it is said, were Odo’s reward for his thus pandering to the misdeeds of his royal neighbour.[437]

Scandal occasioned by the marriage. Much scandal and searching of heart followed on the pretended marriage, scandal which spread throughout all France, throughout all Gaul, throughout all Christendom. Opposition of Ivo and Hugh of Lyons. The famous Bishop Ivo of Chartres protested in many letters to the King and others.[438] If a council of the prelates of France, gathered by the King’s authority at Rheims, was inclined to deal gently with the royal sinner, there were higher ecclesiastical powers who were more unbending. Archbishop Hugh of Lyons, Primate of all the Gauls, no subject of Parisian dukes or kings, but a prince of that Imperial Burgundy which knew no king but Cæsar, gathered an assembly which spoke in another voice. The friend of Anselm, the friend of Urban, called together the bishops of the Gauls at Autun, and their voice denounced the offence which the bishops of France alone had been inclined to pass over.[439] Higher powers still spoke at Piacenza and at Clermont. Excommunication of Philip and Bertrada. Philip and Bertrada were excommunicated often and absolved now and then. None would eat at their table; the dogs were said to refuse the morsels which fell from it. Wherever they went, the public exercise of Christian worship stopped, though, by a somewhat inconsistent indulgence, they were allowed to have a low mass said before them in a private chapel.[440] It would seem as though, in spiritual as well as in temporal things, subjects were to suffer from the crimes of kings, while the kings themselves went unscathed. But when Philip and Bertrada left any town, the bells at once struck out. Then, with allusion no doubt to the supposed power of the bells to chase away thunder and pestilence, the King would say to his companion, “Do you hear, my beauty, how they drive us away?”[441] For fifteen years, allowing perhaps for occasional times of reconciliation, the King of the French never wore his crown or his kingly robes or appeared in royal state at any public ceremony.[442]

Sons of Philip and Bertrada. By this second marriage or adultery, which was held to be in no way done away by the death of the lawful Queen in prison,[443] Philip had two sons, Philip and Florus. Bertrada’s schemes against Lewis. Bertrada wished to be the mother of a king, and in after times the lawful heir Lewis was said to have been the object of not a few plots on the part of his step-mother, if even step-mother she is to be called. But at this stage Philip seems to have kept sense enough to see the merits of his son, and to place full trust in him. By the consent of his realm, he made Lewis the immediate ruler and defender of the exposed frontier of the royal dominions. He granted him in fief the towns of Mantes and Pontoise, and the whole French Vexin.[444] Philip invests Lewis with the Vexin. 1092. But Lewis was made more than this. Practically, whether by any formal act or not, Lewis became the ruler of France, so far as France just then had any ruler. Philip, scorned and loathed of all men, with the curses of the Church hurled over and over again against him, withdrew from ruling, fighting, or anything else but his own pleasures, and threw the whole burthen of the government and defence of his kingdom on the shoulders of his young and gallant son.

Question of the Vexin. We are not told at what exact moment the old question of the Vexin was again first stirred. Philip was not likely to stir it, neither was Robert; William Rufus might not care to stir it while he was lord only of part of Normandy, and not of the whole. But when all Normandy became his, the old dispute naturally came up again in his mind. He would not have been William Rufus if he had not sought to win all that his father had held, all that his father had claimed, and among the rest the place where his father found his death-wound. Grounds of offence on the part of Rufus. The special acts of authority exercised by Philip in the Vexin, the grant of the land as his son’s fief, the grant of the churches of Mantes, the churches which were rebuilding out of his father’s dying gifts, to his own rebellious uncle Odo, would be likely to stir him up still more to put forward his old claim. William demands the French Vexin. 1097. At last, after reflecting, we are told, on the wars and the fate of his father in that region, he sent, in the year of the departure of Anselm, solemnly to demand the cession of the whole Vexin, specially naming the towns and fortresses of Pontoise, Chaumont, and Mantes.[445] Of these Mantes and Chaumont were in the strictest sense border fortresses; Pontoise—​the bridge on the Oise, as its name implies—​lies far nearer the heart of the King’s territory; Pontoise in an enemy’s hand would indeed be a standing menace to Paris. The demands of the Red King almost amounted to a demand for the surrender of the independence of the French kingdom.

Edwᵈ. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

Map illustrating the
FRENCH CAMPAIGN.
A.D. 1098.

The demand is refused. It is needless to say that the demand was refused. Lewis and his counsellors declined to give up the Vexin or any of its fortresses.[446] King William accordingly crossed the sea to assert his rights, and the French campaign possibly began before the end of the year. It is wonderful, when we remember that it is chiefly from our own writers that we get the details of William Rufus’ Norman campaigns, how little they tell us about his French campaigns. Of the war of Maine to which we shall presently come they tell us little enough. Still the name of Maine does appear in their pages, while the name of France at this stage does not. William crosses to Normandy. November 11–30, 1097. We learn indeed that in the November of this year the King crossed into Normandy, but with what object we are not told.[447] What we are told is eminently characteristic of the Red King and his reign. Excesses of the King’s followers. As so often happened, his crossing was delayed by the weather; meanwhile his immediate followers carried out to the full that licence which the King’s immediate followers were wont to allow themselves till Henry and Anselm found sharp means to check them.[448] “His hired in the shires there they lay the most harm did that ever hired or here in frithland should do.”[449] If the army at large is meant, the expression is a strange one. The hired is the King’s household, taking in doubtless household troops in personal attendance on the King, like the old housecarls, but not surely the whole force, national or mercenary. But it was the King’s household whose excesses were specially complained of; and this casual outburst of bitterness is a speaking comment on the general pictures of their misdoings which we have already come across.[450] But it is only of damage done in England by the King’s household that our Chronicler tells us anything. Silence of English writers as to the French war. Of warlike exploits on the other side of the Channel neither he nor any other English writer tells us at this stage a single word.[451]

If from the silence of our own writers we turn to our chief authority on the French side, we shall find a vivid general picture of the war, but hardly any account of particular events. We get indeed one of the most striking of personal contrasts. Though the war which was now waged by Rufus was in every sense a war waged against France, yet it could hardly be called a war personally waged against the nominal ruler of France. It was a war for the Vexin, waged against the lord of the Vexin, and, in its first stages at least, mainly confined to the Vexin. William and Lewis. The struggle between William and Lewis, as it is set forth by the biographer of the French prince, was an unequal one. William had his old weapons at command—​the wealth of England, the traitors whom that wealth could bribe, the mercenaries whom that wealth could hire.[452] He had his own experience in war; he had his veteran troops and their veteran commanders. Chief men on William’s side. Next under the King, comparatively young in years, but first of all in daring as in wickedness, was Robert of Bellême. Then came the King’s brother Henry, and the well-known names of Count William of Evreux, Earl Hugh of Chester, and the old Earl Walter of Buckingham.[453] These were formidable foes for an untried youth like Lewis; the aged warrior who was old on the day of Senlac must have been a strange contrast indeed to the gallant lad on whom the fortune of France now rested. Difficulties of Lewis. Lewis had, we are told, neither men nor money nor allies; he had to pick up all where and how he could. Whenever, often by running to and fro as far as the borders of Berry or Auvergne or Burgundy, he had got together three hundred, or perhaps five hundred, knights, he met King William of England marching against him with ten thousand.[454] Here was little room for pitched battles; Lewis could not risk a meeting with such an enemy in the open field. He had often to retire, sometimes openly to fly.[455] And the different state of the hoards of the two princes showed itself in an effect on their military operations which is characteristic of the time. Fate of the captives on each side. When warriors on the English side—​we must use the language of our French informant—​fell into French hands, the price of their ransom was speedily paid. When French warriors were made prisoners by the forces of Rufus, there was no money to ransom them. They had to languish in bonds with only one hope of deliverance. Those only were set free who were willing to become the men of the King of England and to bind themselves by oath to fight against their own natural lord.[456]

Some then at least of the native subjects of the French crown, who had no conflicting engagements to plead, did not scruple, in the extremities in which they found themselves, to take service on behalf of the invader against their own lord. It is therefore the less wonderful if another class of men, whose interests and whose duties were more doubtful, deemed, when they had to choose between two lords, that Rufus was the lord to be chosen. French traitors. Others again were found of baser mould, who simply took the money of the Red King, and for its sake turned against their own people on behalf of strangers. Among these one is specially marked, one who by his geographical position was called on to be among the foremost champions of France against Norman invasion. This was one of the lords who commanded the fortresses on the Seine, a man whose possessions lay close to the Norman border, Guy of the Rock. Guy of the Rock, the Rock which has taken its name from him and which still is known as La Roche Guyon.[457] The position of his chief stronghold made his adhesion of no small importance. Norman possessions beyond the Epte. The stream of Epte, flowing during a great part of its course through a deep valley, seems designed by nature to part Normandy and France; but, as we have seen, the frontier was ever disputed, and here and there the Norman held small portions of territory on the left bank of the river. One of these Norman holdings on the French side lies by the small village of Gasny, where the boundary, surviving in that of the modern department, is still marked at some distance up the opposite hill. A slight further ascent brings the traveller in sight of one of the noblest bends of the Seine, where the great river, with all its islands, runs immediately below a long line of chalk hills, with their white spurs jutting out in endless fantastic shapes. The windings of the Seine have in fact left at this point little more than a narrow isthmus between itself and its lowlier tributary. Roche Guyon. Just within the French territory at this point, and commanding this important sweep of the great French river, lay the domains of the lord of the Rock. The ridge on which the traveller stands ends in a bluff to the south-east. There, where the hills open for another tributary of the Seine, close by the island of Lavancourt, stood Guy’s now vanished fortress of Vetheuil. But, as we now gaze, by far the most prominent object in the whole curved line of the hill, placed like the imperial seat in the centre of an ancient amphitheatre, rising over the church, the more modern castle, the town, and the airy bridge which modern art has thrown across the river, soar the relics of the fortress which still bears Guy’s name. A spur of the hill is crowned by a small keep, with a round tower attached to a square mass within its compass. But in the days of the Red King, the Guy’s Cliff of the Vexin, now the site of a castle so preeminently visible, was specially known as the site of the stronghold that was invisible. The castle bored in the rock. The lords of the rock had, like the Kenite of old, literally made their nest in the rock itself. The chalk is to this day habitually bored to make houses, churches,[458] any kind of excavation that may be needed. In days before our time this custom had been applied to a more dangerous use; the plundering chiefs of the rock had scooped themselves out a castle in its side. More than one of the chambers remain—​comfortless to our eyes, but perhaps not more comfortless than the chambers within many a tower of timber or masonry—​whence these troglodyte barons looked out to mark the craft upon the Seine, and to exact, by a custom which lingered on till late times, a toll from every passer by. Guy submits to Rufus. Guy of the Rock now submitted to the island king, and his submission supplied a new fetter to pen up the king of the mainland within his havenless realm. At the very entrance of the French territory on this side, Guy’s Rock, Vetheuil, and all that is implied in the possession of Vetheuil and of the Rock, passed from the obedience of the lord of Paris to the obedience of the lord of Winchester and Rouen.

