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Heroes of the Nations

A Series of Biographical Studies presenting the lives and work of certain representative historical characters, about whom have gathered the traditions of the nations to which they belong, and who have, in the majority of instances, been accepted as types of the several national ideals.

FOR FULL LIST SEE END OF THIS VOLUME

Heroes of the Nations

EDITED BY

H. W. C. Davis

FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE

GLORIA RERUM—-OVID, IN LIVIAM, 255.

THE HERO’S DEEDS AND HARD-WON

FAME SHALL LIVE.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

SEAL OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

William

The Conqueror

AND THE RULE OF THE NORMANS

BY

FRANK MERRY STENTON, M.A.

Late Scholar of Keble College, Oxford

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Knickerbocker Press

1908

Copyright, 1908

BY

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

In attempting to write a life of William the Conqueror, one is confronted, at the outset, by a question of considerable urgency. The mere details of the King’s history, if full discussion were given to all matters which have been the subjects of controversy, would far exceed the possible limits of a volume to be included in the series to which the present book belongs. On the other hand, a life of William the Conqueror which ignored the changes in constitutional organisation and social life which followed the events of 1066 would obviously be a very imperfect thing. Accordingly, I have reserved the last three chapters of the book for some examination of these questions; and I hope that the footnotes to the text may serve as, in some sort, a guide to the more difficult problems arising out of the Conqueror’s life and reign.

There is no need to enter here upon a description of the authorities on which the following book is based. For the most part they have been the subjects of thorough discussion; and, with one exception, they are sufficiently accessible in modern editions. The writs and charters issued over England by William I. are only to be found scattered among a great number of independent publications; and the necessity of forming a collection of these documents has materially delayed the appearance of the present work.

It remains that I should here tender my thanks to all those who have rendered assistance to me during the writing of this book. In particular I would express my gratitude to my friend Mr. Roland Berkeley-Calcott, and to the general editor of this series, Mr. H. W. C. Davis. To Mr. Davis I am indebted for invaluable help and advice given to me both during the preparation of the book and in the correction of the proof-sheets. To those modern writers whose works have re-created the history of the eleventh century in England and Normandy I hope that my references may be a sufficient acknowledgment.

F. M. S.

South Hill, Southwell, Notts,

August 27, 1908.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

INTRODUCTION

I

Since the current of barbarian immigration which overthrew the civilisation of Rome in the West, probably no national movement of the kind has more profoundly affected the general course of history than the expansion of Scandinavia which fills the ninth and tenth centuries. Alike in their constructive and destructive work, in the foundation of new communities on conquered soil, as in the changes produced by reaction in the states with which they came in contact, the Northmen were calling into being the most characteristic features of the political system of medieval Europe. Their raids, an ever-present danger to those who dwelt near the shores of the narrow seas, wrecked the incipient centralisation of the Carolingian Empire, and gave fresh impetus to the forces which were already making for that organisation of society which we describe as feudalism; and yet in other lands the Northmen were to preserve their own archaic law and social custom longer than any other people of Germanic stock. The Northmen were to bring a new racial element into the life of Western Europe, but whether that element should adapt itself to the conditions of its new environment, or whether it should develop new forms of political association for itself, was a question determined by the pre-existing facts of history and geography.

For the geographical extent of Scandinavian enterprise is as remarkable as its political influence. At the close of the third quarter of the tenth century it seemed likely that the future destinies of northern Europe would be controlled by a great confederation of Scandinavian peoples. In the parent lands of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden three strong kingdoms had been created by Harold Fair Hair, Gorm the Old, and Eric of Upsala; the Orkneys and Shetlands formed a Norwegian earldom, and a number of vigorous Norse principalities had been planted along the east coast of Ireland. In the extreme north Scandinavian adventurers were already settling the inhospitable shores of Greenland, and lawless chieftains from Norway had created the strange republic of Iceland, whose stormy life was to leave an imperishable memorial in the wonderful literature of its sagas. Normandy was still the “pirates’ land” to the ecclesiastical writers of France, and the designation was correct in so far that the duchy still maintained frequent relations with the Scandinavian homeland and had as yet received no more than a superficial tincture of Latin Christianity. England, at the date we have chosen, was enjoying a brief respite between two spasms of the northern peril, but the wealthiest portion of the land was Scandinavian in the blood of its inhabitants, and within twenty years of the close of the century the whole country was to be united politically to the Scandinavian world.

The comparative failure of this great association of kindred peoples to control the subsequent history of northern Europe was due in the main to three causes. In the first place, over a great part of this vast area the Scandinavian element was too weak in mere numbers permanently to withstand the dead weight of the native population into which it had intruded itself. It was only in lands such as Iceland, where an autochthonous population did not exist, or where it was reduced to utter subjugation at the outset, as in the Orkneys, that the Scandinavian element permanently impressed its character upon the political life of the community. And in connection with this there is certainly to be noted a distinct decline in the energy of Scandinavian enterprise from about the middle of the eleventh century onward. For fully a hundred years after this time the Northern lands continued to send out sporadic bodies of men who raided more peaceful countries after the manner of the older Vikings, but Scandinavia produced no hero of more than local importance between Harold Hardrada and Gustavus Vasa. The old spirit was still alive in the North, as the stories of the kings of Norway in the Heimskringla show; but the exploits of Magnus Bareleg and Sigurd the Jerusalem-farer are of far less significance in general history than the exploits of Swegen Forkbeard and Olaf Tryggvasson, and trade and exploration more and more diverted the energy which in older times would have sought its vent in warlike adventure. And of equal importance with either of the causes which have just been described must be reckoned the attraction of Normandy within the political system of France. By this process Normandy was finally detached from its parent states; it participated ever more intimately in the national life of France, and the greatest achievement of the Norman race was performed when, under the leadership of William the Conqueror, it finally drew England from its Scandinavian connections, and united it to the richer world of western Europe. It was the loss of England which definitely compelled Scandinavia to relapse into isolation and comparative political insignificance.

But the Norman Conquest of England was a many-sided event, and its influence on the political destiny of Scandinavia is not its most important aspect. The events of 1066 derive their peculiar interest from the fact that they supply a final answer to the great problem which underlies the whole history of England in the eleventh century—the problem whether England should spend the most critical period of the Middle Ages in political association with Scandinavia or with France. The mere fact that the question at issue can be stated in this simple form is of itself a matter of much significance; for it implies that the continuance of the independent life of England had already in 1000 become, if not an impossibility, at least a very remote contingency. To explain why this was so will be the object of the following pages, for it was the weakness of the Anglo-Saxon polity which permitted the success of William of Normandy, as it gave occasion of conquest to Cnut of Denmark before him, and the ill governance on which their triumph was founded takes its main origin from events which happened a hundred years before the elder of them was born.

At the beginning of the third quarter of the ninth century, England was in a state of utter chaos under the terrible strain of the Danish wars. Up to the present it has not been possible to distinguish with any certainty between the various branches of the great Scandinavian race which co-operated in the attack on England, nor is the question of great importance for our immediate purpose. The same may be said of the details of the war, the essential results of which were that the midland kingdom of Mercia was overrun and divided in 874 into an English and a Danish portion; that England, north of the Humber, became a Danish kingdom in or about 875; and that Wessex, after having been brought to the brink of ruin by that portion of the Northern host which had not founded a permanent settlement in the north, was saved by its King Alfred in a victory which he won over the invaders at Edington in Wiltshire, in 878. As a result of this battle, and of some further successes which he gained at a later date, Alfred was enabled to add to his dominions that half of the old kingdom of Mercia which the Danes had not already appropriated[^[4]]; a district which included London and the shires west of Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire. For the first half of the tenth century, the main interest of English history centres round the relations between the rulers of Wessex and its Mercian dependency, and the people of the Danelaw.

As the final result of twenty years of incessant warfare, the Danes had succeeded in establishing three independent states on English soil. Guthrum, the leader with whom Alfred had fought at Edington, founded in East Anglia and the eastern midlands a short-lived kingdom which had been reconquered by Edward the Elder before his death in or about 924. To the north of Guthrum’s kingdom came the singular association of the Five Boroughs of Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester, and Stamford, whose territory most probably comprised the shires to which the first four of them have given name, together with Rutland and north-east Northamptonshire. Apart from its anomalous government, of which nothing is really known, this district is distinguished from Guthrum’s kingdom by the fact that the Danish invaders settled there in great numbers, founded many new villages, and left their impress upon the administrative and fiscal arrangements of the country. The Five Boroughs were occupied by Edward the Elder and conquered by his son Edmund, but their association was remembered in common speech as late as the time of the wars of Ethelred and Swegen, and the district, as surveyed in Domesday Book, is distinguished very sharply from the shires to its south and west.[^[5]]

Beyond the Humber the Northmen had founded the kingdom of York, which maintained its independent existence down to Athelstan’s time and which was only connected with the south of England by the slackest of political ties when William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey. In this kingdom, whose history is very imperfectly known, but of which abundant numismatic memorials remain, the Norwegian element appears to have predominated over the Danish and its kings were closely connected with the rulers of the Norse settlements in Ireland. But the peculiar importance of this Northumbrian kingdom lies in the persistent particularism which it continued to display long after it had been nominally merged in the kingdom of the English. Its inhabitants were barbarous beyond the ordinary savagery of the Anglo-Saxons, and bitterly resented any attempt to make them conform to the low standard of order which obtained elsewhere in the land. Among so anarchical a people, it would be useless to look for any definite political ideas, and the situation was complicated by the union of Scandinavian Yorkshire with English Bernicia in one earldom, so that it is difficult to say how far the separatist spirit of Northumbria was due to the racial differences which distinguished it from the rest of the land, how far to surviving memories of the old kingdom which had existed before the wars of the ninth century, and how far to simple impatience of ordered rule by whomsoever administered. But the existence of such a spirit is beyond all doubt; it manifested itself in 957 when Northumbria joined with Mercia in rejecting King Edwy of Wessex; it is strikingly illustrated in the northern legend which represents the sons of Ethelred the Unready as offering Northumbria to Olaf of Norway as the price of his assistance in their struggle with Cnut; it came to the front in 1065, when the northern men rebelled against their southern earl, Tostig Godwinsson; it culminated in the resistance which they offered to William of Normandy, and was finally suppressed in the harrying to which he subjected their province in the winter of 1069. For a century and a half the men of Northumbria had persisted in sullen antagonism to the political supremacy of Wessex.

But the fact remained that within fifty years of Alfred’s death the house of Wessex had succeeded in extending its sway, in name at least, over all the Scandinavian settlers within the limits of England. The “Rex Westsaxonum” had become the “Rex Anglorum,” and Edmund and Edgar ruled over a kingdom which to all appearance was far more coherent than the France of Louis d’Outremer and Hugh Capet. But the appearance was very deceptive, and the failure of the kings of Wessex was so intimately connected with the success of William the Conqueror that its causes demand attention here.

In the first place, the assimilation of the Scandinavian settlers into the body of the English nation should not hide from us the fact that a new and disturbing element had in effect been intruded into the native population. This amalgamation was very far from resulting in a homogeneous compound. The creation of the “Danelaw” in its legal sense—that is, a district whose inhabitants obeyed a new law perfectly distinct from that of any native kingdom—was an event of the greatest consequence. It imposed a tangible obstacle to the unification of the country which was never overcome until the entire system of old English law had become obsolete. The very fact that the geographical area of the Danelaw did not correspond with that of any English kingdom or group of kingdoms makes its legal individuality all the more remarkable. The differences of customary practice which distinguished the east from the west and south were a permanent witness to the success of the Danes in England and they applied to just those matters which concerned most deeply the ordinary life of the common people. A man of Warwickshire would realise the fact that his limbs were valued at a higher or lower rate than those of his neighbour of Leicestershire, when he would be profoundly indifferent to the actions of the ruler of both counties in the palace at Winchester.

More important for our purpose than these general legal peculiarities were the manifold anomalies of the Old English land law. Were it not for the existence of Domesday Book we should be in great part ignorant of the main features of this system; as it is we need have no hesitation in carrying back the tenurial customs which obtained in 1066 well beyond the beginning of the century. So far as the evidence before us at present goes, it suggests that for an indefinite period before the Norman Conquest the social structure of the English people had remained in a condition of unstable equilibrium; in a state intermediate between the primitive organisation of Anglo-Saxon society and the feudalism, though rudimentary, of contemporary France. However strong the tie of kindred may have been in drawing men together into agrarian communities in former days, by the eleventh century at latest its influence had been replaced by seignorial pressure and the growth of a manorial economy. Of itself this was a natural and healthy process, but in England, from a variety of causes it had been arrested at an early stage. The relationship between lord and man was the basis of the English social order, but this relationship over a great part of the country was still essentially a personal matter; its stability had not universally acquired that tenurial guarantee which was the rule in the Frankish kingdom. The ordinary free man of inferior rank was expected to have over him a lord who would be responsible for his good behaviour, but the evidence which proves this proves also that in numberless cases the relationship was dissoluble at the will of the inferior party. In the Domesday survey of the eastern counties, for example, no formula occurs with more striking frequency than that which asserts that such and such a free man “could depart with his land whither it pleased him”; a formula implying clearly enough that the man in question could withdraw himself and his land from the control of his temporary lord, and seek, apparently at any time, another patron according to the dictate of his own fancy. In such a system there is room for few only of the ideas characteristic of continental feudalism; it is clear that the man in no effective sense holds his land of his lord, nor is the former’s tenure conditional upon the rendering of service to the latter. The tie between lord and man was that of patronage rather than vassalage; and its essential instability meant that the whole of the English social order was correspondingly weak and unstable. The Old English state had accepted the principle that a man must needs look for protection to someone stronger than himself, but it had not advanced to the further idea that, for the mere sake of social cohesion, the relationship thus created must be made certain, permanent, and, so far as might be, uniform throughout the whole land.

On the whole it is probable that this result was mainly due to the peculiar settlement which the Danish question had received in the early tenth century. Had the Danes conquered Wessex in Alfred’s time, so that the whole of England had been parcelled out among four or five independent Scandinavian states, the growth of seignorial control over free men and their land might have been indefinitely postponed. Had Alfred’s successors been able to effect the incorporation of the Danelaw with the kingdom of Wessex, the incipient manorialism of the south might have been extended to the east and a rough uniformity of custom in this way secured, giving scope for the gradual development of feudalism according to the continental model. But the actual course of history decided that the native kingdom of Wessex should survive, assert its superiority over the Scandinavian portion of the land, and yet be unable to achieve the conformity of its alien subjects to its own social organisation. Such at least is the conclusion suggested to us by the evidence of Domesday Book. Broadly speaking, Wessex and its border shires had presented in 1066 social phenomena which Norman lawyers were able to co-ordinate with the prevailing conditions of their native land. In Wessex each village would probably belong to a single lord, its land would fall into the familiar divisions of demesne and “terra villanorum,” its men would owe labour service to their master. But beyond the Warwick Avon and the Watling Street, the Normans encountered agrarian conditions which were evidently unfamiliar to them, and to which they could not easily apply the descriptive formula which so admirably suited the social arrangements of the south. They had no previous knowledge of wide tracts of land whose inhabitants knew no lord of lower rank than king, earl, or bishop; of villages which furnished a meagre subsistence to five, eight, or ten manorial lords; of estates whose owner could claim service from men whose dwellings were scattered over half a county. In twenty years the Normans, by conscious alterations, had done more to unify the social custom of England than had been accomplished by the gradual processes of internal development in the previous century; but it was the social division, underlying the obvious political decentralisation of the country, which had sent down the Old English state with a crash before the first attack of the Normans themselves.

But social evils of this kind do their work beneath the surface of a nation’s history, and it is the complete decentralisation of the Old English commonwealth which first occurs to our minds when we wish to explain the double conquest which the land sustained in the eleventh century; a decentralisation expressed in the creation of the vast earldoms which controlled the politics of England in the last years of its independence. The growth of these earldoms is in many respects obscure; to a limited extent they represent old kingdoms which had lost their independence, but in the main they are fortuitous agglomerations of territory, continually changing their shape as the intrigues of their holders or the political sense of the king of Wessex might from time to time determine. From the narrative of the Danish war presented by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it seems certain that each county south of Thames possessed an earl of its own in the ninth century; but this arrangement appears to have been modified by Edward the Elder, and it has been estimated that from the accession of Edward to the close of the tenth century Wessex and English Mercia were divided into a group of earldoms whose number never exceeded eight, a change which inevitably magnified the importance of the individual earl. In the meantime, Northumbria and the territory of the Five Boroughs were being ruled by men of Scandinavian blood, who claimed the title of earl but are very rarely found in attendance at the courts of the King of Wessex.[^[6]] In the wars of Ethelred II. and Edmund Ironside with Swegen and Cnut, the issue of each campaign is decided by the attitude of such men as Aelfric, ealdorman of Hampshire, or Eadric of Mercia, to whom it belonged of right to lead the forces of their respected earldoms, and who seem to have carried their troops from one side to the other without being influenced in the smallest degree by any tie of allegiance which would bind them permanently to either the English or the Danish king. To Cnut himself is commonly attributed a reorganisation of the earldoms, in which their number was temporarily reduced to four, and in which for the first time Wessex as a whole was placed on an equality with the other provincial governments. The simplicity of this arrangement was soon distorted by the occasional dismemberment of the West Saxon and Mercian earldoms, and by the creation of subordinate governments within their limits; but throughout the reign of Edward the Confessor it is the earls of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria who direct the policy of the kingdom.

The privileges and powers inherent in the dignity of an earl were very considerable. We have already referred to his military authority, but he also seems to have enjoyed a judicial prerogative overriding the competence of the local assemblies of the hundred. His wergild was seemingly fixed at a higher rate than that of the ordinary noble, and the fine paid to him for a breach of his peace was half the amount which would be paid to the king, and double the amount paid to the thegn on account of a similar offence.[^[7]] More important from the standpoint of politics was the fact that in every shire certain lands seem to have been appurtenant to the comital office,[^[8]] and these lands formed a territorial nucleus around which an unscrupulous man like Godwine could gather the vast estates of which Domesday reveals him to have been in possession. In practice, too, it was the earls who seem to have gained more than any other men of rank by the growth of that system of patronage which has been described in a preceding paragraph; the natural influence of their position attracted to them the unattached free men of their spheres of government, and they became possessed of a body of personal retainers who might be expected to fight for them at any crisis in their fortunes and who would not be unduly scrupulous as to the causes of a quarrel in which they might be called upon to take part. Fortified by such advantages, the earls were able at an early date to make their dignities hereditary under all normal circumstances, and the attempt of Ethelred to nominate an earl of his own choice to Mercia in the person of Eadric Streona, and of Edward the Confessor to displace the house of Godwine in Wessex in 1051, led to disaster in each case, though the occasion of the respective disasters was somewhat different.

Just as the power of the great earls limited the executive freedom of the monarchy, so in general matters of policy the king’s will was circumscribed by the opinion of the body of his counsellors, his Witanagemot. Now and then a strong king might perhaps enforce the conformity of his witan to his personal wishes; but the majority of the later Anglo-Saxon kings were not strong, and when, on rare occasions, we obtain a glimpse into the deliberations of the king and the wise men, it is the latter who decide the course of action which shall be pursued.[^[9]] That this was a serious evil cannot possibly be disputed. The political supremacy of the Witanagemot bears no analogy to constitutional government in the modern sense of the term: the witan were not responsible to the nation; they were not, in fact, responsible to anybody, for a king who tried to insist on their obedience to his will might find himself, like Ethelred II., deserted by his leading nobles at some critical moment. Also, if we estimate the merit of a course of policy by its results, we shall not be disposed to rate the wisdom of the wise men very highly. In 1066 England was found with an obsolete army, a financial system out of all relation to the facts on which it was nominally based, and a social order lacking the prerequisites of stability and consistency; that the country had recently received a comprehensive restatement of its ancient laws was due not to its wise men, but to its Danish conqueror Cnut. The composition of the Witanagemot—a haphazard collection of earls, bishops, royal officials, and wealthy thegns—afforded no security that its leading spirits would be men of integrity and intelligence; if it gave influence to men like Dunstan and Earl Leofric of Mercia, men who were honestly anxious to further the national welfare, it gave equal influence to unscrupulous politicians like Eadric Streona and Godwine of Wessex. The results of twenty-five years of government by the Witanagemot would supply a justification, if one were needed, for the single-minded autocracy of the Anglo-Norman kings.

The early history of the Witanagemot, like that of so many departments of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, is beset by frequent difficulties; but it seems certain that the period following the middle of the tenth century witnessed a great extension of its actual influence. In part, no doubt, this is due to the increasing power of its individual members, on which we have already commented in the case of the earls, but we certainly should not fail to take into account the personal character of the kings of England during this time. The last members of the royal house of Wessex are a feeble folk. Their physical weakness is illustrated less by the rapidity with which king succeeded king in the tenth century—for Edmund and Edward the Martyr perished by violence—than by the ominous childlessness of members of the royal house. Of the seven kings whose accession falls within the tenth century, four died without offspring. The average fertility of the royal house is somewhat raised by the enormous family of Ethelred the Unready; but fifty years after his death his male line was solely represented by an old man and a boy, neither of whom was destined to leave issue. Nor do the kings of this period appear in a much more favourable light when judged by their political achievements. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edmund make a creditable group of sovereigns enough, though their success in the work they had in hand, the incorporation of Scandinavian England into the kingdom of Wessex, was, as we have seen, extremely limited. Edred, the next king, crippled as he was by some hopeless disease, made a brave attempt to assert the supremacy of Wessex over the midlands and north, but Edwy his successor was a mere child, and under him the southern kingdom once more becomes bounded by the Thames and Bristol Avon. The reign of Edgar was undoubtedly regarded by the men of the next generation as a season of good law and governance, and the king himself is portrayed as a model prince by the monastic historians of the twelfth century; but on the one hand the long misery of Ethelred’s time of itself made men look back regretfully to Edgar’s twenty years of comparative quiet, and also there can be no doubt that the king’s association with St. Dunstan gave him a specious advantage in the eyes of posterity.[^[10]] Nothing in Edgar’s recorded actions entitles him to be regarded as a ruler of exceptional ability. The short reign of Edward the Martyr is fully occupied by the struggle between the monastic party and its opponents, in which the young king cannot be said to play an independent part at all, and the twenty years during which Ethelred II. misconducted the affairs of England form a period which for sheer wretchedness probably has no equal in the national history. Had Ethelred been a ruler of some political capacity, his title of “the Unready,” in so far as it implies an unwillingness on his part to submit to the dictation of the Witanagemot, would be a most honourable mark of distinction; but the series of inopportune acts[^[11]] and futile expedients which mark the exercise of his royal initiative were the immediate causes of a national overthrow comparable only to the Norman conquest itself. With Edmund Ironside we reach a man who has deservedly won for himself a place in the accepted list of English heroes and we may admit his claim to be reckoned a bright exception to the prevailing decadence of the West Saxon house, while at the same time we realise that the circumstances of his stormy career left him no opportunity of showing how far he was capable of grappling with the social and political evils which were the undoing of his country. And then, after twenty-five years of Danish rule, the mysterious and strangely unattractive figure of Edward the Confessor closes the regnal line of his ancient dynasty. Of Edward we shall have to speak at more length in the sequel, noting here only the fact that under his ineffective rule all the centrifugal tendencies which we have considered received an acceleration which flung the Old English state into fragments before the first impact of the Norman chivalry.

It follows from all this that, according to whatever standard of political value we make our judgment, the England of the tenth and eleventh centuries will be found utterly lacking in all qualities which make a state strong and keep it efficient. The racial differences which existed within the kingdom were stereotyped in its laws. The principles which underlay its social structure were inconsistent and incoherent. It possessed no administrative system worthy of the name and the executive action of its king was fettered by the independence of his counsellors and rendered ineffective by the practical autonomy of the provincial governments into which the land was divided. The ancient stock of its kings had long ceased to produce rulers capable of rectifying the prevailing disorganisation and was shortly to perish through the physical sterility of its members. Nor were these political evils counterbalanced by excellence in other fields of human activity. Great movements were afoot in the rest of Europe. The Normans were revolutionising the art of war. The Spanish kingdoms were trying their young strength in the first battles of the great crusade which fills their medieval history; in Italy the great conception of the church purified, and independent of the feudal world, was slowly drawing towards its realisation. England has nothing of the kind to show; her isolation from the current of continental life was almost complete, and the great Danish struggle of the ninth century had proved to be the last work undertaken by independent England for the cause of European civilisation. In Alfred, the protagonist of that struggle, the royal house of Wessex had given birth to a national hero, but no one had completed the task which he left unfulfilled.

II

On turning from the history of England between 950 and 1050 to that of Normandy during the same period, one is conscious at once of passing from decadence to growth; and this although the growth of the Norman state was accompanied by an infinity of disorder and oppression, and the decadence of England was relieved by occasional manifestations of the older and more heroic spirit of the race. Nothing is more wonderful in Norman history than the rapidity with which the pirates’ land became transformed into a foremost member of the feudal world of France, and the extraordinary rapidity of the process seems all the more remarkable from the sparseness of our information with regard to it. The story of the making of Normandy, as told by the Norman historians, is so infected with myth that its barest outlines can scarcely now be recovered. We can, however, see that during the ninth century the north and west coasts of France had been subjected to an incessant Scandinavian attack similar in character to the contemporary descents which the Northmen were making upon England. It is also certain that the settlement of what is now Normandy did not begin until thirty or forty years after the conquest of the English Danelaw, and that for a considerable, if indefinite, term of years new swarms of Northmen were continually streaming up the valleys which debouch on the Channel seaboard. Of Rollo, the traditional founder of the Norman state, nothing is definitely known. The country from which he derives his origin is quite uncertain. Norwegian sagamen claimed him for one of their own race, the Normans considered him to be a Dane, and a plausible case has been made out for referring him to Sweden.[^[12]] His followers were no doubt recruited from the whole of the Scandinavian north, but it is probable that the great mass of the original[original] settlers of Normandy were of Danish origin, and therefore closely akin to the men who in the previous century had found a home in the valleys of the Yorkshire Ouse and Trent. As in the case of Guthrum in East Anglia the conquests of Rollo were defined by a treaty made between the invading chief and the native potentate of greatest consequence; and the agreement known in history as the treaty of Claire sur Epte is the beginning of Norman history. Great obscurity overhangs the terms of this settlement, and we cannot define with any approach to certainty the extent of territory ceded by it to the Northmen.[^[13]] On the east it is probable that the boundary line ran up the Epte, thence to the Bresle, and so down that stream to the port of Eu; but the extension of the original Normandy towards the west is very uncertain, and with regard to its southern frontier there was still room in the eleventh century for border disputes in which William the Conqueror became engaged at an early date. The succeeding history, however, proves clearly enough that the Bessin, Cotentin, and Avranchin formed no parts of Normandy as delimited at Claire sur Epte, and it was in this last quarter, peopled by an influx of later immigrants, that the Scandinavian element in the duchy presented the most obstinate resistance to Romance influences.

The prince with whom Rollo had concluded this memorable treaty was Charles III., king of the West Franks, and the reputed descendant of Charlemagne. The importance of the settlement of Claire sur Epte lay in the future, and in its immediate significance it was little more than an episode in a struggle which had been carried on for nearly half a century between the Carolingian sovereign and the powerful house of the counts of Paris, of which the head at this time was Robert, the grandfather of Hugh Capet. The conquests of Rollo had been made at the expense of Count Robert, and Charles III. in his session of Normandy, like Alfred in the treaty of Wedmore, was abandoning to an invading host a district which had never been under his immediate rule. It was certain that the counts of Paris would sooner or later attempt to recover the valley of the lower Seine, and this fact produced an alliance between the first two dukes of Normandy and their Carolingian overlords which lasted for twenty years. The exact nature of the legal tie which united the earliest dukes of Normandy to the king of France is a disputed question, but we may well doubt whether Rollo had done more than commend himself personally to Charles III., and it is not even certain that the Viking leader had received baptism at the time when he performed the act of homage. As a final question which still awaits settlement, we may note that the date of the treaty of Claire sur Epte is itself uncertain, but that 921 seems the year to which with most probability it may be referred.

If this is so, the conclusion of this settlement must have been the last event of importance in the reign of Charles III., for in 922 he was overthrown by his enemy Robert of Paris, and spent the remaining eight years of his life in prison. Robert thereupon assumed the title of king, but was killed in 923; and the crown passed to Rudolph of Burgundy, who held it until 936. On his death the royal title was offered to Hugh, surnamed the Great, count of Paris, but he preferred to restore the Carolingian line, rather than to draw upon himself the enemity[enemity] of all his fellow-nobles by accepting the precarious throne himself. Charles III. had married Eadgifu, one of the many daughters of Edward the Elder of Wessex, and Louis the Carolingian heir was residing at Athelstan’s court when Hugh of Paris called on him to accept his inheritance. The refusal of Hugh the Great to accept the crown did not materially improve the relations existing between the Carolingian house and the Parisian county, and Louis “from beyond the sea” found it expedient to maintain the alliance which his father had founded with the Norman lords of Rouen. But, long before the accession of Louis d’Outremer, Rollo the old pirate had died, and William Longsword, his son, felt himself less vitally dependent on the support of the king of the Franks. In the confused politics of the period William was able to assert a freedom in making and breaking treaties and in levying external war no less complete than that which was enjoyed by the other princes of France. In general he remained true to the Carolingian friendship; and at the close of his reign Normandy and the French monarchy were jointly opposed to the Robertian house, leagued with the counties of Vermandois and Flanders. The latter county, in particular, was directly threatened by the growth of a powerful state within striking distance of her southern borders; and in 943 William Longsword was murdered by Arnulf of Flanders, the grandson of Alfred of England.

We should naturally wish to know in what way the foundation of Normandy was regarded by the contemporary rulers of England. It is generally assumed, and the assumption is reasonable enough, that Athelstan feared the assistance which the Normans might give to the men of the Danelaw, and that he endeavoured to anticipate any movement on the part of the former by forming a series of marriage alliances with powers capable of forcing Normandy to remain on the defensive. It is probable that Athelstan’s sister Eadhild married Hugh the Great,[^[14]] the natural enemy of William Longsword, and we know that Athelstan lent his support to Alan Barbetorte, who at this time was struggling with indifferent success to preserve Brittany from being overrun by Norman invaders. On the other hand, it would be easy to exaggerate the solidarity of feeling which existed between the Northmen in Normandy and in England; nor do our authorities countenance the belief that the various continental marriages of Athelstan’s sisters formed part of any consistent scheme of policy. There is no evidence that direct political intercourse existed at any time between Athelstan and William Longsword; although we know that the Englishmen who were appointed by the king to negotiate for the reception of Louis d’Outremer in France paid a visit to the court of Rouen.

The murder of William Longsword was followed by the first of the two minorities which occur in Norman history, for Richard the illegitimate heir of the late duke was only a child of ten on his father’s death. The opportunity was too good to be missed, and Louis d’Outremer succeeded for a brief period in making himself master of Normandy, not improbably asserting as a pretext for his intervention a claim to the guardianship of the young duke. Whatever its legal foundation Louis’s action outraged the political individuality of the duchy, and when Richard came to years of discretion he abandoned the traditional Carolingian friendship and attached himself to the Robertian house. He commended himself to Hugh the Great, and thus began a friendship between the lords of Paris and their Norman neighbours which continued for nearly a century and was not the least among the causes which enabled the Robertian house in 987 to crown its existing pre-eminence with the royal title. The reign of Richard I. lasted for more than fifty years, and the history of Normandy during this period is extremely obscure, but there can be no question that it witnessed the gradual consolidation of the duchy, and its no less gradual absorption into the political system of France.