While Guy thus sold to the invader the very entrance-gate of the French kingdom, the Red King found another ally in a far more famous man who held a position of at least equal importance higher up the Seine. Policy of Robert of Meulan. At the head of the nobles who held lands of both kings stood the acknowledged master of all subtle policy, Count Robert of Meulan. We have been so long familiar with his name, whether as the youthful warrior of Senlac or as the experienced counsellor of the Red King, that we may have almost forgotten that the title by which we call him is French, and that he was as great a lord in France as he was in England or in Normandy. We find it hard to think of him as one of those who had thus to choose between two lords, and that he might conceiveably have chosen the cause of Philip—​or rather of Lewis—​against William. We cannot fancy that he took long to decide. He may have argued that William, lord both of Normandy and of England, had two parts in him, while Philip of France had only one. He receives William’s troops. He received the troops of the Red King into his castles, and his adhesion was held to have been of special help to his undertaking. He opened, we are told, a clear path for the English into France.[459] The words sound as if they belonged to the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth century rather than to the last years of the eleventh. And they are clothed with a strange significance when we remember that the man who now opened a way into France for the combined host of Normandy and England was the same man who, two-and-thirty years before, had opened a way into the very heart of England for the combined host of Normandy and France.[460] But in a geographical point of view the expression is fully justified. Importance of the position of Meulan. In a war between the lord of Rouen and the lord of Paris, no man’s friendship could be more valuable to either side than the friendship of the Count of Meulan. A man weaker in fight and less wary in council than the Achitophel of his day might, if he kept the Seine barred as the lord of Meulan could bar it, have gone far to hold the balance between the contending kings. As at Mantes, as at Rouen, as at Paris itself, the islands so characteristic of the Seine are at Meulan also brought into play for purposes of habitation and defence. Description of Meulan. Meulan indeed is, what neither Paris nor Rouen is, at once a hill-fortress and a river-fortress. At a point of the river lying between Mantes, the seat of the Conqueror’s death-wound, and Poissy, the spot where he went to crave help of his lord before the day of Val-ès-dunes, a hill which the surrounding valleys gird as with a natural fosse rises from the right bank of the river. A group of islands is formed at this spot by the branches of the winding stream, fit places for the landing of the forefathers of the Normans in their pirate days. The spot was seized on for defence. A castle arose on the side of the hill, with a town at its foot sloping swiftly down to the river. There a bridge of some antiquity joins the right bank to a central island, which is joined again to the left bank by another bridge. The island, once strongly fortified, still keeps the significant name of the Fort. The bridge which joins the island to the left bank of the river, where lies the suburb known as Les Mureaux, was, at least in later times, defended by a tower bearing the name of La Sangle. A considerable extent of the outer walls of the castle may be traced, and a specially diligent inquirer may thread his way to a small fragment of the castle itself, and may there mark work of a somewhat later date than the time with which we have to do. It is more easy to trace out a large part of the defences of the Fort, and to mark the churches, surviving and desecrated, one of which, high on the hill side, also belongs, like so many others, to the age next following. As in so many other places, so at Meulan, we cannot lay our hand on anything which we can positively affirm to be the work of its most famous lord. But we can well see that the strength of the spot, a spot which in later times played no small part in the wars of the League, was well understood in the days of our story, and that so important a position was strengthened by all the art of the time. When Count Robert received the forces of Normandy and England on the height and in the island of Meulan, he did indeed open a way for those forces into the heart of France. It was a way which might have been expected to lead them straight to the city which then, as ever, might be deemed to be more than the heart of France, to be France itself.

William’s prospects. Count Robert was doubtless guided, then and always, by policy. Many of his neighbours who found themselves in the like case followed his lead. They could not serve two masters; so they made up their minds to serve the master who was strongest either to reward or to punish, him whose purse was the deeper and whose spirit was the fiercer.[461] Altogether the odds seemed frightfully against the French side. Rufus might indeed have small chances of carrying out his grand scheme of uniting Paris—​perhaps Poitiers and Bourdeaux—​under the same lord as Winchester and Rouen; but things at least looked as if the conquest of the disputed lands was about to advance the Norman frontier most dangerously near to the French capital. Above all, when the Seine was barred both at Roche Guyon and at Meulan, we ask how things stood in the border town which lay between them, the town which was one of the special subjects of William’s demands on Philip. How fared it at Mantes when the stream both above and below was in the hands of the enemy? To this question we get no answer; but we see that, in any case, the King of the French was more closely shut up than ever in the central prison-house of his nominal realm.

Failure of William’s plans. But, small as seemed young Lewis’s means of defence, weakened as he further was by treason among his own or his father’s vassals, the resistance made by the French to the Norman or English invasion was valiant, stubborn, and, we may add, successful. William Rufus was much further from conquering France than Henry the Fifth, or even than Edward the Third, was in after times. With all his wealth, all his forces, he could not conquer the land; he could not even take the fortresses to which he specially laid claim. He could not conquer the Vexin; he could not take either Pontoise or Chaumont. Pontoise and Chaumont not taken. While we hear nothing of Mantes, we know that both these two last-named fortresses successfully withstood his attacks. Of the three fortresses which were the special objects of the war, one, that of Chaumont, became in some sort its centre. Castle of Chaumont. The Chaumont with which we have to deal is still distinguished from other places of the same name as Chaumont-en-Vexin. It stands about five miles east of the Epte, at the point where the frontier stream of Rolf is joined by the smaller stream of the Troesne, and makes a marked turn in its course from nearly due south to south-west. The region is a hilly one, though it contains no heights of any remarkable elevation. The Bald Mount itself, which—​unluckily for the inquirer—​is bald no longer, is a wide-spreading hill crowned with a mound which stands out prominently to the eye on every side. The line of the wall which it supported may still be easily traced, and in a few places it is actually standing. On the steep north-eastern side of the hill the small town of Chaumont nestles at its foot, while the stately church of the later days of French architecture soars above the town as the castle again soars above the church. Of the part played in the war by this stronghold we shall hear a little later.

The height of Chaumont commands a vast prospect on all sides; the eye stretches far away over the friendly land to the south, towards the hills bordering on the Seine; but the special rival of Chaumont, the fortress at the junction of the Epte and Troesne, is shut out from sight by a near range of hills which follow the line of the smaller stream. Where the two rivers join, the Epte, like the greater Seine, divides to form a group of islands at the foot of a low hill on the right, the Norman, bank. The castle of Gisors. Here stands the town and fortress of Gisors, the chief bulwark of Normandy towards the north-eastern corner of the Vexin. Once a dependency of the neighbouring Neauflé, whose mound and square tower form a prominent object in the landscape, Gisors had now become a stronghold indeed. Its first defences. 1096. It had been first fenced in about two years before by Pagan of Gisors, a man of whom we shall hear in the course of the war.[462] Somewhat later William gave orders that the border post should be made into a fortress of the greatest possible strength, and he committed the work to the most skilful engineer at his command. Strengthened by Robert of Bellême. All the craft and subtlety of the Devil of Bellême were employed to make Gisors a stronghold which might shelter the eastern frontier of Normandy against all enemies. As far as one can see, the islands in the Epte and the hill which rises above them near to the right bank of the main river were united in one common plan of defence. The town itself, taking in the islands, was walled, either now or at a later time, and defended with a ditch throughout those parts of its circuit which were neither sheltered by the river nor by the castle hill. In the great defences of this last we see the fruit of the engineering skill of Robert of Bellême, and we better learn what in those days was deemed a specially strong fortress. On all sides save that where town and castle join, the hill is girded by a deep ditch, and on the north, the side which lies away from both town and river, the ditch is doubled, and the chief entrance on this side is defended by an outpost between the two. The ditch fences in a vast walled space, in the middle of which art has improved nature by piling up a vast artificial mound crowned by a shell keep. The earthworks are most likely older than either Robert of Bellême or Pagan of Gisors. The outer wall and the shell keep may well be part of Robert’s design, if they are not actually his work; but the towers which now rise so proudly over Gisors, not only the round tower, precious in local legend, but the vast octagon on one side of the keep which bears the name of the martyr of Canterbury, must all be of later date than our time. A graceful chapel within the keep, where the visitor is told with special emphasis that Saint Thomas once said mass, has thus much to show in favour of the legend that it is clearly a work of Henry the Second’s days. Gisors under Henry the Second. His days were stirring days at Gisors as well as the days of Rufus, and a hundred years of sieges had brought new improvements into the art of fortification. All in short that strikes the eye as the traveller draws near to Gisors, Present appearance of Gisors. the castle towers, no less than the strange and striking outline of one of the stateliest of those churches which boasted no bishop or abbot at their head, belongs to later days than those of the Red King’s campaign of Chaumont. Of the defences of the town below little can now be traced, and that part of the defences of the castle on which the historian looks with the deepest interest is carefully hidden from distant view. The tower of Saint Thomas and its lower fellow both seem to rise from the midst of a wood—​a wood artificially planted, seemingly for the express purpose of robbing Gisors of its characteristic feature, of shutting out from sight the mighty motte and keep which Robert of Bellême made ready at the Red King’s bidding to be the strongest bulwark of the Norman land.

Castle of Trye. Near as Gisors stands to Chaumont, another fortress barred the way between them. The road between the two towns passes through Trye—​distinguished from its neighbour Trye-la-Ville as Trye-Château—which appears in our story along with Chaumont as one of the French fortresses which Gisors was specially meant to keep in check. Yet Trye must have been itself specially meant as an outpost against Gisors. Close by Gisors is one of the points where the Norman frontier overlaps the Epte; so that Trye, lying between two and three miles from Gisors, is yet nearer than Gisors to the actual frontier. Trye does not lie, like Chaumont, hidden behind the hills; it stands boldly in the teeth of the enemy, clearly seen from the hill of Gisors, and barring the main road between Gisors and Chaumont, a road which led over level ground and neither over hill nor swamp. Otherwise the site has not, like Gisors and Chaumont, any marked advantages of ground, nor, at present at least, are any earthworks visible. In our time, though a gate and a tower of later date than our story recall the days of the military importance of Trye, the attractions of the spot are chiefly of other kinds. Primæval and later antiquities. Between Trye and Chaumont a cromlech, known as the Three Stones, calls up the thought of days and men which were as mysterious in the time of Rufus as they are now. More than one fragment of mediæval architecture may be lighted on by the way, and Trye itself stands conspicuous for the singular and beautiful Romanesque work—​again too late for our immediate time—​to be found both in its ecclesiastical and its secular buildings.

Chaumont and Trye may practically be looked on as one piece of defence. Castle of Boury. A third fortress, that of Boury,[463] lay further apart to the south-west, hidden from Gisors, like Chaumont, by another line of hills. All three castles seem to have remained unsubdued through the whole war. The valour of the French resistance is dwelled on with pleasure by our Norman or English guide. Did the monk of Saint Evroul, the young scholar of the Severn side, remember that, after all, his father belonged neither to the land of his birth nor to the land of his adoption, but was in truth a Frenchman from Orleans?[464] National feeling in the French Vexin. The French Vexin was inhabited by a valiant race, in whom, if we are not pressing too far the words of our story, a distinct feeling of French nationality was strong. They were ready to run all risks—​it is not said for their King, but for the defence of their country, for the glory of their nation, for the honour of the French name.[465] Valiant men, mercenaries it would seem—​but who was to pay them?--from all parts of Gaul, or at least of France, pressed to their help, and a brave and successful defence was made. Prisoners on both sides. Prisoners on both sides underwent the two different fates which were already spoken of. The name on the Norman side which is best known to us is that of the fierce Gilbert of Laigle; Gilbert of Laigle. with him we hear of the former lord and fortifier of Gisors.[466] Among the captives on the French side the national historian records one who bore a far loftier name, but one which at that moment was hardly a name of honour. Simon of Montfort. Two of the long line of Simons of the French Montfort are heard of in the course of our story, father and son, father and brother of her who in our authorities appears commonly as the woman from Anjou, but who on the Strong Mount of her fathers may have been deemed a Queen of the French. One Simon is now spoken of as a prisoner; both are found somewhat later fighting stoutly in the cause of France. We have heard that the Red King let none free who would not undertake to fight on his side. Are we to infer that a forefather of our own deliverer had learned the lesson of Harold, that an extorted oath is of no strength?

§ 2. The First War of Maine.
1098.

Dates of the French war. November, 1097–September, 1098. These events on the French side, of which thus far we have but a vague account, would seem to have happened during the first half of the year with which we are dealing. But all that we can say for certain is that they happened between the November of one year and the September of the next. Of the struggle which was going on at the same time in Maine, the dates are far more clear. War of Maine. January—​August, 1098. It began in January and it was deemed to be over in August. But its immediate occasion arose the year before, and its general causes go much further back. Fully to understand the war of William and Helias, more truly the war of Helias and Robert of Bellême, we must trace out the events of several years. History of Maine. 1089–1098. While we have been following the fates of England, Normandy, Scotland, and Wales, much of high interest has been going on in Maine which had no connexion with the affairs of any part of Britain, and which had but little influence on Norman affairs either. But now that England and Normandy have again a common ruler, the affairs of England, or at least the affairs of her King, have again a close connexion with the affairs of Maine. We have now therefore to take up the tale of that noble city and county from the days when we had to tell of Duke Robert’s campaign before Ballon and Saint Cenery.[467]

Robert suspects the loyalty of Maine. 1089. The submission of Maine to the Norman Duke which then took place lasted only till the next favourable opportunity for asserting the old independence of the city and county. No great time after he had taken possession, Robert began to suspect the loyalty of his Cenomannian subjects. A strange story follows, which connects itself in a way yet stranger with the tale of the royal household of France which we have lately been telling. Robert, it seems, was sick at the moment when he, or some one else for him, thought it needful to take action against impending revolt in Maine. He asks help of Fulk of Anjou. He sent messengers and gifts to Count Fulk of Anjou, the famous Rechin, praying him to come to him.[468] Fulk, it will be remembered, claimed the over-lordship of Maine, and Robert himself had, long before, at the peace of Blanchelande, done a formal homage to Fulk for the county.[469] The Angevin Count was supposed to have influence with the people of Maine, influence which might be enough to hinder them from revolting. That influence Robert now prayed Fulk to use. The Angevin agreed on one condition, namely that the Norman would use his own influence in quite another quarter, for quite another purpose. Fulk asks for Bertrada of Montfort. Fulk wanted a wife. As the story is told us, he is said to have had two living wives already; but that seems not to have been the case.[470] His first wife, the daughter of a lord of Beaugency, died, leaving a daughter. He then married Ermengarde of Bourbon—​a description not to become royal for some ages—​the mother of his son Geoffrey Martel. Her he put away on the usual plea of kindred, and now it was that he appeared as the wooer of that Bertrada of whom we have already spoken of in her later character. The daughter of Simon of Montfort was the niece of Count William of Evreux, through her mother Agnes, Count William’s sister. Bertrada brought up by Heloise. Her mother would seem to have been dead, and she was brought up in her uncle’s house, under the schooling of Countess Heloise.[471] The Count of Anjou, no longer young, driven to strange devices as to his shoes,[472] and burthened with a former wife whose divorce might be called in question, felt that he was hardly likely to win favour as a lover in the eyes either of Bertrada herself or of her guardians. But the Rechin was skilful at a bargain. He would engage to keep Maine in the Duke’s obedience, if the Duke would get him the damsel of Montfort to wife.[473] Robert set off for Evreux in person, and pleaded Fulk’s cause with Count William. The Count of Evreux was duly shocked, and set forth the obvious objections to the marriage. William of Evreux’s bargain about his niece. But he too was open to a bargain; he would get over his scruples if the Duke would restore to him certain lordships to which he asserted a right, and would grant certain others to his nephew William of Breteuil. These lands had been the possession of his uncle Ralph of Wacey, guardian of the Great William in his early days, who it seems was sportively known as Ralph with the Ass’s Head.[474] Let the Duke give him and his nephew back their own, and Bertrada should be, as far as the Count of Evreux was concerned, Countess of Anjou.

Robert consents. The Duke did not venture to answer without the advice of his counsellors. His counsellors. But the combined wisdom of Robert of Bellême, lately a rebel but now again in favour,[475] of the Ætheling Eadgar, and of that monastic William of Arques of whom we have already heard,[476] advised the acceptance of Count William’s terms. The whole county of Maine was of more value than the lordships which the Count of Evreux demanded as the price of his niece.[477] The power and the will of Fulk to do what he promised about Le Mans and Maine seems not to have been doubted. The double bargain was struck, and it was carried out for a season. Count William and his nephew got all that they asked, except that one lordship passed to Gerard of Gournay. Fulk marries Bertrada. Fulk too got what he asked, namely Bertrada, till such time as King Philip took her away. She had time to quarrel with her stepson Geoffrey, and to become the mother of Fulk, afterwards Count of Anjou and King of Jerusalem, and grandfather of the first Angevin King of England. Maine kept quiet for a year. And Count Fulk was able, by whatever means, to keep the Cenomannian city and county in a formal allegiance to the Norman Duke, till such time as the temptations to revolt became too strong to be withstood.

Movements in Maine. Our story however seems to imply that the submission of Maine to Robert was wholly on the surface, and that all this while schemes were going on for shaking off the hated Norman yoke. The present movement took the same form which had been taken by the movement in the Conqueror’s day.[478] The avowed object of Cenomannian patriotism was now, as then, the restoration of the ancient dynasty. The valour and energy of the citizens of Le Mans are constantly spoken of; but we hear nothing this time of the commune. The rule of some prince seems to be assumed on all hands, and for a while all seem to have agreed in seeking that prince in the same quarter in which they had sought a prince already. Hugh son of Azo sent for. 1090. Little indeed of good for Le Mans or Maine had come of the former application to Azo and Gersendis; but their son Hugh had now reached greater years and experience, and the men of Maine again sent into Italy to ask for him to reign over them.[479] Union of Geoffrey and Helias. The application was supported both by Geoffrey of Mayenne, of whom we have so often heard during the last thirty years, and by Helias of La Flèche, who might well have asserted his own claims against those of the distant house of Este.[480]

Helias of La Flèche. Helias now becomes the hero of the Cenomannian tale. He is one of the men of his time of whom we can get the clearest idea. We see him alike in his recorded acts and in his elaborately drawn portrait; and by the light of the two we can hail in him the very noblest type of the age and class to which he belonged. We see in him a no less worthy defender of the freedom of Maine than Harold was of the freedom of England. His character He stands before us with his tall stature, his strong, thin, and well-proportioned frame, his swarthy complexion, his thick hair cropped close after Norman or priestly fashion.[481] Brave and skilful in war, wise and just in his rule in peace, ready and pleasant in speech, gentle to the good and stern to the evil, faithful to his word, and corrupted neither by good nor evil fortune, a man withal of prayer and fasting, the bountiful friend of the Church and the poor, Helias stands forth within the narrow range of a single county of Gaul as one who, on a wider field, might have won for himself a place among the foremost of mankind.[482] With the house of the old Counts of Maine he had a twofold connexion. and descent. The male line of Herbert Wake-dog had come to an end; but in the female line Helias came of it in two descents, while Hugh came in one only. Not only was his mother Paula one of the sisters of the younger Herbert, but his father John of La Flèche was son of a daughter of Wake-dog himself.[483] His castles. To his father’s Angevin fief of La Flèche, among the islands of the Loir, his marriage with Matilda, a grand-niece of Archbishop Gervase of Rheims, known to us better as Bishop of Le Mans,[484] had added a string of castles in the south of Maine. Two of these, Mayet and the one which is specially called the Castle of the Loir, fill a prominent place in our story.[485] Helias was plainly the greatest lord of eastern Maine, the modern department of Sarthe, as Geoffrey of Mayenne was the greatest in western Maine, the modern department which still bears the name of his own fortress.[486] His possible claim on the county. One might have thought that the position of Helias as a great local chief might, when the elders of Maine were called on to choose a prince, have outweighed any slight genealogical precedence on the part of the stranger Hugh. But the great men of the county may not have been disposed to place one of themselves over their own heads. He accepts the succession of Hugh. Anyhow Helias, like his father before him,[487] waived his own claim to the succession. Along with the lord of Mayenne and the great mass of the people of the city and county, he welcomed the Ligurian prince—​such is the geography of our chief guide—​when he came to take possession of the dominion to which the voice of the Cenomannian people had called him a second time.[488]

Negotiations with Hugh. We are to suppose that the negotiations with the house of Este were going on during the year when Count Fulk contrived to keep Maine outwardly quiet. But when the quarrel between William and Robert broke out, when Normandy was divided and dismembered, the Angevin over-lord’s influence gave way. The time for action was clearly come. Revolt of Maine. 1090. Le Mans and all Maine now openly rose against the Norman dominion. Duke Robert’s garrisons were driven out;[489] the Cenomannian land was again free. Invitation to Hugh. But the first act of restored freedom was to invite Hugh of Este, descendant of the ancient counts, to come at once to take possession, and to rule in the palace on the Roman wall which fences in the Cenomannian hill.

Opposition of Bishop Howel. The chief opponent of the movement for independence was, as before, the Bishop. The throne of Saint Julian was still filled by the Breton Howel, the nominee of the Conqueror, and he stood firm in his loyalty to his patron’s eldest son.[490] He withstood the revolt by every means in his power, and scattered interdicts and anathemas against the supporters of the newly-elected Count.[491] Hugh had not yet come, and the opposition of the Bishop was felt to be dangerous. Howel imprisoned by Helias. Helias therefore, whose piety did not lead him to any superstitious reverence for ecclesiastical privileges, dealt with Howel as an enemy, or at least as one whom it was well to keep out of the way for a season. As the Bishop was going through his diocese with a train of clergy, in the discharge of some episcopal duty, Helias seized him, carried him off, and put him in ward at La Flèche.[492] The great grievance seems to have been that Howel was denied the company of his attendant clergy, and was allowed the services only of one unlettered rustic priest. The fear was lest the Bishop and his more learned companions would, in their Latin talk, plot something which their keepers would not understand.[493] This very complaint shows that the Bishop’s imprisonment was not of a very harsh kind. But the cause of the captive prelate was zealously taken up by his clergy. Interdict of Le Mans. Le Mans and its suburbs were put under a practical interdict; divine worship ceased; the bells were silent; the doors of the churches were stopped up with thorns.[494] Great, it is said, was the joy when the Bishop was set free and came back to his city. Liberation of Howel on Hugh’s coming. We are told by a writer in the episcopal interest that Helias set him free in a fit of penitence, in answer to many intercessions from nobles, clergy, and neighbouring bishops. Howel was gracious and forgiving, and let his wrongs be forgotten on the restoration of whatever had been taken from him.[495] All this is possible; but the more definite statement that Howel was kept in ward till Hugh came shows that his captivity was a matter of policy, and that he was set free as soon as it seemed that no object could be gained by prolonging it.

Hugh reaches Le Mans. Meanwhile Hugh was on the road. At the border fortress of La Chartre he was met by the magistrates of Le Mans—​the city seems, as often in Cenomannian history, to act for the whole county—​who swore oaths to him, counting, it is added, their former oaths to Duke Robert for nought.[496] Howel flees to Robert. The Bishop, determined not to acknowledge the revolution, fled to the court of the prince whom he did acknowledge. But he found little help there. Robert’s carelessness as to his loss. The idle and luxurious Robert seemed not to care, he seemed almost to rejoice, that so noble a part of his dominions had fallen away from him.[497] One thing only he would not give up; he would at all hazards cleave to his rights over the Cenomannian bishopric.He cleaves to his rights over the bishopric. Robert bade Howel to go back to Le Mans, but to do nothing which could be taken as an admission of Hugh as temporal lord of the bishopric.[498] Howel went home, and found the new Count, for whatever reason, quartered in the episcopal palace. He had himself to live in the abbey of Saint Vincent, just outside the city. Dispute between Hugh and Howel. A long dispute followed between the Breton Bishop and the Italian Count, and then came a still fiercer dispute between the Bishop and a party in his own Chapter. One or two points are of constitutional interest, and remind us of questions which we have just before heard of in our own land. Howel refuses to acknowledge Hugh as advocatus. The Count called on Howel to acknowledge himself as his feudal superior for the temporalities of the bishopric.[499] He refused and left the city, on which Hugh seized the temporalities of the bishopric. Howel and his Chapter. Worse even than the Count were the Bishop’s clerical enemies, one Hilgot at their head. By a cruel subtlety they had persuaded him to appoint as Dean a mere boy from his own land, Geoffrey by name, of the age of twelve years only—​so it is said. Disputes about the deanery. Now they turned about, found fault with the appointment, and set up an anti-dean of their own.[500] The Bishop crossed over to England for help, and, strange to say, he found a friend in the King.[501] Howel comes to England. But meanwhile all kinds of wrongs were done to his people, even to branding an innocent boy in the face.[502] At last a reconciliation between the Count and the Bishop was brought about, partly because of the turn taken by public feeling. Saint Julian’s, in the absence of its chief pastor, was forsaken, while crowds flocked to keep the feasts of the Church at the Bishop’s monastic retreat. This was at the priory of Solêmes, near Sablé, lying south-west of the city, towards the Angevin border.[503] Return of Howel. June 28, 1090. At last the prelate came back amidst universal joy, and the Count made good all wrongs and losses that he had undergone.[504]

Unpopularity of Hugh. But happier days were to come for the Bishop and the people of Maine. It was not only to Howel and his clergy that the Italian Count had made himself hateful. He had none of the qualities which were needed in the ruler of a high-spirited people in a time of danger. Idle, timid, weak of purpose, he had no power among the men over whom he was set; and he had not, as seems to have been hoped for, brought with him any store of money from the south.[505] His wife, a daughter of Robert Wiscard, a woman of a lofty spirit, was too much for him. He put her away, and was excommunicated by Pope Urban for so doing.[506] Despised of all men, he was thinking of flight.[507] February, 1091. It was now moreover the moment when the Norman power had again become specially dangerous to Maine. Danger of Maine. The sons of the great William, lately at variance, were now reconciled, and the subjugation of Maine was one of the terms of their agreement.[508] Helias saw his opportunity. He set forth the dangers of the land to his cousin. Hugh said that he wished to sell his county and be off.[509] Helias argued that, in that case, he ought to sell it to no one but himself. He set forth his right by birth; he said that it was no easy place that he was seeking. But his just rights and a love for the freedom of the land called him to it, and he trusted that God would help him in his post of danger.[510] A bargain was soon struck. Helias buys the county. For a sum of ten thousand Cenomannian shillings Hugh agreed to abdicate in favour of his cousin. The coronet of Maine passed from the son of Gersendis to the son of Paula. Hugh went back into Italy with his money, and Helias was received without opposition as Count of Maine.[511]

First reign of Helias. 1091–1098. The reign of Helias over Le Mans and Maine lasted for about twenty years, with a break of three years of warfare of which we shall presently have to speak. First came a time of seven or eight years, during which the Cenomannian people might indeed be objects of envy to the people either of Normandy or of England. The new prince, by every account of his actions, showed himself the model of a ruler of those times. His strong and just rule. He did justice and made peace; as far as a prince of those days could do so, he sheltered the weak from the oppressions of the strong.[512] His personal piety was not lessened, nor was his devotion to the Church less zealous, now that the ecclesiastical power was no longer a political enemy. His friendship for Howel. Strong in the friendship of his late gaoler, Bishop Howel could rule his diocese in peace, and could carry on his works of building, both in the city itself and in his neighbouring lordship of Coulaines.[513] Peace of the land. And these happy years were years of peace without as well as within. The rule of Helias was undisputed; Maine saw neither revolt within her own borders nor invasion from any power beyond them. Whatever designs either Robert or William may have cherished against the independence of Maine, those designs did not for the present take the shape of any overt act. Robert seems to have done absolutely nothing; the first signs of impending evil showed themselves soon after William’s acquisition of Normandy; 1096. but there was no open warfare for two years longer.