The seventh year of the reign of Richard II. was marked by an event of the first importance for the history of both England and Normandy—the marriage of Ethelred II. and Emma the duke’s sister. England was at the time in the very centre of the great Danish war which marks the close of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, and it is distinctly possible that the match may have been prompted by a desire on Ethelred’s part to close the Norman harbours to his enemies’ ships. But, apart from all dubious attributions of political motive, the importance of the marriage lies in the fact that Normandy remains thenceforward a permanent factor in English politics. The marriage must have produced an immediate immigration of Normans into England; so early as 1003 we find a French reeve of Queen Emma in charge of the city of Exeter. The mere union of the dynasties—the marriage of the representative of the ancient and decadent royal house of Wessex to the great-granddaughter of the pirate chief Rollo—was alone a sufficiently striking event. But by chance it happened that the strain of Norman blood in the offspring of the marriage came of itself to produce political results of the gravest consequence. No one in 1002 could foresee that the new queen would bear a son whose early life would be passed in exile in his mother’s land, and who would return thence to his father’s inheritance saturated with Norman ideas of the art of government; still less could anyone foresee that in virtue of this marriage a Norman duke would one day claim the throne of England by right of inheritance. But less striking results of the new alliance would soon enough become apparent. The ubiquitous Norman trader would become a more frequent visitor to the English ports, and Normandy would at once become a friendly land to Englishmen crossing the Channel for purposes of trade or pilgrimage. Nor should the marriage be considered exclusively from the English standpoint. The reception of a Norman princess as queen of England proved at least that the Norman duke was no longer a barbarian intruder among the higher nobility of France; he might not be a sovereign prince as yet, but he was certainly a ruler of greater consequence beyond the borders of the French kingdom than were any of his fellow-vassals of the French crown. It is true that the alliance of 1002 marks no immediate change in the French relations of the duke of Normandy; his energies were still confined to the petty struggles which he, like his father and grandfather, carried on with varying success against this neighbour or that. But events were soon to prove how strong a state had really been created in Normandy by the obscure dukes of the tenth century, and the marriage of Ethelred and Emma pointed to the quarter in which the strength of Normandy would find its field at last.

It must be owned that we can only describe the internal condition of Normandy, as it existed at the beginning of the eleventh century, in very general terms. Normandy, like the rest of the French kingdom, was passing through a phase in which the legislative power of the sovereign was in abeyance; and in default of written laws we can only rely upon the incidental information afforded by legal documents or by the casual expressions of later chroniclers.[^[15]] But the main features of Norman feudalism at this time are fairly certain, and sufficient to point a contrast with the contemporary constitution of England in almost every particular in which the details of the two systems are known to us.[^[15]]

In the first place, vassalage had become localised in Normandy. The relationship between lord and man would in most cases imply that the latter held his land of the former. So far as we can tell, the course of Norman feudalism started from a point of departure different from that with which the English system takes its origin. The history of the terms employed to designate dependent tenure seems to make this clear. At an early date a great man’s vassal will hold of him a precarium; he will be a tenant at will, his tenure will be revocable at his lord’s instance. To the precarium succeeds the beneficium; a term which sufficiently expresses the fact that the tenant’s rights over his land are derivable from his lord, although it does not, like the older word, imply their temporary character. In the meantime, the hereditary principle in regard to dependent tenure is continually securing a wider extension, and the feudum, the fee, the term which ultimately supplanted the precarium and beneficium, denotes an estate which will in the normal course of things descend to a tenant’s heir. Some such succession of ideas can distinctly be traced in the Frankish kingdom, and the Anglo-Saxon land books here and there contain words and phrases which suggest that the English land law would have followed a similar development, had it not been arrested by the general dislocation of society occasioned by the wars of the ninth century. The wide estates with which the newly converted kings of Wessex, the Hwicce and the Middle Angles, endowed the churches founded in their dominions afforded an excellent field for the growth of dependent tenure, which was not neglected by thegn and free man, anxious to participate in the wealth of the saints by virtue of discharging military obligations which monks and clerks could not perform in person. But the Danish wars stripped the eastern churches of their possessions and peopled the eastern counties with settlers of approximately equal rank; and when in the century before the Norman Conquest the land loan reproduces many of the features of the continental precarium, it appears as an exotic institution rather than as a normal development of previous tenurial custom. It would be very easy to exaggerate the distinction which exists between England and Normandy in this matter; the mass of our contemporary information about Old English land tenure relates to ecclesiastical estates; but with Domesday Book before us we cannot doubt that the distinction was very real and of deep importance in connection with the other divergent features of the Anglo-Saxon social organisation.

Everything, then, seems to show that, for at least a hundred years before 1086, dependent tenure and the hereditary descent of fiefs had been recognised features of the land system of Normandy. We also know that these principles had, long before the conquest of England, produced their corollaries in the rights of wardship, marriage, and relief, which a lord would enjoy upon occasion with reference to his vassals.[^[16]] Women were capable of inheriting land and Norman custom allowed at least to the duke the privilege of choosing a husband for his female vassal. The rights of assuming the guardianship of a minor’s land, and of receiving a money payment upon the succession of a new heir, were obvious developments of the originally precarious character of the fief, and we shall see that King Henry of France exercised the former right over Normandy itself upon the death of Duke Robert in 1035. There does not seem to be any direct evidence for the existence of the relief as a Norman custom before 1066, but its appearance in England immediately after the Conquest is sufficient proof of its previous recognition by the feudal law of Normandy. None of these customs, so far as we can tell, had found a place in the social system of independent England.

Private jurisdiction was undoubtedly an essential feature of Norman feudalism, though we may well doubt whether the principles on which it was based had ever been defined by Norman lawyers. It is also clear that the duke possessed upon occasion the power of overruling the judgment of his barons, and that his exercise of this power was applauded by all who were interested in the welfare of the humbler classes of society. The military character of feudalism made it imperative that there should be some power in the land capable of vindicating right by force, and the stronger dukes of Normandy were not slow in the assertion of their judicial supremacy. How far the ubiquitous manorial court of Norman England represents an imitation of continental practice, and how far it is referable to the “sake and soke” possessed by Anglo-Saxon thegns, is a difficult question, and the explanation given by the legal writers of the generation succeeding the Conquest must be reserved for a later chapter.

It is, however, clear, that one custom which to modern ideas would be ruinous to any social order distinguishes Norman life from that of England in the eleventh century. Private war was a recognised custom in Normandy. For obvious reasons this custom was fenced round with stringent regulations; the duke’s license was necessary before a campaign could be opened and its conduct was subject to his general supervision. But private war is separated by no certain barrier from anarchy, and under a weak duke or during a minority the barons of Normandy would take the law into their own hands. Herein lay the real cause of the disorders which prevailed during the minority of William the Conqueror; and in the abeyance of state intervention the church endeavoured with considerable success to confine the practice within reasonable limits. The Truce of God, in the limitations which it enforced upon the operations of war, made life more tolerable for peasant and burgess, but it was at best an inefficient substitute for the hand of a strong ruler. William the Conqueror made good peace in Normandy, as well as in England, and we may well doubt whether even private war, so long as its legal sanctions were respected, was not less harmful to the well-being of a community than were the savage outbreaks of internal strife which from time to time occurred under the helpless government of Edward the Confessor.

The exact nature of the feudal tie which bound the duke of Normandy to the king of France is a very difficult question.[^[17]] It undoubtedly comprised all those obligations which were implied in the performance of the act of homage, but these would vary indefinitely in stringency according to the status of the parties concerned. An oath of fealty and service was certain to be kept only so long as the man to whom the oath was sworn could compel its observance by the threat of confiscation. When made between two parties who were for effective purposes equal in power, there was no certainty that the oath would imply more than an assertion of dependence on the part of the man who swore. On the other hand, it would be an error to regard the homage which a duke of Normandy paid to his overlord merely as a ceremonial form. Even in the early feudal times the sense of personal honour would generally serve to prevent a man from wantonly attacking his lord. William the Conqueror, whenever possible, refrained from violating the fealty which he had sworn to King Henry; and if put on his defence for his conduct at Varaville, he would probably have pleaded that the necessity of self-preservation outweighed all other considerations. But in earlier times the maintenance of feudal relations between Normandy and France was less dependent upon the personal loyalty of the reigning duke. Occasionally, the king of France will confirm the grants of land with which the duke of Normandy endowed some religious house; he may, as we have seen, claim the right of wardship over a duchy during a minority. Also, it should not be forgotten that in the case of the dukes between Richard I. and Robert I. the traditional alliance between Normandy and the Capetian dynasty disguised the practical autonomy of the former. So long as the knights of Normandy were at the disposal of the king of France for an attack upon Flanders or Blois, the king would not be concerned to argue the question whether they were furnished to him in obedience to his claim to feudal service, or merely in pursuance of the territorial interests of his vassal.

Within the limits of his territory, the duke of the Normans enjoyed an almost absolute sovereignty. The external limitation of his authority—the suzerainty of the king of France—was at its strongest very ineffectual, and within the duchy the barons were to an exceptional degree subject to the ducal power. All the members of the Norman baronage stood very much on a level in regard to the extent of their fiefs, and the political influence which any individual baron might from time to time exercise depended mainly on his personal favour with the duke. Here and there among the mass of the Norman nobility we meet with a family claiming a more ancient origin and a purer descent than that of the ducal house, and disposed towards insurrection thereby; but such cases are highly exceptional, and the names which are of most significance in the history of William the Conqueror are those of men who held official positions at his court, or were personally related to his line. In Normandy there were no baronies of the first rank, and the number of counties was small; also most of them, by the policy of dukes Richard I. and II., had been granted on appanages to junior members of the reigning family. One striking exception to the territorial significance of the Norman baronage existed in the great fief of Bellême, which lay on the border between Normandy and Maine, and was regarded as dependent on the French crown.[^[18]] The lords of Bellême in early times are certainly found behaving as sovereign princes, but it fortunately happened that the male line of the family became extinct during William’s reign, and a standing obstacle to the centralisation of the duchy was removed when Mabel, the heiress of this formidable house, carried its vast possessions to her husband, the duke’s loyal friend, Roger de Montgomery.

The ecclesiastical, like the lay, baronage of Normandy had no members fitted by their territorial influence to lead an opposition to the ducal power. The greater abbeys of Normandy, Fécamp, St. Wandrille, Jumièges, had been founded or refounded by the dukes themselves, and the restoration of the western bishoprics had mainly been the pious work of Richard I. The re-establishment of the Norman episcopate after the disorder of the settlement could never have been effected had it not been for the countenance afforded to the movement by successive dukes, and the connection between church and state in Normandy was peculiarly intimate. The rights of patronage, elsewhere jealously guarded by the king of the French, in Normandy belonged to the duke, and his power of nominating the official leaders of the church enabled him to govern the whole ecclesiastical policy of the land. Naturally, there occur from time to time gross instances of nepotism, as when Odo, Duke William’s brother, was thrust into the see of Bayeux at the age of ten; but in general the dukes of Normandy were at pains to select worthy candidates for bishoprics and abbeys, and in 1066 the spiritual quality of the Norman episcopate was extraordinarily high. Over the independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction which had arisen in the duchy under the influence of the great[great] Cluniac movement the duke kept a steady control; when in England the Conqueror is found insisting that no ecclesiastical law shall be introduced into the country without his sanction, he was but asserting a principle which had governed his conduct in regard to those matters in Normandy.

This intimate connection of church and state had, even before the accession of William, produced a powerful indirect result upon the ecclesiastical culture of Normandy. In Normandy, as in England, the Danish wars of the previous century had been fatal to the monastic life of the districts affected, and with monasticism perished such elements of literary culture as the Carolingian age could show. It was nearly a century after the treaty of Claire-sur-Epte before monasticism revived in Normandy, and this revival was due almost entirely to the importation of foreign monks into the duchy under the patronage of Richard II. and his successors. In connection with the newly founded monasteries there arose schools, some of which in a surprisingly short time rivalled the older institutions of Chartres and Tours, and participated to the full in the cosmopolitan culture which underlay the development of medieval scholasticism. Of these schools, the most famous was undoubtedly that of Bec, the rise of which well illustrates the character of the revival of learning in Normandy.[^[19]] The abbey of Bec itself was only a recent institution, having been founded in 1034 by an unlettered knight, named Herlwin, who was desirous of living a monastic life in association with a few chosen companions. Nothing in any way distinguished Bec from half a dozen other abbeys founded during the same decade, and the house owes its unique distinction to the circumstance that in 1042 an able young Italian jurist and grammarian, Lanfranc of Pavia, undertook the direction of its school. As a logical and speculative theologian Lanfranc is said to display small original ability, but no one was better fitted than he by nature to superintend the early development of an institution to which we may conveniently, if inaccurately, apply the designation of a university. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the reputation of the individual teacher was a matter of much greater importance than were the traditions of the school which he taught, and the school of Bec, under Lanfranc’s guidance, rapidly became the education centre of eastern Normandy. Its fame was vastly increased by the fact that its leader became involved in a theological controversy in which the whole of the Catholic Church was interested. A famous theologian, Berengar, a teacher in the school of Tours, had taken upon himself the task of controverting the received opinion as to the nature of the Eucharist, and Lanfranc stepped forward as the leading controversialist on the conservative side. In the dialectical struggle which followed, the honours of debate fell to Lanfranc; Berengar’s opinions were condemned both by a provincial synod under Archbishop Maurilius, of Rouen, and also by a general council held at Rome in 1056, and Lanfranc, to the men of his time, appeared to be the foremost theologian in Normandy. But wider duties than the charge of the school of Bec rapidly devolved upon him as the friend and intimate counsellor of the duke, and on his translation to the newly founded abbey of St. Stephen’s, at Caen, his place was taken by a man of greater subtlety of mind if no less administrative capacity. The career of Anselm of Aosta, who succeeded Lanfranc in the priorate of Bec, raises issues which lie beyond the life and reign of William the Conqueror, but reference should certainly be made to the educational work which Anselm performed in the days before his name was famous as the champion of Hildebrandine ideas in the ecclesiastical polity of England. As a teacher, it is probable that Anselm had no rival among the men of his time, and if his educational efforts were solely directed at the production of learned and zealous monks, this does not in the least detract from the greatness of the work to which the prime of his life was devoted. It is under Anselm, rather than under Lanfranc, that the influence of the school of Bec reaches its height, and the gentle character and deep philosophical insight of the monk from Aosta supply a pleasant contrast to the practical and at times unscrupulous activity of his predecessor at Bec and Canterbury.

III

It must be owned that we possess very little information as to the causes which towards the close of the tenth century led to a revival of the Scandinavian raids upon England. No consistent tradition upon this matter was preserved in the north, and the first descent of the Vikings upon England in 981 provokes no especial comment from the native chroniclers who have recorded it. Now, as in the previous century, the Danes had the command of the sea, and the settlements of the ninth-century Vikings in the east of England offered to their descendants an excellent base of operations in the heart of the realm. For the first ten or twelve years after 980 the Danish and Norse raiders contented themselves with plunder and tribute, and the definite conquest of England was not achieved before 1013, when Swegen Forkbeard, king of Denmark, expelled Ethelred from his kingdom and enjoyed a few months’ uncontested reign as the uncrowned king of the land. The English reaction under Edmund Ironside is a brief although brilliant episode in the war, but the superior numbers of the enemy told in the end, and from 1016 to 1042 England remained politically united to the Scandinavian world.

The rule of Cnut, Swegen’s son, met with no opposition on the part of his English subjects. But although Cnut ruled England with such strictness and justice that on the eve of the Norman Conquest his reign was still regarded as a model of good government, his rule was nevertheless that of a Scandinavian king.[^[20]] All the surviving sons of Ethelred met with death or banishment at his hands, and his marriage with Ethelred’s widow was much more probably the result of passion than of policy. In the personnel of the local government of England his reign witnessed a complete change. His earldoms were given either to the companions of his early warfare, such as Eric of Northumbria[^[21]] and his son Hakon of Worcestershire, or to new men, such as Godwine of Wessex, whom he had raised from insignificance and could depose at pleasure. So far as we know only one native family of ancient rank received favour from the foreign king. The earldom of Mercia, which had been left vacant by the summary execution of Eadric Streona early in 1017, was given to Leofwine, a representative of a noble midland family and the father of the more famous Leofric, the wisest of the counsellors of Edward the Confessor. Such Englishmen as received secular promotion at Cnut’s hand received it for the most part in Scandinavia, where the honour which they enjoyed had apparently become a cause of discontent to the Danes before Cnut’s death. In general policy also Cnut’s attention was directed towards the north rather than towards the Romance lands, with which Ethelred’s marriage had brought England into contact. It is very probable that Cnut dreamed of an empire which should include England and the whole of Scandinavia, and it is certain that in 1028 he conquered Norway and claimed the submission of the king of Sweden. In all this Cnut was behaving as the heir of Harold Blue-tooth and Swegen Forkbeard, rather than as the successor of Edgar and Ethelred. His rule brought peace to England and Englishmen needed no more to induce them to submit to it.

In the machinery of the English government, it does not appear that Cnut’s reign marks any changes of importance. He governed England, as he governed Norway, through viceroys; and if his earls bear more the character of royal officials than did Ethelred’s ealdormen, this was due rather to Cnut’s superior power than to any fundamental change in the character of their positions. Under Edward the Confessor the provincial governments became again as autonomous as ever. It was a matter of great importance that Cnut ordered the compilation of a general code of the law current at this time, a work which may be held to earn for him the title of the greatest legislator of the eleventh century.[^[22]] When the battle of Hastings was fought, Cnut’s code was still the newest and most explicit statement of Old English custom, and the additions which the Conqueror made to it were few and for the most part of minor importance.

Cnut’s death was followed by the immediate disruption of his empire. Norway passed to Swegen, his eldest son; and on his death after a brief and troubled reign was rapidly conquered by Magnus, the son of Cnut’s Norwegian rival Olaf the Holy. Denmark was taken by Harthacnut, a son of Cnut and Emma of Normandy, and Harold, the third surviving brother, secured England and held it for five years. His short reign was marked by a dramatic event which is of importance as furnishing one of the ostensible motives assigned by the Conqueror’s apologists for his invasion of England. In 1036 the Etheling Alfred, son of Ethelred and Emma, left his secure exile in Normandy and came to England. His object, we are told, was to visit his mother, the lady Emma, and to take council with her how he might best endeavour to gain the kingdom for himself. He therefore landed with but few companions, and before he had seen his mother he was met by Godwine, the Earl of Wessex, who received him peaceably and entertained him with lavish hospitality at Guildford. Thereupon Godwine’s name vanishes from the story, but the same night the etheling and his party were surrounded by King Harold’s men and taken prisoners; Alfred was so horribly blinded that he soon died from his injuries, and his companions were mutilated, imprisoned, or sold as slaves according to the king’s fancy. The whole affair was clearly the result of foul treachery and it is impossible to doubt that the surprise at Guildford was Godwine’s work.[^[23]] The traitorous earl, indeed, skilfully evaded the penalty of his crime, but when William of Normandy was about to cross the sea, he was careful to appear as the avenger of the wrongs which his cousin had suffered thirty years before.

At some time between the death of Cnut in 1035 and the death of Harold I. in 1040, the latter’s brother Harthacnut, as king of Denmark, had made a treaty with Magnus of Norway which served as the pretext for twenty years of war between the two states, and as the foundation of the Norwegian claims on England which were asserted by Harold Hardrada in the campaign which ended at Stamfordbridge. The secession of Norway under Magnus from the Danish connection was not likely to pass uncontested, and the host of both nations prepared to try the matter in a great battle at the Elf in the winter following Magnus’s succession. On both sides, however, there was a strong party in favour of peace, and a compromise was arranged by which the kings swore brotherhood and promised that in the event of either dying without a son to succeed him his dominions should pass to the survivor or his heir.[^[24]] The succession of Harthacnut to England in 1040 took place without protest from Magnus, but on the former’s childless death in 1042 the treaty should have come into operation, and Magnus was careful to claim the crown of England from Edward the Confessor. Edward denied the Norwegian king’s right, and he was so strongly supported by the leading men of the land that Magnus deemed it best to let him reign in peace, but the claim was undoubtedly present to the mind of Magnus’s heir, Harold Hardrada, when he started on his memorable expedition in 1066,[^[25]] and it accounts for the alarm which noblemen of Scandinavian tendencies were able to arouse in England during the earliest years of Edward’s rule.

The man who had played the leading part in the events which led to the acceptance of Edward as king of England, was undoubtedly Earl Godwine; and the chief interest of Edward’s reign lies in the varying fortunes of the family of which Godwine was the founder. With notable skill the earl used the influence which he possessed as King Edward’s protector to further the territorial interests of his family, and within three years of Edward’s accession Godwine and his sons were in possession of a belt of earldoms which extended without a break along the south coast of England, from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. By 1050 the whole of England was divided between Godwine and his two eldest sons, Swegen and Harold, Leofric of Mercia, Siward of Northumbria, and Ralf of Mantes, a nephew of King Edward, who had received from his uncle the earldom of Hereford, and was making of that distant shire an outpost of Norman influence already before the middle of the century.

In 1051 the power of the house of Godwine was suddenly overthrown for a time by an unexpected revolution. The immediate cause of the catastrophe was very trivial, but there can be little doubt that it was really due to the jealousy which the king felt at the inordinate power possessed by the Earl of Wessex. Godwine in 1042 had played the part of a king-maker; but, like other king-makers, he found that the sovereign whom he had created began to resent his influence. In the summer of 1051 Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had married King Edward’s sister, paid a visit to his brother-in-law, and on his return prepared to cross the Channel from Dover to the capital of his own country. Arrived at Dover, Eustace demanded from the citizens entertainment for himself and his suite; a demand which was seemingly quite in accordance with the custom by which the inhabitants of a town in the eleventh century were liable to find quarters for the retinue of a king, or for persons whom the king might send down to them.[^[26]] On the present occasion, however, the men of Dover showed signs of disallowing the custom, and a fight ensued in the streets of the town, in which each side lost some twenty men. Eustace immediately returned to the king’s court, and demanded the punishment of the citizens, which was granted to him, and its execution entrusted to Godwine, within whose earldom Dover lay. The earl flatly refused to carry out the king’s orders, whether through a magnanimous objection to the justice of the sentence or through fear of incurring local unpopularity by enforcing it. Thereupon, Edward for once asserted his royal independence, and events proved that for the moment at least he had reserves of strength upon which Godwine and his party cannot have counted. The king summoned a meeting of the Witanagemot to be held at Gloucester, at which, among other charges, Godwine was to be accused of complicity in the death of Alfred the Etheling, fifteen years before. Godwine refused to stand his trial, and proceeded to collect troops from all the family earldoms, a move which was discovered by a similar levy made on the king’s behalf by the earls of Hereford, Mercia, and Northumbria. Civil war was averted by the moderation of the chiefs of the king’s party, who arranged a postponement of the charges against Godwine until the next Michaelmas, when a gemot was to be held in London for their discussion. Godwine agreed to this; and, that he might not be taken unawares, he moved from the west country to Southwark, where he took up his abode supported by a great host drawn from his earldom. But the delay was fatal to his cause: his troops lost heart and deserted, and before long the king was able to decree summary banishment for the earl and all the family. The earl fled to Flanders, Harold to the Ostmen of Dublin,[^[27]] and for a year Edward remained the undisputed master of his own realm.

The royalist party which had achieved this memorable success was in the main recruited from two sources. The hostility of Mercia and Northumbria to the domination of a West Saxon earl brought over to the king’s side a vast number of supporters who were doubtless no more loyal in reality to the king than were Godwine and his men, but who welcomed so fair an opportunity of striking a blow at the rule of the southern family. On the other hand, it is clear that racial feeling entered into the quarrel, and that the Norman settlers whom Edward had invited to take land and lordship in England were the avowed enemies of Godwine and his party. It is only natural to infer that Edward, in addition to the predilection which he must have felt for men of the race among which he had found shelter in the days of his exile, should wish to find in them some counterpoise to the power of the Earl of Wessex and his associates. It is certain that there was a powerful Norman element at court, and in the country, which contributed very materially to the king’s success in 1051. The archbishopric of Canterbury and the sees of London and Dorchester were held by Norman priests, and in Herefordshire, under the jurisdiction of Earl Ralf, a flourishing Norman colony had been planted on the Welsh border. Under this Norman influence the art of castle-building was introduced into England, to the infinite disgust of the country folk in the neighbourhood of the new fortresses, and the Earl of Hereford tried very unsuccessfully to induce the local militia, of which he was the official leader, to serve on horseback in their campaigns against the Welsh. In another direction, the king’s “chancery,” which was gradually becoming an organised medium for the discharge of the king’s legal business, was largely staffed by Norman clerks, and the service of the royal chapel was in part, at least, conducted by priests from across the Channel. In the sphere of commerce the connection between England and Normandy, which can be traced already in the time of King Ethelred, was steadily becoming closer and more permanent; before 1066 at least five of the ports of Sussex were in Norman hands, and Norman merchants possessed a haven of their own in the estuary of the Thames. We can never hope to form an exact estimate of the extent of Norman influence in the last days of the Anglo-Saxon state, but there can be no doubt either of its general significance or of its importance in lessening the shock occasioned by the rapid Normanisation of England after 1066.

For the present, however, the Normans in England were not strong enough permanently to assume the direction of the commonwealth, and in 1052 Godwine and his sons made a triumphant return. The old earl had no difficulty in recruiting a powerful force in Flanders, and Harold in Danish Ireland found numbers of adventurers only too eager to follow the fortunes of a leader who could promise excitement and booty. In the middle of 1052, Harold, acting no doubt in concert with his father, set sail from Ireland with nine ships, landed on the coast of Somerset at Porlock, and there proceeded to slay and harry in true Viking fashion, passing on round the Land’s End and so along the Channel. In the meantime Godwine with his Flemish pirates had reached the Isle of Wight and plundered it until the inhabitants were driven to pay whatever ransom the earl might demand. Off the Isle of Wight Harold joined forces with his father, and the earls sailed on past Pevensey and Hastings and along the Kentish shore, drawing many volunteers from the friendly ports at which they called, while their crews indulged in sporadic devastation elsewhere. Without serious opposition the exiles entered the Thames, and sailed up the river as far as London Bridge; Godwine disembarked at Southwark and the feeling of the city declared itself unmistakably on his side. The archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Dorchester made a hurried escape from the town and rode for their lives to the Essex coast, where they crossed to Normandy. The king, powerless to protect his friends in the moment of the reaction, had no option but to restore Godwine and his family to all their honours and offices, and he was forced to declare outlaw “all Frenchmen who had raised disorder and proclaimed bad law and had plotted evil against the land.” He was, however, even allowed to retain about his person such Normans as Godwine’s party chose to consider loyal to the king and his people; and indeed it does not appear that the triumph of the nationalists in 1052 was followed by any considerable exodus of foreign settlers from the country.

Godwine had thus secured an unequivocal victory, but he and his friends proceeded to make a false move, the result of which was to throw the whole influence of the church on to the side of the Norman invader in 1066. The flight of the archbishop of Canterbury had left the metropolitan see at the mercy of Godwine’s party, and it was immediately given to Stigand, bishop of Winchester, the leading ecclesiastical partisan of the earl of Wessex. The act was a gross violation of law and decency, for the exiled archbishop had been deposed by no clerical tribunal, and Stigand did not improve his position by continuing to hold the see of Winchester in plurality with that of Canterbury. The Curia refused to recognise him as metropolitan, and in 1058 Stigand aggravated his guilt by accepting the pallium, the badge of the archiepiscopal rank, from an antipope, thereby in effect giving defiance to that section of the church which represented its highest ideals, and was destined to exercise most influence in the coming years. Before long Stigand’s political associates perceived the mistake that had been made, and for the next fifteen years the province of Canterbury was, in matters of spiritual jurisdiction, left without a head. Between 1058 and 1066 Stigand never consecrated a bishop, and at ecclesiastical ceremonies of especial importance his place was taken by the primate of York. To all strict churchmen the nominal head of the church in England was a schismatic, disowned by his own suffragans and banned by the Holy See; and it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this fact in preparing the public opinion of Europe to support the enterprise of William of Normandy in 1066.

Godwine survived his restoration for little more than a year, and on his death in 1053 his earldom of Wessex passed to Harold as his eldest surviving son. For thirteen years it is probable that Harold was the real head of the English government. Until the very close of this period the internal history of England is almost barren of recorded events, and its significance lies in the steady aggrandisement of the family of which Harold was now the head. By the beginning of 1065 the wealthiest and most warlike parts of the country were divided into earldoms held by members of the house of Godwine. Wessex, Harold kept under his own rule, with the addition of the shires of Gloucester and Hereford; Leofwine, his youngest brother, governed a province comprising Essex, Hertford, Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex; Gyrth, a third brother, held East Anglia; to which was added the midland shire of Oxford.[^[28]] Even Northumbria had been secured by an earl of the family, for Tostig, the only one of Godwine’s sons for whom King Edward seems to have felt personal affection, had received the government of that lawless land upon the death of its native earl, Siward, in 1055. Less obvious, but equally suggestive of the general trend of Harold’s policy, is the enormous amount of land of which he held direct possession at the Confessor’s death. There was scarcely a shire in which a certain number of estates were not held by the earl of Wessex in 1066; and Domesday Book, in recording the fact of his ownership, will often also record that it had been acquired by force or injustice. Harold, like his father, was quite unscrupulous in the advancement of his interests, and his greed for land and revenue is one of the few traits in his character of which we can be certain. Of his brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine are very imperfectly known to us, although in the Norman traditions of the twelfth century the former is represented as the real hero of the campaign of Hastings on the English side. But Tostig, the earl of Northumbria, was a man of stronger character, and the circumstances of his fall from power demand a brief account in this place.

Tostig’s appointment in 1055 had been an experiment and a rash one. From the overthrow of the Northumbrian kingdom by Edred, down to the last year of Harthacnut, a dynasty of native earls had presided over the north. The succession in the southern half of the earldom, between Tees and Humber, had been broken in the reign of Cnut, but the ancient family continued to rule in Bernicia until in 1041 Ealdwulf II., the last earl of the house, was murdered by Siward the Danish ruler of Yorkshire. Siward thereupon reunited the two halves of the Northumbrian earldom, gaining in local eyes some title to the government by his marriage with Aelflaed, the niece of his victim Eadwulf; and for fourteen years his ruthless severity kept his province in comparative quiet. In Tostig, Siward’s successor, the Northumbrians for the first time were expected to obey a south-country stranger, and hence there was no qualification to the hatred which Tostig caused by his imitation of his predecessor’s methods of government. As a personal favourite of the king, Tostig was absent from his province for long spaces of time, and it is not easy to understand why the Northumbrians submitted for ten years to the spasmodic tyranny of a stranger. But at last, in 1064, Tostig entrapped and murdered two leading thegns of the north, named Gamel the son of Orm, and Ulf; and at Christmas time in the same year Gospatric, the last male descendant of the ancient earls of Bernicia, was slain at the king’s court in Tostig’s interest.[^[29]] For nine months there was ominous peace in Northumbria, and then, very unexpectedly, in October, 1065, a great revolt burst out. Two hundred thegns marched to York, held a meeting in which we may possibly recognise a Northumbrian gemot, deposed Tostig, and offered the earldom to Morcar, brother of Edwin the reigning earl of Mercia, and grandson of Leofric. These events were followed by a general massacre of Tostig’s adherents in York, and then the rebel army, with Morcar, the new earl, at its head, rolled southwards to force a confirmation of its revolutionary acts from the king.

At the moment of the outbreak Tostig was absent in Hampshire, hunting with King Edward. Events had now passed quite beyond his control; Morcar had been joined by his brother Earl Edwin with the fyrd of Mercia, and a contingent of Welshmen, and the combined force had reached Northampton, their line of advance being marked with wholesale ravages which can be traced very clearly in the pages of the Northamptonshire Domesday.[^[30]] At Northampton the rebels were met by Harold bearing a message from the king to the effect that, if they were to disperse, their charges against Tostig should be heard and decided in lawful manner. They returned a blank refusal to accept Tostig again as their earl, swept on down the Cherwell Valley, and next appear in occupation of Oxford. In the meantime Edward had called a council at Bretford near Salisbury, at which there was a long and angry debate, and Harold was roundly accused of stirring up the present rising for his own advantage. The earl cleared himself of the charge with an oath, and the discussion turned to the measures to be adopted to restore order. Edward himself was for putting down the revolt by force; but his counsellors urged the difficulty of conducting a campaign in winter, and the king was seized with a sudden illness which left the immediate control of affairs in the hands of Harold. Accordingly Harold paid a second visit to the rebels’ camp, this time at Oxford, and formally granted their demands. Tostig was outlawed, Morcar was recognised as earl of Northumbria, and Waltheof, the son of Siward, who might consider himself aggrieved by this alienation of his father’s earldom, was portioned off with the midland shires of Northampton, Huntington, Bedford, and Cambridge. Tostig himself, to the king’s great regret, took ship for Flanders, and spent the winter at St. Omer.