Translation of Saint Julian. October 17, 1093. In these times of exceptional quiet there is little to record beyond ecclesiastical ceremonies. It was a bright day at Le Mans when Bishop Howel was able to translate the body of the venerated patron of the city to the place of honour in his new building.[514] That was the time when Anselm, already enthroned, was waiting for consecration, and when Malcolm had turned away from Gloucester to plan his last invasion of Northumberland.[515] In these years too Howel must have finished the two stately towers of Saint Julian’s minster, of which we shall before long have a tale to tell. But Le Mans presently saw a greater day than all, as it seemed at least in the eyes of the biographer of her bishops. Visit of Pope Urban to Le Mans. November or December, 1095. After the days of Piacenza and Clermont, Pope Urban honoured the Cenomannian city with his presence. For three days the sovereign Pontiff was the guest of Howel, and we are told that, though it was a year of scarceness, yet the Bishop of Le Mans was able to entertain the Pope and his following right bountifully.[516] Howel, it is said, appeared among his fellow-bishops conspicuous for the gifts of both mind and body. Men rejoiced with him on the happiness of receiving such a guest, and deemed from his health and vigour that he might long enjoy his honours.[517] Sickness of Howel. 1095–1097. Before long he fell sick, and his sickness was unto death, although his end did not come till nearly two years after the preaching at Clermont. The visit of Urban, the death of Howel, led to important events in the history of Maine.

The preaching of the crusade, above all the presence, and doubtless the preaching, of the crusading Pope in his own city, stirred up the same impulse in the heart of Helias which was stirred up in the hearts of so many other men of his day. Helias takes the cross. 1095–1096. Young and strong, devout and valiant, he would go and fight to win back the sepulchre of his Lord from the misbelievers and to deliver his Christian brethren in other lands from their cruel bondage. By the counsel of the Pope, the Count of Maine took the cross, and made ready to go on the armed pilgrimage along with his neighbours, with Robert of Normandy and Stephen of Chartres.[518] Estimate of his action. Our feeling perhaps is that Helias, like Saint Lewis, had a stronger call to stay at home than to go on the crusade. A certain part of mankind, a small part certainly, but that part among which his immediate duty lay, was peaceful and happy under his rule as they were not likely to be under the rule of any other. Could it be right, we might argue, for him to leave a work which none could do but himself, a work which he had taken on his shoulders of his own free will, for another work, however noble, which others could do as well as himself? Let Robert go and win honour abroad instead of dishonour at home. Normandy was in such a case that the coming even of Rufus was a happy change. Let Stephen of Chartres go; he left his royal-hearted Adela behind him. Let King Philip go, if he could go; his son Lewis would rule his realm far better than he. But let Helias stay, and keep for his land and city that well-being which he had given and which another might take away. Sigurd and Eystein. An argument nearly the same as this was actually pressed on the crusading Sigurd by his stay-at-home brother Eystein. While Sigurd was warring far away, Eystein had done a great deal of good to his own people in Norway.[519] But there are moments in the world’s history, moments when all has to be sacrificed to a great cause, when arguments like these, so sound against ordinary warfare, sound above all against the utterly purposeless warfare of those days, cannot be listened to. Argument in favour of the Crusade. If Western Christendom was to arm for a crusade, it was well that that crusade should be headed by the noblest men in Western Christendom. The work would not be done, if it were only left to lower souls. If Godfrey was to march, it was fit that Helias should march beside him. Godfrey went; Helias did not go. He had now a neighbour who made it vain for him to think of leaving his own land in jeopardy, even to carry out his promise to Pope Urban and to go on the holy war.

William in Normandy. August (?), 1096. The bargain between William and Robert had just been struck. The two brothers were together at Rouen. Robert was about to set out for Jerusalem; William had come to take possession of Normandy. It would have been the height of rashness for Helias to join in the enterprise of Robert, unless he could make his county safe during his absence against any aggression on the part of William. Danger to Maine. According to Norman doctrines, Maine was simply a rebellious province. Robert had done nothing to stop the rebellion, but he had never acknowledged either Hugh or Helias as lawful Prince of the Cenomannians. Where Robert had done nothing, William would be likely to act with vigour. The claims which Robert had simply not acknowledged William might be inclined to dispute with the sword. Importance of Norman neutrality. It was therefore of the utmost moment for the Count of Maine to secure the friendship, or at least the neutrality, of the new ruler of Normandy. Helias doubtless knew that, if William bound himself by his knightly promise, that promise would be faithfully kept, and he perhaps hoped that towards one who was bound on a holy errand, an errand during which he would be harmless and powerless as far as Maine and Normandy were concerned, the chivalrous king might be disposed to pledge such a promise. He therefore went to Rouen, and sought interviews with both brothers. Helias and Robert. He first took counsel with the Duke.[520] Helias and William. Robert, we know, could give counsel to others,[521] and he had no temptation at this moment to give unfriendly counsel to Helias. By his advice, the Count of Maine went to the King; He professes himself William’s vassal. he addressed him reverently, and, if his words be rightly reported, acknowledged himself his vassal. So to do was no degradation, and the acknowledgement might turn the King’s heart towards him. He set forth his purpose of going to the crusade; he said that he wished to go as the King’s friend and in his peace.[522] Answer of Rufus; he demands the cession of Maine. Then Rufus burst forth in a characteristic strain. Helias may go whither he thinks good; but let him give up the city and county of Maine; whatever his father held it was William’s will to hold also.[523] Helias answers that he holds his county by lawful inheritance from his forefathers, and that he hopes by God’s help to hand it on to his children. But if the King has a mind to try the question in a peaceful pleading, he is ready to maintain his right before kings, counts, and bishops, and to abide by their judgement.[524] Rufus tells him that he will plead against him with swords and spears and countless arrows.[525] Challenge of Helias. Then Helias spoke his solemn challenge. He had wished to fight against the heathen in the name of the Lord, but he had found the enemies of Christ nearer to his own doors. The county which he held was his by the gift of God;[526] he would not lightly give it up, nor leave his people to the wolves as sheep without a shepherd. Let the King and all his nobles hear. He bore the cross of a pilgrim; that cross he would not lay aside; he would bear it on his shield, on his helmet, on the saddle and bridle of his horse. Under the protection of that sign he would go forth to defend himself against all who might attack him, that all might know that those who were fighting against him were fighting against a warrior of the cross. He trusted in Him who ruled the world and who knew the secrets of his heart, that a day would come when he would be able to discharge his vow according to the letter.[527] Rufus lets Helias go with a defiance. The Red King bade him go whither he would and do what he would; he had no mind to fight against crusaders, but he would have the city which his father had once won.[528] Let Helias get together workmen to repair his broken walls.[529] He would presently visit the citizens of Le Mans, and would show himself before their gates with a hundred thousand pennoned lances.[530] He would send cars drawn by oxen, and laden with arrows and javelins. But before the oxen could reach Le Mans, he would be there with many legions of armed men.[531]

Such was the threatening message which Helias was bidden to receive as the most certain truth and to go back and tell his accomplices—​that is, we may understand, his faithful subjects. Helias makes ready for defence. He went back to his capital, and began to put his dominions into a state fit to withstand an attack. But as yet no attack came; for a year or more neither king nor legions nor oxen were seen before the gates of Le Mans. William delays his attack. 1096–1097. William was busy with many matters, with the dispute with Anselm, with the Welsh war, with the affairs of Scotland. We are told, characteristically enough, that in the midst of all these affairs he forgot Maine altogether. Helias meanwhile remained in actual possession of the county, not attacked or disturbed by Rufus, but in no way acknowledged by him, with the King’s threats hanging over him, and knowing that an attack might come at any moment. At last this armed neutrality came to an end. An event happened which called the King’s mind back to Cenomannian affairs in a manner specially characteristic of Cenomannian history.

Affairs of the bishopric. Again, as so often in our story, the bishopric of Le Mans becomes the centre of the drama and the subject of dispute among the princes of the world. Death of Howel July 29, 1097. In the middle of the summer, shortly before the council of Winchester, Bishop Howel died, seemingly of the same sickness which had come upon him soon after the visit of Pope Urban. Helias, like Hugh, deemed himself, as the reigning Count, to be the temporal lord of the bishopric, and he at once nominated to the vacant see. Helias nominates Geoffrey. His choice was the Dean of Saint Julian’s, that same Geoffrey who had been placed by Howel in the deanery in his childhood, and who, if the dates be right, must still have been wonderfully young for a bishop.[532] The canons choose Hildebert. But the canons of Saint Julian’s stood upon their right of free election, and chose a man of greater name, their Chancellor and Archdeacon, the famous Hildebert.[533] They placed him at once, seemingly against his own will, on the episcopal throne.[534] At first Helias was wroth, and was minded to set aside this direct slight to his authority. Helias accepts the election. But the rights of the Chapter were set before him, and, unlike our own Confessor under less provocation, he yielded, and accepted the election.[535] The Dean, deeming himself sure of the bishopric, had made ready a great feast; but his dainties were spread and eaten to no purpose.[536] Geoffrey Archbishop of Rouen. 1111. His time of promotion was only deferred. Fourteen years later, Geoffrey succeeded William the Good Soul in the archbishopric of Rouen. So his now more successful competitor was not fated always to remain in the second rank of prelacy. Hildebert Bishop of Le Mans. 1097–1126. One of the great scholars of his day, renowned for his writings both in prose and verse, a diligent writer of letters and thereby one of the authorities for our history, a builder, a reformer, an enemy of heresy who could yet deal gently with the heretic,[537] a model in short, we are told, of every episcopal virtue, Hildebert ruled the church of Le Mans for more than twenty-nine years, Archbishop of Tours. 1126–1134. and then for the last nine years of his long life was removed to the metropolitan throne of Tours.[538]

All the elements of the Cenomannian state, prince, clergy, and people, had joined in the elevation of Hildebert. But there was one to whom any free election or nomination by any of the local powers was in its own nature distasteful. Claims of the Norman Dukes over the bishopric. It was perhaps because their claim was very doubtful that the princes of the Norman house clave with such special obstinacy to their rights over the temporalities of the see of Le Mans. The bishopric was the one thing in Maine which even the careless Robert cared about.[539] And to William Rufus, who so deeply cherished his father’s memory, it would seem a crowning indignity that a bishop appointed by his father, a special and loyal friend of his father, should be succeeded by any one, whether the choice of count, chapter, or commune, in whose election he himself had no share. Anger of Rufus at the election of Hildebert. When the King heard of the election of Hildebert, he was very wroth. He forbade his consecration, seemingly under threats of open war.[540] Hildebert was consecrated none the less, and the war which Rufus had hitherto planned in his heart, broke out in action.[541]

William in Normandy. November, 1097. When William crossed the sea in the November following the election of Hildebert, we may believe that the wrong which he held to have been done to him in the matter of that election was in his mind as a secondary cause of action, along with his demand of the Vexin from the King of the French. His designs on Maine. He came for war with France; he was ready for war with Maine also. But we do not hear of any actual military operations till the next year had begun. And, when warfare began, it was at first warfare carried on, just as often happened in Wales and even in Scotland, by the King’s licence indeed, but not by the King himself. Robert of Bellême attacks Maine. The immediate danger lay on the side of the county which was threatened by the constant enemy of Maine and of Helias, Robert of Bellême. From him came the first acts of warfare. It was against him that Helias now found it needful to strengthen his castle of Dangeul.[542] Helias strengthens the castle of Dangeul. Its position. This point lies to the north-east of Ballon, at only a few miles’ distance. The castle stands on a height nearly equal to that of Ballon, though Dangeul does not take the same marked form of a promontory, but rather stands on the edge of a wide expanse of high ground sinking by stages down to the plain below. The fortress has wholly vanished; but its site may be traced within the grounds of the modern château which has taken its place, and which represents, in a figure, the stronghold of Helias. The view which the spot commands shows how well the site was chosen. The eye ranges as far as the height of Sillé-le-Guillaume on one side, as far as the Norman Chaumont on the other. Dangeul stood right in the way of an advance of the arch-enemy, whether from his own home at Bellême or from any of his Norman or Cenomannian fortresses.

Geographical character of the war; waged chiefly with Robert of Bellême. The war of Maine is largely a war between Helias and Robert of Bellême. This gives the war its special geographical character. The immediate possessions of Helias lay in the south-eastern part of the county; the fortresses of the enemy threatened him from the north-east. The capital lay between them. The result is that the seat of war is confined to the eastern part of Maine, the modern department of Sarthe, and that Le Mans itself is its special centre. Of western Maine, the modern department of Mayenne, we hear nothing. There is no news from the old battle-field of Domfront, Ambrières, and Mayenne itself, though of the lord of Mayenne we still continue to hear. There is nothing this time to tell of Sainte-Susanne or of Sillé-le-Guillaume.[543] The war takes up such an area as is natural when the strife is waged mainly for the city of Le Mans, when it is waged between the lord of La Flèche and the lord of Bellême. The enemy advances from Alençon and Mamers; he is checked by the fortification of Dangeul.

Edwᵈ. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

Map illustrating the
CAMPAIGN OF MAINE
A.D. 1098.

Effects of the occupation of Dangeul. The occupation of this last strong post by Helias was not without effect. He did not indeed win back any of the castles which were held by Robert of Bellême; but the garrison of Dangeul kept the invader in check, and hindered him from carrying his accustomed ravages through the whole country. This move of Helias seems even to have convinced Robert that the conquest of Maine was an undertaking too great for his own unassisted power. Robert of Bellême invites the King. January, 1098. In January he went to the King, and stirred him up to a direct attack on Helias. With a lover of warfare like Robert winter went for nothing; it would be just the time to take the enemy by surprise, while they were not expecting any attack. The King, we are told, was unwilling. It is hard to understand why this should be, unless he was too busily occupied with the war in the Vexin. He was ashamed however—​the chivalrous feeling again comes in—​to shrink from any warlike enterprise which was proposed to him.[544] William and Robert against Helias. The King and the Count of Bellême set forth; but they found the Count of Maine fully their match. He knew how war was to be carried on in his own land against an enemy stronger than himself. Guerrilla warfare of Helias. He planted detachments at every convenient post; he lined the hedges and defences of every kind with men; he guarded the passages of the streams, and the difficult approaches of the woods. Against this kind of skirmishing warfare the mighty Rufus and all his knights were able to do as little as they were able to do against the light-armed Welsh.[545] The King waxed fiercer than ever against the men of Maine and their Count; William leaves Maine. but he withdrew his own personal presence, betaking himself doubtless to the other seat of war.

Robert of Bellême continues the war. Meanwhile Robert of Bellême was left to carry on the struggle with Helias. He was ordered by Rufus to bring together as large a force as he could in his own fortresses, nor did the King forget to supply him with abundance of money for that purpose.[546] On such a bidding as this, Robert of Bellême, Robert the Devil on Cenomannian lips, set to work with a will which fully bore out his surname. He built new fortresses, he strengthened the old ones with deep ditches.[547] He had already occupied nine castles, besides fortified houses, on Cenomannian ground.[548] Castles held by him in Maine. The list is given as Blèves, Perray, Mont-de-la-Nue, Saônes, Saint Remy-du-plain, Lurçon, Allières, Motte de Gauthier-le-Clincamp, and Mamers. All these lie in the north-eastern part of the county, the part immediately threatened from Alençon and Bellême. They occupy nearly the whole of the land between the Cenomannian Orne and the upper course of the Sarthe above Alençon, lying on each side, north and south, of the great forest of Perseigne. The line of the Sarthe from Alençon to Le Mans remained untouched, while Ballon stood as the advanced guard of the capital, and Dangeul was a yet further outpost of Helias, in the very teeth of the invader from Bellême. Perray, alone among the points held by Robert, stands as far south as the lower course of the Orne.

Several of the castles on this list occupied marked sites, and have left considerable traces. Mamers and Blèves were strictly border fortresses, points which Robert had seized just within the Cenomannian border; the others were more advanced points in the heart of the Cenomannian land. Mamers. Mamers, with its streets sloping down to the young Orne, is the only one of the places on our list which is now at all a considerable town. But the only signs of its fortifications which are to be seen are found in the names of its streets, which suggest the former presence of a fort by the river and of a castle on somewhat higher ground. Mamers, due west from Bellême, may well have been Robert’s first conquest, and its occupation may have marked his first advance into the dominions of his neighbour. But he must also, early in his career, have made himself master of Blèves. Blèves. This is a point which has no natural advantages of height, but which, standing in the very north-east corner of Maine, separated from Perche by a small tributary of the Sarthe, is important from its border position and as commanding a bridge. A mound which once stood there has been levelled; a graceful Renaissance house near its site is the present representative of the castle; but parts of the ditches may still be seen; the church, near but not within the enclosure, contains work which may have been looked on by Hildebert and Helias, and ancient masonry still remains at the manorial mill. Blèves lies north of the forest of Perseigne; Allières. at Allières, on its eastern verge, all actual traces of the castle have vanished; but the church again contains some small parts which seem contemporary with our story, and the site of the fortress may well be marked by the modern château on the hill-side commanding a wide view to the south. But more speaking witnesses of this war may be seen at two points lying south of the forest and directly west of Mamers. Saint Remy-du-plain. Saint Remy, distinguished as Saint Remy du Plain from a namesake to the south-east known as Saint Remy du Mont, stands, not indeed in the plain, but on the edge of the high ground. It commands an extensive view, reaching to the point which bounds most of the views in northern Maine, the butte of Chaumont. Saônes. A site of the like kind, but with a less wide prospect, is held by Saônes at a short distance to the south, hard by that unusual feature in these lands, a small lake. Saônes is now a small village, but it was once of importance enough to give its name to the surrounding district of Saosnois or Sonnois. In both these cases the castle-mound rises immediately to the west of the church, the latter at Saint Remy being a late building of more pretension than is usual in the neighbourhood. Each mound has its surrounding ditch, which at Saint Remy is of most striking depth; each has its encircling wall; each has its inner tower, that at Saônes of an irregular four-sided shape, that of Saint Remy octagonal without and round within. Here are two unmistakeable and most striking sites of the fortresses which the invader from Perche rent away from the Cenomannian county. But, with such small remains of walls as are still left, it is hard to say in each case how much may be the work of Robert of Bellême himself. The mounds—​natural hills improved by art—​and their ditches are doubtless far older than his day; the walls must often be far later. Small architectural remains of the eleventh century. There is little architectural detail left to decide such points; we are left to the less certain evidence of masonry. Some of the masonry in the inner building at Saônes certainly has the air of work of the eleventh century. In any case, whatever may be the exact amount of his work among the existing remains, everything bears witness to the impression which Robert’s invasion made on the district and to the reputation which he left behind him. Not far from Saônes, some remains of dykes, of the age or object of which it would be rash to speak with certainty, still keep the name of Robert the Devil.

Nature of the country and of the war. A visit to the scene of this war, a look-out from any of the chief fortified points, brings forcibly home to us the nature of that kind of struggle with which we are dealing. Nothing but an actual sight of Italy and Greece fully brings home to the mind the state of things when each city was a sovereign commonwealth, armed with all the powers of war and peace. Till we take in the fact with our own eyes, we do not thoroughly understand how men felt and acted when they constantly lived with rivals, rivals who might at any moment become enemies, within sight of their own territory. Teaching of the landscapes in Maine. The out-look from any of the Cenomannian heights, the out-look from the home and centre of mischief on the hill of Bellême, brings home to us another state of things with equal force. Had the commune of Le Mans lived on, had other neighbouring cities followed its example, the older Greek, the later Italian, model might have been seen in all its fulness on the soil of northern Gaul. And warfare between Le Mans and Tours, between Le Mans and Alençon, carried on with that mixture of lofty and petty motives which is characteristic of warfare between rival cities, would have been ennobling compared with the state of things which actually was. The castles. For here we see every available point seized on to make what, at least in the hands of Robert of Bellême, was a mere den of robbers.[549] From his own scarped mound at Bellême the destroyer could see far enough into the Cenomannian land to give a keen whet to his appetite for havoc. Within the land which thus lay open to his attack, we see from every height the sites, not of one or two only, but of a whole crowd of strongholds which have passed away. A very few only of these strongholds could ever have been needed for the protection of any town or for the general defence of the country. Their object private war. They were strongholds which had been first raised for the purpose of private war, and which, in the hands of their present master, were turned to the purpose of general oppression. One wonders how, in such a state of things, when almost every village was overshadowed by its robber’s nest, a single husbandman could till his field, or a single merchant carry his wares from town to town. Contrast with England. And we must remember that, unless during the nineteen years of anarchy, this state of things never existed in England. Our forefathers raised their wail over the building of the castles and over the evil deeds which were wrought by those who built them. Comparative rarity of castles in England. But at no time in England, save on the borders which were exposed to the foreign enemies of the kingdom, did castles stand so thick on the ground as they did in the land on which we now look. The eye which has been used to track out the scenes of the Cenomannian war comes back to an English landscape of the same kind, to mark the steep bluff or the isolated mount, which seems designed to be girt with a ditch and crowned with a donjon, and almost to wonder that no ditch or donjon ever was there. And, as we gaze on the land where they crowned every tempting site, we better understand the joy and thankfulness with which men hailed the reign of any prince who put some curb on the pride and power of the knightly disturbers of the peace and gave to smaller men some chance of possessing their own in safety. We can understand how in such a prince this overwhelming merit was held to outweigh not a few vices and crimes in his own person. We can understand how, at the beginning of every period of restored order, a general sweeping away of castles was as it were the symbolic act of its inauguration. State of the Cenomannian castles. And perhaps the thought comes all the more home to the mind, because the Cenomannian castles are, to so great an extent, a memory and not a presence. They are not like those castles by the Rhine which have come to take their place as parts of a picturesque landscape. As a rule, it is not the castles themselves, but the sites where we know that they once stood, which catch the eye as it ranges from Mamers to Sillé, from Ballon to Alençon. But when we see how many spots within that region had been made the sites of these dens of havoc—​when we think how many of them had, in the hands of Robert of Bellême, become dens of havoc more fearful than ever—​we shall better understand how men cherished the names of William the Great and of his youngest son; we shall better understand the work which had now to be done in the Cenomannian land by one nobler than either the son or the father.