The above course of events is clear, and attested by good contemporary authority, but there is evidently much beneath the surface which is not explained to us. The revolt must clearly have been planned and organised some time before its actual outbreak, but who was really responsible for it? It would be natural enough to lay the blame on Edwin and Morcar, and on any showing they can hardly be acquitted, but it is at least doubtful whether the causes of the rising do not lie deeper. It is hard to avoid suspicion that the men who accused Harold in the council at Bretford may have had knowledge of the facts behind their accusation. It is quite certain that Harold was forming plans for his own succession to the throne upon Edward’s death—would those plans be furthered by the substitution of Morcar for Tostig as earl of Northumbria? From this point we are in the region of conjecture, but our authorities give us certain hints which are significant. It was certain that the last wishes of the king would be a most powerful factor in determining the choice of his successor; Tostig was Edward’s favourite, Harold might well feel anxious about the manner in which the old king would use his influence when the end came. Then, too, there is evidence that Harold about this time was trying to conciliate the great Mercian family; and the suspicion is raised that Edwin’s acquiescence in Harold’s schemes in 1066 was not unconnected with Morcar’s elevation in 1065. Lastly, Harold’s action in granting the demands of the rebels, the moment that Edward’s illness had given him a free hand, is itself suggestive of some collusion with the authors of the rising. If Harold’s policy had been strictly honourable his conduct should hardly have given rise to doubts like these; and if on the evidence before us we may hesitate to condemn him outright, we may at least acknowledge that his contemporary accusers deserved a respectful hearing.

More important and less conjectural than the nature of Harold’s conduct is the picture given by these events of the conditions of England in 1065. All the symptoms of political disorganisation on which we have already commented—the independence of the great earls, the importance of the executive, the fatuity of the royal counsellors, the personal weakness of the king—are illustrated by the narrative of Tostig’s expulsion. For just another year the Old English state was to stand trembling to its fall, and then the final test of political stability would be applied and a conquering race would slowly rebuild the social fabric which it had overthrown.

Penny of Edward the Confessor

CHAPTER I
THE MINORITY OF DUKE WILLIAM AND ITS RESULTS

Among the famous stories which enliven the history of the early dukes of Normandy there stands out prominently the tale of the romantic circumstances which led to the birth of Duke William II., the greatest of his line. The substantial truth of the legend has never been called in question, and we may still read in safety how Robert, the young count of the Hiesmois, the Son of Duke Richard I. and the fourth in descent from Rollo, was riding towards his capital of Falaise when he saw Arlette, the daughter of a tanner in the town, washing linen in a stream, according to one account—dancing, according to another; how he fell in love at first sight, and carried her off straightway to his castle; and how the connection thus begun lasted unbroken until Robert’s death seven or eight years later. The whole course of William’s early history was determined by the fact of his illegitimacy, and the main points of the story as we have it must already have been known to the citizens of Alençon when they cried out “Hides for the tanner” as the duke came up to their defences in the famous siege of 1049. In fact, the tale itself is thoroughly in keeping with the sexual irregularity which was common to the whole house of Rollo, with the single exception of the great Conqueror himself, and we may admit that there is a certain dramatic fitness in this unconventional origin of the man who more than any other of his time could make very unpromising conditions the prelude to brilliant results.[^[31]] The exact date of William’s birth is not certain; it is very probable that it fell between October and December, 1027, but in any case it cannot be placed later than 1028, a fact which deserves notice, for even at the latter date Robert himself cannot possibly have been older than eighteen and may very well have been at least a year younger.

EASTERN NORMANDY
and the border Counties

The reign of Robert I., by some caprice of historical nomenclature surnamed the Devil, was a brilliant period of Norman history. Succeeding to the ducal throne on the sudden, perhaps suspiciously sudden, death of his brother Richard III., in 1028, Robert, in the six years of his rule, won for the duchy an unprecedented influence in the affairs of the French kingdom. The first duty of a Norman duke, that of keeping his greater vassals in order, Robert seems to have performed very effectively; we may perhaps measure the strength of his hand by the outburst of anarchy which followed the news of his death. And his intervention in the general feudal politics of France, interesting enough in itself, gains in importance when viewed with reference to the history of his greater son. William the Conqueror inherited the rudiments of a policy from his father; throughout much of his reign he was following lines of action which had been suggested between 1028 and 1035.

This was so with reference to the greatest of all his achievements, the conquest of England. There seems no reason to doubt that Robert had gone through the form of marriage with Estrith, the sister of Cnut, and there is a strong probability that he planned an invasion of England on behalf of the banished sons of Ethelred. The marriage of Robert’s aunt, Emma, first to Ethelred and then to Cnut,[^[32]] began, as we have seen, that unbroken connection between England and Normandy which culminated in the Norman Conquest. Norman enterprise was already in Robert’s reign extending beyond the borders of the French kingdom to Spain and Italy; that it should also extend across the Channel would not be surprising, for Normandy was connected with England by commercial as well as dynastic ties. And William of Jumièges, writing within fifty years of the event, has given a circumstantial account of Robert’s warlike preparations. According to him the invasion of England was only prevented by a storm, which threw the duke and his cousin Edward, who was accompanying him, on to the coast of Jersey. Robert does not seem to have repeated the attempt, and before it was made again England had suffered a more subtle invasion of Norman ideas under the influence of Edward the Confessor.

Nor was Norman intervention lacking at the time beyond the western border of the duchy. Robert had inherited old claims to suzerainty over Brittany, and he tried to make them a reality. For some time past Normandy and Brittany had been drawing nearer to each other; Robert was himself a Breton on his mother’s side, and if one aunt of his was queen of England, another was the dowager countess of Brittany. Breton politics were never quite independent of one or other of the great powers of north France, Normandy, Anjou, or Blois, each of which could put forward indeterminate feudal claims over the peninsula. Anjou, under its restless, aggressive counts, was here as elsewhere a formidable rival to Normandy, and in face of its competition Robert could not allow his claims on Brittany to lapse. Hence, when Count Alan repudiated his homage, a Norman invasion followed, the result of which was a fresh recognition of Robert’s overlordship, and the establishment of still closer relations between the two states.[^[33]] Alan is found acting as one of the guardians of William’s minority—in fact he died, probably from poison, while besieging the revolted Norman castle of Montgomery in his ward’s interest—and his successor Conan was never really friendly towards Normandy. Yet, notwithstanding his hostility, Norman influence steadily gained the upper hand in Brittany during William’s life. It is significant that he drew more volunteers for his invasion of England from Brittany than from any other district not under his immediate rule.

JUMIÈGES ABBEY—FAÇADE

The relations of Robert with the French crown were still more important. The ancient alliance between the dukes of Normandy and the Capetian dynasty which William inherited, and which was to be his chief safeguard during the first fifteen years of his reign, had been greatly strengthened by the action taken by Robert in the internal affairs of the Isle de France. One of the few threads of consistent policy which run through the complicated history of this period is the persistent mistrust of successive kings of France towards their formidable neighbours, the counts of Blois. The possessions of the latter lay astride the royal demesne in two great blocks, the county of Blois, which bordered it on the west, and the county of Troyes or Champagne, which lay along its eastern frontier. The whole territorial group far exceeded the royal possessions in extent and resources, and its geographical position gave its lords the strategical advantage as well. Accordingly, the French kings were driven to seek countervailing support among their greater vassals, and at this time they found it in the duchy of Normandy. A similar alliance had been formed in the tenth century against the Carolingians; the traditional friendship was readily adapted to new conditions.

Its value was clearly proved by the events which followed the death of King Robert the Pious. Henry, his eldest surviving son, had been associated with him in the kingship and designated as his successor, but Constance the queen dowager intrigued against the eldest brother in favour of her younger son Robert. Odo II., the able and ambitious count of Blois, took the side of the latter and drove Henry out of the royal demesne. He fled to Normandy and was well received by Robert; there exists a charter of the latter to the abbey of St. Wandrille which Henry attests as a witness in company with his fellow-exiles, Edward, afterwards king and confessor, and Edward’s unlucky brother the Etheling Alfred.[^[34]] Well supported with Norman auxiliaries Henry returned and conquered the royal demesne piecemeal; and, in return for Robert’s help, we are told that the king ceded to him the Vexin Français, the district between the Epte and the Oise.[^[35]]

The internal condition of Normandy at this period might perhaps compare favourably with that of any of the greater fiefs of north France. A succession of able dukes had, for the time being, reduced the Norman baronage to something like order. Other countries also at this time offered a fairer field for the exercise of superfluous activity; the more unquiet spirits went off to seek their fortune in Spain or Italy. But in Normandy, as elsewhere, everything depended on the head of the state. All the familiar features of feudal anarchy, from the illicit appropriation of justice and the right of levying taxes to simple oppression and private war, were still ready to break out under a weak ruler. And there existed an additional complication in the large extent of territory which was in the hands of members of the ducal house. The lax matrimonial relations of the early dukes had added a very dangerous element to the Norman nobility in the representatives of illegitimate or semi-legitimate lines of the reigning family. They are collectively described by William of Jumièges as the “Ricardenses,” and he tells us with truth that it was these oblique kinsmen of William who felt most aggrieved at, and offered most opposition to, his accession. They were especially formidable from the practice, which had been followed by the early dukes, of assigning counties to younger brothers of the intended heir. Duke Robert himself had before his accession held the county of the Hiesmois. Of the illegitimate sons of Richard I., Robert, archbishop of Rouen, the eldest, held in his lay capacity the county of Evreux; his next brother, Malger, the county of Mortain; his youngest brother, William, the county of Eu; while William, the youngest son of Richard II., possessed the county of Arques. It is noteworthy that each of these appanages was, at one period or another in the life of William, the scene of a real or suspected revolt against him.

Such was the general condition of the Norman state when Robert, in the winter of 1034, meditating a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, held a council at Fécamp to decide who should be his successor in case of misadventure, and brought with him in that capacity his seven-year-old son William.[^[36]] Notwithstanding the discreet reticence of the later writers who describe the scene, we can see that the proposal was intensely distasteful to the Norman baronage. To any law-abiding section of the assembly it must have meant entrusting the welfare of the duchy to the most doubtful of hazards, and it was a direct insult to the family pride of the older Norman nobility. Had there existed at this time any member of the ducal house who combined legitimacy of birth with reasonable proximity in the scale of succession, Duke Robert would undoubtedly have had the greatest difficulty in carrying his point. But among his many kinsmen there was not one who did not labour under some serious disqualification. Nicholas, the illegitimate son of Richard III., would have been a possible claimant, but Duke Robert had taken the precaution of compelling him, child as he was, to become a monk, and he was now safely bestowed in the ducal monastery of Fécamp.[^[37]] Guy of Brionne, the son of Robert’s sister, was legitimate indeed, but was younger than William, and would be counted a member of a foreign house; Malger and William, Robert’s two surviving brothers, were both illegitimate, and the former was a churchman. Members of the older line, descending from Richard I., probably stood too far back from the line of succession to admit of their appearance as serious competitors, and after all there was a strong probability that the question would not become a matter of immediate importance. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem were not infrequent events at this time[^[38]] and Robert’s age was considerably under thirty. He had previously secured the assent of his overlord King Henry to his proposed heir, and the end of the deliberations at Fécamp was the recognition of William by the Normans as their future duke.

As it happened, Duke Robert’s pilgrimage turned out ill; he died on the homeward journey, at Nicea, on the second of July, 1035, and the government fell to William, or rather to the guardians whom his father had provided for him before his departure. Of these the highest in rank was Count Alan of Brittany, William’s cousin,[^[39]] with whom were associated Count Gilbert of Brionne, the ancestor of the mighty house of Clare,[^[40]] Osbern the seneschal of Normandy, and a certain Thorold or Thurcytel de Neufmarché, the latter having personal charge of the young duke. It was an ominous circumstance that each of these men came to a violent end within five years of William’s accession. The house of Montgomery alone accounted for two of them: Osbern the seneschal was cut down in William’s bedroom by William, son of Roger de Montgomery; Count Alan met his death, as we have seen, during the siege[siege] of Montgomery Castle itself. The assassins of Thurcytel de Neufmarché are not recorded by name, and a certain amount of confusion hangs over the end of Count Gilbert of Brionne; but William of Jumièges, a good authority, states that he fell a victim to murderers hired by Ralf de Wacy, the son of Archbishop Robert of Rouen. It is at least certain that shortly after this last event Ralf de Wacy was chosen by William himself, acting, as is said, upon the advice of his chief men, as his guardian and the commander of the Norman army.

More important than this list of crimes is the general question of the relations which existed at this critical period between William and the king of France. We have seen that Duke Robert had secured the king’s consent to his nomination of William as the heir of Normandy; and we have good reason for believing that William after his accession was, in the feudal sense of the phrase, under the guardianship of his overlord. Weak as the French monarchy seems to be at this time it had not, thus early in the eleventh century, finally become compelled to recognise the heritable character of its greater fiefs. Its chances of interfering with credit would vary with each occasion. If a tenant in chief were to die leaving a legitimate son of full age, the king in normal cases would not try to change the order of inheritance; but a dispute between two heirs, or the succession of a minor, would give him a fair field for the exercise of his legal rights. Now William of Normandy was both illegitimate and a minor and his inheritance was the greatest fief of north France; by taking up the office of guardian towards him the king would at once increase the prestige of the monarchy, and also strengthen the ancient friendship which existed between Paris and Rouen. Nor are we left without direct evidence on this point. William of Malmesbury, in describing the arrangements made at Fécamp, tells us that Count Gilbert of Brionne, the only one of William’s guardians whom he mentions by name, was placed under the surveillance of king Henry[^[41]]; and Henry of Huntingdon incidentally remarks that in 1035 William was residing with the king of France and that the revenues of Normandy were temporarily annexed to the royal exchequer. In view of the statements of these independent writers, combined with the antecedent probability of the case, we may consider it probable that William, on his father’s death, became the feudal ward of his suzerain,[^[42]] and that very shortly after his own accession he spent some time in attendance at the royal court.

It must be confessed that we know very little as to the events of the next ten years of William’s life. They were critical years, for in them William was growing up towards manhood and receiving the while a severe initiation into the art of government. The political conditions of the eleventh century did not make for quiet minorities; they left too much to the strength and discretion of the individual ruler. Private war, for instance, might be a tolerable evil when duly regulated and sanctioned by a strong duke; under the rule of a child the custom merely supplied a formal excuse for the prevailing anarchy. Later writers give various incidental illustrations of the state of Normandy at this period. We read, for instance, how Roger de Toeny, a man of most noble lineage, on returning to Normandy from a crusade against the Moors in Spain, started ravaging the land of his neighbours in sheer disgust at the accession of a bastard to the duchy, and was killed in the war which he had provoked.[^[43]] But such stories only concern the history of William the Conqueror in so far as they indicate the nature of the evils the suppression of which was to be his first employment in the coming years. To turn the fighting energy inherent in feudal life from its thousand unauthorised channels, and to direct it towards a single aim controlled and determined by himself, was to be the work which led to his greatest achievements. In the incessant tumults of the first ten years of his reign we see the aimless stirring of that national force which it is William’s truest glory to have mastered and directed to his own ends.

We get one glimpse of William at this time in a charter[^[44]] which must have been granted before 1037, as it is signed by Archbishop Robert of Rouen, who died in that year. The document is of interest as it shows us the young duke surrounded by his court, perhaps at one of the great church festivals of the year. Among the witnesses we find Counts Waleran of Meulan, Enguerrand of Ponthieu, and Gilbert of Brionne; the archbishop of Dol, as well as his brother metropolitan of Rouen; Osbern the seneschal, and four abbots, including the head of the house of Fécamp, in whose favour the charter in question was granted. The presence of the count of Ponthieu and the archbishop of Dol is important as showing that even at this stormy time the connection between Normandy and its neighbours to east and west had not been wholly severed; and it is interesting to see two of William’s[William’s] unlucky guardians actually, in attendance on their lord. It may also be noted that at least one other charter[^[45]] has survived, probably a little later in date, but granted at any rate in or before 1042, in which among a number of rather obscure names we find the signature of “Haduiardus Rex,” which strange designation undoubtedly describes Edward of England, then nearing the end of his long exile at the court of Normandy.

To this difficult period of William’s reign must apparently be assigned a somewhat mysterious episode which is recorded by William of Jumièges alone among our authorities. One of the strongest border fortresses of Normandy was the castle of Tillières, which commanded the valley of the Arve and was a standing menace to the county of Dreux. The latter was at this time in the hands of the crown, but in the tenth century it had been granted to Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy. He had ceded it to Count Odo of Blois as the marriage portion of his daughter Mahaut, but on her speedy death without issue Odo had refused to return it to his father-in-law; and in the border warfare which followed, the duke founded the castle of Tillières as a check upon his acquisitive neighbour.[^[46]] On Odo’s death in 1018 the county of Dreux passed to his overlord the king of France, but Tillières continued to threaten this latest addition to the royal demesne. We know very little as to what went on in the valley of the Arve during the twenty years that followed Odo’s death, but by the beginning of William’s reign it seems certain that the Norman claims on Dreux itself had been allowed to lapse, and the present dispute centres round Tillières alone. At some unspecified period in William’s minority we find King Henry declaring that, if William wished to retain his friendship, Tillières must be dismantled or surrendered. The young duke himself and some of his barons thought the continued support of the king of France more valuable than a border fortress and were willing to surrender the castle; but its commander, one Gilbert Crispin, continued to hold out against the king. Tillières was thereupon besieged by a mixed force of Frenchmen and Normans, and William, possibly appearing in person, ordered Gilbert Crispin to capitulate. He obeyed with reluctance and the castle was at once burned down, the king swearing not to rebuild it within four years, but within the stipulated period it seems that the treaty was broken on the French side. The king at first retired, but not long afterwards he recrossed the border, passed across the Hiesmois, burned Argentan, and then returning rebuilt the castle of Tillières in defiance of his oath, while at the same time it would appear that the viscount of the Hiesmois, one Thurstan surnamed “Goz,” was in revolt against William and had garrisoned Falaise itself with French troops. Falaise was at once invested, William again appearing on the scene to support Ralf de Wacy, the commander of his army, and it seemed probable that the castle would be taken by storm; but Thurstan Goz was allowed to come to terms with the duke and was banished from Normandy, his son Richard continuing in William’s service as viscount of Avranches. The family is of great interest in English history, for Hugh the son of the latter Richard was to become the first earl “palatine” of Chester. And so it may be well to note in passing that the rebel Thurstan is described by William of Jumièges as the son of Ansfrid “The Dane,” a designation which is of interest both as proving the Scandinavian origin of the great house of which he was the progenitor, and also as suggesting that a connection, of which we have few certain traces, may have been maintained between Normandy and its parent lands for upwards of a century after the treaty of Claire-sur-Epte.

The above is the simplest account that we can give of these transactions, which are not very important in themselves, but have been considered to mark the rupture of the old friendship between the Capetian dynasty and the house of Rollo.[^[47]] But the whole subject is obscure. The king’s action, in particular, is not readily explicable on any theory, for there is good reason to believe that at this time he was actually William’s feudal guardian and certainly a few years later he appears as fully discharging the duties of that office on the field of Val-es-dunes; so that it is not easy to see why on the present occasion he should inflict gratuitous[gratuitous] injury on his ward by sacking his towns and burning his castles. The affair of Tillières would be quite intelligible if it stood by itself: it was only natural that the king should take advantage of his position to secure the destruction or surrender of a fortress which threatened his own frontier, and the fact that William himself appears as ordering the surrender would alone suggest that he was acting under the influence of his overlord. But the raid on Argentan is a more difficult matter. We do not know, for instance, whether there was any connection between the revolt of Thurstan Goz and the king’s invasion of the Hiesmois; the mere fact that the rebel commander of Falaise took French knights into his pay, by no means proves that he was acting in concert with the French king. The story as we have it suggests that there may have been two parties in Normandy at this time, one disposed to render obedience to the king of France as overlord, the other maintaining the independence of the Norman baronage; a state of affairs which might readily lead to the armed intervention of the king of France, half in his own interest, half in that of his ward. But considering the fact that we owe our knowledge of these events to one chronicler only, and that he wrote when the rivalry between Normandy and France had become permanent and keen, we may not improbably suspect that he antedated the beginning of strife between these two great powers, and read the events of William’s minority in the light of his later history.

The revolt of western Normandy which took place in the year 1047 marks the close of this obscure and difficult period in William’s life; it is in the crisis of this year that something of the personality of the future Conqueror is revealed to us for the first time. With the battle of Val-es-dunes William attained his true majority and became at last the conscious master of his duchy, soon to win the leading place among the greater vassals of the French crown. For ten years more, indeed, he was to be confronted, at first by members of his own family, whose ill-will became at times something more than passive disaffection, and afterwards by his overlord made jealous by his increasing power, but the final issue was never again in serious doubt after his barons had once tried conclusions with him in pitched battle and had lost the game.

JUMIÈGES ABBEY—INTERIOR

For all this, the revolt of 1047 came near putting a summary close to William’s career and life. Normandy at this time was far from being a homogeneous state; apart from the general tendency of feudalism towards the isolation of individual barons, the greater divisions of the duchy had as yet little real cohesion; and a line of cleavage which is all-important in this revolt is marked by the river Dive, which separates Rouen and its territory, where the ducal power might be expected to be at its strongest, from the lands of the Bessin and Cotentin, which were always predisposed to local independence. These districts, as we have seen, formed no part of the territory ceded to Rollo by the treaty of Claire-sur-Epte, and it is quite possible that the course of events in the present year may have been affected by the distinction between the Gallicised Northmen of the Rouennais and Evrècin and the more primitive folk of the lands west of Dive. At any rate it was from the latter quarter that the main strength of the rising was drawn. The Bessin[Bessin] and Cotentin revolted under their respective viscounts, Randolf de Brichessart and Neel de Saint Sauveur, the latter being the most prominent leader in the whole affair; and with them were associated one Hamo, nicknamed “Dentatus,” the lord of Thorigny and Creuilly, and Grimbald the seigneur of Plessis. The nominal head of the revolt was William’s cousin Guy, son of Reginald, count of the Burgundian Palatinate by Adeliz, daughter of Duke Richard II. of Normandy, a young man, who up to this time had been the constant companion of William, and had received from him Brionne and Vernon, two of the most important castles of eastern Normandy. Guy was one of the few legitimate members of the ducal family, and he and his confederates found a justification for their rising in the stain which rested upon William’s birth. We are told that their ultimate object was to divide the duchy among themselves, and we may suppose that Guy would have taken Rouen and the surrounding country with the title of duke, leaving the western lords in practical independence. The latter took an oath to support his claims and to depose William, and they put their castles into a state of defence.

When the revolt broke out William was in the heart of the enemies’ country at Valognes, a town which seems to have been his favourite hunting seat in the west of Normandy. The opportunity was too good to be missed, and a plot was laid for his capture which came within an ace of success, and according to later tradition was only discovered, on the point of its execution, by Gallet, William’s fool. The duke had gone to bed when Gallet burst into his room and called on him to escape for his life. Clad in such garments as came to hand William sprang on horseback, and rode away through the dead of night eastwards towards his native and loyal town of Falaise. He took the coast road, crossing the estuary of the Vire at low water, and by day-break he had covered the forty miles which separate Valognes from Rye. It so chanced that Hubert the lord of Rye was standing between his castle mound and the neighbouring church as the duke came riding by, and recognising his lord he asked the reason of his haste. Upon learning of his danger Hubert called three of his sons and bade them escort the duke to Falaise; but even in the capital of his native province William made no delay, and hastened across the borders of his duchy to ask help of his overlord and guardian, King Henry of France.[^[48]] The king and the duke met at Poissy, and a French army prepared to enter Normandy under the leadership of the king in person, while on his part William summoned the men of Rouen, Auge, Lisieux, Evreux, and the Hiesmois, men, that is, from all Normandy east of the Dive and from the territory belonging to Falaise, west of that river. The Normans assembled in the latter district and concentrated on the Meance near Argences; the French army drew together on the Laison between Argences and Mezidon. King Henry heard mass and arranged his troops at Valmeray, then crossed the Olne on to the plain of Val-es-dunes and drew up his men on the bank of the river. In that position he was joined by William, who had crossed at the ford of Berangier, and the combined force prepared for battle, the Frenchmen forming the left wing and the Normans the right.[^[49]]

In the meantime the revolt had spread apace. The rebels had seized the duke’s demesne and, it would seem, were prepared to invade the loyal country across the Dive, for they had reached Val-es-dunes before the king and the duke had arrived there. Like their opponents, they drew up their army in two divisions, the men of the Cotentin forming the right wing and those of the Bessin the left. The battle seems to have begun by a charge of the Cotentin men on the French, but of the struggle which followed we have only a confused and indefinite account; it appears to have been a simple cavalry encounter, calling for no special tactical skill in the leaders of either side. Even in most of the Norman accounts of the battle William plays a part distinctly secondary to that of his overlord, although the latter had the ill luck to be unhorsed twice during the day, once by a knight of the Cotentin and once by the rebel leader Hamo “Dentatus.” Before long the fight was going decisively in favour of the loyal party. The rebel leaders seem to have mistrusted each other’s good faith. In particular Ralf of Brichessart began to fear treachery; he suspected that Neel de Saint Sauveur might have left the field, while one of his own most distinguished vassals had been cut down before his eyes, by the duke’s own hand as later Norman tradition said. Accordingly, long before the fight was over he left the field, but the western men were still held together by Neel, who made a determined stand on the high ground by the church of St. Lawrence. At last he too gave way, the flight became general, and it was at this point that the rebel force suffered its heaviest losses, for the broken army tried to make its way into the friendly land of the Bessin, and the river Olne lay immediately to the west of the plateau of Val-es-dunes. Large numbers of the rebels perished in the river and the rest escaped between Alegmagne and Farlenay, while Guy himself, who had been wounded in the battle, fled eastward to his castle of Brionne.

The reduction of this fortress must have been for William the most formidable part of the whole campaign. Even in the middle of the eleventh century the art of fortification was much more fully developed than the art of attack, and at Brionne the site of the castle materially aided the work of defence. The castle itself stood on an island in the river Risle, which at that point was unfordable, and it was distinguished from the wooden fortifications common at the time by the fact that it contained a stone “hall,” which was evidently considered the crowning feature of its defences.[^[50]] Immediately, it would seem, after the battle of Val-es-dunes King Henry retired to France, while William hastened to the siege of Brionne. A direct attack on the castle being impossible, William built counterworks on either bank of the Risle and set to work to starve the garrison into surrender. By all accounts the process took a long time,[^[51]] but at last the failure of supplies drove Guy to send and ask for terms with William. These were sufficiently lenient; Guy was required to surrender Brionne and Vernon, but was allowed to live at William’s court if he pleased. No very drastic measures were taken with regard to the rebels of lower rank, but William, realising with true instinct where his real danger had lain, dismantled the castles which had been fortified against him; and with the disappearance of the castles the fear[^[52]] of civil war vanished from Normandy for a while. The capital punishment of rebellious vassals was not in accordance with the feudal custom of the time.[^[53]] The legal doctrine of sovereignty, which made the levying of war against the head of the state the most heinous of all crimes, was the creation of the revived study of Roman law in the next century; and a mere revolt, if unaggravated by any special act of treason, could still be atoned for by the imprisonment of the leaders and the confiscation of their lands. To this we must add that William as yet was no king, the head of no feudal hierarchy; the distance that separated him from a viscount of Coutances was far less than the distance that came to separate a duke of Somerset from Edward IV. The one man who was treated with severity on the present occasion was Grimbald of Plessis, on whom was laid the especial guilt of the attempt on William’s life at Valognes. He was sent into perpetual imprisonment at Rouen, where he shortly died, directing that he should be buried in his fetters as a traitor to his lord.[^[54]] Guy of Burgundy seems to have become completely discredited by his conduct in the war, life in Normandy became unbearable to him, and of his own free will he retired to Burgundy, and vanishes from Norman history.

The war was over, and William’s future in Normandy was secured, but the revolt had indirect results which extended far beyond the immediate sequence of events. It was William’s duty and interest to return the service which King Henry had just done to him, and it was this which first brought him into hostile relations with the rising power on the lower Loire, the county of Anjou. The history of Anjou is in great part the record of a continuous process of territorial expansion, which, even by the beginning of the eleventh century had raised the petty lordship of Angers to the position of a feudal power of the first rank. Angers itself, situated as it was in the centre of the original Anjou, was an excellent capital for a line of aggressive feudal princes, who were enabled to strike at will at Brittany, Maine, Touraine, or Saintonge, and made the most of their strategical advantage. With Normandy the counts of Anjou had not as yet come into conflict; the county of Maine had up to the present separated the two states, and the collision might have been indefinitely postponed had not the events of 1047 compelled William of Normandy to bear his part in a quarrel which shortly afterwards broke out between the king of France and Count Geoffrey II. of Anjou.

The first five years of William’s minority had coincided, in the history of Anjou, with the close of the long reign of Count Fulk Nerra, who for more than fifty years had been extending the borders of his county with unceasing energy and an entire absence of moral scruple, and has justly been described as the founder of the Angevin state. His son and successor Geoffrey, commonly known in history, as to his contemporaries, under the significant nickname of Martel, continued his father’s work of territorial aggrandisement. He had three distinct objects in view: to round off his hereditary possessions by getting possession of Touraine, and to extend his territory to the north and south of the Loire at the expense of the counts of Maine and Poitou respectively. His methods, as described by Norman historians, were elementary; his favourite plan was to seize the person of his enemy and allow him to ransom himself by the cession of the desired territory. This simple device proved effective with the counts of Poitou and Blois; from the former, even before the death of Fulk Nerra, Geoffrey had extorted the cession of Saintonge, and from the latter, after a great victory at Montlouis in 1044, he gained full possession of the county of Touraine. The conquest of Touraine was undertaken with the full consent of the king of France; the counts of Blois, as we have seen, were ill neighbours to the royal demesne, and King Henry and his successors were always ready to ally themselves with any power capable of making a diversion in their favour. On the other hand their policy was not, and could not be, consistent in this respect; the rudimentary balance of power, which was all that they could hope to attain at this time, was always liable to be overthrown by the very means which they took to preserve it; a count of Anjou in possession of Saintonge and Touraine could be a more dangerous rival to the monarchy than the weakened count of Blois. Accordingly, less than four years after the battle of Montlouis, we find King Henry in arms against Geoffrey Martel, and William of Normandy attracted by gratitude and feudal duty into the conflict.[^[55]]

When William, archdeacon of Lisieux, the Conqueror’s first biographer, was living, an exile as he styles himself, in Poitou shortly after this time, the prowess of the young duke in this campaign was a matter of current conversation.[^[56]] The Frenchmen, we are told, were brought to realise unwillingly that the army led by William from Normandy was greater by far than the whole force supplied by all the other potentates who took part in the war. We are also told that King Henry had the greatest regard for his protégé, took his advice on all military matters, and remonstrated with him affectionately on his too great daring in the field. William seems in his early days to have possessed a full share of that delight in battle which is perhaps the main motive underlying the later romances of chivalry, and his reputation rose rapidly and extended far. Geoffrey Martel himself said that there could nowhere be found so good a knight as the duke of Normandy. The princes of Gascony and Auvergne and even the kings of Spain sent him presents of horses and tried to win his favour.[^[57]] Also it must have been about this time that William made overtures to Baldwin, count of Flanders, for the hand of his daughter, while in 1051 we know that he made a journey, fraught with memorable consequences, to the court of Edward the Confessor. In fact, with the subjugation of his barons and his first Angevin war William sprang at a bound into fame; the political stage of France lacked an actor of the first order, and William in the flush of his early manhood was an effective contrast to the subtle and dangerous count of Anjou.

At some undetermined point in the war an opportunity presented itself for Geoffrey Martel to gain a foothold in Norman territory. On the border between Normandy and Maine stand the towns of Domfront and Alençon, each commanding a river valley and a corresponding passage from the south into Normandy. Domfront formed part of the great border fief of Bellême, and at this time it was included in the county of Maine, over which, as we shall see later, Geoffrey Martel was exercising rights of suzerainty. Alençon was wholly Norman, but its inhabitants found William’s strict justice unbearable, and being thus predisposed for revolt they admitted a strong Angevin garrison sent by Geoffrey Martel. William decided to retaliate by capturing Domfront, leaving Alençon to be retaken afterwards.[^[58]] The plan was reasonable, but it nearly led to William’s destruction, for a traitor in the Norman army gave information as to his movements to the men of Domfront, and it was only through his personal prowess that William escaped an ambush skilfully laid to intercept him as he was reconnoitring near the city. The siege which followed was no light matter. It was winter, Geoffrey had thrown a body of picked men into the castle, and, unlike Brionne, Domfront was a hill fortress, accessible at the time only by two steep and narrow paths. It would thus be difficult to carry the place by sudden assault; so William, as formerly at Brionne and later at Arques, established counterworks and waited for the result of a blockade, harassing the garrison meanwhile by incessant attacks on their walls. The counterworks, we are told, consisted of four “castles,” presumably arranged so as to cover the base of the hill on which Domfront stands, and William contented himself for the present with securing his own supplies and preventing any message being carried from the garrison to the count of Anjou, in the meantime making use of the opportunities for sport which the neighbouring country offered. At last the men of Domfort contrived to get a messenger through the Norman lines and Geoffrey advanced to the relief of his allies with a large army. What followed may be told in the words of William of Poitiers:

“When William knew this he hastened against him [Geoffrey], entrusting the maintenance of the siege to approved knights, and sent forward as scouts Roger de Montgomery and William fitz Osbern, both young men and eager, who learned the insolent intention of the enemy from his own words. For Geoffrey made known by them that he would beat up William’s guards before Domfront at dawn the next day, and signified also what manner of horse he would ride in the battle and what should be the fashion of his shield and clothing. But they replied that he need trouble himself no further with the journey which he designed, for he whom he sought would come to him with speed, and then in their turn they described the horse of their lord, his clothing and arms. These tidings increased not a little the zeal of the Normans, but the duke himself, the most eager of all, incited them yet further. Perchance this excellent youth wished to destroy a tyrant, for the senate of Rome and Athens held such an act to be the fairest of all noble deeds. But Geoffrey, smitten with sudden terror, before he had so much as seen the opposing host sought safety in flight with his whole army, and lo! the path lay open whereby the Norman duke might spoil the wealth of his enemy and blot out his rival’s name with everlasting ignominy.”[^[59]]

It is painful to pass from this rhapsody to what is perhaps the grimmest scene in William’s life. The retreat of Geoffrey, to whatever cause it is to be assigned, exposed Alençon to William’s vengeance. Leaving a sufficient force before Domfront to maintain the siege, in a single night’s march he crossed the water-parting of the Varenne and the Sarthe, and approached Alençon as dawn was breaking. Facing him was the fortified bridge over the Sarthe, behind it lay the town, and above the town stood the castle, all fully defended. On the bridge certain of the citizens had hung out skins, and as William drew near they beat them, shouting “Hides for the tanner.”[^[60]] With a mighty oath the young duke swore that he would prune those men as it were with a pollarding knife, and within a few hours he had executed his threat. The bridge was stormed and the town taken, William unroofing the houses which lay outside the wall and using the timber as fuel to burn the gates, but the castle still held out. Thirty-two of the citizens were then brought before the duke; their hands and feet were struck off and flung straightway over the wall of the castle among its defenders.[^[61]] With the hasty submission of the castle which followed William was free to give his whole attention to the reduction of Domfront, and on his return he found the garrison already demoralised by the news of what had happened at Alençon, and by the ineffective departure of Geoffrey Martel. They made an honourable surrender and Domfront became a Norman possession,[^[62]] the first point gained in the struggle which was not to end until a count of Anjou united the thrones of Normandy, Maine, and England.

Denier of Geoffrey Martel

CHAPTER II
REBELLION AND INVASION

Between the first Angevin war and the outbreak of overt hostilities between Normandy and France, there occurs a period of five or six years the historical interest of which lies almost entirely in the internal affairs of the Norman state. It was by no means an unimportant time; it included one external event of great importance, William’s visit to England in 1051, but its real significance lay in the gradual consolidation of his power in Normandy and its results. On the one hand it was in these years that William finally suppressed the irreconcilable members of his own family; on the other hand the gradual dissolution of the traditional alliance between Normandy and the Capetian house runs parallel to this process and is essentially caused by it. From the very time when William attained his majority these two powers begin steadily to drift apart; the breach widens as William’s power increases, and the support given by the king of France in these years to Norman rebels such as William Busac and William of Arques is naturally followed by his invasions of Normandy in 1054 and 1058. As compensation for this William’s marriage with Matilda of Flanders falls within the same period, and events ruled that the alliance thus formed was to neutralise the enmity of the Capetian house at the critical moment of the invasion of England. There is indeed a sense in which we may say that it was William’s success in these six years which made the invasion of England possible; whether consciously or not, William was making indispensable preparation for his supreme endeavour when he was taking the castles of his unquiet kinsmen and banishing them from Normandy.

The first of them to go was William surnamed “the Warling,” count of Mortain and grandson of Duke Richard the Fearless. His fall was sudden and dramatic. As we have only one narrative of these events it may be given here at length:

“At that time William named the Warling, of Richard the Great’s line, was count of Mortain. One day a certain knight of his household, called Robert Bigot, came to him and said, ‘My Lord, I am very poor and in this country I cannot obtain relief; I will therefore go to Auplia, where I may live more honourably.’ ‘Who,’ said William, ‘has advised you thus?’ ‘The poverty which I suffer,’ replied Robert. Then said William, ‘Within eight days, in Normandy itself, you shall be able in safety to seize with your own hands whatever you may require.’ Robert therefore, submitting to his lord’s counsel, bided his time, and shortly afterwards, through Richard of Avranches his kinsman, gained the acquaintance of the duke. One day they were talking in private when Robert among other matters repeated the above speech of Count William. The duke thereupon summoned the count and asked him what he meant by talk of this kind, but he could not deny the matter, nor did he dare to tell his real meaning. Then said the duke in his wrath: ‘You have planned to confound Normandy with seditious war, and wickedly have you plotted to rebel against me and disinherit me, therefore it is that you have promised booty to your needy knight. But, God granting it, the unbroken peace which we desire shall remain to us. Do you therefore depart from Normandy, nor ever return hither so long as I live.’ William thus exiled sought Apulia wretchedly, accompanied by only one squire, and the duke at once promoted Robert his brother and gave him the county of Mortain. Thus harshly did he abuse the haughty kindred of his father and honourably exalt the humble kindred of his mother.”[^[63]]

The moral of the story lies in its last sentence. The haughty kindred of the duke’s father were beginning to show themselves dangerous, and William threw down the challenge to them once for all when he disinherited the grandson of Richard the Great in favour of the grandson of the tanner of Falaise. But, apart from the personal questions involved, the tale is eminently illustrative of William’s conception of his duty as a ruler. By policy as well as prepossession he was driven to be the stern maintainer of order; the men who would stir up civil war in Normandy wished also to disinherit its duke, and from this followed naturally that community of interest between the ruler and his meaner subjects as against the greater baronage which was typical of the early Middle Ages in Normandy and England alike. It is inadvisable to scrutinise too narrowly the means taken by William to secure his position; if on the present occasion he exiled his cousin on the mere information of a single knight, he had already been taught the wisdom of striking at the root of a rebellion before it had time to grow to a head. We must not expect too much forbearance from the head of a feudal state in his dealings with a suspected noble when the banishment of the latter would place a dangerous fief at the former’s disposal. Lastly, we may notice the way in which Apulia is evidently regarded as a land of promise at this time by all who seek better fortune than Normandy can give them. In the eleventh century, as in the fifteenth, Italy was exercising its perennial attraction for the men of the ruder north, and under the leadership of the sons of Tancred of Hauteville a new Normandy was rising on the wreck of the Byzantine Empire in the West by the shores of the Ionian Sea.

Probably about this time, and possibly not without some connection with the disaffection of William the Warling, there occurred another abortive revolt, of which the scene was laid, as usual, in one of the semi-independent counties held by members of the ducal house. In the north-east corner of Normandy the town of Eu with its surrounding territory had been given by Duke Richard II. to his illegitimate brother William. The latter had three sons, of whom Robert, the eldest, succeeded him in the county, Hugh, the youngest, subsequently becoming bishop of Lisieux. The remaining brother, William, surnamed Busac, is a mysterious person whose appearance in history is almost confined to the single narrative which we possess of his revolt. The latter is not free from difficulty; William was not his father’s eldest son, and yet at the period in question he appears in possession of the castle of Eu, and, which is much more remarkable, he is represented as laying claim to the duchy of Normandy itself. At present this is inexplicable, but it is certain that the duke besieged and took Eu and drove William Busac into exile. The place of refuge which he chose is very suggestive. He went to France and attached himself to King Henry, who married him to the heiress of the county of Soissons, where his descendants were ruling at the close of the century.[^[64]] It is plain that the king’s opportunist policy has definitely turned against William of Normandy, when we find a Norman rebel received with open arms and given an important territorial position on the border of the royal demesne.[^[65]]

The third and last of this series of revolts can be definitely assigned to the year 1053. It arose like the revolt of William Busac in the land east of Seine, and its leader was again one of the “Ricardenses,” a member of a collateral branch of the ducal house. William count of Arques was an illegitimate son of Duke Richard II., and therefore brother by the half blood to Duke Robert I., and uncle to William of Normandy. With the object of conciliating an important member of his family the latter had enfeoffed his uncle in the county of Arques, the district between Eu and the Pays de Caux. Before long, however, relations between the duke and the count became strained; William of Arques was said to have failed in his feudal duty at the siege of Domfront, and when a little later he proceeded to fortify the capital of his county with a castle, it was known that his designs were not consonant with loyalty towards the interests of his lord and nephew. In the hope of anticipating further trouble the duke insisted on his legal right of garrisoning the castle with his own troops, but the precaution proved to be quite futile, for the count soon won over the garrison, defied his nephew, and spread destruction over as wide an area as he could reach from his base of operations. At this time, as at the similar crisis of 1047, William seems to have been at Valognes; he was certainly somewhere in the Cotentin when the news of what was happening at Arques was brought to him.[^[66]] Without a moment’s delay he rode off towards the scene of the revolt, crossing the Dive estuary at the ford of St. Clement and so past Bayeux, Caen, and Pont Audemer to the Seine at Caudebec, and then to Baons-le-Comte and Arques, his companions dropping off one by one in the course of his headlong ride until only six were left. Near to Arques, however, he fell in with a party of three hundred horsemen from Rouen, who had set out with the object of preventing the men of Arques from carrying supplies into the castle. William had not yet outgrown the impetuosity which called forth King Henry’s admonitions in the campaign of 1048: he insisted on delivering an instant attack, believing that the rebels would shrink from meeting him in person, and dashed on to the castle regardless of the remonstrances of the Rouen men, who counselled discretion. Charging up the castle mound he drove the count and his men within the fortress as he had anticipated, and we are given to understand that but for their hastily shutting the gates against him the revolt would have been ended then and there.

The surprise assault having failed, nothing was left but a blockade, and accordingly William established a counterwork at the base of the castle and entrusted it to Walter Giffard, lord of the neighbouring estate of Longueville, while he himself went off, “being called by other business,” as his panegyrist tells us. As a matter of fact it is probable that he withdrew from a sense of feudal propriety,[^[67]] for no less a person than King Henry of France was advancing to the relief of the garrison. On all grounds it was desirable for William to refrain from setting a bad example to his barons by actually appearing in arms against his own overlord, and so the operations against the king were left to the direction of others. At the outset they were fortunate. There were still a few barons in the county of Arques who had not joined the rebels, and one of them, Richard of Hugleville, possessed a castle, a few miles from Arques itself, at St. Aubin, which lay on the line of march of the French king. Possibly it was this fact which suggested to the besiegers the idea of intercepting the king before he reached Arques; at any rate, they formed a plan of the kind, which proved successful and curiously anticipates one of the most famous episodes in the greater battle of Hastings. The king, who had been marching carelessly with a convoy of provisions intended for the garrison within Arques, halted near to St. Aubin. In the meantime the Normans before Arques had sent out a detachment which they divided into two parts, the greater part secreting itself not far from St. Aubin, while the rest made a feint attack on the royal army. After a short conflict the latter division turned in pretended flight, drew out a number of the king’s army in pursuit, and enticed them past the place where the trap was laid, whereupon the hidden Normans sallied out, fell on the Frenchmen, and annihilated them, slaying Enguerrand, count of Ponthieu, and many other men of note. Notwithstanding this check, the king hurried on to Arques, and succeeded in throwing provisions into the castle, and then, eager to avenge the disaster at St. Aubin, he made a savage attack on the counterwork at the foot of the hill. But its defences were strong and its defenders resolute: so the king, to avoid further loss, beat a hasty retreat to St. Denis, and with his withdrawal Duke William reappeared upon the scene.[^[68]] Then the blockade was resumed in earnest, and we are told that its severity convinced the count of Arques of his folly in claiming the duchy against his lord. Repeated messages to King Henry begging for relief found him unwilling to risk any further loss of prestige, and at last hunger did its work. The garrison surrendered, asking that life and limb might be guaranteed to them, but making no further stipulation, and William of Poitiers gleefully describes the ignominious manner of their exit from the castle.[^[69]] Here, as after Val-es-dunes, it was not the duke’s policy, if it lay in his power, to proceed to extremities against the beaten rebels, and William was notably lenient to his uncle, who was deprived of his county and his too-powerful castle, but was granted at the same time a large estate in Normandy. However, like Guy of Burgundy, he declined to live in the country over which he had hoped to rule and he went into voluntary exile at the court of Eustace of Boulogne.

One outlying portion of the duchy remained in revolt after the fall of Arques. On the south-western border of Normandy the fortress of Moulins had been betrayed to the king by Wimund, its commander, and had received a royal garrison under Guy-Geoffrey, brother of the duke of Aquitaine. The importance of this event lay in the fact that Moulins in unfriendly hands threatened to cut off communications between the Hiesmois and the half-independent county of Bellême. Fortunately for the integrity of the duchy, the fate of Moulins was determined by the surrender of Arques; the garrison gave up their cause as hopeless, and retired without attempting to stand a siege.[^[70]]

At some indefinite point in the short interval of peace which followed the revolt of William of Arques, William of Normandy was married to Matilda, daughter of Baldwin count of Flanders, in the minster at Eu. On William’s part the consummation of the marriage was an act of simple lawlessness noteworthy in so faithful a son of Holy Church, for in 1049 the General Council of Rheims had solemnly forbidden Count Baldwin to give his daughter to William of Normandy, and had simultaneously inhibited William from receiving her.[^[71]] A mystery which has not been wholly solved hangs over the motives which underlay this prohibition; for genealogical research has hitherto failed to discover any tie of affinity which might furnish an impediment, reasonable or otherwise, to the proposed marriage, while at the middle of the eleventh century the provisions of the canon law on the subject of the prohibited degrees were much less rigid and fantastic than they subsequently became. Yet the decree is duly entered among the canons of the Council of Rheims, and it served to keep William and his chosen bride apart for four years. Early in 1053, however, Pope Leo IX. had been taken prisoner by the Normans in Italy at the battle of Aversa, and the coincidence of his captivity with William’s defiance of the papal censure has not escaped the notice of historians.[^[72]] By all churchmen of the stricter sort a marriage celebrated under such conditions was certain to be regarded as a scandal. Normandy was laid under an interdict, and in the duchy itself the opposition was headed by two men of very different character. Malger, the archbishop of Rouen at the time, was a brother of the fallen count of Arques, and the excommunication which he pronounced against his erring nephews was probably occasioned as much by the political grievances of his family as by righteous indignation at the despite done to the Council of Rheims. William speedily came to an understanding with the Pope by means of which he was enabled to remove Malger from his archbishopric, but the marriage was also condemned by the man who both before and after that event held above all others the place of the duke’s familiar friend. The career of Lanfranc of Pavia, at this moment prior of Bec, will be more fittingly considered elsewhere, but his opposition to William’s marriage was especially significant because of his great legal knowledge and the disinterestedness of his motives, and the uncompromising attitude of his most intimate counsellor cut the duke to the quick. In the outburst of his anger William savagely ordered that the lands of the monastery of Bec should be harried, and that Lanfranc himself should instantly depart from Normandy. A chance meeting between the duke and the prior led to a reconciliation, and Lanfranc was thereupon employed to negotiate with the papal court for a recognition of the validity of the marriage. Nevertheless five years passed before Pope Nicholas II. in 1059 granted the necessary dispensation, accompanied by an injunction that William and his wife should each build and endow a monastery by way of penance for their disobedience; and the reasons for this long delay are almost as difficult to understand as are the grounds for the original prohibition in 1049. But it is probable that William, having once taken the law into his own hands and gained possession of his bride, was well content that the progress of his suit at Rome should drag its slow length along, trusting that time and the chances of diplomatic expediency might soften the rigours of the canon law, and bring the papal curia to acquiescence in the accomplished fact.

The county of Flanders, with which Normandy at this time became intimately connected, held a unique position among the feudal states of the north. Part only of the wide territory ruled by Baldwin IV. owed feudal service to the king of France, for the eastern portion of the county was an imperial fief, and the fact of his divided allegiance enabled the count of Flanders to play the part of an international power. By contemporary writers Count Baldwin is occasionally graced with the higher title of Marquis,[^[73]] and the designation well befitted the man who ruled the wealthiest portion of the borderland between the French kingdom and the German empire. The constant jealousy of his two overlords secured him in practical independence, and in material resources it is probable that no prince between the English Channel and the Alps could compete with the lord of Bruges and Ghent; for the great cities of Flanders were already developing the wealth and commercial influence which in the next generation were to give them the lead in the movement for communal independence. For some thirty years we find Baldwin cultivating the friendship of England, as became a ruler whose subjects were already finding their markets in English ports; and as the political situation unfolded itself, the part he chose to take in the strife of parties across the Channel became a matter of increasing concern for English statesmen. “Baldwin’s land,” as the English chronicler terms it, was the customary resort of political exiles from England, and in 1066 it was the attitude of the count of Flanders which, as we shall see, really turned the scale in favour of William of Normandy. At the early date with which we are dealing no one could have foreseen that this would be so, but the value of a Flemish alliance was already recognised in England by the aggressive house with which William was at last to come into deadly conflict. In 1051, Tosig, son of Earl Godwine of Wessex, wedded Judith, Count Baldwin’s sister,[^[74]] and this fact inevitably gave a political complexion to William’s marriage to Matilda, two years later. Godwine, as leader of the English nationalists, and William as ultimate supporter of the Normans in England, were each interested to secure the alliance of a power which might intervene with decisive effect on either side and could not be expected to preserve strict neutrality in the event of war. William was too shrewd a statesman to ignore these facts; yet after all he probably regarded his marriage rather as the gratification of a personal desire than as a diplomatic victory.

Long before the political results of William’s marriage had matured themselves, the relations between the duke of Normandy and the king of France had entered upon a new phase. The event of the war of 1053 had shewn that it was eminently in the interests of the French monarchy that the growth of the Norman power should be checked before it could proceed to actual encroachment on the royal demesne; and also that if this were to be accomplished it would no longer suffice for King Henry to content himself with giving support to casual Norman factions in arms against their lawful ruler. This plan had led to ignominious failure, and it was clear that in future it would be necessary for King Henry to appear as a principal in the war and test whether the Norman duke was strong enough to withstand the direct attack of his suzerain. These considerations produced a phenomenon rarely seen at this date, for the king proceeded to collect an army in which, through the rhetoric in which our one contemporary writer veils its composition, we must recognise nothing less than the entire feudal levy of all France. So rarely does French feudalism combine to place its military resources at the disposal of its sovereign that the fact on this occasion is good evidence of the current opinion as to the strength of Normandy under its masterful duke. In the war which followed, the territorial principles which found their fullest expression in the policy of the dukes of Normandy gained a signal victory over incoherent feudalism represented by the king of France at the head of the gathered forces of his heterogeneous vassals. Not until successive kings had reduced the royal demesne to such unity as had already been reached by Normandy in the eleventh century, could the French crown attempt successful aggressive war.

In addition to their feudal duty, certain of the king’s associates in the forthcoming campaign had their individual reasons for joining in an attack on Normandy. The ducal house of Aquitaine would naturally be attracted into the quarrel by the failure of Guy-Geoffrey to hold Moulins in the late war; Guy of Ponthieu had to avenge his brother’s death at St. Aubin. Little as the several feudal princes of France may have loved their suzerain, their jealousy would readily be roused by the exceptional power of one of their own number, and the king seems to have found little difficulty in collecting forces from every corner of his realm. From the Midi the counts of Poitou and Auvergne and the half-autonomous dukes of Aquitaine and Gascony sent contingents; north of the Loire, every state from Brittany to the duchy of Burgundy was represented in the royal army with one singular exception. Whatever the reason of his absence, Geoffrey Martel, William’s most formidable rival, does not appear in the list of the king’s associates as given by William of Poitiers.[^[75]] This may be due to a mere oversight on the latter’s part, or more probably it may be that Geoffrey was too independent to take part in an expedition which, although directed against his personal enemy, was commanded by his feudal lord. But with or without his aid the army which obeyed the king’s summons was to all seeming overwhelmingly superior to any force which the duke of Normandy could put into the field.

With so great an army at his disposal, the king could well afford to divide his forces and make a simultaneous invasion of Normandy at two different points. The lower course of the Seine supplied a natural line of demarcation between the spheres of operation of the two invading armies, and accordingly the royal host mustered in two divisions, one assembling in the Beauvoisis to ravage the Pays de Caux, the other assembling at Mantes, and directed at the territory of Evreux, Rouen, and Lisieux. The first division was drawn from those lands between the Rhine and the Seine, which owed allegiance to the French crown, and was placed under the command of Odo the king’s brother and Reginald of Clermont. The army which gathered at Mantes comprised the Aquitanian contingent, together with troops drawn from the loyal provinces north of Loire and west of Seine, and was led by the king in person. The general plan of campaign is thus intelligible enough, but its ultimate purpose is not so clear, perhaps because the king himself had formed no plans other than those which related to the actual conduct of the war. On his part William formed a scheme of defence corresponding to his enemies’ plan of attack. He took the field in person with the men of the Bessin, Cotentin, Avranchin, Auge, and Hiesmois, the districts, that is, which were threatened by the king and his southern army, entrusting the defence of the Pays de Caux to leaders chosen on account of their local influence, Count Robert of Eu, Hugh of Gournai, Hugh de Montfort, Walter Giffard, and Gilbert Crispin, the last a great landowner in the Vexin. William’s object was to play a purely defensive game, a decision which was wise as it threw upon the king and his brother the task of provisioning and keeping together their unwieldly armies in hostile territory. The invading force moved across the country, laying it waste after the ordinary fashion of feudal warfare, William hanging on the flank and rear of the king’s army, cutting off stragglers and foraging parties and anticipating the inevitable devastation of the land by removing all provisions from the king’s line of advance. The king had penetrated as far as the county of Brionne when disaster fell on the allied army across the Seine. Thinking that William was retiring in front of the king’s march the leaders of the eastern host ignored the local force opposed to themselves in the belief, we are told, that all the knights of Normandy were accompanying the duke. But the count of Eu and his fellow-officers were deliberately reserving their blow until the whole of their army had drawn together, and the French met little opposition until they had come to the town of Mortemer, which they occupied and used as their headquarters while they ravaged the neighbourhood in detail at their leisure. Spending the day in plunder they kept bad watch at night, and this fact induced the Norman leaders to try the effect of a surprise. Finding out the disposition of the French force through spies, they moved up to Mortemer by night and surrounded it before daybreak, posting guards so as to command all the exits from the town; and the first intimation which the invaders received of their danger was the firing of the place over their heads by the Normans. Then followed a scene of wild confusion. In the dim light of the wintry dawn the panic-struck Frenchmen instinctively made for the roads which led out of the town, only to be driven in again by the Normans stationed at these points. Some of course escaped; Odo the king’s brother and Reginald of Clermont got clear early in the day, but for some hours the mass of the French army was steadily being compressed into the middle of the burning town. The Frenchmen must have made a brave defence, but they had no chance and perished wholesale, with the exception of such men of high rank as were worth reserving for their ransoms. Among these last was Count Guy of Ponthieu, whose brother Waleran perished in the struggle, and who was himself kept for two years as a prisoner at Bayeux before he bought his liberty by acknowledging himself to be William’s “man.” The victory was unqualified, and William knew how to turn it to fullest account.

He received the news on the night following the battle, and instantly formed a plan, which, even when described by his contemporary biographer, reads like a romance. As soon as he knew the result of the conflict he summoned one of his men and instructed him to go to the French camp and bring to the king himself the news of his defeat. The man fulfilled his directions, went off, climbed a high tree close to the king’s tent, and with a mighty voice proclaimed the event of the battle. The king, awakened by these tidings of disaster from the air, was struck with terror, and, without waiting for the dawn, broke up his camp, and made with what haste he might for the Norman border. William, seeing that his main purpose was in a fair way of achievement, refrained from harassing the king’s disorderly retreat; the French were anxious to end so unlucky a campaign, and peace was soon made. According to the treaty the prisoners taken at Mortemer were to be released on payment of their ransoms, while the king promised to confirm William in the possession of whatever conquests he had made, or should thereafter make, from the territory of Geoffrey of Anjou.[^[76]] Herein, no doubt King Henry in part was constrained by necessity, but in view of his defeat it was not inappropriate that he should make peace for himself at the expense of the one great vassal who had neglected to obey the summons to his army.[^[77]] And it should be noted that William, though he has the French king at so great a disadvantage, nevertheless regards the latter’s consent to his territorial acquisitions as an object worth stipulation; King Henry, to whatever straits he might be reduced, was still his overlord, and could alone give legal sanction to the conquests made by his vassals within the borders of his kingdom.

It would, however, be a mistake to regard this treaty as marking a return to the state of affairs which prevailed in 1048, when the king and the duke of Normandy were united against the count of Anjou in the war which ended with the capture of Alençon. The peace of 1054 was little more than a suspension of hostilities, each party mistrusting the other. The first care of the duke, now that his hands were free, was to strengthen his position against his overlord, and one of the border fortresses erected at this time was accidentally to become a name of note in the municipal history of England. Over against Tillières, the border post which King Henry had taken from Normandy in the stormy times of William’s minority, the duke now founded the castle of Breteuil, and entrusted it to William fitz Osbern, his companion in the war of Domfront.[^[78]] Under the protection of the castle, by a process which was extremely common in French history, a group of merchants came to found a trading community or bourg. The burgesses of Breteuil, however, received special privileges from William fitz Osbern and when he, their lord, became earl of Hereford these privileges were extended to not a few of the rising towns along the Welsh border. The “laws of Breteuil,” which are mentioned by name in Domesday Book, and were regarded as a model municipal constitution for two centuries after the conquest of England, thus take their origin from the rights of the burgesses who clustered round William’s border fortress on the Iton.[^[79]]

Another castle built at this time was definitely intended to mark the reopening of hostilities against the count of Anjou. At Ambrières, near the confluence of the Mayenne and the Varenne, William selected a position of great natural strength for the site of a castle which should command one of the chief lines of entry from Normandy into the county of Maine. The significance of this will be seen in the next chapter, and for the present we need only remark that in 1051, on the death of Count Hugh IV., Geoffrey Martel, by a brilliant coup d’état had secured his recognition by the Manceaux as their immediate lord, and was therefore at the present moment the direct ruler of the whole county. On the other hand, the widow of the late count had sought refuge at William’s court, and her son Herbert, the last male of the old line of the counts of Maine, had commended himself and his territory to the Norman duke. For three years, therefore, William had possessed a good legal pretext for interference in the internal affairs of Maine; and but for the unquiet state of Normandy during this time, followed by the recent French invasion, it is probable that he would long ago have challenged his rival’s possession of the territory which lay between them. That the foundation of the castle of Ambrières was regarded as something more than a mere casual acquisition on William’s part, is shewn by the action of Geoffrey of Mayenne, one of the chief barons of the county of Maine, on hearing the news of its intended fortification. With the punctiliousness which distinguishes all William’s dealings with Geoffrey Martel, William had sent word to the count of Anjou that within forty days he would enter the county of Maine and take possession of Ambrières. Geoffrey of Mayenne, whose fief lay along the river Mayenne between Ambrières and Anjou, thereupon went to his lord and explained to him that if Ambrières once became a Norman fortress his own lands would never be safe from invasion. He received a reassuring answer; nevertheless, on the appointed day, William invaded Maine and set to work on the castle according to his declaration; and, although rumour had it that Geoffrey Martel would shortly meet him, the days passed without any sign of his appearance. In the meantime, however, the Norman supplies began to run short, so that William thought it the safest plan to dismiss the force which he had in the field, and to content himself with garrisoning and provisioning Ambrières, leaving orders that his men should hold themselves in readiness to reassemble immediately on receiving notice from him. Geoffrey Martel, who had probably been counting on some action of the kind, at once seized his opportunity, and, as soon as he heard that the Norman army had broken up, he marched on Ambrières, having as ally his stepson William, duke of Aquitaine, and Éon, count of Penthievre, the uncle of the reigning duke of Brittany. With William still in the neighbourhood and likely to return at any moment, it was no time for a leisurely investment, so Geoffrey made great play with his siege engines, and came near to taking the place by storm. His attack failed, however, and William, drawing his army together again, as had been arranged, compelled the count to beat a hasty retreat. Shortly afterwards Geoffrey of Mayenne was taken prisoner; and William, with a view to further enterprises in Maine, seeing the advantage of placing a powerful feudatory of that county in a position of technical dependence upon himself, kept him in Normandy until he consented to do homage to his captor.[^[80]] It is also probable that on this occasion William still further strengthened his position with regard to Maine by founding on the Sarthon the castle of Roche-Mabille, which castle was entrusted to Roger of Montgomery, and derives its name from Mabel, the heiress of the county of Bellême, and the wife of the castellan.