Wrong and sacrilege of Robert of Bellême. In the minds of Helias and his contemporaries the occupation of so large a part of their country was yet more keenly embittered by the despite done to holy places and the wrong wrought on men who enjoyed exceptional respect even in the fiercest times. Some of the strongholds of Robert the Devil were planted on lands belonging to the Church, especially to the abbeys of Saint Vincent and La Couture without the walls of Le Mans. The peaceful tenants of these religious houses, accustomed to a milder rule than their neighbours, groaned under the oppressions of their new masters.[550] Stirred up by this wrong and sacrilege, the Count of Maine marched forth to protect his people. Now that the King was gone, he even ventured on something like a pitched battle. Helias defeats Robert at Saônes. He met Robert of Bellême at the head of a superior force near the lake and castle of Saônes, not far, it may be, from the dyke which specially bears the tyrant’s name. The pious Count and his followers, calling on God and Saint Julian, attacked the sacrilegious invaders and put them to flight.[551] Several of the nobles of Normandy were wounded or taken prisoners. Robert of Courcy, a name not new to us,[552] lost his right eye. William of Wacey and several others were taken, and were released on the payment of heavy ransoms.[553] Helias, in short, carried on a defensive warfare in the spirit of a Christian knight. Not so his enemy. Cruelty of Robert. Robert of Bellême carried on a war of aggression in the spirit of a murdering savage. All the worst horrors of war were let loose upon the land. Robert’s treatment of prisoners was not that which the captive Normans met with at the hands of Helias. In the holy season of Lent, when other sinners, we are told, forsook their sins for a while, the son of Mabel only did worse than ever. Three hundred prisoners perished in his dungeons. Large ransoms were offered for their release; but Robert would not forego for money the pleasure of letting them die of cold, hunger, and wretchedness.[554]

April, 1098. The war thus went on till the end of April. On the Wednesday in the last week of that month Helias made an expedition against Robert. Second victory of Helias. April 28, 1098. The exact point of attack is not told us; but doubtless it was some of the fortresses held by the enemy. It was perhaps Perray, the hostile point furthest to the south, perhaps Saônes, the scene of his own former victory over the invaders. The starting-points of the Count’s operations were the two points which he held as outposts of the city against attacks from the north, Ballon and his own immediate dwelling-place at Dangeul. From these castles Helias led forth his forces. The day’s skirmish was successful; the pride of Robert the Devil received another check.[555] But fortune soon turned from the better to the worse cause. Helias taken prisoner near Dangeul. The Count bade the main body of his followers march on to Ballon, while he himself, with seven knights only, was minded to halt at his own castle of Dangeul. As he drew near to the fortress, he saw a few men lurking among the trees and bushes.[556] Trees and bushes are still there in abundance, surrounding the modern house which in a figure represents the castle of Helias. The presence of liers-in-wait so near his own home was threatening. Helias rode against them and scattered them; in so doing he also scattered his own small party. But the few men in the thickets were only the advanced guard of a larger body. The arch-fiend Robert was himself near in ambush. At the lucky moment he sprang forth; his comrades seized the Count, along with his standard-bearer Hervey of the Cenomannian Montfort,[557] and the more part of his small following. The few who escaped made their way to Ballon, to turn the joy of their comrades into sorrow at the news that Count Helias was a prisoner.[558]

Contrast between Robert of Bellême and William Rufus. The noblest man in Gaul was now at the mercy of the vilest. Helias was helpless in the hands of Robert of Bellême. The tale which follows is picturesque in itself, and it is specially valuable as throwing light on the mixed character of the Red King. With all his evil deeds, he was at least not the worst man with whom we have to do. We now see what mere chivalry could do and what it could not do. It could not raise a man to the level of Helias; but it kept him from sinking to the level of Robert of Bellême. Helias surrendered to the King. Helias was far too important a captive to be left to die a lingering death in the dungeons of Robert. He was taken to Rouen, and handed over to the King; and in the King’s hands he at least ran no risk as to life or limb. William Rufus might perhaps not understand a patriot fighting for his city and country. He could perhaps understand a prince fighting for the inheritance of his fathers. He could most fully understand and admire a gallant and honourable knight fighting manfully in any cause, even though his gallantry was directed against himself. William and Helias. In one or other of those characters, Helias extorted a kind of respect from the King who was so bitterly enraged against him. Helias kept at Rouen. The fortune of war had gone against the defender of Maine, but William was not disposed to press his advantage harshly. Helias was kept in the castle of Rouen, a prisoner, but a prisoner whose durance was, by the King’s express order, relieved by honourable treatment.[559]

State of things at Le Mans; the new municipality. One element of the Cenomannian state, and that the highest, was thus lost to it. But at Le Mans the prince was only one element in the state; the ecclesiastical and the civic powers appear alongside of him at every stage. As soon as the Count was in the hands of the enemy, another power, perhaps not the old commune, yet some form of republican or municipal government, at once sprang up. Bishop Hildebert and the Council. Bishop Hildebert appears at the head of a council or assembly of some kind which devised measures daily for the safety of the commonwealth.[560] We must not build too much on the expressions of rhetorical writers who loved to bring in classical allusions; still, considering what Le Mans had been, a momentary burst of the old freedom is no more than we might reasonably look for. If so, the restored commonwealth had, at its first birth, to brave the full might of the younger William, as the former commonwealth had had to brave the full might of the elder. We can only tell the tale as we have it, and we have no means of connecting what was going on in Maine with what was going on at the same time in the Vexin. William’s council at Rouen. Yet one is a little surprised to find William, at this stage of the year, sitting quietly at Rouen, holding a council, and presently sending forth orders for the levying of a great army, as if two wars were not already waging. His speech. In his council of the Norman barons the Red King is made to express himself in a humane and devout strain. Hitherto he had been careless about winning back the heritage of his father; he had been unwilling, for the mere sake of enlarging his dominions, to trouble a peaceful population or to cause the death of human beings.[561] Now however God, who knew his right, had, without any knowledge of his, delivered his enemy into his hands; what should he do further?[562] The writers of these times do indeed allow themselves strange liberties in putting speeches, and sometimes very inappropriate speeches, into the mouths of the actors in their story. But surely to put words like these into the mouth of William Rufus, as something uttered in seriousness, would be going beyond any conceivable licence of this kind. Considering his better authenticated speeches, one is tempted to believe that we have here the memory of some mocking gibe. He, King William, had not laid waste the fields of Maine nor caused men to die of hunger in prison. It was only Robert of Bellême who had done such things. It would be quite in character with Rufus, as with Jehu, to ask, Who slew all these?[563] Nor is such brutal mockery in any way inconsistent with the display of chivalrous generosity whenever any appeal is made personally to himself in his knightly character. A great levy ordered. Anyhow we are told that the barons advised that a summons should go forth bidding the whole force of Normandy to come together for an expedition to win back the land of Maine. They themselves would come, willingly and with all daring, in their own persons.[564]

All this reads strangely in a narrative which, a page or two before, had told us of the warfare around Gisors which, one would think, must have been going on at this very moment. But we read that the messengers went forth, and that the host came together. Not only from Normandy, but from Britanny and Flanders, from Burgundy and France—​not a word as to the treason implied in this last name—​men flocked to the banners of the prince who was so bountiful a paymaster.[565] At some stage of their march, an aged French warrior, a survivor of the wars of King Henry—​one therefore who could remember the ambush of Varaville and the flames of Mortemer, perhaps even the clashing of lances at Val-es-dunes—​Gilo de Soleio by name, beheld the host from the top of a high hill. Numbers of the army. He had seen many and great gatherings of men, but never on this side the Alps—​had he fought then in Apulia or at Dyrrhachion?--had he seen so vast an army. He told the number of the men at fifty thousand.[566] Be the figures trustworthy or not as to this particular army, this is one of several hints which help to show us what passed in those days for an army of unusual numbers.[567]

The army meets at Alençon. June, 1098. The trysting-place of this great host was at Alençon, the border town and fortress of Normandy, where the Sarthe divides the Norman and Cenomannian lands.[568] Once famous as the town whose people had felt so stern a vengeance for their insults to the great William, it was now a stronghold of Normandy against Maine, at all events a stronghold of Robert of Bellême against those who still maintained the cause of the captive Helias. There the army met in June.[569] Rufus, in invading Maine, was repeating an exploit of his father. He entered by the same road, and began by threatening the same fortress. The words of our authorities may lead us to think that he himself tarried at Alençon, while his army, or the bulk of it, marched to Fresnay.[570] The army at Fresnay. Fresnay-le-Vicomte, Fresnay-on-Sarthe, was the first castle in Maine to which the Conqueror had laid siege, and under its walls Robert of Bellême had been girt with the belt of knighthood.[571] At that time Fresnay, along with Beaumont lower down the river, had dared to withstand the invader. Both fortresses stand on heights overlooking the Sarthe; Fresnay, seated on a limestone rock rising sheer from the stream, might seem well able to defy any enemy. The castle and church of Fresnay. Of the ancient part of the castle nothing is left but shattered walls and a stern gateway of a later age. The church, a gem of the art of an age nearly a hundred years later, contains only a small part which can have been standing in the days of Rufus. Beaumont-le-Vicomte. Beaumont is not mentioned in our present story. But its square keep must have already looked down on the Sarthe and its islands, while a mound on each side of the town, one seemingly artificial, one by the river-side only improved by art, may perhaps mark the sites of besieging towers raised by the Conqueror to bring town and castle into subjection.[572] The then lord of Fresnay and Beaumont, the Viscount Hubert, had at a later stage forsaken both his castles on the Sarthe, to defy, and that successfully, the whole might of William the Great from his more inaccessible donjon on the rock of Sainte-Susanne.[573] His successor, the Viscount Ralph, felt no call to run any such risks. The Viscount Ralph asks for a truce. When the army drew near to Fresnay, when no hostilities beyond a little skirmishing had as yet taken place, Ralph went to the King at Alençon and asked for a truce. He pleaded that he was but one member of a body; he could not take on himself the duties of the head of that body; he could not without dishonour be the first man in Maine to yield his castle without fighting. The council of Maine was sitting in the city; he, Ralph, was bound by their resolves; let the King go on to Le Mans and negotiate; as he should find peace or war at Le Mans, he should find peace or war at Fresnay.[574] Rufus grants it. Rufus, always ready to answer any appeal to his personal generosity, praised the proposal of Ralph, and granted him the truce which he asked for.[575] He did the like to others whose lands lay on his line of march. Action of Geoffrey of Mayenne. Among these we hear of Rotrou of the Cenomannian Montfort, and of one whose name has for so many years been sure to meet us the first moment he set foot on Cenomannian soil, the now surely aged Geoffrey of Mayenne.[576]

Estimate of their conduct. The conduct of these lords seems to show lukewarmness, to say the least, in the cause of Cenomannian independence. We are again reminded of the days of the commune, of the unwillingness of the nobles to accept the republican government, of the special treason of Geoffrey himself.[577] We can understand that many of the lords of castles throughout Maine, though they might prefer their own count to the king who came against them, might yet prefer the king to any form of commonwealth. The local historian does not scruple to use strong language on the subject. For we can hardly doubt that Geoffrey, Ralph, Rotrou, and others in the like case, are the persons who are referred to as the faithless men by whose consent Rufus was led to hasten to the city.[578] But the King had another motive to call him thither. Fulk Rechin at Le Mans. By this time there was no longer a commonwealth to be dealt with; Le Mans had again a prince, though no longer her native prince. May 5, 1098. In the very week after Helias was taken prisoner, Fulk of Anjou came to Le Mans, and brought with him his son Geoffrey. He himself came in his character of superior lord,[579] while Geoffrey, to whom Eremburga, the only child of Helias, was betrothed, might pass in some sort for the heir of the county.[580] He is received. The citizens, we are told, received the Angevin count willingly; any master was better than the Norman. Fulk’s son Geoffrey left at Le Mans. Fulk put garrisons in the fortresses of La Mans, with his son in command. He then left the city, seemingly for operations in other parts of Maine.[581]

E. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

LE MANS

March of Rufus. Against this new enemy William Rufus set out from Alençon. He had to overtake the host which was already at Fresnay. He crossed the Sarthe; he continued his course along its left bank, and stopped for the first time at Rouessée-les-fontaines.[582] This point is no great distance from Alençon, and it is still some way north of Fresnay. The present village of Rouessée contains no signs of any castle or mansion fitted for a king’s reception. Castle of Bourg-le-roi. One suspects that the exact spot meant must be the neighbouring castle of Bourg-le-roi, a castle said to take its name from Rufus himself. Here a ruined round tower, with walls of amazing thickness and girded by a deep ditch, looks down from a small hill on what seems to be the preparation for a large town which has never been built. A small village and church are sheltered within walls of vast compass, pierced by gates of later date than the days of Rufus and Helias. His next stage is distinctly spoken of as an encampment. The King had now joined his army. Rufus at Montbizot That night his camp was pitched at Montbizot, in the peninsula between the Sarthe and the Cenomannian Orne.[583] and Coulaines. On the third day he encamped in the meadows, by the Sarthe, hard by the village of Coulaines.[584] He was still on the left bank of the river, the same bank as the city itself, though the bend which the stream makes immediately under the hill of Le Mans gives the city almost the look of standing on the other side. Wide meadows spread from the village of Coulaines to the foot of the hill; they were now covered by the tents of Rufus. View of Le Mans. Right before the eyes of the army, high on its hill, rose the city which they were come to attack, and it rose so as to bring at once before their leader’s eyes the objects which would specially stir up his wrath. As Le Mans is seen from the meadows of Coulaines, the city and its hill lie almost out of sight to the south-west. The prominent objects are those which stand in the north-east corner of the city and in the adjoining suburb. Highest of all, rising above the city itself, soared the abbey of Saint Vincent without the walls, the house whose tenants had been so cruelly oppressed by Robert of Bellême.[585] Saint Julian’s, on its lower ground, almost closes in the view on the other side. When Rufus drew nigh, the twin towers of Howel rose high in all the freshness of their newly-finished masonry, to remind the King that the chair of the prelate whom his father had appointed was now filled by a successor in whose choice no regard had been paid to his own pleasure. Between the two minsters rose the royal tower, the tower of his father, the fortress which had passed away from him and from his father’s house, held no longer even by a rebellious vassal, as he might deem Helias, but by the invading stranger from Anjou. How deeply one at least of these feelings rankled in the mind of Rufus is shown by his dealings with the immediate neighbourhood of his encampment. The village of Coulaines was an episcopal lordship. Rufus ravages Coulaines. For the churl chivalry taught no mercy; in his wrath against Hildebert, the King burned the church and the whole village, and cruelly laid waste the neighbouring lands.[586]

But however fiercely Rufus might wreak his spite on the unlucky lands and tenants of the bishopric without the walls, the flock of Hildebert within the city was safe for a while. Le Mans was not to pass into the King’s hands just yet, and Ralph of Beaumont and Geoffrey of Mayenne might still keep their bat-like nature for some while longer. Sally from the city. For it is at this stage that the local historian places an exploit of the citizens of Le Mans which reminds us of the way in which our own Godwine was said to have won the special favour of Cnut for himself and his fellow-Englishmen.[587] The men of the city marched forth—​whether under Angevin leadership we are not told—​to attack the King’s camp at Coulaines. Rufus goes away. Rufus, deeming that some treachery was on foot, marched off in the night with his army. In the morning the citizens occupied the camp and found no one there.[588] It is hard to say what we are to make of this story, which has a somewhat mythical sound. But it has at least thus much of truth in it, that Rufus was obliged to break up the siege of Le Mans for a while. Ballon betrayed to Rufus and occupied by Robert of Bellême. The castle of Ballon, of which we have already so often heard, was betrayed to Rufus by its lord Pagan of Mont-Doubleau, and it was held that this strong position, nearly due north of the city, almost put the city itself into the King’s power. Robert of Bellême was put in command at Ballon, with three hundred knights. At his bidding the land was ravaged in every way; the vines were rooted up and the crops were trampled down. But at last the invaders began to feel the effects of the damage they themselves had done. A failure of provisions, especially of oats for the horses, hindered the Red King from keeping on the siege.[589] The siege of Le Mans raised. He went away into Normandy, bidding his men go home and see to their harvests, and come again when the crops were reaped.[590] Nothing is more natural in the case of the native Normans, who would feel in such a case very much as Englishmen felt; but one can hardly believe that William allowed his great mercenary force to be wholly broken up. And again, the question keeps always presenting itself, What was going on in the Vexin? Was there any moment when so eager a warrior, with two wars on his hands at once, left both of them to take care of themselves? Throughout this story the relations between the French and the Cenomannian wars form a never-ceasing puzzle. But we presently come to an incident of the campaign which is the most characteristic in the whole history of William Rufus.

Fulk attacks Ballon. While William was away, Count Fulk, at the head of a mixed host, Angevin and Cenomannian, laid siege to the newly-betrayed castle of Ballon. The attack went on for some days; a message was sent to the King for help. To meet this fresh danger, the nobles of Maine and Anjou pressed in greater numbers to help the Count and his force. Successful sally of the besieged. The defenders of the castle planned a sally. Beggars went out as spies, and brought in news that the besiegers were busy dining at the hour of tierce. The sally was made; the besiegers were surprised in the midst of their meal;[591] a hundred and forty knights and a crowd of foot-soldiers were taken prisoners. The rest took to flight and left a rich spoil of arms, clothes, and furniture as a prey to the Normans. Many of the captives were men of high rank and great possessions. The story almost reads as if Robert of Bellême condemned them to die of hunger; if so, Rufus came before hunger had done its work; cold would no longer be a means of torture. William at Ballon, c. July 20, 1098. It was now not Lent, but the third week in July, when King William with a great force came to Ballon. A cry presently reached him from the prisoners, “Noble King William, set us free.” The chivalrous King, who had no mercy for the peasants of Coulaines, felt his heart stirred towards the captive knights of Anjou. His treatment of the captive knights. He ordered that a meal should be made ready for them along with his own followers, and he set them free on their parole till the meal was ready. Some of his companions suggested to him that, in the crowd and confusion, they might easily escape. Rufus cast aside such a suggestion with scorn. He would never believe that a good knight would break his word; he who should do so would have punishment enough in the scorn of all mankind that would follow him.[592] Illustration of the chivalrous spirit. Here we see the chivalrous character in all its fulness. Justice and mercy go for nothing; the law of God and the law of man go for nothing; the oath of the crowned king, the promise of a prince and a brother, go for nothing; but the class tie of knighthood is sacred; the promise made under its guaranty is sacred. As a good knight, William Rufus is faithful to his own word pledged as such to others; as a good knight, he will not believe that a brother of his order can be other than faithful to his word pledged as such to him.

Fulk goes back to Le Mans. The siege of Ballon was at an end. Fulk, we are told, betook himself to the city, and there stayed in some of the monasteries, waiting to see what would happen.[593] But the defenders of Le Mans, both native and Angevin, had now made up their minds that resistance to the power of Rufus was hopeless; their object was to treat for peace. Negotiations for peace. The captive Helias was allowed a share in the negotiations; he was specially fearful that Fulk might make some agreement by which he himself might be cut off from Maine for ever.[594] Share of Helias. By the King’s leave, Bishop Hildebert and some of the chief men of the city visited Helias, and they agreed on terms which were put into the form of an agreement between Rufus and Fulk. Convention between William and Fulk. August, 1098. It was rather a military convention than a treaty of peace, and it left all the disputed questions unsettled. Nothing was said either as to the general question about the bishopric or as to the particular election of Hildebert. Nor was it at all ruled who was to be looked on as lawful Count of Maine. It was not even agreed that hostilities were to cease. The actual terms are conceived in words which seem to come from Rufus himself. The memory of his father is put prominently forward. Le Mans to be surrendered. Le Mans and all the fortresses which had been held by the late King William were to be surrendered to King William his son. Helias to be set free. Helias and all other prisoners on both sides were to be set free.[595] All sides, we are told, rejoiced at this agreement. To William and his followers it was a great immediate triumph. To the people of Le Mans it was at least immediate deliverance from a wasting struggle. And wary men may have seen that the liberation of Helias was not too dearly bought even by the surrender of his capital. If the valiant Count were set free, free alike from fetters and from promises, he would win back his lost city and dominion before long.

Submission of Le Mans. But for the present all went according to the pleasure of the Red King. Rufus, as his father had twice done, entered Le Mans without bloodshed, amidst at least the outward welcome of its inhabitants. And it may well be that, if Helias was not to be had, they may have looked on William as a more promising master than Fulk. The convention was formally accepted, and it was immediately carried out. The castles occupied by the King’s troops. Robert the son of Hugh of Montfort, that Hugh whom we have already heard of on Senlac and at Dover,[596] was sent at the head of seven hundred chosen knights, full armed in their helmets and coats of mail, to occupy the fortresses of Le Mans.[597] They met with no opposition; the garrisons, native or Angevin, marched out; the Normans took possession. All the strong places of the city—​the ancient palace of the counts on the Roman wall—​the donjon of William the Great, the royal tower, standing so dangerously near to the north wall of Saint Julian’s minster—​the other fortress of the Conqueror, the tower of Mont Barbet on its height, overlooking the city from the side of Saint Vincent’s abbey—​all that the father had either subdued or called into being—​now passed without a blow into the hands of the son. The King’s banner—​what was the ensign wrought upon it?--was hoisted amid shouts of victory on the highest point of the royal tower. King William the Red had achieved the object which in his thoughts came nearest to the nature of a duty. He had brought under his hand all that had ever been under the hand of his father.[598]

William’s entry into Le Mans. On the day of the military occupation followed the day of the joyous entry. The Red King entered, doubtless by the northern gate, the gate between Saint Vincent’s abbey and the royal tower. His new subjects welcomed him with shouts and songs, and were received by him to his full peace.[599] His reception by Hildebert. Bishop Hildebert, seemingly now admitted to favour, with his clergy and people, met the King with psalms and processions. They led him by the royal tower, with his own banner floating on its battlements, to the cathedral church, now a vaster and more splendid pile than when the first Conqueror had been led to it with the same pomp.[600] The church of Saint Julian. The twin towers of Howel soared in their freshness; the aisles which we still see, with their abiding Roman masonry, had risen at his bidding; it may well have been by the mighty portal of his rearing that Rufus entered within the hallowed walls. Within, the sight was different in every stone, in every adornment, from that on which we now gaze. The columns and arches of Saint Julian’s nave were still the columns and arches of the basilica which Aldric had raised when Le Mans was a city of the Empire of the pious Lewis.[601] It may be that of those columns we can here and there spell out some faint traces amid the finer masonry and gorgeous foliage of the next age. But of the works to the east, still new when Rufus came, the splendid reconstructions of later times have left us no signs. The choir of Arnold still blazed in all its freshness with the rich decorations which had been added by the skill and bounty of Howel. The first bloom had not passed away from the painted ceiling, from the rich pavement, from the narrow windows glowing with the deep richness of colour which no later age could surpass. Through all these new-born splendours of the holy place the scoffer and blasphemer was solemnly guided to the shrines of Saint Julian and of all the saints of Le Mans. And there were moments when the heart of Rufus was not wholly shut against better thoughts. As at Saint Martin of the Place of Battle, so at Saint Julian in newly-won Le Mans, we may deem that some dash of thankfulness was mingled with his swelling pride, as he felt that he had finished his father’s work.

William leaves Le Mans. The stay of William at Le Mans does not seem to have been long. The government of the city was put into the hands of Count William of Evreux and of Gilbert of Laigle. The royal tower, well provisioned, stocked with arms and with all needful things, was placed under the immediate command of Walter the son of Ansgar of Rouen.[602] General submission of Maine. The nobles of Maine now came in to make their submission and to receive the King’s garrisons into their castles. Among them were Count Geoffrey of Mayenne and the Viscount Ralph of Beaumont. The terms of their engagement were fulfilled. Their castles were to follow the fortune of Le Mans, and Le Mans now was King William’s.[603]

But he who had lately been the lord of them all was waiting for the benefits of the convention to be extended to himself. We are a little surprised when we presently find the King at Rouen, and when we further find that Helias, who had been lately in ward in the castle there, had now to be brought hither from a prison at Bayeux.[604] Meeting of William and Helias. The King and his captive met face to face. The contrast between the outward look of the two men was as striking as the difference in their inward souls. Before the victorious King, short, bulky, ruddy, fierce of countenance, hasty and stammering in speech, stood the captive Count, tall, thin, swarthy, master of eloquent and winning words. Something of bodily neglect marked, perhaps not so much the rigour of his confinement as a captive’s carelessness of wonted niceties. His hair, usually neatly trimmed, was now rough and shaggy.[605] The King seems to have begun the dialogue;[606] “I have you, Sir.” Helias answered with dignity and respect, as a man of fallen fortunes speaking to a superior in rank, and yet not stooping to any unworthy submission. Proposals of Helias. He called on the King, in the name of his might and his renown, to help him. He had once, he said, been a count, lord of a noble county. Fortune had now turned against him, and he had lost all. He asked leave to enter the King’s service, to be allowed to keep his rank and title of count, but pledging himself not to make any claim to the Cenomannian county or city, till by some signal exploit on the King’s behalf he should be deemed worthy to receive them as a grant from the King’s free will. Till then it would be enough for him to have his place in the royal following and to enjoy the royal friendship.