Three years of quiet followed these events, about which, as is customary with regard to such seasons, our authorities have little to relate to us. In 1058 came the third and last invasion of Normandy by King Henry of France, with whom was associated once more Count Geoffrey of Anjou. No definite provocation seems to have been given by William for the attack, but in the interests of the French crown it was needful now as it had been in 1053 to strike a blow at this over-mighty vassal, and the king was anxious to take his revenge for the ignominious defeat he had sustained in the former year. Less formidable in appearance than the huge army which had obeyed the king’s summons in the former year, the invading force of 1058 was so far successful that it penetrated into the very heart of the duchy, while, on the other hand, the disaster which closed the war was something much more dramatic in its circumstances and crushing in its results than the daybreak surprise of Mortemer. This expedition is also distinguished from its forerunner by the fact that the king does not seem to have aimed at the conquest or partition of Normandy: the invasion of 1058 was little more than a plunder raid on a large scale, intended to teach the independent Normans that in spite of his previous failures their suzerain was still a person to be feared. The king’s plan was to enter Normandy through the Hiesmois; to cross the Bessin as far as the estuary of the Dive and to return after ravaging Auge and the district of Lisieux. Now, as five years previously, William chose to stand on the defensive; he put his castles into a state of siege and retired to watch the king’s proceedings from Falaise. It was evidently no part of the king’s purpose to attempt the detailed reduction of all the scattered fortresses belonging to, or held on behalf of, the duke[^[81]]; and this being the case it was best for William to bide his time, knowing that if he could possess his soul in patience while the king laid waste his land, the trouble would eventually pass away of its own accord. And so King Henry worked his will on the unlucky lands of the Hiesmois and the Bessin as far as the river Seule, at which point he turned, crossed the Olne at Caen, and prepared to return to France by way of Varaville and Lisieux. William in the meantime was following in the track of the invading army. The small body of men by which he must have been accompanied proves that he had no thought of coming to any general engagement at the time, but suddenly the possibilities of the situation seem to have occurred to him, and he hastily summoned the peasantry of the neighbourhood to come in to him armed as they were. With the makeshift force thus provided he pressed on down the valley of the Bavent after the king, who seems to have been quite unaware of his proximity, and came out at Varaville at the very moment when the French army was fully occupied with the passage of the Dive. The king had crossed the river with his vanguard[^[82]]; his rearguard and baggage train had yet to follow. Seizing the opportunity, which he had probably anticipated, William flung himself upon the portion of the royal army which was still on his side of the river and at once threw it into confusion. The Frenchmen who had already passed the ford and were climbing up the high ground of Bastebourg to the right of the river, seeing the plight of their comrades, turned and sought to recross; but the causeway across the river mouth was old and unsafe and the tide was beginning to turn. Soon the passage of the river became impossible, the battle became a mere slaughter, and the Norman poet of the next century describes for us the old king standing on the hill above the Dive and quivering with impotent passion as he watched his troops being cut to pieces by the rustic soldiery of his former ward. The struggle cannot have taken long; the rush of the incoming tide made swimming fatal, and the destruction of the rearguard was complete. With but half an army left to him it was hopeless for the king to attempt to avenge the annihilation of the other half; he had no course but to retrace his steps and make the best terms he could with his victorious vassal. These terms were very simple—William merely demanded the surrender of Tillières, the long-disputed key of the Arve valley.[^[83]] With its recovery, the tale of the border fortresses of Normandy was complete; the duchy had amply vindicated its right to independence, and was now prepared for aggression.

Thus by the end of 1058 King Henry had been definitely baffled in all his successive schemes for the reduction of Normandy. With our knowledge of the event, our sympathies are naturally and not unfairly on the side of Duke William, but they should not blind us to the courage and persistency with which the king continued to face the problems of his difficult situation. In every way, of course, the weakest of the early Capetians suffers by comparison with the greatest of all the dukes of Normandy. The almost ludicrous disproportion between the king’s legal position and his territorial power, his halting, inconsistent policy, and the ease with which his best-laid plans were turned to his discomfiture by a vassal who studiously refrained from meeting him in battle, all make us inclined to agree with William’s panegyrical biographer as he contemptuously dismisses his overlord from the field of Varaville. And yet the wonder is that the king should have maintained the struggle for so long with the wretched resources at his disposal. With a demesne far less in area than Normandy alone, surrounded by the possessions of aggressive feudatories and itself studded with the castles of a restive nobility, the monarchy depended for existence on the mutual jealousy of the great lords of France and on such vague, though not of necessity unreal, respect as they were prepared to show to the successor of Charlemagne. The Norman wars of Henry I. illustrated once for all the impotence of the monarchy under such conditions, and the kings who followed him bowed to the limitations imposed by their position. Philip I. and Louis VI. were each in general content that the monarchy should act merely as a single unit among the territorial powers into which the feudal world of France was divided, satisfied if they could reduce their own demesne to reasonable obedience and maintain a certain measure of diplomatic influence outside. Accordingly from this point a change begins to come over the relations between Normandy and France; neither side aims at the subjugation of the other, but each watches for such advantages as chance or the shifting feudal combinations of the time may present. Within a decade from the battle of Varaville the duke of Normandy had become master of Maine and England, but in these great events the French crown plays no part.

Denier of Henry I. of France

CHAPTER III
THE CONQUEST OF MAINE AND THE BRETON WAR

By a curious synchronism both King Henry of France and Count Geoffrey Martel died in the course of the year 1060; and, with the disappearance of his two chief enemies of the older generation, the way was clear for William to attempt a more independent course of action than he had hitherto essayed. Up to this year his policy had in great measure been governed by the movements of his overlord and the count of Anjou, both of them men who were playing their part in the political affairs of France at the time when he himself was born. From this date he becomes the definite master of his own fortunes, and the circumstances in which the king and the count left their respective territories removed any check to his enterprise and aggression which might otherwise have come from those quarters. The king was succeeded by his son Philip, at this time a child of scarcely seven years old, and the government of France during his minority was in the hands of Baldwin of Flanders, William’s father-in-law. In Anjou a war of succession broke out which reduced that state to impotence for ten years. Geoffrey Martel had left no sons, but had designated as his successor another Geoffrey, nicknamed “le Barbu,” the elder son of his sister Hermengarde by Geoffrey count of the Gatinais.[^[84]] The younger son, however, Fulk “le Rechin,” had determined to secure the Angevin inheritance for himself, and by the time that he had accomplished his purpose most of the territorial acquisitions of Geoffrey Martel had been torn from Anjou by the neighbouring powers. Saintonge and the Gatinais fell respectively into the possession of the duke of Aquitaine and the king of France; and, more important than all, the Angevin acquisition of Maine, the greatest work of Geoffrey Martel, was reversed when in 1063 William of Normandy entered Le Mans and made arrangements for the permanent annexation of the country.

The counts of Maine had never enjoyed such absolute sovereignty over their territory as was possessed by the greater feudatories of the French crown.[^[85]] In addition to the usual vague claims which both Normandy and Anjou were always ready to assert over their weaker neighbours, and which nobody would take seriously when there was no immediate prospect of their enforcement, the suzerainty of the king of France was much more of a reality over Maine than over Flanders or Aquitaine. In particular the patronage of the great see of Le Mans rested with the king for the first half of the eleventh century; and this was an important point, for the bishops of the period are prominent in the general history of the county. For the most part they are good examples of the feudal type of prelate, represented in Norman history by Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances; and several of them were drawn from a house fertile in feudal politicians, that of the counts of Bellême, whose great fief lay on the border between Maine and Normandy. This connection of the episcopate of Le Mans with a great Norman family might be taken as itself implying some extension of Norman influence over Maine were it not that the house of Bellême, half independent and altogether unruly, was quite as likely to work against its overlord as in his favour. In fact, it was largely through the Bellême bishops of Le Mans that Angevin power came to be established in Maine for a while; the bishops were steadily opposed to the line of native counts, and looked to Anjou for a counterpoise. In particular, Bishop Gervase (1036–1058) brought it about that King Henry made a grant of all the royal rights over the see to Count Geoffrey Martel for the term of his life, the bishop taking this step in pursuance of an intrigue against the guardian of the reigning count, who was at the time a minor. Having served his turn Gervase quickly fell into disfavour with Geoffrey and endured a seven years’ imprisonment at his hands; but it was through his false step that Geoffrey first secured a definite legal position in Mancel politics.

The counts of Maine themselves are rather shadowy people, but it is necessary to get a clear idea of their mutual relationships. Count Herbert, surnamed “Eveille Chien,” the persistent enemy of Fulk Nerra of Anjou and the last of his line to play a part of his own in French affairs, had died in 1035, leaving a son, Hugh IV., and a daughter, Biota, married to Walter of Mantes, count of the Vexin Français. Hugh, being under age, was placed under the governance of his father’s uncle, Herbert “Bacco,” the regent with whom Bishop Gervase was at enmity. When the above-mentioned grant of the patronage of the bishopric of Le Mans to Geoffrey Martel had given the latter a decent pretext for interference in the quarrel, the expulsion of Herbert Bacco quickly followed; and while the bishop was in captivity Geoffrey ruled the country in the name of the young count. Upon his death, in 1051, Geoffrey himself, in despite of the claims of Hugh’s own children, was accepted by the Manceaux as count of Maine—for it should be noted in passing that the Mancel baronage was always attached to Anjou rather than to Normandy. The date at which these events happened is also worthy of remark, for it shows that during that rather obscure war in the Mayenne valley which was described[described] in the last chapter William of Normandy was really fighting against Geoffrey Martel in his position as count of Maine. A legal foundation for Norman interference lay in the fact, which we have already noticed, that Bertha of Blois, the widow of Hugh III., had escaped into Normandy, and that by her advice her son Herbert, the heir of Maine, had placed himself and his inheritance under the protection of his host. William, seeing his advantage, was determined to secure his own position in the matter. He made an arrangement with his guest by which the latter’s sister Margaret was betrothed to his own son Robert, who here makes his first appearance in history, with the stipulation that if Hugh were to die without children his claims over Maine should pass to his sister and her husband. We do not know the exact date at which this compact was made, but it is by no means improbable that some agreement of the kind underlay that clause in the treaty concluded with King Henry after Mortemer by which William was to be secured in all the conquests which he might make from Geoffrey of Anjou.

On the latter’s death in 1060 Norman influence rapidly gained the upper hand in Maine.[^[86]] The war of succession in Anjou prevented either of the claimants from succeeding to the position of Geoffrey Martel in Maine; and if Count Herbert ruled there at all during the two years which elapsed between 1060 and his own death, in 1062, it must have been under Norman suzerainty. With his death the male line of the counts of Maine became extinct, and there instantly arose the question whether the county should pass to Walter, count of Mantes, in right of his wife Biota, the aunt of the dead Herbert, or to William of Normandy in trust for Margaret, Herbert’s sister, and her destined husband, Robert, William’s son. In the struggle which followed, two parties are clearly to be distinguished: one—and judging from events the least influential—in favour of the Norman succession, the other, composed of the nationalists of Maine, supporting the claims of Biota and Walter. The latter was in every way an excellent leader for the party which desired the independence of the county. As count of the Vexin Français, Walter had been steadily opposed to the Norman suzerainty over that district, which resulted from the grant made by Henry I. to Robert of Normandy in 1032. His policy had been to withdraw his county from the Norman group of vassal states, and to reunite it to the royal demesne; he acknowledged the direct superiority of the king of France over the Vexin, and he must have co-operated in the great invasion of Normandy in 1053; for it was at his capital that the western division of the royal host assembled before its march down the Seine valley. Even across the Channel the interests of his house clashed with those of William. Walter was himself the nephew of Edward the Confessor, and his brother Ralph who died in 1057 had been earl of Hereford. The royal descent of the Vexin house interfered seriously with any claim which William might put forward to the inheritance of Edward the Confessor on the ground of consanguinity. It is only by placing together a number of scattered hints that we discover the extent of the opposition to William which is represented by Walter of Mantes and his house, but there can be no doubt of its reality and importance.

In Maine itself the leaders of the anti-Norman party seem to have been William’s own “man” Geoffrey of Mayenne and the Viscount Herbert, lord of Sainte-Suzanne. There is no doubt that the mass of the baronage and peasantry of the county were on their side, and this fact led William to form a plan of operations which singularly anticipates the greater campaign of the autumn of 1066. William’s ultimate objective was the city of Le Mans, the capital of Maine and its strongest fortress, the possession of which would be an evident sanction of his claims over the county. But there were weighty reasons why he should not proceed to a direct attack on the city. Claiming the county, as he did, in virtue of legal right, it was not good policy for him to take steps which, even if successful, would give his acquisition the unequivocal appearance of a conquest; nor from a military point of view was it advisable for him to advance into the heart of the county with the castles of its hostile baronage unreduced behind him. He accordingly proceeded to the reduction of the county in detail, knowing that the surrender of the capital would be inevitable when the whole country around was in his hands. The initial difficulties of the task were great, and the speed with which William wore down the resistance of a land bristling with fortified posts proves by how much his generalship was in advance of the leisurely, aimless strategy of his times. We know few particulars of the war, but it is clear that William described a great circle round the doomed city of Le Mans, taking castles, garrisoning them where necessary with his own troops, and drawing a belt of ravaged land closer and closer round the central stronghold of the county. By these deliberate measures the defenders of Le Mans were demoralised to such an extent that William’s appearance before their walls led to an immediate surrender. From the historical point of view, however, the chief interest of these operations lies in the curiously close parallel which they present to the events which followed the battle of Hastings. In England, as in Maine, it was William’s policy to gain possession of the chief town of the country by intimidation rather than by assault, and with the differences which followed from the special conditions of English warfare his methods were similar in both cases. London submitted peaceably when William had placed a zone of devastation between the city and the only quarters from which help could come to her; Le Mans could not hope to resist when the subject territory had been wasted by William’s army, and its castles surrendered into his hands. Nor can we doubt that the success of this plan in the valleys of the Sarthe and Mayenne was a chief reason why it was adopted in the valley of the Thames.

At Le Mans, as afterwards at London, William, when submission had become necessary, was received with every appearance of joy by the citizens; here, as in his later conquest, he distrusted the temper of his new subjects, and made it his first concern to secure their fidelity by the erection of a strong fortress in their midst—the castle which William planted on the verge of the precincts of the cathedral of Le Mans is the Mancel equivalent of the Tower of London. And, as afterwards in England, events showed that the obedience of the whole country would not of necessity follow from the submission of its chief town; it cost William a separate expedition before the castle of Mayenne surrendered. But the parallel between the Norman acquisition of Maine and of England should not be pressed too far; it lies rather in the circumstances of the respective conquests than in their ultimate results. William was fighting less definitely for his own hand in Maine than afterwards in England; nominally, at least, he was bound to respect the rights of the young Countess Margaret, and her projected marriage with Robert of Normandy proves that Maine was to be treated as an appanage rather than placed under William’s immediate rule. And to this must be added that the conquest of Maine was far less permanent and thorough than the conquest of England. The Angevin tendencies of the Mancel baronage told after all in the long run. Before twelve years were past William was compelled to compromise with the claims of the house of Anjou, and after his death Maine rapidly gravitated towards the rival power on the Loire.

While the body of the Norman army was thus employed in the reduction of Maine, William despatched a force to make a diversion by ravaging Mantes and Chaumont, the hereditary demesne of his rival,—an expedition in its way also anticipating the invasion which William was to lead thither in person in 1087, and in which he was to meet his death. Most probably it was this invasion, of which the details are entirely unknown, which persuaded Walter of Mantes to acquiesce in the fait accompli in Maine; at least we are told that “of his own will he agreed to the surrender [of Le Mans], fearing that while defending what he had acquired by wrong he might lose what belonged to him by inheritance.” Within a short time both he and his wife came to a sudden and mysterious end, and there was a suspicion afloat that William himself was not unconcerned in it. It was one of the many slanders thrown upon William by Waltheof and his boon companions at the treasonable wedding feast at Exning in 1075 that the duke had invited his rival and his wife to Falaise and that while they were his guests he poisoned them both in one night. Medieval credulity in a matter of this kind was unbounded; and a sinister interpretation of Walter’s death was inevitably suggested by the fact of his recent hostilities against his host.

One check to the success of William’s plans followed hard on the death of Walter and Biota. Margaret, the destined bride of Robert of Normandy, died before the marriage could be consummated. In 1063 Robert himself could not have been more than nine years old; while, although Margaret must have reached the age of twelve, the whole course of the history suggests that she was little more than a child, a fact which somewhat tends to discount the pious legend, in which our monastic informants revel, that the girl shrank from the thought of marriage and had already begun to practise the austerities of the religious profession. She left two sisters both older than herself, whose marriage alliances are important for the future history of Maine[^[87]]; but their claims for the present were ignored, and William himself adopted the title of count of Maine.

Somewhere about the time of these events (the exact date is unknown) William was seized with a severe illness, which brought him to the point of death. So sore bestead was he that he was laid on the ground as one about to die, and in his extreme need he gave the reliquary which accompanied him on his progresses to the church of St. Mary of Coutances. No chronicler has recorded this episode, of which we should know nothing were it not that the said reliquary was subsequently redeemed by grants of land to the church which had received it in pledge; yet the future history of France and England hung on the event of that day.[^[88]]

It was probably within a year of the settlement of Maine that William engaged in the last war undertaken by him as a mere duke of the Normans, the Breton campaign which is commonly assigned to the year 1064. As in the earlier wars with Anjou, a border dispute seems to have been the immediate occasion of hostilities, though now as then there were grounds of quarrel between the belligerents which lay deeper. Count Alan of Rennes, William’s cousin and guardian, had been succeeded by his son Conan, who like his father was continually struggling to secure for his line the suzerainty of the whole of Brittany as against the rival house of the counts of Nantes, a struggle which, under different conditions and with additional competitors at different times had now been going on for more than a century. The county of Nantes at this particular time was held by a younger branch of the same family, and there are some slight indications that the counts of Nantes, perhaps through enmity to their northern kinsmen, took up a more friendly attitude towards Normandy than that adopted by the counts of Rennes. However this may be, Count Conan appears in the following story as representing Breton independence against Norman aggression; and when William founded the castle of Saint James in the south-west angle of the Avranchin as a check on Breton marauders, Conan determined on an invasion of Normandy, and sent word to William of the exact day on which he would cross the border.

By the majority of Frenchmen it would seem that Brittany was regarded as a land inhabited by savages; in the eleventh century the peninsula stood out as distinct from the rest of France as it stands to-day. Its inhabitants had a high reputation for their courage and simplicity of life, but they were still in the tribal stage of society, and their manners and customs were regarded with abhorrence by the ecclesiastical writers of the time. Like most tribal peoples they had no idea of permanent political unity; and the present war was largely influenced by the fact that within the county of Rennes a Celtic chief named Rhiwallon was holding the town of Dol against his immediate lord on behalf of the duke of Normandy.[^[89]] Instead of invading Normandy as he had threatened, Conan was driven to besiege Dol, and it was William’s first object in the campaign to relieve his adherent there.

What gives exceptional interest to the somewhat unimportant expedition which followed is the undoubted presence in William’s army of his future rival for the crown of England, Harold the earl of Wessex.[^[90]] The reason for, and the incidents connected, with, his visit to Normandy will have to be considered in a later chapter, but there cannot be any question as to its reality; and in a famous section, the Bayeux tapestry, our best record of this campaign, shows us Harold rescuing with his own hand a number of Norman soldiers who were being swept away by the Coesnon as the army crossed the border stream of Brittany. On the approach of the Norman army Conan abandoned the siege of Dol and fell back on his capital of Rennes; but relations soon seem to have become strained between Rhiwallon and his formidable ally, for we find Rhiwallon remarking to William that it mattered little to the country folk around Dol whether their substance were to be consumed by a Norman or a Breton army. Possibly it may have been the remonstrances of Rhiwallon which induced William to retire beyond the Norman border, but we are told that as he was in the act of leaving Brittany word was brought to him that Geoffrey (le Barbu) count of Anjou had joined himself to Conan with a large army and that both princes would advance to fight him on the morrow. It does not appear that William gave them the opportunity, but the tapestry records what was probably a sequel to this campaign in the section which represents William as besieging Conan himself in the fortress of Dinan. From the picture which displays Conan surrendering the keys of the castle on the point of his spear to the duke it is evident that the place was taken, but we know nothing of the subsequent fortunes of the war nor of the terms according to which peace was made. Within two years of these events, if we are right in assigning them to 1064, Conan died suddenly,[^[91]] and was succeeded by his brother-in-law Hoel, count of Cornouaille, who united in his own person most of the greater lordships into which Brittany had hitherto been divided.

THE SIEGE OF DINANT FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

It may be well at this point briefly to review the position held by William at the close of 1064. With the exception of his father-in-law of Flanders, no single feudatory north of the Loire could for a moment be placed in comparison with him. Anjou and the royal demesne itself were, for different reasons, as we have seen, of little consequence at this time. The influence of Champagne under its featureless rulers was always less than might have been expected from the extent and situation of the county; and just now the attention of Count Theobald III. was directed towards the recovery of Touraine from the Angevin claimants rather than towards any rivalry with the greater power of Normandy. Brittany indeed had just shown itself hostile, but the racial division between Bretagne Brettonante and the Gallicised east, which always prevented the duchy from attaining high rank among the powers of north France, rendered it quite incapable of competing with Normandy on anything like equal terms. With the feudal lords to the east of the Seine and upper Loire William had few direct relations, but they, like the princes of Aquitaine, had received a severe lesson as to the power of Normandy in the rout of the royal army which followed the surprise of Mortemer. On the other hand, Normandy, threaded by a great river, with a long seaboard and good harbours, with a baronage reduced to order and a mercantile class hardly less prosperous than the men of the great cities of Flanders, would have been potentially formidable in the hands of a ruler of far less power than the future conqueror of England. Never before had Normandy attained so high a relative position as that in which she appears in the seventh decade of the eleventh century; and, kind as was fortune to the mighty enterprise which she was so soon to undertake, its success and even its possibility rested on the skilful policy which had guided her history in the eventful years which had followed Val-es-dunes.

Denier of Conan II. of Brittany

CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF THE ENGLISH SUCCESSION

The idea of a Norman conquest of England was no new thing when the actual blow fell in the autumn of 1066. The fateful marriage of Ethelred and Emma, sixty years before, had made it impossible that the politics of the island and the duchy should ever again be independent of each other; it led directly to the English expedition of Robert of Normandy in 1034, and in Edward the Confessor it gave England a king who was half a Norman in blood, and whose ideas of government were derived from the political conditions of his mother’s land. To whatever aspect of the history of this period we may turn, this Norman influence will sooner or later become apparent; in religion and commerce, as in the narrower field of politics, the Norman is working his way into the main current of English national life.

All this, however, is somewhat apart from the question as to the date at which Duke William began to lay plans for carrying out the conquest of England in his own person. There are two unknown quantities in the problem: the date at which it was generally recognised that Edward the Confessor would leave no direct heir to the English throne, and the king’s own subsequent intentions with respect to the succession. Had such an heir been forthcoming in 1066 we may be sure that his inheritance would have been undisturbed from the side of Normandy, for William’s claim to succeed his childless cousin by right of consanguinity was something more than a matter of form. Now Edward was married in 1045, being then in the very prime of life, and we must certainly allow for the passage of a reasonable period of time before we can feel certain that the politicians of England and Normandy were treating the succession as an open question. In particular it is difficult to be confident that in 1049, when the negotiations for the marriage of William and Matilda of Flanders were in progress, the ultimate childlessness of Edward the Confessor was known to be inevitable.[^[92]]

A similar uncertainty hangs over the plans which the Confessor formed in the latter event for the future of his kingdom. His Norman blood, his early residence in the duchy, and the marked predilection which he showed for men of Norman race, very naturally lead to the impression that, in the earlier part of his reign at least, his desire was to provide for the transmission of his inheritance to his mother’s family. But even this conclusion is not beyond question. Edward on his accession in 1042 occupied a most difficult position. After twenty-five years of Danish rule a very distinct party in the state wished to maintain the Scandinavian connection. Edward’s recognition as king was mainly the work of Earl Godwine and his party, and the earl expected and could enforce full payment for his services. Edward would have shown less than the little intelligence with which he is to be credited if he had failed to see that some counterpoise to the power of his overmighty subject might be found by giving wealth and influence to strangers from across the Channel. Hence arose that stream of Norman immigration which distinguishes the reign and the consequent formation of a royalist, non-national party; for each individual settler must have understood that all he might possess in the island depended on the king’s favour. Such a policy was bound sooner or later to produce a reaction on the part of Godwine and his associates; and thus arose the famous crisis of the autumn of 1051. Godwine, trying to reassert his influence in the state, fails to carry with him the other earls of England in an attack on the king’s favourites and is driven to flee the country. What Godwine resented was clearly the existence of a rival power at court, and the apathy in his cause of such men as Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria suggests that he was not recognised by them as in any real sense the champion of national as against foreign influences. With his flight the first period of the reign of Edward the Confessor ends, and in the interval before his restoration William of Normandy made his first appearance on the shores of England.

Of this visit we know very little; the native chronicler of Worcester simply tells us that “Earl William came from over sea with a great company of Frenchmen, and the king received him and as many of his companions as pleased him and let them go again.” The question at once presents itself, did Edward at this time make any promise of the English crown to William? If he ever did make an explicit promise to this effect it can scarcely be placed at any other date, for this was the only occasion after Edward’s departure from Normandy in 1042 on which the king and the duke are known to have met in person. The fact that such a promise forms an essential part of the story of the Conquest as told by all Norman writers is an argument in its favour which would more than counterbalance the natural silence of the English authorities, were they much better informed upon matters of high policy than is actually the case. But, after all, the question is really of secondary importance, for in the next year Godwine returned to power, and Edward for the rest of his reign seems to have made no serious attempt to disturb the ascendency of the English party.

The death of Godwine in 1053 made little immediate difference to the political situation in general nor to the existing relations between Normandy and England. The succession of his son Harold to the earldom of Wessex provokes no comment on the part of the contemporary chroniclers; the semi-hereditary character of the great earldoms was by this time recognised for all working purposes. Nevertheless, we can see that the accession of Harold to a provincial government of the first rank, and most probably to the unofficial primacy in the state which had been held by Earl Godwine, takes place among the chief events in the sequence of causes which ended in the great overthrow of 1066. On the other hand we should not be led by the actual cause of the history into the assumption that Harold’s designs upon the crown had already begun at this early date. With all his personal weakness, King Edward’s own wishes were likely to be the decisive factor in the choice of his successor, nor have we any record that Harold opposed the candidate whom we know to have received the king’s favour shortly after this time.

This candidate, whose appearance in the field with the king’s sanction was likely to prove fatal to any aspirations to the throne in which either William or Harold might have begun to indulge, was Edward the Etheling, son of the famous Edward Ironside, and therefore nephew by the half-blood to the Confessor. He had been sent by Cnut into remote exile, and the summons which brought him back to England as its destined heir was the work of King Edward himself. By a strange chance, immediately on his arrival in 1057, and before he had even seen the king, the etheling fell ill and died,[^[93]] and, although there was something about his end which was rather mysterious, there is nothing to suggest that it was accelerated in the interest of any other pretender to the crown. With his death there really passed away the one promising chance of perpetuating the old English dynasty, for Edgar, the son of the dead etheling, who was to live until 1126 at least, can only have been the merest child in 1057.

SEAL OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

It would seem then that 1057 is the earliest possible year from which the rivalry of William of Normandy and Harold Godwinson for the throne of England can be dated. The recall of Edward the Etheling suggests that it cannot be placed earlier, while the state of preparedness in which both parties are found at the beginning of 1066 shows that their plans must have been formed for some years at least before the Confessor’s death. And there is one mysterious episode which may very possibly have some connection with the change in the succession question caused by the death of Edward the Etheling. In or about 1058 Earl Harold made a tour on the continent, reaching as far as Rome, but also including Normandy and North France generally, and we are told that he made arrangements for receiving help from certain French powers if he should need it at any time.[^[94]] The passage in which we are told of these negotiations is very obscure, but it is by no means improbable that Harold, when the death of the etheling had opened for him a possibility of succeeding to the crown, may have tried to find allies who would hamper the movements of his most formidable rival when the critical time came. Also it is not without significance that 1058 is the year of Varaville, a date at which French jealousy of Norman power would be at its height. At any rate we may at this point stop to consider the relative position occupied by the earl and the duke respectively with respect to their chances of succeeding to the splendid inheritance of the oldest dynasty in Western Europe.

The first point which deserves discussion is the nature of the title to the English crown. “Hereditary” and “elective,” the words which one naturally contrasts in this connection, are terms of vague and fluctuating meaning in any case, while it has always been recognised that neither can be employed in relation to the tenure of the crown at any period of English history without due qualification. To say simply that the English monarchy was “elective” at the period with which we are dealing, is an insufficient statement unless we also consider the limits within which the choice lay on any given occasion, the process involved in the act of election, and the body which exercised the elective right. With regard to the first of these matters there undoubtedly existed an ancient and deep-seated feeling that a king should only be chosen from a kingly stock; in the eleventh century the sentiment still survived with which at an earlier period the nation had demanded that its rulers should have sprung from the blood of the gods. This idea was far older than any feeling of nationality, to which it might from time to time run counter—it helps, for instance, to explain the ease with which the English had accepted the royal Dane Cnut for their ruler—but with this highly important reservation it is very improbable that the succession was determined by anything which could be called general principles. The crown would naturally pass to the most popular kinsman of the late ruler, and the question of the exact relationship between the dead king and his heir would be a secondary matter.

William of Normandy was of sufficiently noble birth to satisfy the popular sentiment in the former respect, for Rollo himself was the scion of an ancient line of Norwegian chieftains. Harold on his mother’s side inherited royal blood, for Gytha, Earl Godwine’s wife, was descended from the family of the kings of Sweden; but whereas no writer near the time remarks on this feature in Harold’s descent, the origin of the “jarls of Normandy” was still a living memory in the north. Far more important in every way, however, was the undoubted kinship between William and King Edward, a fact which William made the very foundation of his claim and which was undoubtedly recognised by the men of the time as giving him an advantage which could not be gainsaid. At the present day, indeed, it is rather difficult to understand the influence exercised by the somewhat distant relationship which was all that united William and Edward, especially in view of the fact that Edgar, son of Edward the Etheling, still continued the male line of the royal house of Wessex. We can only explain it on the ground that in 1066 Edgar was under the age at which he would be competent to rule independently, and that the public opinion of the time would not accept a minor as king so long as there existed another candidate connected with the royal house and capable of taking up the reins of government in his own hands. In fact, of the three candidates between whom the choice lay on the Confessor’s death William, after all, was the one who combined the greatest variety of desirable qualifications. Edgar was nearest to the throne by order of birth, but his youth placed him at a fatal disadvantage; Harold was a man of mature years and of wide experience in the government, but his warmest supporters could not pretend that he was a kinsman of King Edward; William was already a ruler whose fame had spread far beyond the borders of his own duchy, and in the third generation he could claim a common ancestor with the dead king. Lastly, we should remember that the fact which under modern conditions would outweigh all other considerations, the fact that William was a foreigner, was less important in the eleventh century than at any later time. It was certainly a disadvantage, but one which was shared in a less degree by both William’s competitors: if he was a pure Norman, Harold was half a Dane, Edgar was half a German. The example of Cnut showed that there was nothing to prevent a man of wholly foreign blood from receiving general acceptance as king of England; and if the racial differences which existed in the country prepared the way for his reception, something of the same work was done for William by those Normans who had flocked into England under King Edward’s protection.

In all those cases in which the late king had left no single, obvious, heir to the throne, the succession would naturally be settled by the great men of the land—by that informal, fluctuating body known as the “witan.” So far as we can tell, the witan would be guided in part by the prevailing popular opinion, but more effectually by the known wishes of the dead sovereign with respect to his successor; we know, for instance, that both these influences contributed to the election of Edward the Confessor himself.[^[95]] It is, however, probable that, so far from the elective nature of the monarchy having been a main principle of English institutions from the earliest date, the idea was really an importation of the eleventh century. It has recently been suggested that the action of the witan in early times with regard to the choice of a new king was something which would be much better described as “recognition” than as election in any modern sense, that there is no evidence to prove that the witan behaved as a united body, and that it was the adhesion of individual nobles to the most likely heir which really invested him with the royal power.[^[96]] According to this account, such traces of election in the wider sense as are discernible in the eleventh century may with probability be set down to Danish influence, for the three Scandinavian nations had advanced much further than other Teutonic peoples in the development of their native institutional forms. But, even so, there is much in the history of the year 1066 to suggest that the older ideas still prevailed: William claimed the throne by hereditary right and it was the submission of Stigand, Edwin, Morcar, Edgar the Etheling, and the citizens of London, not the vote of any set assembly, which gave sanction to his claim.

In the light of this anticipation we may now consider the most perplexing question in William’s life, the truth underlying the famous story of Harold’s visit to Normandy and the oath which he there swore to William. Unlike most questions relating to the eleventh century, the difficulty in the present case arises from the wealth of our information on the subject; with the exception of those purely English writers Florence of Worcester and the authors of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the significance of whose silence will be seen shortly, every historical writer of the fifty years succeeding the Conquest tells the story at length, and no two writers tell the same story. And yet we cannot safely reject the tale as fabulous for two reasons: the silence of those who wrote with native sympathies proves that there was an element of truth in the Norman story which they did not feel themselves at liberty to deny, while the rapid diffusion of the tale itself among writers widely separated in point of place and circumstance would be unintelligible if it were the result of sheer invention. Nor is a story necessarily suspicious because its details are romantic.

The skeleton of the tale is that Harold, happening, for reasons diversely stated, to be sailing in the Channel, was driven by a storm on to the coast of Ponthieu, and that being thereby regarded as the lawful prey of the count he was thrown into prison at Beaurain, evidently to be held to ransom. While Harold was in prison the Duke of Normandy became apprised of the fact, and sending to Count Guy, who had become his feudal dependant after the battle of Mortemer, William had Harold brought with all honour into the duchy. For an indefinite time the earl stayed at the court of the duke, and even accompanied him on the Breton expedition which was described in the last chapter; but before his departure he placed himself under some obligation to his host, the nature of which is the key to the whole matter, but with regard to which scarcely any two writers are in unison. There is no doubt that Harold became William’s man, and it would seem certain that he took an oath which bore some reference to the rivalry for the English throne in which both were evidently engaged. Most writers make the essence of the oath to be a promise on the part of Harold to do all in his power to secure the crown for William upon Edward’s death, and there is a powerful current of tradition which asserts that Harold pledged himself to marry one of William’s daughters. In other words, Harold undertook to recognise William as king of England in due season, and to secure for him the adhesion of such of the English nobility as were under his influence; his marriage with William’s daughter being doubtless intended to guarantee his good faith when the critical moment came. Such an agreement would still leave Harold obviously the first man in England; indeed the relationship which would have been created between William and Harold, if it had been carried into effect, would in some respects have reproduced the relationship in which Edward the Confessor had stood with regard to Earl Godwine in 1042. This fact makes it difficult to believe that Harold was necessarily acting under compulsion when he took the oath; he had many rivals and enemies in England, and it was well worth his while to secure his position in the event of Edward’s death before his own plans were mature.[^[97]]

William on his part had everything to gain by causing Harold to enter into such an engagement. If the oath were kept William would have turned a probable rival into an ally; if it were broken he would secure all the moral advantage which would accrue to him from the perjury of his opponent. But there is no reason to believe that he insisted on Harold taking the oath merely in order that he might break it, nor is there any good authority for the famous story that William entrapped Harold into taking a vow of unusual solemnity by concealing a reliquary beneath the chest on which the latter’s hand rested while he swore. It was inevitable that an incident of this kind should gather round it a mythical accretion: but the whole course of the history proves that some such episode really took place. William’s apologists could put it in the forefront of their narratives of the Conquest, and all subsequent writers have dwelt upon it as a main cause of the invasion; yet, although scepticism is from time to time expressed upon this detail or that, not one of the historians of the next century, some of whom were possessed of distinct critical powers, and had access to good sources of information, has given a hint that the whole story was a myth.

On January 5, 1066, King Edward died, and on Thursday, January 6th, Earl Harold was chosen as king by the Witan assembled at Westminster for the Christmas feast, and crowned that same day by Ealdred, archbishop of York. We possess a circumstantial account of the last days of Edward, written only a few years after these events, which describes how the King, within an hour of his death, had emphatically commended his wife and his kingdom to the care of Harold.[^[98]] With little debate, as it would seem, the last wishes of the last king of the line of Egbert were carried into effect; Harold was chosen king forthwith, and on the same day the sanction of the church made the step irrevocable. England was now committed to the rule of a king whose title to the crown depended solely upon the validity of the elective principle, and whose success or failure would depend upon the recognition which this principle would obtain among foreign powers, and upon the support which those who had chosen to accept him as their lord were prepared to extend to him, should his claim be challenged. Under the circumstances the choice of Harold was perhaps inevitable. The dying wish of Edward could not with decency be disregarded; the scene of the election lay in just that part of the country where the interest of the house of Godwine was at its strongest; and if traditional custom were to be disregarded and the royal line forsaken no stronger native candidate could have been found. On the other hand, there could be no doubt that the event of that memorable Epiphany was fraught with danger on every side. Even if it had not thrown defiance to the most formidable prince in Europe, it founded an ominous precedent, it showed that the royal dignity was not beyond the grasp of an aspiring subject, it exposed the crown to intrigues of a class from which England, weak at the best as was its political structure, had hitherto been exempt. The Norman Conquest was an awful catastrophe; but at least it saved England from the perils of an elective monarchy.

HAROLD ENTHRONED
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

The impression which the coronation of Harold made upon the politicians of Europe was unmistakable. From Rome to Trondheim every ruler to whom the concerns of England were a matter of interest realised that a revolutionary step had been taken. From the crude narrative of the Latin historian of the Norwegian kings, as from the conventional periods of the papal chancery, we gather that the accession of Harold was regarded as an act of usurpation, although there is no unanimity as to the personality of the rightful heir whom he had supplanted. Old claims, long dormant, were revived; the kings of Norway and Denmark remembered that England had once belonged to the Scandinavian world. Had Edgar the Etheling or William of Normandy been elected, murmurings from this quarter at least would no doubt have been heard, but they would have lost half their force: the former could have appealed to the prevailing sentiment in favour of hereditary right; the latter could in addition have poured at once into England a military force sufficient to meet all possible invaders on equal terms. Harold had neither of these safeguards, and his oath to William had given to the most powerful section of his opponents an intelligible ground on which to base their quarrel. Seldom in any country has a new dynasty been inaugurated under circumstances so full of foreboding.

All this, of course, meant a corresponding increase of strength to William. Vague as is our knowledge of the negotiations with the several powers whose good-will was desirable for his enterprise, we can see that he brought them at least into a general attitude of friendly neutrality. We are told that the Emperor Henry IV. promised the unqualified support of Germany if it should be needed,[^[99]] and also that Swegen Estrithson of Denmark joined William’s side, though our informant adds that the Danish king proved himself in effect the friend of William’s enemies. The French crown was, as we have seen, under the influence of Baldwin of Flanders, William’s father-in-law; and so long as a war of succession distracted Anjou, William need fear no danger from that quarter. Maine was a dependency of the Norman duchy. Nothing, in fact, in William’s history is more remarkable than the way in which, at the very moment of his great attempt, the whole political situation was in his favour. No invasion of England would have been possible before 1060, when King Henry of France and Geoffrey Martel were removed from William’s path, while the growth of King Philip to manhood and the formation of Flanders into an aggressive anti-Norman state under Robert the Frisian would have increased William’s difficulties a thousandfold if Edward the Confessor had lived for five years longer. In great part William’s advantageous position in 1066 was due to his own statesmanship; in no small degree it resulted from the discredit which the national cause of England suffered in the eyes of Europe from the election of Harold; but above all it must be set down to William’s sheer good luck. William the Conqueror, like Napoleon, might have believed in his star without incurring the reproach of undue superstition.

Of all William’s negotiations that which was most characteristic of the temper in which he pursued his claim was an appeal to the head of the church to decide between his right and that of Harold:

“That no rashness might stain his righteous cause he sent to the Pope, formerly Anselm, bishop of Lucca, asserting the justice of the war he had undertaken with all the eloquence at his command. Harold neglected to do this; either because he was too proud by nature, or because he mistrusted his own cause, or because he feared that his messengers would be hindered by William and his associates, who were watching all the ports. The Pope weighed the arguments of both sides, and then sent a banner to William as an earnest of his kingdom.”[^[100]]

The nature of this transaction should not be misunderstood. By inviting the papal arbitration William was in no sense mortgaging any of the royal prerogatives in the island which he hoped to conquer. His action, that is, does not in any way resemble the step which his descendent John took a hundred and fifty years later, when he surrendered his kingdom to Innocent III. to be held thenceforward as a papal fief.[^[101]] William was simply submitting his cause to the court which was the highest recognised authority in all matters relating to inheritance, and which was doubly competent to try the present case, involving as it did all the questions of laesio fidei which arose out of Harold’s oath. Nor need we doubt that the verdict given represented the justice of the case as it would be presented to the pope and his advisers; we know at least, on the authority of Hildebrand himself, that it was not without an acrimonious discussion that judgment was given in favour of William. It would seem, in fact, that it required all the personal influence that Hildebrand could exercise to persuade the leaders of the church to commit themselves to the support of claims which, if prosecuted, must inevitably lead to bloodshed. And in later years Hildebrand told William that his action had been governed by his knowledge of the latter’s character, and by the hope that when raised to a higher dignity he would continue to show himself a dutiful subject of the church.[^[102]] Hildebrand added that he had not been disappointed; and in fact the attraction of the great island of the west within the influence of the ideas of the reformed papacy was worth the suppression of a few scruples on the part of the Curia.

HAROLD’S OATH
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

Seventy years afterwards the papal court was again called upon to adjudicate in a dispute relating to the succession to the English throne, and this under circumstances which deserve notice here as illustrating the nature of William’s appeal. In 1136, immediately, it would seem, after the coronation of Stephen, his rival, the Empress Matilda sent envoys to Pope Innocent II. to protest against the usurpation. Stephen, wiser in his generation than Harold, replied by sending his own representative, and the case was argued in detail before a council specially convened for the purpose by the pope. Just as in the more famous episode of 1066, the point on which the plaintiff’s advocates grounded their case was the fact that the defendant had taken an oath to secure the succession of his rival; and it rested with the pope to decide whether this oath were valid. It is with reference to this last point that the parallel between the events of 1066 and 1136 ceases: in the latter case the pope by refusing to give judgment tacitly acquitted Stephen of the guilt of perjury; in 1066 Harold’s neglect to lay a statement of his case before the papal court produced its natural result in the definite decision which was given against him.[^[103]] In either case it will be seen that what is submitted to the Curia is a question of law, not of politics; the pope is not regarded as having any right to dispose of the English crown; he is merely asked to consider the respective titles of two disputants.

Armed thus with the sanction of the church there lay before William the serious task of raising an army sufficiently large to meet the military force at his rival’s command on something like equal terms. Such an army could not possibly be derived from Normandy alone, great as was the strength of the duchy in comparison with its area. However favourable the general outlook might be for William’s plans, he cannot have thought for an instant of staking the whole resources of Normandy upon a single venture; a venture of which the possible results might be very brilliant but of which the immediate risk was very great. Nor was it possible for William by any stretch of feudal law to summon his vassals and their men to follow him across the Channel as a matter of right and duty; if he were to obtain their support he was bound to place the expedition before them as a voluntary enterprise. Thus stated there can have been little doubt as to the response which would be made to his appeal. The Norman conquest of Naples and the Norman exploits in Spain had proclaimed to the world the mighty exploits of which the race was capable, nor need we believe that the Normans themselves mistrusted their reputation. And although William’s contemporary biographer, anxious to display the magnanimity of his hero, has represented the latter’s subjects as viewing the enterprise with dismay,[^[104]] it is not really probable that the Norman knighthood was seriously deterred from adventuring itself for unlimited gains in the rich and neighbouring island by the prospect of having to fight hard for them.

In the early part of 1066, but most probably after the termination of William’s cause at Rome, a council of the Norman baronage met at Lillebonne[^[105]] to discuss the proposed invasion of England. It is plain that what most exercised the minds of William and his barons was the difficulty of building, equipping and manning a number of ships sufficient for the transport of the army within a reasonable time. In fact it seems probable that one special purpose of the council was to ascertain the number of ships which each baron was prepared to contribute towards the fleet—a matter which lay altogether outside the general question of military service and could only be solved by amicable agreement between the duke and his vassals taken individually. William stipulated that the ships should be ready within the year; a demand which to some at least appeared impossible of fulfilment; and, indeed, the creation of an entire fleet of transport vessels within six months is a wonderful illustration of the energy with which the Norman nobility adopted the cause of the duke. Transport vessels the ships were, and nothing else, as is evident from the representation of them in the Bayeux tapestry, and we are bound to conclude that it was well for William that his passage of the Channel met with no serious opposition on the part of Harold. As might be expected, the number of ships actually provided is very variously given by different writers. Curiously enough the most probable, because the lowest, estimate is made by a very late authority, the Norman poet Wace, who says that when he was a boy his father told him that six hundred and ninety-six ships assembled at St. Valery. There have also come down to us several statements of the contribution which the greater barons of Normandy made to the fleet, which are probably true in substance although the lists differ among themselves and the totals which they imply exceed the modest figures presented by Wace.[^[106]] It would appear that William’s two half-brothers headed the list; Robert of Mortain giving a hundred and twenty ships, Odo of Bayeux a hundred. The counts of Evreux and Eu, both members of the ducal family, furnished eighty and sixty ships respectively. William Fitz Osbern, Roger de Beaumont, Roger de Montgomery, and Hugh d’Avranches gave sixty ships each; Hugh de Montfort, fifty. Two men who do not appear in the subsequent history, a certain Fulk the Lame and one Gerald, who, although styled the seneschal, is difficult to identify at William’s court, gave forty ships each. Thirty ships were given by Walter Giffard and by Vulgrin, bishop of Le Mans; and Nicholas, abbot of St. Ouen, and the son of Duke Richard III. contributed twenty. An interesting figure in the list is Remi, the future bishop of Lincoln, who in 1066 was only almoner of Fécamp abbey, but nevertheless provided a ship and manned it with twenty knights. The Duchess Matilda herself supplied the ship, named the Mora, which was to carry her husband. One fact stands out clearly enough on the surface of this list—the great bulk of the fleet was supplied by William’s kinsmen and by men whom we know to have enjoyed his immediate confidence, and it is significant that we can recognise in this brief account just those men who received the greatest spoils of the conquered land. Among these few names the future earldoms of Kent, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Chester, Buckingham, Warwick, and Leicester are represented. Doubtless the rest of the Norman nobility in one way or another contributed in proportion to its wealth, but we have just accounted for nearly eight hundred vessels, and it is clear that in the all-important matter of the fleet William found his fullest support among his relatives and personal friends.

How far this statement would hold good in relation to the army of the Conquest is a question which we have no detailed means of answering. Doubtless the lords of Montfort, Longueville, Montgomery, and their fellows brought the full complement of their vassals to the duke’s muster, but the essential fact in the composition of William’s army lies in the width of the area from which it was recruited. From every quarter of the French kingdom, and from not a few places beyond its borders, volunteers crowded in to swell the Norman host. Brittany supplied the largest number of such volunteers, and next to Brittany came Flanders, but the fame of William’s expedition had spread beyond the Alps, and the Norman states in South Italy and Sicily sent their representatives.[^[107]] And this composite character of the army which fought at Hastings had deep and abiding results. A hundred years after the Conquest, Henry II. will still be sending out writs addressed to his barons and lieges “French and English,” and the terminology here expresses a fact of real importance. The line of racial distinction which was all-important in later eleventh-century England was not between Englishmen and Normans, but between Englishmen and Frenchmen. England fell, not before any province, however powerful, of the French kingdom, but, in effect, before the whole of French-speaking Europe, and, by her fall, she herself became part of that whole. For nearly a hundred years England had been oscillating between the French and the Scandinavian world; the events of 1066 carried her finally within the influence of Southern ideas in religion, politics, and culture.

The French auxiliaries of William have often been described as adventurers, and adventurers in a sense no doubt they were. But the word should not be pressed so as to imply that they belonged to a social rank inferior either to their Norman associates or to the English thegnhood whom they were to displace,—there should be no talk of “grooms and scullions from beyond the sea”[^[108]] in this connection. Socially there was little to distinguish a knight or noble from Brittany or Picardy from Normans like Robert d’Oilly or Henry de Ferrers; nor, rude as their ideas of comfort and refinement must seem to us, have we any warrant for supposing that Wigod of Wallingford or Tochi the son of Outi had been in advance of either in this respect. Like the Normans themselves the Frenchmen varied indefinitely in point of origin. Some of them were the younger sons of great houses, some belonged to the lesser baronage, some to the greater; Count Eustace of Bologne might by courtesy be described as a reigning prince. Some of the most famous names in the succeeding history can be traced to this origin—Walter Tirel was lord of Poix in Ponthieu, Gilbert of Ghent was the ancestor of the medieval earls of Lincoln. But the best way of realising the prevalence of this non-Norman element among the conquerors of England is to work through one of the schedules which the compilers of Domesday Book prefixed to the survey of each county, giving the names of its land-owners, and to note the proportion of “Frenchmen” to pure Normans. In Northamptonshire, for example, among forty-three lay tenants there occur six Flemings, three Bretons, and two Picards, and Northamptonshire in this respect is a typical county.

At or about the time of the council of Lillebonne there is reason to believe that messages were passing between William and Harold concerning the fulfilment of the fateful oath. It is fairly certain that William demanded the surrender of the crown and Harold’s immediate marriage to his daughter, agreeing in return to confirm him in his earldom of Wessex, which last is probably what is meant when our rhetorical informants tell us that William promised to grant half the kingdom to his rival. Such negotiations were bound to fall through; Harold had gone too far to withdraw, even if he had been so minded, and William’s object in making these proposals could only have been to maintain in the eyes of the world the appearance of a lawful claimant deprived of his inheritance. Also we may be quite sure that the building of the fleet was not interrupted during the progress of the negotiations.

The difficulties of Harold’s reign began early. The weakness of his position was revealed at the outset by the refusal of Northumbria to accept him as king, a refusal very possibly prompted by Earl Morcar, who could not be expected to feel much loyalty towards the new dynasty. By making a special journey to York, Harold succeeded in silencing the opposition for the moment, and his marriage with Ealdgyth, the sister of Earls Edwin and Morcar, which may be dated with probability to about this time,[^[109]] was very possibly intended to conciliate the great midland house. It would certainly serve as a definite assertion that Harold had no intention of fulfilling that part of his oath to William which pledged him to a marriage with the duke’s daughter, nor can we doubt that Harold realised the expediency of providing an heir to his crown with the least possible delay. At any rate he seems to have been enjoying a few weeks of tranquillity after his visit to York when he received an unmistakable intimation of the coming storm, which was none the less ominous because its immediate results were insignificant.

Tostig, the dispossessed earl of Northumbria, had spent the winter of 1065–6, as we have seen, with Baldwin of Flanders,[^[110]] a fact which is suggestive when we remember the relations between Baldwin and William of Normandy. It is evident that Tostig was spending the period of his banishment in forming schemes for his restoration, and the fact that his brother on becoming king dare not or would not recall him made him inevitably a willing tool of William’s policy. Accordingly, early in 1066 Tostig moved from Flanders into Normandy, appeared at the duke’s court, and urged him on to an invasion of England. It is quite possible that he was present at the assembly of Lillebonne; one writer goes so far as to say that the arguments of Tostig contributed largely to persuade the Norman nobility to undertake the enterprise,[^[111]] and William may have derived some little advantage from the fact that he could point to one man of high rank among the English nation as an adherent. But it would seem that Tostig was unwilling to await the development of his host’s plans, and in May he set off from the Cotentin on an expedition of his own intended to ravage the English coasts. He landed first in the Isle of Wight, where the inhabitants bought him off with money and provisions, and then sailed, ravaging the coast of Sussex and Kent, until he came to Sandwich. At Sandwich he raised a small force of sailors, but at the same time the news of his expedition was brought to his brother in London, who at once set out for the Kentish coast. Before he could reach Sandwich, however, Tostig had started northward again and finally entered the Humber with sixty ships, harrying the coast of Lindsey. Upon receiving the news Earls Edwin and Morcar, having called out the local fyrd, marched with it to the Humber and compelled Tostig to take refuge in his ships. At this point Tostig was deserted by the men of Sandwich whom he had impressed, and, his fleet being now reduced to twelve ships, he made his way to Scotland and spent the summer, we are told, with King Malcolm.[^[112]]

Tostig’s futile raid has an interest of its own in the glimpse which it gives us of the English defences just before the Norman invasion. The evidence of Domesday Book shows that an Anglo-Saxon king had some sort of naval force permanently at his disposal, and we know that Harold built and manned a number of ships to keep the Channel against his Norman rival, but, from whatever cause, the English navy in this critical year proved itself miserably ineffective.[^[113]] A mere adventurer, with no foreign aid of any consequence and no local support in England, Tostig could still spread devastation with impunity along half the English coast. The story of Tostig’s expedition reads like a revival of one of the Danish raids of the ninth century—the enemy sacks a town, the fyrd are summoned and hurry to the spot to find that the raiders have just left to plunder the nearest unprotected locality. Clearly the coast defences of England, for all the bitter experience of the Danish wars, had made no real advance since the days of Alfred, and it is not unfair to remark that this fact reflects little credit upon the statesmanship of Harold. He had himself been an exile and had made a bid for power by a piratical descent upon England very similar to the present expedition of Tostig’s. If he really possessed the power, during the last ten years of the Confessor’s reign, with which he is usually credited, it should not have been impossible for him to create a naval force strong enough to counteract such attempts for the future. The events of 1066 are an excellent illustration of the influence of sea power in history; wind and weather permitting, an invader could land an army in England at whatever time and place best suited him. As for Tostig himself, his expedition had been ignominious enough, but before the year was out he was to earn immortality by his association with the last great Scandinavian invasion of England and by the part which he is made to play in the magnificent saga of Stamfordbridge.

The summer visit of Tostig to Scotland must have been interrupted by another voyage of greater distance and followed by most momentous consequences. Very possibly he was dissatisfied with the amount of immediate support which his claims had received from William of Normandy; at all events he now made application to a prince of higher rank, more restless spirit, and still more varied experience in the art of war. Although there are chronological difficulties in the story which cannot be discussed here, there can be little real doubt that Tostig in person sailed to Norway, was received by Harold Hardrada, and incited the most warlike king in Europe to an invasion of England. As a matter of fact it is probable that Harold Hardrada, like William of Normandy, would have made his attempt even if Tostig had never come upon the scene; the passage of the English crown to a subject house, coming at a time when there was a temporary lull in the chronic warfare between the three Scandinavian powers, might remind the king of Norway that he could himself, if he chose, put forward a decent pretext for an adventure which would be certain to bring him fame and might rival the exploits of Swegen and Cnut.[^[114]] The extent of the preparations which Harold Hardrada had evidently made for his enterprise would of itself suggest that they were independent of the representations of the banished earl of Northumbria, while on the other hand Tostig plays too prominent a part in the Norwegian traditions of the expedition for us to reject his voyage to Norway as mere myth, and his presence may have had some influence in determining the objective of the invaders when once they had touched the shores of England.

After making his appeal to Harold Hardrada, Tostig returned to Scotland and began to raise a force of volunteers there on his own account. Early in September the king of Norway set sail from the Sogne Fiord near Bergen, due west to the subject earldom of the Orkneys and Shetlands, where he was joined by Paul and Erling, the two joint earls, and by a large reinforcement of the islanders.[^[115]] From the Orkneys Harold sailed on without recorded incident as far as the Tyne, where he was joined, according to agreement, by Tostig with his Scottish auxiliaries, and then the combined force made for the Yorkshire coast and began offensive operations by a harrying of Cleveland. Passing southward the invaders encountered an ineffectual resistance at Scarborough and along the coast of Holderness, but were able to round Spurn Head without any opposition from the English fleet. The Humber and the inland waters of Yorkshire lay open to Harold, and it would seem that as the Norwegian fleet sailed up the Ouse the English fleet retreated up the Wharfe, for Harold chose to disembark at Riccall, a village some five miles below the confluence of these rivers. Riccall was chosen as the headquarters of the fleet, which could easily block at this point any attempt on the part of the English vessels to break out to the open sea while Harold and his army marched straight on York. At Fulford, two miles from the city, the invaders met the fyrd of Yorkshire under Earls Edwin and Morcar, and the defeat of the local force led to the surrender of York four days afterwards. The city was not put to the sack; hostages[^[116]] were exchanged between Harold and the men of York, and it was very possibly to await the delivery of further sureties from the rest of the shire that the king moved out of his new conquest to the otherwise undistinguished village of Stamfordbridge.

On the following day King Harold of England himself arrived at York. News of what was happening in Yorkshire must have been brought to London with extraordinary rapidity, for the battles of Fulford and Stamfordbridge were fought, as men remarked at the time, within five days of each other. Harold possessed the permanent nucleus of an army in the famous body of “huscarles” who resided at his court, and with them he dashed up the great road from London to York, taking along with him so much of the local militia of the counties through which he passed as happened to fall in with his line of march. At Tadcaster, where the north road crosses the Wharfe, he found and inspected the English “fleet,” and on Monday, the 25th of September, one day after Harold Hardrada had entered the capital of Northumbria, it opened its gates to Harold of England. At this time Harold can have done scarcely more than pass through the city for the same day he covered the ten miles which separate York from Stamfordbridge and fell unexpectedly upon the Norwegian army scattered in utter unpreparedness along either bank of the Derwent. The Norwegians on the right, or York, bank of the Derwent were driven into the river by the English attack, and then occurred a strange incident of which the record, curiously enough, is only preserved in the chronicle of the distant monastery of Abingdon. It was essential for the English to get possession of the bridge which spanned the unfordable river before the Norwegians on the left bank should have time to form up in line of battle, and we are told:

“There was one of the Norwegians who withstood the Englishmen so that they could not climb over the bridge and gain the victory. Then one of the Englishmen shot with an arrow and that did nothing, and then came another under the bridge and stabbed him underneath his coat of mail, and then Harold king of the English came over the bridge and his army with him.”[^[117]]

We have no details of the struggle which must have raged along the rising ground on which the modern village of Stamfordbridge stands, nor do we know with certainty how Harold Hardrada and Tostig fell, but it is clear that the result of that day’s fighting was an unequivocal victory for the English; the men who had been left in charge of the Norwegian fleet at Riccall were willing to accept peace at Harold’s hands and were allowed to depart with their ships to Norway. Harold indeed in this great fight had proved himself a worthy inheritor of the crown of the West Saxon kings, and it was a strange destiny which ruled that the last victory in the struggle of three centuries between Englishman and Northman should fall to no descendant of Egbert or Alfred, but to an English king who was half a Northman himself by blood. But a stranger destiny was it which ruled that one week should see the overthrow of the last great invader from the north and the opening of a new era for England in the entry of the greater invader from beyond the Channel. Harold Hardrada fell at Stamfordbridge on Monday, William of Normandy landed at Pevensey on Thursday.

Penny of Harold Hardrada

CHAPTER V
THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE CONQUEST AND THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS

The spring and summer of 1066 must have been a time of restless activity on the part of William and of those who were associated with him in the preparations for the great enterprise of the autumn. The building of the fleet was being pushed forward, and volunteers from kindred states were continually arriving to be incorporated in the Norman army; this much we may infer from the fact that by August both fleet and army were ready for the expedition, but we know scarcely anything as to William’s own movements in the interval. On the fifteenth of June a council was held at Bonneville at which Lanfranc was appointed abbot of William’s new foundation of St. Stephen’s Caen, and three days later Cicely, the eldest daughter of William and Matilda, was formally dedicated to the religious life at the consecration of her mother’s house, the sister monastery of the Holy Trinity. The motives which prompted the duke and duchess to complete their religious undertakings were widely felt among the Norman baronage. The conquerors of England appear in a somewhat unaccustomed light as we read the charters by which they gave or confirmed land, each to his favoured monastery, “when Duke William was setting out across the sea.” It was fully realised that the enterprise might end in utter disaster; the prudent abbot of Marmoutier, for instance, in case of accidents, secured from Robert, the heir of Normandy, at his father’s request, a confirmation of all the grants which the latter had made to the house during his reign.[^[118]]

The temporal affairs of Normandy were also discreetly arranged at this time. Matilda was appointed regent, and was supported by a council presided over by Roger de Beaumont, a man of age and experience, and a personal friend of the duke. No doubt if William had perished in England Robert would have succeeded him, but, although he was now of sufficient age to make a voluntary confirmation of his father’s grants of land, he was clearly not old enough to undertake the government of the duchy during an interregnum. The fact that the expedition itself provided employment for the great mass of the fighting men of Normandy would promise a quiet rule for Matilda and her advisers, nor indeed do we hear of any disturbances taking place in the duchy while William was across the Channel.

Before the close of August the fleet was ready at last, and lay at the mouth of the Dive ready to set sail at any moment.[^[119]] The army also was ready for embarkation, and the only thing which was lacking to the expedition was a south wind to carry the fleet to the Sussex coast. But for six weeks at least that south wind refused to blow, and every week of delay increased William’s difficulties a hundredfold. Nothing could have been more discouraging to an army of adventurers than week after week of compulsory inaction; and the fact that William was able to keep perfect order, among a force part only of which owed direct allegiance to him as feudal lord, suggests that he possessed qualities of leadership which were not very common among the captains of his day. At more than one crisis in his life William had already shown that he could possess his soul in patience until the moment arrived at which it was possible to strike, and he must have succeeded in imparting something of this spirit to his troops in their vigil by the Dive. In the more definite work of commissariat we know that he proved himself a master; for no shortage of provisions was felt at any time during the unexpected delay, and few eleventh-century armies could have remained for a month in the same quarters without being driven to find their own means of subsistence in plunder. William’s biographer was justified in remarking on the fact that the unarmed folk of the neighbourhood could pass to and fro without trembling when they saw a body of soldiers;[^[120]] and before the task of provisioning the army by regular means had become an impossibility, a west wind served to carry the fleet to a point which offered a shorter passage across into England than that which was presented by its original station on the Dive.

Within the county of Ponthieu, which had become a member of the Norman group of vassal states when Count Guy became William’s “man” after the battle of Mortemer, the estuary of the Somme supplied an excellent natural harbour beneath the town of Saint Valery. The passage from the mouth of the Dive seems to have been accomplished without incident, and William and his forces took possession of their new quarters on the twelfth day of September. For more than a fortnight the situation did not seem to have improved in any way; the wind which was carrying Harold Hardrada down the coast of Yorkshire kept William locked in the mouth of the Somme. The weather was cold and squally and we have a contemporary description of the way in which William kept watching the weathercock on the church tower and of his joy if for a moment the gale drove it to point northward.[^[121]] The strain of suspense was now beginning to tell upon the army:

“The common soldiers, as frequently happens, began to murmur in their tents that the man must be mad to wish to conquer a foreign country, that his father had proposed to do the same and had been baffled in the same way, that it was the destiny of the family to try for things beyond their reach and to find God for their enemy.”[^[122]]

It was clearly necessary to do something to relieve the prevailing tension, and the expedient chosen was characteristic of the time; the relics of the patron saint of the town were brought with great solemnity out of the church, and the casket which contained them was exhibited to receive the prayers and offerings of the duke and his army. The result was a convincing proof of the virtue of the bones of St. Valery; without further delay the south wind blew.[^[123]]

The same day saw the embarkation of the Norman army, the work being carried through as quickly as possible in evident fear that the wind might slip round again to its former quarter. Night was falling before all was ready, and before the duke, after a final visit to the church of St. Valery, had given his last orders on the Norman shore. It was important that the fleet should be prevented from scattering in the darkness, so each vessel was ordered to carry a light, a lantern of special power adorning the masthead of the duke’s own ship. With the same object it was directed that the fleet should anchor as soon as it was clear of the estuary of the Somme, and await further orders. Through the dead of night the fleet hung outside the harbour, and it was still dark when the expedition ventured out at last into the open waters of the Channel. The great body of the ships, each of which carried a heavy load of horses in addition to its freight of men-at-arms, was inevitably outstripped by the unimpeded galley which bore William to his destiny; and when the dawn began to break, the duke found himself out of sight of the rest of the fleet, and not yet within view of the English shore. In these circumstances William cast anchor and breakfasted “as it had been in his own hall,” says one of his companions; and, under the influence of the wine with which the Mora was well supplied, his spirits rose, the prospects of his enterprise seemed golden in the morning light, and he spoke words of encouragement to his companions. And at last the sailors reported that the rest of the fleet began to come in sight; the four ships which first appeared together upon the horizon grew more and more until the man on the look-out could be made by our imaginative informant to remark that the masts of the fleet showed like a forest upon the sea.[^[124]] Then the duke weighed anchor for the last time, and the south wind still holding carried him and his fleet into Pevensey bay at nine in the morning; the day being St. Michael’s Eve—by an appropriate chance, for the archangel was highly honoured in the Norman land.