William disposed to accept Helias’ proposal. Such an appeal as this went straight to the better part of William’s nature, and he was at once disposed to agree to the proposal of Helias. But then stepped in the selfish prudence of Robert of Meulan, who measured other men by himself. He is hindered by Robert of Meulan. He was now the King’s chief adviser, and he jealously grudged all influence which might fall to the lot of any one else.[607] The admission of Helias to the King’s friendship and councils would of all things be the least suited for Robert’s purposes. He could not bear that any man, least of all a man of a spirit so much higher than his own, should be so near the throne as Helias threatened to be. The men of Maine, said the Count of Meulan, were a cunning and faithless race. All that the captive Helias sought by his offers was to insinuate himself into the King’s favour, to learn his secrets, that he might be able, when a fitting moment came, to rise up against him with more advantage and join himself to his enemies with greater power. The purpose of Rufus was changed by the malignant counsel of Count Robert. The petition of Helias was refused; it was again made; it was again refused. Defiance of Helias. Then the Count of Maine spoke his defiance. “Willingly, Sir King, would I have served you, if it had been your pleasure; willingly would I have earned favour in your sight. But now, I pray you, blame me not, if I take another course. I cannot bear with patience to see mine inheritance taken from me. All right is denied to me by overwhelming violence; wherefore let no man wonder if I again renew my claim, if I strive with all my might to win back the honour of my fathers.” Rufus was beside himself with wrath at words like these; but it was in words only that his wrath spent itself. He stammered out, “Scoundrel, what can you do? Be off, march, take to flight; Answer of Rufus. I give you leave to do all you can, and, by the face of Lucca, if you ever conquer me, I will not ask you for any grace in return for my favour of to-day.” Even after this outburst, the Count had self-command enough to ask for a safe-conduct, and the King had self-command enough to grant it. Helias set free. Helias was guided safely through the Norman duchy, and made his way, to the delight of his friends, to his own immediate possessions on the borders of Maine and Anjou.[608]

Illustration of the King’s character. Of all the stories of the Red King there is none more characteristic than this. His first impulse is to accept a generous and confiding offer in the spirit in which it was made. For a moment he seems to rise to the level of the man who stood before him. Even when his better impulse is checked by an evil counsellor, he does not sink so low as many would have sunk in the like case. In the wildest wrath of his insulted pride, he does not forget that his word as a good knight is pledged to the man who has defied him. Rufus was bound by all the laws of chivalry to let Helias go this time, whatever he might do if he caught him again. And the laws of chivalry Rufus obeyed in the teeth of temptations of opposite kinds. A meaner tyrant might have sent Helias at once to death or blinding. A calmer or more wary prince, even though not a tyrant, might have argued that it was unsafe for him and his dominions to let the man go free who had uttered such a challenge. He might further have argued that a speech which was so like an open declaration of war at once set aside the conditions of peace. But William Rufus, when once on his point of honour, was not led away from it either by the impulse of vengeance or by the calculations of prudence. His knightly word was pledged that Helias should go free. Free therefore he went, after his defiance had been answered by a counter defiance, each alike emphatically characteristic of the man who uttered it.

§ 3. The End of the French War.
September-December, 1098.

The war of Maine was, or seemed to be, over. And, just at this point we get a chronology clear enough to enable us to fix the connexion of the two works which were going on at once. We have seen William in his Norman capital at a time when we should rather have looked for him on one or other of his Norman frontiers. William on the continent. 1097–1099. But it seems plain that he spent the whole year on the mainland, and that he did not cross to England at any time between the two Christmas feasts which he is specially said to have kept in Normandy. Helias was set free in August, and we are led to believe that Rufus now deemed that the war of Maine was over, or at least that he could afford to despise it in its present stage. Extent of William’s conquests in Maine. We shall presently see that the war of Maine was by no means over, and that William’s Cenomannian conquests hardly reached beyond the capital and the lands north of the capital. He begins, but does not finish. We are inclined to wonder that a warlike prince like Rufus took no further heed to a campaign which was manifestly unfinished, while an active enemy was again at liberty and was still in possession of a strong line of castles. But this is neither the first nor the last time in which we find William the Red much more vigorous in beginning a campaign than in ending it. And in this case he may, with two wars on his hands, have not unreasonably thought that, after so great a conquest as that of the capital of Maine, he could afford to turn his thoughts to the other seat of warfare. In the month after Helias was set free, he made up his mind for a special effort against the stubborn border-land of France.

William sets forth. September 27, 1098. Two days before Michaelmas, William set forth, from what head-quarters we are not told, at the head of a great army. On his way to the seat of war he enjoyed the hospitality of Ralph of Toesny on the hill of Conches. That night there was a sign in the heavens; The sign in the sky. the whole sky blazed and seemed as red as blood. At other times such a portent in the heavens might not have seemed too great to betoken some great victory or defeat on the part of one or other of the contending kings of the West. But, while Christendom was on its march to the eastern land, the heavens could tell of nothing meaner than the ups and downs of the strifes between two continents and two creeds. Its meaning. If the sky was red over Conches and Evreux and the whole western world, it was because at that moment Christians and heathens met in battle in the eastern lands, and by God’s help the Christians had the victory.[609] But William Rufus cared little for signs and wonders, even when he himself was deemed to be the subject of their warning. His heart was not in Palestine, but on the French border; and his present business was a march against the most distant of the three fortresses to which he laid claim. Chaumont and Trie still held out; but their garrisons could not hinder him from carrying a destructive raid into districts far more distant from his head-quarters at Gisors. He marches to Pontoise. He marched to the south-east, burning, plundering, and carrying off prisoners from the whole French territory as far as Pontoise.[610]

The invading King had now reached a point of French soil nearer to Paris than the spot where Count Robert kept the Seine barred at Meulan. At Pontoise, as the name implies, was the bridge spanning the Oise, the tributary which joins its waters with those of the Seine at Conflans—​the Gaulish Confluentes—between Paris and Meulan. Castle and town of Pontoise. Here a precipitous rock rises above the stream, a rock which, strengthened and defended by art in every way, was crowned by the vast circuit of the castle of Pontoise. Here is no town sloping down from the castle to the river. The castle rock rises sheer—​it rose most likely from the water itself, till the Oise, like the Seine at Rouen, was curbed by a quay. In the view from the bridge, the castle, shorn as it is of its towers and of all that can give stateliness to such a building, still lords it over everything. The town of Pontoise seems to crouch by the side of the rock; the great church of Saint Maclou, with its lofty tower of late architecture, is wholly hidden from sight. It is only at some distance beyond the river, in the suburb known as that of Saint Ouen l’Aumône, that we begin to see that the church stands on ground not much lower than the site of the castle. Strong position of the town. We then learn that the town of Pontoise, standing on a height separate from the castle-rock, well walled, and with streets as steep as those of Le Mans or Lincoln, was in itself no contemptible fortress. As usual, there is little or nothing in town or church or castle that we can positively assign to the period of our story. But the main features of the spot must be the same now as they were when the Red King led his plundering host as far as the bridge of the Oise. Pontoise the furthest point of the raid. It is plain that this was the end of his course on this side; it is plain that Pontoise was not added to the list of fortresses which were taken by him or betrayed to him. But we have nothing to explain why he turned back at this point, whether he met with any repulse in an attack on Pontoise or whether he attacked Pontoise at all. We only know that Pontoise marks in one sense the furthest point of the French campaigns of William Rufus. We shall presently find him on another side at a greater distance from his own dominions; but Pontoise marks his nearest approach to the capital of France. Had Pontoise been William’s as well as Meulan, Paris would indeed have been threatened. But this south-eastern journey was clearly, in its effect at least, a mere plundering raid, from which Rufus came back to attempt a more regular attack on the nearer enemy at Chaumont.

Siege of Chaumont. The siege of Chaumont is described to us in greater detail than the march on Pontoise, but we do not, any more than at Pontoise, get a really intelligible account. It is plain that the siege was a considerable enterprise, one to which Rufus led his whole army. It is also plain from the result that its issue must have an important effect on the turn of affairs. But of the siege itself all that we hear is one of those strange stories by which we are sometimes met, stories which must have some meaning, which must be grounded on some fact, and which yet, as they stand, pass all belief. We are told that the defenders of Chaumont were valiant men, strong to defend the battlements of their own castle. But to defend their own castle was all that they could do; their numbers were not enough to enable them either to meet William’s great army in open battle, or even to hinder his plunderers from laying waste the neighbouring lands. But the defence of Chaumont itself was stout, and, as it turned out, successful. The archers of Chaumont shoot the horses only. Yet we are told that the garrison of Chaumont, out of the fear of God and out of tenderness towards men, stood strictly on the defensive, or took the offensive only towards brute beasts. In taking aim at the besiegers, they avoided the persons of the riders, and aimed all their blows at the horses. Seven hundred horses of great price fell under the arrows and darts of the men of Chaumont, and their carcases made a rich feast for the dogs and birds of prey of the Vexin.[611] Chaumont not taken. The virtue of these scrupulous warriors did not go unrewarded. Our story breaks off somewhat suddenly; but we see that at all events Chaumont was not taken.

The war now takes a turn of special interest, which makes us specially regret the very unsatisfactory nature of our materials. The field of our story is suddenly enlarged; but events do not crowd it at all in proportion to its enlargement. Rare notices of southern Gaul. It is but seldom that our tale brings us into any direct dealing with the lands and the princes south of the Loire. We have seen the tongue of oil supplant the Danish tongue in Normandy, and we have seen it appear as a rival to our own speech in our own island. But we have been seldom called on to listen to the accents of the tongue of oc. But at this moment the chief potentate of that tongue suddenly appears on the field of our story, an appearance from which we naturally look for great events. The young lord of the Vexin and heir of France had to meet a new enemy, almost as powerful, and quite as reckless and godless, as the old one. Coming of William of Poitiers. Another William, William of Poitiers and Aquitaine, came to the help of William of Normandy and England.[612] He was in the end to go to the crusade—​to go not exactly in the guise of Godfrey or Helias.[613] But he had not yet set out; and, before he went, he came to strike a blow on behalf of the prince to whom he was said to have sold the reversion of his dominions. Alliance of Normandy and Aquitaine. The mighty dukes of the North and the South might seem to have utterly hemmed in the smaller realm of the king whose men they were or should have been.[614] The final results of their alliance were not memorable, but the coming of the southern duke had the immediate effect of carrying the war into districts little used to the presence of English or even of Norman warriors.

Campaign to the west of Paris. It can hardly fail to have been the march of William of Aquitaine which led to a campaign carried on in the lands west and south-west of Paris, within the triangle which may be drawn between the three points of Mantes, Paris, and Chartres. One side of this triangle is formed by the Seine itself, and here the adhesion of the Count of Meulan must have effectually guarded the seat of war from the north. Somewhat to the west of Meulan, between that fortress and Mantes, the small stream of the Maudre empties itself into the Seine. Valley of the Maudre. The course of this stream and the valley through which it flows formed the chief seat of warfare at this stage, seemingly after the attacks on Chaumont had proved fruitless. Small as the Maudre is, its course makes a clearly marked valley, running nearly north and south. Maule. About the middle of it lies Maule, the fortress of Peter of Maule, the benefactor of the house of Saint Evroul, and therefore high in favour with its historian. Further to the south, where the stream is a mere brook, the valley widens into a plain between hills, and here some of the strongest points are occupied by the strongholds of the French house of Montfort, numbering among them the spot which gave that house its ever-memorable name. Montfort-l’Amaury. Here rose the hill which above all others glories in the name of the Strong Mount, the home of the Simons and the Amalrics. Under the name of Montfort-l’Amaury it still keeps the less illustrious of the two names, one or other of which was always borne by its successive counts. Neauphlé-le-Château. To the north-east of the cradle of their race, on the other side of the Maudre, the Counts of Montfort had planted another stronghold on a height, which, though all traces of a fortress have passed away, still keeps the name of Neauphlé-le-Château, as distinguished from another place of the same name, Neauphlé-le-Vieux. Epernon. Much further to the south-west, on the upper course of the Drouelle, a tributary of the Eure, stood Epernon, another fortress of the house of Montfort, a border fortress of the strictly French territory towards the lands of the Counts of Chartres. The two Williams march against the Montfort castles. On this district now fell the heavy wrath of the two Williams, who led a mighty multitude against Montfort and Epernon and laid waste the whole surrounding land. They had traitors in their service; they came under the guidance of Almaric the Young and of Nivard of Septeuil.[615] This last place lies in the valley of the Vaucouleurs, a stream running almost parallel with the Maudre and joining the Seine at Mantes. Such a position, lying nearly due west from Maule, and at a greater distance north-east from Montfort, marks a dangerous outpost thrown out from the Norman side into the heart of the French territory. Seat of war affected by the coming of William of Poitiers. Of the line of march of the Poitevin duke we have no account; but it must have been his coming which caused the seat of war to be changed from the north-west of the threatened capital of France to the south-west, a region so much better suited for an invader from the south.