William’s landing was entirely undisputed; the good luck which, as we have noticed, waited on his expedition in its diplomatic antecedents, attended its military details also. During the summer months, Harold, making what use he could of the antiquated military system of England, had called out the fyrd, and lined the south coast with troops, which, however helpless they might be in a pitched battle with the Norman chivalry, might have brought considerable inconvenience to William, if they had been in evidence at the moment of his landing. From May to September the Sussex coast in general, Hastings and Pevensey in particular, were guarded by the rural forces of the shire.[^[125]] At last, about the time when William was moving from the Dive to St. Valery, the patience and provisions of the fyrd gave out together; the rustics had been kept away from their homes for four times the customary period of service without anything happening, and they refused to stay on guard any longer. They probably would not have made any difference to the ultimate result in any case, nor need we blame Harold for being unable to keep them together; but the fact is another illustration of the hopeless inefficiency of the old English state. And then, one week before William’s landing, Harold had gathered the whole of such professional soldiers as England contained, and had spent them in the life-and-death struggle at Stamfordbridge. Harold Hardrada had fallen, but his overthrow had gone far to exhaust the military resources of England, and it was a shattered, if victorious, army which was resting with Harold Godwinson, at York, when a fugitive from Sussex arrived to tell that William of Normandy had landed, and that the south lay at his mercy.

William’s first movements in England were very deliberate. His immediate care was to fortify his position at Pevensey and so protect his fleet against surprise. At Pevensey, as afterwards at Lincoln, a line of Roman walling could be turned to account in the construction of a castle,[^[126]] which was run up in the course of the day; and having thus, like his Scandinavian ancestors, secured for himself a base of operations if events turned out ill, William marched to Hastings, which was to be his base of operations for the rest of the campaign.[^[127]] At Hastings, therefore, another castle was thrown up, the building, like nearly all the castles built during the twenty years which followed the Conquest, consisting merely of a mound, with wooden defences on the top and a ditch and one or more outer works below. Hastings is a point of departure for many roads; a fact which no doubt very largely accounts for William’s choice of the town as his headquarters; for it could easily be provisioned by supplies from the neighbouring country, and it lay very conveniently as a base for an attack on London.

The men of east Sussex were not long before they felt the pressure of the invading army. Most of the villages in the neighbourhood of Hastings are recorded in Domesday to have been “waste” at some period between the death of King Edward and 1066, and the connection between these signs of ravage and William’s camp at Hastings is sufficiently obvious. But it is not probable that William attempted any systematic harrying of this district such as that which three years afterwards he carried out with grim success in the country beyond the Humber; the Sussex villages, as a rule, had quite recovered their former prosperity by the date of the great survey. The passage of foraging parties over the land demanding provisions, which would be none too readily granted, and the other incidents of a medieval war of invasion, are enough to account for depreciation of the kind recorded. Harold himself, as he drew towards Hastings, left traces of his march in similar cases of temporary devastation, and there is no reason to suppose that William undertook a deliberate harrying of Sussex in order to provoke Harold to a general engagement.[^[128]]

THE BUILDING OF HASTINGS CASTLE FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

William, indeed, as yet can hardly have known the result of Stamfordbridge with any degree of certainty. Rumours of the great battle in the north would no doubt gradually filter down into Sussex during the week following the event, but for some days after his arrival at Hastings William cannot have ignored the possibility that it might be a Norwegian host which would ultimately appear upon the edge of the downs. Definite news, however, at some unspecified date, was brought to William by a message from an unexpected quarter.[^[129]] Robert, the son of Wymarc, a Breton knight, who in some unknown way could claim kindred with both William and Edward, had been “staller” or master of the horse to the latter, and had stood together with Harold and Stigand by the king’s deathbed. Whether he had actually been present at the battle of Stamfordbridge is uncertain; but shortly after the fight he sent a messenger to William to advise a speedy withdrawal to Normandy before something worse happened to him. The message ran that Harold had destroyed the huge forces of the king of Norway, himself the bravest man in the world, and that now, inspired by victory, he was turning upon the duke with a great and enthusiastic army. Rather unwisely Robert went on to add that the Normans were no match for the English, either in numbers or bravery, and that William, who had always shown himself discreet hitherto, would do well to retire at once, or at all events to keep within his fortifications and avoid a battle in the open field. To this well-meaning person William replied that his one desire was to come to blows with Harold, that although Robert’s advice might have been better expressed yet he thanked him for it, and that if he had with him but ten thousand instead of sixty thousand men[^[130]] he would never retire without wreaking vengeance on his enemy. It is not unlikely that Robert’s message was really inspired by Harold himself, and from one or two turns of expression in William’s reply we may perhaps gather that he suspected as much; although it might be thought that Harold, who had seen something of his rival in past years, cannot have had much hope of getting rid of him by mere intimidation. However this may be, it is interesting to find Robert, a prominent member of a class which has suffered much abuse because of an assumed lack of patriotism towards its adopted country, playing a part which so admirably saves his duty to his king and his kinsman alike.

We have two poetical accounts of the way in which the news of William’s landing was brought to Harold at York. Wace, the Norman poet of the twelfth century, tells how a Sussex “chevalier” heard the shouting of the “peasants and villeins” as the fleet drew in to the shore, and how, attracted by the noise, he came out, hid behind a hill and lay there until the work of disembarkation was over and the castle at Pevensey thrown up; then riding off with lance and sword, night and day, to York, to tell the king the news of what he had seen.[^[131]] Guy, bishop of Amiens, who wrote within a short time of the event, makes the news of the Norman arrival be borne by a rustic from Hastings, not Pevensey; and the details which are told to Harold relate to the devastation caused by the invaders near Hastings, not to the landing itself.[^[132]] Perhaps these two stories are not quite incompatible with each other; but we need not attempt to reconcile them here, in view of the undoubted fact that Harold was informed of William’s landing within some three days of the event.

At this crisis Harold acted with astonishing energy. Taking with him his faithful huscarles, a body sadly thinned by the battle of a few days before, he hurried southwards by way of Tadcaster, Lincoln, Stamford, and Huntingdon, the same route which in the reverse direction he had followed in the previous week; now as then drawing into his force the fyrd of the shires through which he passed. Edwin and Morcar were directed to raise the levies of their respective earldoms, and in their expected absence the government of the north was entrusted to Marleswegen, the sheriff of Lincolnshire,[^[133]] an Englishman who remains little more than a name in the narrative of the Conquest, but who, if Harold had triumphed at Hastings might probably have played an important part in the history of the following years. How far Harold really believed in the fidelity of the northern earls is uncertain; they had shown no overt signs of disaffection during the last months since he had married their sister. On the other hand, considering the long-standing rivalry between his house and theirs, and their probable share in the Northumbrian difficulties at the beginning of his reign, Harold was perhaps not altogether surprised that Edwin and Morcar, in the words of Florence of Worcester, “withdrew themselves and their men from the conflict.” With the best intentions they would have found it difficult to join him in time for the battle; it would not have been easy for them to raise the fyrd from all the shires between the Humber and the Tweed on the one part and between the fens and the Severn on the other, and to bring the troops to London within the five days which Harold spent there. For on October 11th,[^[134]] a fortnight after the battle of Stamfordbridge, Harold set out from London on his last march towards the Sussex downs.

It is an interesting, but not very profitable, speculation how far Harold was justified in staking his all upon the result of a single battle with the invader. With our knowledge of what happened it is natural to condemn him; he was condemned by the general opinion of the historians of the next generation, and very possibly their sentence is right. On the other hand we cannot but feel that we know very little of the real facts of the case; even the essential question of the relative numbers of the English and Norman armies cannot be answered with any degree of accuracy. It may be argued with much plausibility that the wisest course for Harold would have been to let William work his will upon the unfortunate inhabitants of Sussex, trusting to time and the national feeling likely to be aroused by the ravages of an invader to bring an overwhelming superiority in numbers over to his side. This, we may be sure, would have been the course taken by William himself in such a case, but Harold was probably by nature incapable of playing a waiting game of this kind. His ability, so far as we can tell, lay in sudden assaults and surprises; the more deliberate processes of generalship were foreign to his temperament. And then there remains the fact that the loyalty of Mercia and Northumbria was at least doubtful; delay on Harold’s part might only mean that Edwin and Morcar with their forces would have time to come over effectively to William’s side, while another great victory so soon after Stamfordbridge would have placed Harold in a position from which, for the time being, he could defy all rivals. At any rate he took the step, and paid the penalty of failure.

But, whatever we may think of the general wisdom of Harold’s strategy, it is impossible to deny that he showed a general’s appreciation of the tactical possibilities of the ground on which he chose to put the fate of England to the test. After a forced march through the thick woods which at that time covered the Sussex downs, the king halted his army on a barren ridge of ground seven miles north-east of the town of Hastings. It is plain from all the narratives of the forthcoming encounter that the ridge in question was quite unoccupied at the time of the battle; and when the English chroniclers wish to describe its site they can only tell us that Harold and William came together “by the hoar apple-tree.”[^[135]] The strength of the position was determined, not so much by the general elevation of the ground, which at no point reaches a greater height than 300 feet above sea level, as by the fact that it was surrounded by country very hilly and much broken by streams, and that its physical features lent natural support to the disposition of an army which relied for success on its capacity for stolid resistance. The position was undoubtedly chosen by Harold with the object of forcing his enemy to an immediate battle; for William could not move either east or west from Hastings without exposing his base to an English attack; and Harold, who knew that the main strength of a Norman army lay in its troops of mailed horsemen, had been careful to offer battle on a site in which the cavalry arm would be placed by the ground at a natural disadvantage.[^[136]]

From the nature of the case it has come about that we possess very little information either as to the numbers of the English army or as to the details of its formation on the day of battle. The Norman writers, on whom we are compelled to rely, have naturally exaggerated the former, nor did any survivor from the English army describe the order of its battle array to the chroniclers of Worcester or Peterborough. In recent studies of the great battle there is manifested a strong unwillingness to allow to either the English or the Norman host more than a small proportion of the numbers which used to be assigned to it thirty years ago.[^[137]] It is very improbable that William led more than 6000 men into action on October 15, 1066, and there is good reason for doubting whether the knightly portion of his army can have exceeded 5000. Small as this last number may appear, every man included in it was an efficient combatant; but the English force was largely composed of rustics impressed from the shires through which Harold had rushed on his great march from York to London after the battle of Stamfordbridge, and even so, it is far from certain that the native force was materially stronger than the army of invasion. With regard to its distribution, we know that the English line of battle seemed convex to the Normans on their approach from the south-east,[^[138]] and it is probable that it ran for some 800 yards along the hill of battle, the flanks being thrown well back so as to rest upon the steep bank which bounds the ridge towards the north. It is certain that the English troops were drawn up in extremely close order, and it is a natural assumption that Harold would place the kernel of his army, the huscarles who had survived Stamfordbridge, in the front rank; stationing his inferior troops in the rear so as to support the huscarles in resisting the impact of the Norman cavalry.[^[139]] On the highest point of the whole line, a spot now marked by the high altar of the Abbey church of Battle, Harold planted his standard; and it was round the standard that the fight was most stoutly contested, and that, after seven hours of struggle, the king at last fell.

In speaking of the generalship displayed by Harold’s rival on this occasion, it is important to beware of the associations aroused by modern military terminology. At least if we speak of him as a strategist or tactician, we should be careful to remember that strategy and tactics themselves had attained to but a rudimentary stage of development in Northern Europe in the eleventh century. Recent studies of the battle of Hastings, the one fight of the period in regard to which we possess a considerable amount of detailed information, have brought out the fact that William’s host was far too stiff and unwieldy a body to perform the complicated evolutions by which it used to be assumed that the day was won.[^[140]] We should be committing a grave error if we were to suppose that the Norman army possessed that mobility and capacity for concerted action among its several divisions which belonged to the forces led by Turenne or Marlborough. Feudal battles were determined more by the event of simple collisions of large masses of men than by their manœuvres when in the field: the skill of a great feudal captain lay chiefly in his ability to choose his ground so as to give his side the preliminary advantage in the shock of battle; apart from the example of his personal valour he had but little influence upon the subsequent fortunes of the day. On the present occasion William was compelled to fight on the ground of his opponent’s choice; and this initial disadvantage cost the Norman leader an indefinite number of his best troops, and, even after the issue of the battle had been decided, protracted the English resistance until nightfall had put an end to the struggle. On the other hand, there was one fatal weakness in the English host which must have been recognised by the other side already before the fight had begun. The fact that Harold, for all effective purposes, was totally unprovided with either archers or cavalry exposed his army to a method of attack which he was quite unable to parry, and the arrangement of the Norman line of battle shows that William from the first relied for success on this advantage. The battle of Hastings was won by the combination of archery and cavalry against infantry whose one chance of success lay in the possibility that it might keep its formation unbroken until the strength of the offensive had been exhausted.[^[141]]

THE DEATH OF HAROLD
(FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY)]

In the early morning of the 14th of October the Norman army moved out of Hastings and advanced across the seven miles of broken country which lay between the English army and the sea. The march must have been a toilsome business, and the rapidity with which it was accomplished is remarkable.[^[142]] At the point marked by the modern village of Telham, the road from Hastings to Battle passes over a hill which rises to some 350 feet above sea-level, and commands a view of the English position. On the far side of this hill it is probable that William halted, waited for his scattered troops to come together, and then drew them out in order of battle. In his first line he placed his light-armed infantry, who probably formed a very inconsiderable portion of his army, and were unprovided with defensive harness. To these inferior troops succeeded infantry of a higher class, protected by armour, but, like the light-armed skirmishers in the front rank, armed only with bows and arrows and slings. The function of the infantry in the coming encounter was to harass the English with their missiles and tempt them to break their ranks. Lastly came the main body of the Norman army, the squadrons of cavalry, on whom it rested to attack the English line after it had been shaken by the missiles of the previous ranks.[^[143]] The whole army was further arranged in three great divisions, the native Normans composing the centre, the Bretons, under the command of Alan, son of Count Éon of Penthievre, forming the left wing, and the French volunteers the right.[^[144]] In the centre of the whole line of advance, the Norman counterpart of the English standard, there was borne the consecrated banner which William had received from the pope.[^[145]]

So quickly had the march from Hastings been made that the actual fighting was opened at about nine in the morning[^[146]] by an advance of the Norman foot. Galled by a heavy fire from the archers, which could only be answered very ineffectively by the spears and stones which were almost the sole missile weapons of the English, numbers of the native troops broke away from their line, in defiance of the strict orders issued by Harold to the effect that no man should leave his post. In the meantime, the Norman cavalry had been steadily making its way to the front in order to take immediate advantage of the disorder caused in the English ranks by the fire of the archers. But the knights could only move their horses slowly up the hill; the solidity of the English formation had not been seriously affected as yet, and the cavalry were compelled to attack an unbroken line. The result was disaster. The Breton auxiliaries on the left fell back, the confusion spread rapidly, and the English, seizing their advantage, sallied forth and drove the entire Norman line before them in headlong flight down the hill.[^[147]] Fortunately William had not joined in this first attack in person, and when in their panic the Normans believed that their leader had fallen, they were soon recalled to their senses by the sight of the duke with bared head, laying about him with his spear, and shouting words of reproof and encouragement.[^[148]] Mounted as they were, the flying knights could have but little difficulty in outstripping their pursuers, but, if we may trust the Bayeux tapestry, a number of English and Normans perished together in the course of the flight, by falling into a deep depression in the ground situated somewhere between the base of the hill and the duke’s post. According to the same authority, the bishop of Bayeux did good service at this moment, restoring order among the baggage-carriers and camp-followers, who were apparently becoming infected with the panic which had seized their masters.[^[149]] Between the duke and his brother, the flight was checked, and then the knights, eager to avenge their disgrace, rallied, turned, and cut off their pursuers from their comrades on the hill, making a wholesale slaughter of them.[^[150]] Mainly through William’s self-possession the Norman rout had ended after all in a distinct success gained for his side.

As soon as the cavalry had re-formed, the attack on the English position was resumed; this time under the immediate leadership of the duke. The struggle at the foot of the hill had given its defenders time to close their ranks, and the English continued to present an impenetrable front to the Norman cavalry. All along the line a desperate struggle raged for some hours, but of its details no tale can be told, although it is probable that it was at this point in the battle that Gyrth and Leofwine, Harold’s brothers, fell, and there is good reason for believing that the former was struck down by the hand of the duke himself. William, indeed, in all our authorities is represented as the life and soul of the attack, “more often calling to his men to come on than bidding them advance” says William of Poitiers; he had three horses killed under him before the day was over, and he did all that might be done by a feudal captain to keep his troops together and to inspire them by his example. But notwithstanding his exertions it is evident that the English were more than holding their own,[^[151]] and a second repulse suffered thus late in the day by the Norman cavalry would almost certainly have passed into a rout of the whole army. At this crisis it occurred to some cunning brain, whether that of the duke or another, that it might be possible by feigning flight to tempt the English troops to break their formation, and then, by turning on suitable ground, to repeat the success which had ended the real flight in the forenoon. The movement was easily carried out; a body of Normans rode away, and a crowd of Englishmen, regardless of everything except the relief from the immediate strain of keeping their ranks, hurled themselves down the hill shouting curses and cries of victory. No discipline could have been kept under the circumstances, and when the galloping knights suddenly spread out their line, wheeled around their horses, and surrounded the disordered mob of their pursuers the latter were ridden down and cut to pieces by scores.[^[152]]

FOSSE DISASTER, BATTLE OF HASTINGS
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

It is, of course, impossible to estimate the actual extent of the loss which the English sustained in the episode of the feigned flight, but there can be little doubt that its success marks the turning-point in the fortune of the day. No incident in the great battle made a deeper impression upon the historians who have described it for us, and the tale of the feigned flight is told in different narratives with great variety of circumstance and detail. But from the writers who lived nearest to the time we may infer with tolerable certainty that the manœuvre in question was a sudden expedient, devised and acted upon without previous organisation, and also that it was a simple, not a combined movement. The whole business of decoying the English from the hill, turning upon, and then surrounding them, was the work of one and the same body of knights. On the other hand, it is probably incorrect to speak of the feigned flight in the singular, for our best authority distinctly asserts that the same stratagem was used twice[^[153]]; fighting was going on along a front of at least half a mile in length, and different sections of the Norman army may very well have carried out the movement at different times, and in complete independence of each other. However this may be, the effect of the manœuvre was soon apparent. The English line, though shrunken in numbers, closed its ranks and kept its formation, wedged together so tightly that the wounded could not fall behind to the rear, nor even the dead bodies drop to the ground. But the superior endurance of the Norman troops was beginning to tell; the English were rapidly losing heart,[^[154]] and the consummation of William’s victory only waited for the destruction of King Harold, and of the warriors who fought with him round the standard.

The attack which finally beat down the resistance of the English line seems to have been delivered from some point to the south-east of the hill.[^[155]] The battle had already continued for seven or eight hours, and twilight was beginning to fall,[^[156]] but its approach could only remind the shaken remnant of the native host that the day was lost, and the end of the great fight was now very near. It was in the last confused struggle which raged round the standard in the fading light that Harold met his death; and then his companions, tired out and hopeless of reinforcement, yielded the ground they had defended for so long, and broke away to the north-west along the neck of land which connects the hill of battle with the higher ridges of the downs beyond it. The victors followed in hot pursuit; but a strange chance gave to Harold, in the very hour of his death, a signal revenge over the men at whose hands he had just fallen. A little to the west of the original position of the English army one of the head-waters of the Asten had cut a deep ravine, of which the eastern face was so steep as to be a veritable trap for any incautious horsemen who might attempt to ride down it. In the gathering darkness knight after knight, galloping after the English fugitives in secure ignorance of the ground, crashed down into this gully; and the name Malfosse, borne throughout the Middle Ages by the ravine in question, bears witness to the extent of the disaster which the victorious army suffered at this point.[^[157]] Harold, after he had lost life and kingdom, was still justified of the ground which he had chosen as the place of battle.

Late in the night William returned to the battlefield and pitched his tent there. There could be no doubt that he had gained an unequivocal victory; his rival was dead, the native army annihilated; he could well afford to give his troops the rest they needed. The early part of the following day was spent in the burial of the Norman dead; the work being carried out under the duke’s immediate care. The English folk of the neighbourhood soon came in numbers to the battlefield and begged for the bodies of their fallen kinsfolk, which they were allowed to carry away for burial; but the unclaimed corpses were left strewn about the hill. Before long the bodies of Harold, Gyrth and Leofwine were found lying close together; but Harold’s corpse had been horribly mangled, and, according to the later romantic story, it was only identified by means of certain marks upon the body which were known and recognised by the dead man’s mistress, Edith the Swan-necked. Towards the close of the morrow of the battle, William returned to his castle at Hastings, bearing Harold’s body with him for burial upon the shore in unconsecrated ground as befitted an excommunicate, and an urgent message from Gytha, Godwine’s widow, offering for her son’s body its weight in gold, did nothing to shake his purpose.[^[158]] With characteristic irony William remarked that it was but fitting that Harold in death should be appointed guardian of the shore and sea, which he had tried to defend in life; and the dead king’s body, wrapped in a purple robe, was laid out of sight somewhere among the rocks along the shore of Hastings bay. Later tradition indeed asserted that Harold before long was translated from this unhallowed grave to a tomb in the minster of the Holy Cross at Waltham, which he had founded three years before[^[159]]; but the authority on which this story depends is none of the best, and, for all that we really know to the contrary, the last native king of England is still the guardian of the Sussex shore.

Harold, above all kings in English history with the possible exceptions of Richard III. and Charles I., was happy in the circumstances of his death. He gained thereby an immediate release from the performance of an impossible task, and he was enabled to redeem the personal ambitions which governed his past life by associating them in the moment of his fall with the cause of the national independence of England. It has been possible for historians to regret the outcome of the battle of Hastings only because it overthrew Harold before he could prove the hopelessness of the position in which he had placed himself. What chance had he, a man of uncertain ancestry and questionable antecedents, of completing the work which had overcome every king before him: the work of reconciling the antagonism of north to south, of making the royal word supreme in the royal council, of making the provincial nobility of England and its dependents the subjects of the king and of the king only? It may well be that such a task would have proved beyond the power of any native king, though descended from the immemorial line of Cerdic; how could it be completed by an ambitious earl, invested indeed with the royal authority, but crippled in its exercise by the bitter rivalry of men who had formerly been his fellow-subjects; whose birth was more noble, whose wealth was scarcely less, who, in opposition to his rule, could rely upon endless reserves of local patriotism, the one source of political strength which the land contained? To genius, indeed, all things are possible, but to ascribe genius to this commonplace, middle-aged earl would be to do sheer violence to the meaning of words. Harold will always hold a noble place in the record of English history; but he owes that place solely to the events of his last month of life, when the terrible necessity of straining every faculty he possessed in the support of his trembling throne roused in him a quickness of perception and a rapidity of action which his uneventful career as earl of Wessex could never have called into being. Harold was undoubtedly the best captain that England had seen since the death of Edmund Ironside, just fifty years before the battle of Hastings; but the work which Harold had undertaken would have called for quite other powers than those which he revealed so unexpectedly on the eve of his death. William the Conqueror, endowed as he was by nature with the faculties of a great ruler to an extent perhaps without parallel in English history; superior by the fact that he came in by conquest to all the local jealousies which distracted Anglo-Saxon politics; and with unique opportunities of recasting the social and tenurial features of English life; could only create a strong and uniform government in England after three years of almost incessant war, the reduction of a third of England to a wilderness, and the remodelling in principle of the whole fabric of the English administration, civil and military. When it is remembered that the resistance to William was made essentially on grounds not of national feeling, but of local particularism, and that these forces would undoubtedly have conspired against Harold as they afterwards conspired against his rival, we can only conclude that fate was kind which slew Harold in the heat of battle in a noble cause, instead of condemning him to witness the disintegration of his kingdom, in virtual impotence, varied only by spasmodic outbreaks of barren civil war.

Penny of Harold II.

CHAPTER VI
FROM HASTINGS TO YORK

Catastrophic as the battle of Hastings seems to us now, in view of the later history, its decisive character was not recognised at once by the national party. The very incoherence of the Anglo-Saxon polity brought a specious advantage to the national cause, in that the defeat of one part of the nation by an invader left the rest of the country comparatively unaffected by the fact. The wars of Edmund Ironside and Cnut, fifty years before, show us groups of shires one after the other making isolated attempts to check the progress of the enemy, and few men could already have realised that the advent of William of Normandy meant the introduction of new processes of warfare which would render hopeless the casual methods of Anglo-Saxon generalship. Neither side, in fact, understood the other. William, on his part expecting that the total overthrow of the English king with his army would imply the immediate submission of the whole land, took up his quarters at Hastings on the day after the battle to receive the homage of all those Englishmen who might come in person to accept him as their lord. The passage of five days without a single surrender taught him that the fruits of victory would not fall into his hands without further shaking, and meanwhile the English nobility began to form plans for a continued resistance to his pretensions in the name of another national king.

Who that king should be was the first question which demanded settlement. There was no hope of preserving the English crown in the house of Godwine: the events of the past three weeks had been fatal to all the surviving sons of the old earl, with the exception of Wulfnoth the youngest, and he was most likely a prisoner or hostage in Normandy.[^[160]] Harold’s one legitimate son was most probably as yet unborn; he had at least three illegitimate sons of sufficient age, but their candidature, if any one had suggested it, would certainly have been inacceptable to the churchmen on whom it rested to give ultimate sanction to any choice which might be made. Two alternatives remained: either a return might be made to the old West Saxon line in the person of Edgar the Etheling, or a new dynasty might be started again by the election of Edwin or Morcar. The one advantage which the former possessed, now as earlier in the year, was the fact that his election would not outrage the local particularism of any part of the country; it might not be impossible for Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria to unite round him in a common cause. Nor was it unnatural that in this hour of crushing disaster men’s minds should involuntarily turn to the last male heir of their ancient kings. Apart from these considerations, there was something to be said in favour of the choice of one of the northern earls. It must have been clear that Mercia and Northumbria would have to bear the brunt of any resistance which might subsequently be made to the invader, whose troops were already occupying the eastern shires of the earldom of Wessex, and who would be certain before long to strike a blow at London itself. But the success of Harold’s reign had not been such as to invite a repetition of the experiment of his election. Edgar the Etheling was chosen king, and the two brother earls withdrew to Northumbria, imagining in their own minds, says William of Malmesbury, that William would never come thither.[^[161]]

This motive gives an interest to their withdrawal which is lost if we regard it as a mere act of treachery to the national cause. There can be little doubt that what Edwin and Morcar intended was a partition of the kingdom between themselves and William, and it is at least questionable whether such a plan had not a better prospect of success than an attempt to recover the whole land for a king who had no personal qualities of leadership, and who could never hope to attach to himself any of that local sentiment in which lay the only real strength of the national party. The idea of a divided kingdom was by no means chimerical. Old men still living could remember the partition made by the treaty of Alney between Edmund Ironside and Cnut, and it was not a sign of utter folly for any man to suppose, within a week of the battle of Hastings, that William, having settled his score with Harold, might content himself with his rival’s patrimonial earldom of Wessex, leaving the north of England to its existing rulers. No one at this date could be expected to understand the extent to which William’s political ideas differed from those of Cnut; nor need we suppose that Edwin and Morcar were mistaken as to the reality, though they may have overestimated the military value, of the feeling for local independence in their two great earldoms. In the case of Northumbria, indeed, even after William’s presence had been felt in every part of the land, so acute an observer as Archbishop Lanfranc insisted on the subordination of the see of York to that of Canterbury on the ground that an independent archbishop of York might canonically consecrate an independent king of the Northumbrians.[^[162]] What was lacking to the plan was not local separatism, but the skill and consistency of purpose which alone could turn it to account. Neither the ignominious failure of Edwin and Morcar, on the one hand, nor the grandiose phrases of chancery clerks about the “Empire of Britain,” on the other, should blind us to the fact that England was united only in name until the strong rule of its Norman lords had made the king’s word as truly law in Yorkshire as in Middlesex.

While the English leaders were disposing of their crown William was pursuing his deliberate course towards London by a route roughly parallel with the coast of Kent and Sussex. His delay at Hastings had not been time wasted; it allowed his troops to recover from the strain and excitement of the great battle, and it gave him the opportunity of receiving badly needed reinforcements from Normandy. On the 20th of October, six days after the battle, the second stage of the conquest began; William, with the main body of his army, moved out of Hastings, leaving a garrison in the newly built castle, and marched across the border of Kent to Romney. The men of the latter place had cut off a body of Norman soldiers who had landed there by mistake before the battle of Hastings; and the most famous sentence written by the Conqueror’s first biographer relates how William at Romney “took what vengeance he would for the death of his men.”[^[163]] Having thus suggested by example the impolicy of resistance, a march of fifteen miles between the Kentish downs and the sea brought William to the greatest port and strongest fortress in south England, the harbour and castle of Dover. The foundation of the castle had probably been the work of Harold while earl of Wessex, and, standing on the very edge of the famous cliffs overhanging the sea, the fortress occupied a site which to Englishmen seemed impregnable, and which was regarded as very formidable by the Norman witnesses of this campaign.[^[164]] The castle was packed with fugitives from the surrounding country, but its garrison did not wait for a formal demand for its surrender. Very probably impressed by what had happened on the previous day at Romney, they met William half way with the keys of the castle, and the surrender was duly completed when the army arrived at Dover. It was William’s interest and intention to treat a town which had submitted so readily as lightly as possible, but the soldiers, possibly suspecting that the booty of the rich seaport was to be withheld from them, got out of hand for once, and the town was set on fire. William attempted to make good the damage to the citizens, but found it impossible to punish the offenders as he wished, and ended by expelling a number of Englishmen from their houses, and placing members of his army in their stead.[^[165]] Eight days were spent at Dover, during which the fortifications of the castle were brought up to an improved standard, and then William set out again “thoroughly to crush those whom he had conquered.” But before his departure he appointed the castle as a hospital for the invalided soldiers; for dysentery, which was set down at the time to over-indulgence in fresh meat and strange water, had played havoc with the army.[^[166]]

With the surrender of Dover William’s communications with Normandy were firmly secured, and he now struck out directly towards his destined capital, along the Roman road which then, as at every period of English history, formed the main line of communication between London and the Kentish ports. Canterbury was the first place of importance on the way, and its citizens followed the prudent example of the men of Dover. Before William had gone far from Dover, the Canterbury men sent messengers who swore fealty to him, and gave hostages, and—an act which was a more unequivocal recognition of his title to the crown—brought him the customary payment due yearly from the city to the king. From this point, indeed, William had little reason to complain of the paucity of surrenders; the Kentishmen, we are told, crowded into his camp and did homage “like flies settling on a wound.”[^[167]] But the even course of his success was suddenly interrupted. On the last day of October, he took up his quarters at a place vaguely described by William of Poitiers as the “Broken Tower,” and was there seized by a violent illness, which kept him for an entire month incapable of moving from the neighbourhood of Canterbury. But, if we can trust the chronology of our authorities, it was during this enforced delay that William received the submission of the capital of Wessex. Winchester at this time had fallen somewhat from its high estate under the West Saxon kings; along with certain other towns it had been given by Edward the Confessor to his wife Eadgyth as part of her marriage settlement, and it was now little more than the residence of the dowager queen. On this account, we are told that William thought it would be unbecoming in him to march and take the town by force and arms, so he contented himself with a polite request for fealty and “tribute.” Eadgyth complacently enough agreed, took counsel with the leading citizens, and added her gifts to those which were brought to William on behalf of the city.[^[168]] This ready submission was a fact of considerable importance. Winchester lay off the track of an invader whose objective was London, and apart from his illness William could scarcely have afforded to part with a detachment of his small army sufficiently large to make certain the capture of the town. Yet the old capital was a most ancient and honourable city, containing the hall of the Saxon kings, in which probably were deposited the royal treasure and regalia; and its surrender with the ostentatious approval of King Edward’s widow was a useful recognition of William’s claim to be the true heir of the Saxon dynasty. In his dealings with Winchester the Conqueror’s example was followed by William Rufus, Henry I., and Stephen, though the paramount necessity for them of seizing the royal hoard at the critical moment of their disputed successions made them each visit the royal city in person.[^[169]]

On his recovery, at or near the beginning of December, William resumed his advance on London. Doubtless Rochester made a peaceful surrender, but we have no information as to this, nor as to any further details of the long march until it brought the Conqueror within striking distance of London. London, it is plain, was prepared for resistance; and the narrow passage of the bridge, the only means of crossing the river at this point, made the city virtually impregnable from the south. William was not the man to waste valuable troops in a series of hopeless assaults when a less expensive method might prevail, and on the present occasion he merely sent out a body of five hundred knights to reconnoitre. A detachment of the English was tempted thereby to make a sally, but was driven back across the bridge with heavy loss, Southwark was burned to the ground,[^[170]] and William proceeded to repeat the plan which had proved so successful in Maine three years before. Abandoning all attempt to take the city by storm, he struck off on a great loop to the west, and his passage can be traced clearly enough in Domesday Book by the devastation from which a great part of Surrey and Berkshire had not fully recovered twenty years afterwards. The Thames was crossed at last at Wallingford, and it was there that William received the submission of the first Englishman of high rank who realised that the national cause was doomed. Stigand, the schismatic archbishop of Canterbury, did homage and swore fealty, explicitly renouncing his allegiance to Edgar the Etheling, in whose ill-starred election he had played a leading part.[^[171]] The weakness of Stigand’s canonical position, which was certain to be called in question if William should ever be firmly seated on the throne, made it advisable for him to make a bid for favour by an exceptionally early submission, and it was no less William’s policy graciously to accept the homage of the man who was at least the nominal head of the church in England. Probably neither party was under any misapprehension as to the other’s motives; but in being suffered to enjoy his pluralities and appropriated church lands for three years longer Stigand was not unrewarded for his abandonment of the national cause at the critical moment.

The exact time and place at which the remaining English leaders gave in their allegiance are rather uncertain. There is some reason, in the distribution of the lands which Domesday implies to have undergone deliberate ravage about this time, to suppose that, even when William was on the London side of the Thames, he did not march directly on the city, but continued to hold a north-easterly course, not turning southwards until he had spread destruction across mid-Buckinghamshire and south-west Bedfordshire. The next distinct episode in the process of conquest occurred at a place called by the Worcester Chronicle “Beorcham,” where allegiance was sworn to William on a scale which proved that now at last his deliberate policy had done its intended work, and that the party of his rival had fallen to pieces without daring to contest the verdict given at Hastings in the open field. Edgar the king-elect, and Archbishop Ealdred of York, with the bishops of Worcester and Hereford, and a number of the more important citizens of London “with many others met him [William], gave hostages, made their submission, and swore fealty to him.” And William of Poitiers tells us that when the army had just come in sight of London the bishop and other magnates came out, surrendered the city, and begged William to assume the crown, saying that they were accustomed to obey a king, and that they wished to have a king for their lord. One is naturally tempted to combine these two episodes, but this can only be done by abandoning the old identification of “Beorcham” with Great Berkhampstead, thirty miles from London, and by assuming the surrender to have taken place when the army appeared on the edge of the Hertfordshire Chilterns overlooking the Thames Valley, fifteen miles away, from the high ground of Little Berkhampstead near Hertford.[^[172]]

Whatever the exact place at which the offer of the crown was made to William, it was straightway submitted by him to the consideration of the chiefs of his army. Two questions were laid before them: whether it was wise for William to allow himself to be crowned with his kingdom still in a state of distraction, and—this last rather a matter of personal feeling than of policy—whether he should not wait until his wife could be crowned along with him. Apart from these considerations, the assumption of the English crown was a step which concerned William’s own Normans scarcely less intimately than his future English subjects. The transformation of the duke of the Normans into the king of the English was a process which possessed a vital interest for all those Normans who were to become members of the English state, and William could not well do less than consult them on the eve of such a unique event. As to the ultimate assumption of the crown by William, no two opinions were possible: Hamon, viscount of Thouars, an Aquitanian volunteer of distinction, in voicing the sentiments of the army, began by remarking that this was the one object of the enterprise; but he went on to advocate a speedy coronation on the ground that were William once crowned king resistance to him would be less likely undertaken and more easily put down. With quite unintentional irony he added that the wisest and most noble men of England would surely never have chosen William for their king, unless they had seen in him a suitable ruler and one under whom their own possessions and honours would probably be increased. To guard against any wavering on the part of these “prudentissimi et optimi viri,” William immediately sent on a detachment to take possession of London and to build a castle in the city, while he himself, during the few days which had to pass before the Christmas feast for which he had fixed his coronation, devoted himself to sport in the wooded country of south Hertfordshire.[^[173]]

Of the deliberations within London which led to this unconditional surrender on the part of the national leaders, we know little with any certainty, but it is not improbable that at some stage in his great march William had entered into negotiations with some of the chief men in the etheling’s party. Our most strictly contemporary account of these events[^[174]] makes the final submission the result of a series of messages exchanged between the duke and a certain “Esegar” the Staller, on whom as sheriff of London and Middlesex fell the burden of providing for the defence of the city. We are given to understand that William sent privately to “Esegar” asking that he should be recognised as king and promising to be guided in all things by the latter’s advice. On receiving the message Esegar decided, rather unwisely, as the event proved, to try and deceive William; so he called an assembly of the eldest citizens and, laying the duke’s proposal before them, suggested that he should pretend to agree with it and thus gain time by making a false submission. We are not told the exact words of the reply which was actually sent, but we are informed that William saw through the plan and contrived to impress the messenger with his own greatness and the certain futility of all resistance to him to such an extent that the messenger on his return, by simply relating his experiences, induced the men of London to abandon the etheling’s cause straightway. The tale reads rather like an improved version of some simpler negotiations, but that is no reason for its complete rejection, and we may not unreasonably believe that, in addition to intimidating the city by his ravages in the open country, William tried to accelerate matters by tampering with some at least of those who were holding his future capital against him.

On Christmas day William was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Ealdred of York, a clear intimation that Stigand’s opportunist submission would not avail to restore to him all the prerogatives of the primacy. The ceremony was conducted with due regard, as it would seem, to all the observances which had usually attended the hallowing of the Anglo-Saxon kings, only on the present occasion it was necessary to ask the assembled people in French as well as in English whether they would accept William as their king. The archbishop of York put the question in English, Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, that in French, and the men of both races who were present in the Abbey gave a vociferous assent. Unfortunately the uproar within the church was misunderstood by the guard of Norman horsemen who were stationed outside, and they, imagining that the new subjects of their duke were trying to cut him down before the altar, sought to relieve his immediate danger by setting fire to the wooden buildings around,[^[175]] and so creating a diversion. In this they were quite successful; amid indescribable confusion the congregation rushed headlong out of the church, some to save their own property, and some to take advantage of so exceptional an opportunity of unimpeded plunder. The duke and the officiating clergy were left almost alone; and in the deserted abbey William, quivering with excitement,[^[176]] became by the ritual of unction and coronation the full and lawful successor of Alfred and Athelstan. But before the crown was placed upon his head the Conqueror swore in ancient words, which must have sounded ironical amid the noise and tumult, that he would protect God’s churches and their rulers, would govern all the people subjected to him with justice, would decree and keep right law, and would quite forbid all violence and unjust judgments.[^[177]] And so the seal of the Church was set upon the work which had been in fact begun on that morning, three months before, when William and his army disembarked on the shore of Pevensey.

The disorder which had attended the coronation was actually the result of a misapprehension on the part of William’s own followers, but he evidently felt that the possibility of a sudden rising on the part of the rich and independent city was a danger which should not be ignored. Accordingly, to avoid all personal risk, while at the same time keeping in close touch with his capital, William moved from London to Barking, and stayed there while that most famous of all Norman fortresses, the original “Tower of London,” was being built. Most probably it was during this stay at Barking that William received the homage of such leading Englishmen as had not been present at the submission on the Hertfordshire downs. In particular Edwin and Morcar would seem to have recognised the inevitable at this time[^[178]]; the coronation of William as king of all England by the metropolitan of York may have taught them that a division of the kingdom no longer lay within the range of practical politics. At any rate William did not think that it would be well for him to let them out of his sight for a season, and within a few days of the New Year they are found accompanying him as hostages into Normandy.

Our sole knowledge of the general state of the country at this most critical time comes from certain scattered writs which can be proved to have been issued during the few weeks immediately following the coronation. The information which they give is but scanty; they were of course not intended to convey any historical information at all, but they nevertheless help us to answer the important question how much of England had really submitted for the time to William’s rule by the end of 1066, and they do this in two ways. On the one hand, they were witnessed by some of the more important men, English as well as Normans, who were present in William’s court; on the other hand, we may safely acquit William of the folly of sending his writs into counties in which there was no probability that they would be obeyed. Foremost among the documents comes a writ referring to land on the border of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, which shows us King William, like King Edward before him, sending his orders to the native authorities of the shire—in the present case the bishops of Ramsbury and Worcester, and two thegns named Eadric and Brihtric, with whom, however, Count Eustace of Boulogne is significantly associated.[^[179]] From the other side of the country comes a more famous document in which William, “at the request of Abbot Brand,” grants to the said abbot and his monks of Peterborough the free and full possession of a number of lands in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Leofric, abbot of Peterborough, had been mortally wounded at the battle of Hastings, and on his death the monks had chosen their provost Brand as his successor. He, not discerning the signs of the times, had gone and received confirmation from Edgar the Etheling, of whose inchoate reign this is the only recorded event; and it required the mediation of “many good men” and the payment of ten marks of gold to appease the wrath of William at such an insult to his claim. The present charter is the sign of William’s forgiveness, but for us its special interest lies in the fact that it shows us the king’s word already current by the Trent and Humber, while the appearance among its witnesses of “Marleswegen the sheriff” shows that the man to whom Harold had entrusted the command of the north did not see fit to continue resistance to the new king of England.[^[180]]

ST. JOHN’S CHAPEL, IN THE TOWER OF LONDON

Much more evidence, if we can trust it, pointing in the same direction, can be derived from a number of writs in English, which were apparently granted at this time in favour of Westminster Abbey.[^[181]] Nothing could be more natural than that William at this time should show especial favour to the great religious house within whose precincts he had so recently been crowned, and although the language of these documents is very corrupt, and the monks of Westminster Abbey were practised and successful manufacturers of forged charters, there is not sufficient reason for us to condemn the present writs as spurious. And if genuine, and correctly dated, they add to the proof that William’s rule was accepted in many shires which had never yet seen a Norman army. The king greets Leofwine, bishop of Lichfield and Earl Edwin and all the thegns of Staffordshire in one writ; Ealdred, archbishop, and Wulfstan, bishop, and Earl William and all the thegns of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire in another; and if his rule was accepted in these three western shires, and also in the eastern counties represented by the Peterborough document, the submission of the midlands and in fact of the whole earldom of Mercia would seem to follow as a matter of course. It is also worth noting that no document relating to Northumbria, the one part of the country which offered a really protracted resistance to the Norman Conquest, can be referred to this early period in William’s reign.

CHARTER OF WILLIAM I. TO THE LONDONERS
(IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE CORPORATION)

All this, therefore, should warn us against underrating the immediate political importance of the battle of Hastings. It did much more than merely put William into possession of the lands under the immediate rule of the house of Godwine; the overthrow of the national cause which it implied brought about so general a submission to the Conqueror that, with the possible exception of the Northumbrian risings, all subsequent resistance to him may with sufficient accuracy be described as rebellion. William, it would seem, at the time of his coronation, was the accepted king of all England south of the Humber, and the evidence which suggests this conclusion suggests also that at the outset of his reign he wished to interfere as little as possible with the native system of administration. Even in the counties which had felt his devastating march, English sheriffs continued to be responsible for the government of their wasted shires. Edmund, the sheriff of Hertfordshire, and “Sawold,” the sheriff of Oxfordshire, may be found in other writs of the Westminster series on which we have just commented. The Norman Conquest was to be followed by an almost complete change in the personnel of the English administration, but that change was first felt in the higher departments of government; the sheriffs of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire were not displaced, but Earl William Fitz Osbern, Count Eustace of Boulogne, and Bishop Odo of Bayeux begin to be held responsible for the execution of the king’s will in the shires where they had influence.

To the close of 1066 or the beginning of 1067 must also be assigned a charter of exceptional form and some especial constitutional interest in which King William grants Hayling Island, between Portsmouth and Chichester, to the monastery of Jumièges. In this document William is made to describe himself as lord of Normandy and “basileus” of England by hereditary right, and to say that, “having undertaken the government of England, he has conquered all his enemies.” One of these enemies, namely Earl Waltheof, attests the charter in question, and is flanked in the list of witnesses by Bishop Wulfwig of Dorchester, who died in 1067, and by one Ingelric, a Lotharingian priest who is known to have enjoyed William’s favour in the earliest years of his reign.[^[182]] But it is the phrase “hereditario jure” which deserves particular attention. Rarely used in formal documents in later years, when the chancery formulas had become stereotyped, the words have, nevertheless, a prospective as well as a reflexive significance. They contain not only an enunciation of the claims in virtue of which King William had “undertaken the government of England,” but also a statement of the title by which that government would be handed down to his descendants. For, whatever may have been the title to the crown in the old English state, from the Norman Conquest onwards it has clearly become “hereditary” in the only sense in which any constitutional meaning can be attached to the word. Not a little of the evidence which has been adduced in favour of an “elective” tenure of the crown in Anglo-Norman and Angevin times is really the creation of an arbitrary construction of the terms employed. “Hereditary right” is not a synonym for primogeniture; the former words imply no more than that in any case of succession the determining factors would be the kinship of the proposed heir to the late ruler and the known intentions of the latter with respect to his inheritance. Disputed successions there were in plenty in the hundred and fifty years which followed the Conquest, but the essence of the dispute in each case was the question which of two claimants could put forward the best title which did not run counter to hereditary principles. The strictest law of inheritance is liable to be affected by extraneous complications when the crown is the stake at issue, and the disqualification which in 1100 attached to Robert of Normandy as an incapable absentee, in 1135 to Matilda the empress as a woman and the wife of an unpopular foreigner, in 1199 to Arthur as an alien and a minor, should not be allowed to mask the fact that in none of these cases did the success of a rival claimant contravene the validity of hereditary ideas. It was inevitable that, where the very rules of inheritance themselves were vague and fluctuating, the application made of them in any given instance should be guided by expediency rather than by a rigid adherence to the strict forms of law; yet nevertheless we may be sure that William Rufus and Henry I., like William the Conqueror, would claim to hold the throne of England not otherwise than “hereditario jure.”

At Barking the submission of the leading Englishmen went on apace. Besides Edwin and Morcar, Copsige, a Northumbrian thegn, and three other Englishmen called Thurkill, Siward, and Ealdred, were considered by Norman writers men of sufficient importance to deserve mention by name, and in addition to these shadowy figures we are told that many other “nobles” also came in at this time.[^[183]] No apparent notice was taken by William of the tardiness of their submissions; all were received to favour, and among them must very probably be included the victim of the one great tragedy which stands out above all the disaster of the Conquest, Waltheof, the son of Siward. Waltheof was confirmed in his midland earldom of Northampton, and received a special mark of grace in being allowed to marry the Conqueror’s niece Judith, daughter of Enguerrand, the count of Ponthieu who had perished in the ambuscade at St. Aubin in 1054, by Adeliz, the daughter of Robert of Normandy and Arlette. Nor was this an isolated measure of conciliation, for one of William’s own daughters was promised to Earl Edwin, and in general it would seem that at this time any Englishman might look for favour if he liked to do homage and propitiate the new king with a money gift. The latter was essential, and from an incidental notice in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a chance expression in the Domesday of Essex, it has been inferred that a formal “redemption” of their lands on the part of the English took place at this time.[^[184]] The direct evidence for so far-reaching an event is certainly slight, but it would fall in well with the general theory of the Conquest if all Englishmen by the mere fact of their nationality were held to have forfeited their lands. William, it must always be remembered, claimed the throne of England by hereditary right. He had been defrauded of his inheritance by the usurpation of Harold, in whose reign, falsely so called according to the Norman theory, all Englishmen had acquiesced, and might therefore justly incur that confiscation which was the penalty, familiar alike to both races, for treason. Stern and even grotesque as this theory may seem to us, it was something more than a legal fiction, and we should be driven to assume for ourselves some idea of the kind even if we did not possess these casual expressions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Domesday scribe. On the one hand, all Englishmen had rejected William’s claim, and so many as could be hurried down to Hastings in time had resisted him in the open field; on the other hand, the number of Englishmen who were still holding land of the king twenty years after the Conquest was infinitesimal in comparison with the number who had suffered displacement. It would be natural to connect these two facts, but nothing is more probable in itself than that, before repeated rebellions on the part of the English had sharpened the edge of the Norman theory, the conquered race was given an opportunity of compounding for its original sin by making a deprecatory payment to the new lord of the land.

Nevertheless, it is to this period that we must undoubtedly assign the initial stages of the process which, before twenty years were over, was to substitute an alien baronage for the native thegnhood of England. It was clearly necessary that William should give some earnest at least of the spoils of war to his leading followers, and the amount of land already at his disposal must have been very considerable. The entire possessions of the house of Godwine were in his hands, and the one form of statecraft which that family had pursued with consistency and success had been the acquisition of landed property, nor do the dubious methods by which much of that property had been originally acquired seem to have invalidated King William’s tenure of it. The battle of Hastings, moreover, had been very fatal to the land-owning class of the southern shires, and no exception could be taken to William’s right to dispose of the lands of men who had actually fallen whilst in arms against him. Even in this simple way, the king had become possessed of no small territory out of which he could reward his followers, and the complicated nature of the Anglo-Saxon land-law assisted him still further in this respect. If, for instance, a thegn of Surrey had “commended” himself and his land to Harold as earl of Wessex, King William would naturally inherit all the rights and profits which were involved in the act of commendation: he could make a grant of them to a Norman baron, and thus, without direct injury being done to any man, the Norman would become possessed of an interest in the land in question, which, under the influence of the feudal ideas which accompanied the Conquest, would rapidly harden into direct ownership. In fact, there exists a considerable quantity of evidence which would suggest that a portion at least of the old English land-owning class was not displaced so much as submerged; that the Norman nobility was superimposed upon it as it were, and that the processes of thought which underlay feudal law invested the newcomers with rights and duties which made them in the eyes of the state the only recognised owners of the lands they held. We possess no detailed account of the great “confiscation” earlier than the Domesday Survey of twenty years after the battle of Hastings, and apart from the changes which must have occurred in the course of nature in that time, the great survey is not the sort of authority to which we should look for an accurate register of the fluctuating and inconsistent principles of a law of ownership which was derived from, and had to be applied to, conditions which were unique in Western Europe. But a priori it is not probable that all the thousands of cases in which an English land-owner has disappeared, and is represented by a Norman successor, should be explained by exactly the same principle in every instance. In one case the vanished thegn may have set out with Harold to the place of battle, and his holding have been given outright by the new king to some clamorous follower; in another, a dependent of the English earl of Mercia may have become peaceably enough a dependent of the Norman earl of Shrewsbury, and have sunk into the undifferentiated peasant class before the time arrived for Domesday to take cognisance of him; a third Englishman may have made his way to the court at Barking and bought his land of the Conqueror for his own life only, leaving his sons to seek their fortunes in Scotland or at Constantinople. The practical completeness of the actual transfer from the one race to the other should not lead us to exaggerate the simplicity of the measures by which it was brought about.[^[185]]

One word should perhaps be said here about the character of the Anglo-Saxon thegnhood, on which the Conqueror’s hand fell so heavily. It was far from being a homogeneous class. At one end of the scale were great men like Esegar the Staller or Tochi the son of Outi, whose wide estates formed the bulk of the important Domesday fiefs of Geoffrey de Mandeville and Geoffrey Alselin. But, on the other hand, a very large proportion of the total number of men styled “thegns” can have been scarcely superior to the great mass of the peasantry whom the Norman lawyers styled collectively “villeins.” When we find in a Nottinghamshire village five thegns, each in his “hall,” owning between them land worth only ten shillings a year,[^[186]] we see that we must beware of the romantic associations aroused by the word “thegn.” These men can have been distinguished from the peasantry around them by little except a higher personal status expressed in a proportionately higher wergild, and their depression into the peasant class would be rendered fatally easy by the fact that the law of status was the first part of the Anglo-Saxon social system to become antiquated. When the old rules about wer and wite had been replaced by the new criminal jurisprudence elaborated by the Norman conquerors, the one claim of these mean thegns to superior social consideration vanished. And lastly, it should be noted that where the Domesday Survey does reveal members of the thegnly class continuing to hold land directly of the king in 1086, it shows us at the same time that the class is very far from being regarded as on an equality with the Norman baronage. The king’s thegns are placed after the tenants in chief by military service, even after the king’s servants or “sergeants” of Norman birth; they are only entered as it were on sufferance, under a heading to themselves, at the very end of the descriptions of the several shires in which they are to be found.[^[187]] They belonged in fact to an order of society older than the Norman military feudalism which supplanted them, and by the date of the Domesday Survey they were rapidly becoming extinct as a class in the shires south of the Humber, but no financial record like Domesday Book could be expected to tell us what became of them. Mere violent dispossession would no doubt be a great part of the story if told, but much of the change would have to be set down to the silent processes of economic and social reorganisation.

There remains one other legal document, more famous than any of these which we have considered, which was most probably granted at or about this time. The city of London had to be rewarded for its genuine, if belated, submission, and the form of reward which would be likely to prove most acceptable to the citizens would be a written security that their ancient customs and existing property should be respected by the new sovereign. And so “William the king greets William the bishop and Geoffrey the port-reeve and all the burghers, French and English, within London,” and tells them that they are to enjoy all the customs which they possessed in King Edward’s time, that each man’s property shall descend to his children, and that the king himself will not suffer any man to do them wrong.[^[188]] Yet, satisfactory as this document may have been as a pledge of reconciliation between the king and his capital, it nevertheless bears witness in its formula of address to a significant change. Geoffrey the port-reeve is a Norman; he is very probably the same man as Geoffrey de Mandeville, the grandfather of the turbulent earl of Essex of Stephen’s day,[^[189]] and his appearance thus early in the place of Esegar the Staffer suggests that the latter had gained little by his duplicity in the recent negotiations. It was of the first importance for William to be able to feel that London at least was in safe hands; he could not well entrust his capital and its new fortress to a man who had so recently held the city against him.

William’s rule in England was by this time so far accepted that he could afford to recross the Channel and show himself to his old subjects invested with his new dignities. The regency of Matilda and her advisers had, as far as we know, passed in perfect order, but it was only fitting that William should take the earliest opportunity of proving to the men of the duchy the perfect success of the enterprise, the burden of which they had borne with such notable alacrity. It was partly no doubt as an ostensible mark of confidence in English loyalty that, before crossing the Channel, William dismissed so many of his mercenary troops as wished to return home[^[190]]; but their dismissal coincides in point of time with a general foundation of castles at important strategic points all over the south of England. The Norman castle was even more repugnant than the Norman man-at-arms to the Anglo-Saxon mind, and when the native chronicler gives us his estimate of William’s character and reign he breaks out into a poetic declamation as he describes the castles which the king ordered to be built and the oppression thereby caused to poor men.[^[191]] But deeper than any memory of individual wrong must have rankled the thought that it was these new castles which had really rendered hopeless for ever the national cause of England; that local discontent might seethe and murmur in every shire without causing the smallest alarm to the alien lords ensconced in their stockaded mounds. The Shropshire-born Orderic, writing in his Norman monastery, gives us the true military reason for the final overthrow of his native country when he tells us that the English possessed very few of those fortifications which the Normans called castles, and that for this reason, however brave and warlike they might be, they could not keep up a determined resistance to their enemies. William himself had learned in Normandy how slow and difficult a task it was to reduce a district guarded by even the elementary fortifications of the eleventh century; he might be confident that the task would be impossible for scattered bodies of rustic Englishmen, in revolt and without trained leadership.

But for the present there seems to have been no thought of revolt; the castles were built with a view to future emergencies. No very elaborate arrangements were made for the government of England in William’s absence. It was entrusted jointly to William Fitz Osbern, the duke’s oldest friend, and Odo of Bayeux, his half-brother, who were to be assisted by such distinguished leaders of the army of invasion as Hugh de Grentmaisnil, Hugh de Montfort, and William de Warenne. The bishop of Bayeux was made primarily responsible for the custody of Kent, with its all-important ports, and the formidable castle of Dover. Hugh de Grentmaisnil appears in command of Hampshire with his headquarters at Winchester; his brother-in-law, Humphrey de Tilleul, had received the charge of Hastings castle when it was built and continued to hold it still; William Fitz Osbern, who had previously been created earl of Hereford, seems to have been entrusted with the government of all England between the Thames and the earldom of Bernicia, with a possible priority over his colleagues.[^[192]] On his part, William took care to remove from the country as many as possible of the men round whom a national opposition might gather itself. Edgar the Etheling, earls Edwin, Morcar, and Waltheof, with Archbishop Stigand, and a prominent Kentish thegn called Ethelnoth, were requested to accompany their new king on his progress through his continental dominions.[^[193]] We cannot but suspect that William must have felt the humour as well as the policy of attaching to his train three men each of whom had hoped to be king of the English himself; but it would have been impossible for the native leaders to refuse to grace the protracted triumphs of their conqueror, and early in the year the company set sail, with dramatic fitness, from Pevensey.

In the accounts which we possess of this visit, it appears as little more than a series of ecclesiastical pageants. William was wisely prodigal of the spoils of England to the churches of his duchy. The abbey church of Jumièges, whose building had been the work of Robert, the Confessor’s favourite, was visited and dedicated on the 1st of July, but before this the king had kept a magnificent Easter feast at Fécamp[^[194]] where, thirty-two years before, Duke Robert of Normandy had prevailed upon the Norman baronage to acknowledge his seven-year-old illegitimate son as his destined successor. The festival at Fécamp was attended by a number of nobles from beyond the Norman border, who seem to have regarded Edwin and Morcar and their fellows as interesting barbarians, whose long hair gave unwonted picturesqueness to a formal ceremony. At St.-Pierre-sur-Dive, where William had spent four weary weeks in the previous autumn, waiting for a south wind, another great assembly was held on the 1st of May, to witness the consecration of the new church of Notre Dame. Two months later came the hallowing of Jumièges; and the death of Archbishop Maurilius of Rouen, early in August, seems to have given occasion for another of these great councils to meet and confirm the canonical election of his successor. The monks of Rouen cathedral had chosen no less a person than Lanfranc of Caen as their head, but he, possibly not without a previous consultation with his friend and lord King William, declined the office, and when on a second election John, bishop of Avranches, was chosen, Lanfranc went to Rome and obtained the pallium for him.[^[195]] Whether Lanfranc’s journey possessed any significance in view of impending changes in the English Church, is unfortunately uncertain for lack of evidence; but his refusal of the metropolitan see of Normandy suggests that already he was privately reserved for greater things. In any case, he is the man to whom we should naturally expect William to entrust such messages as he might think prudent to send to the Pope concerning his recent achievements and future policy in England.

From his triumphal progress in Normandy, William was recalled by bad news from beyond the Channel. Neither of his lieutenants seems to have possessed a trace of the more statesmanlike qualities of his chief. William Fitz Osbern, good soldier and faithful friend to William as we may acknowledge him to have been, did not in the least degree understand the difficult task of reconciling a conquered people to a change of masters, and Bishop Odo has left a sinister memory on English soil. William’s departure for Normandy was signalised by a general outbreak of the characteristic vices of an army of occupation, in regard to which the regents themselves, according to the Norman account, were not a little to blame. Under the stimulus of direct oppression, and in the temporary absence of the dreaded Conqueror, the passive discontent of the English broke out into open revolt in three widely separated parts of the kingdom.

Of the three risings, that in the north was perhaps the least immediately formidable, but the most suggestive of future difficulties for the Norman rulers. Copsige, the Northumbrian thegn who had submitted at Barking, had been invested with the government of his native province, but the men of that district continued to acknowledge an English ruler in Oswulf, the son of Eadwulf, who had been subordinate earl of Bernicia under Morcar. Copsige in the first instance was able to dispossess his rival, but the latter bided his time, collected around him a gang of outlaws, and surprised Copsige as he was feasting one day at Newburn-on-Tyne. The earl escaped for a moment, and took sanctuary in the village church; but his refuge was betrayed, the church was immediately set on fire, and he himself was cut down as he tried to break away from the burning building.[^[196]] The whole affair was not so much a deliberate revolt against the Norman rule as the settlement of a private feud after the customary Northumbrian fashion, and it may quite possibly have taken place before William had sailed for Normandy. Oswulf was able to maintain himself through the following summer, but then met his end in an obscure struggle with a highway robber, and the province was left without an earl until the end of the year, when Gospatric, the son of Maldred, a noble who possessed an hereditary claim to the title, came to court and bought the earldom outright from William.[^[197]] In the meantime, however, the Northumbrians were well content with a spell of uncontested anarchy, and they made no attempt to assist the insurgents elsewhere in the country.

The leader of the western rising was a certain Edric, nicknamed the “Wild,” whom the Normans believed to be the nephew of Edric Streona, the famous traitor of Ethelred’s time. This man had submitted to the Conqueror, but apparently refused to accompany him into Normandy, and the Norman garrison of Hereford castle began to ravage his lands. In this way he was driven into open revolt, and he thereupon invited Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, the kings of Gwynedd and Powys, to join him in a plundering expedition over Herefordshire, which devastated that country as far as the river Lugg, but cannot have done much to weaken the Norman military possession of the shire.[^[198]] Having secured much booty, Edric withdrew into the hills with his Welsh allies, and next appears in history two years later, when he returned to play a part in the general tumult which disquieted England in 1069.

The most formidable of the three revolts which marked the period of William’s absence had for its object the recovery of Dover castle from its Norman garrison.[^[199]] It is the one rising of the three which has an intelligible military motive, and it contains certain features which suggest that it was planned by some one possessed of greater political ability than can be credited to the ordinary English thegn. Count Eustace of Boulogne, the man of highest rank among the French auxiliaries of the Conqueror, had already received an extensive grant of land in England as the reward for his services in the campaign of Hastings, but he had somehow fallen into disfavour with the king and had left the country. The rebel leaders knowing this, and judging the count to be a competent leader, chose for once to forget racial differences in a possible chance of emancipation, and invited him to cross the Channel and take possession of Dover castle. Eustace, like Stephen of Blois, a more famous count of Boulogne, found it an advantage to control the shortest passage from France to England; he embarked a large force of knights on board a number of vessels which were at his command, and made a night crossing in the hope of finding the garrison within the castle off their guard. At the moment of his landing Odo of Bayeux and Hugh de Montfort happened to have drawn off the main body of their troops across the Thames; a fact which suggests that the rebels had observed unusual secrecy in planning their movements. The count was therefore able to occupy the town, and to lay siege to the castle without hindrance, but failed to take the garrison by surprise, as he had hoped, and met a spirited resistance. The assault lasted for some hours, but the garrison more than held their own, and at last Eustace gave his troops the signal to retire to their ships, although it was known that a delay of two days would have brought large reinforcements to the side of the insurgents. It must also have been known that the same time would have brought Odo of Bayeux with his trained troops within dangerous proximity to Dover; and the impossibility in the eleventh century of successfully conducting a siege against time is some excuse for Eustace’s rather ignominious withdrawal. The first sign of retreat, however, was turned to the advantage of the garrison, who immediately made a sally and threw the besiegers into a state of confusion which was heightened by a false rumour that the bishop of Bayeux was at hand. A large part of the Boulogne force was destroyed in a desperate attempt to reach the ships, a number of men apparently trying to climb down the face of the cliffs on which Dover castle stands. Count Eustace himself, who knew the neighbourhood, became separated from his men and escaped on horseback to an unrecorded port, where he was fortunate enough to find a ship ready to put out to sea. The English, thus deprived of their leader, dispersed themselves over the country, and so avoided the immediate consequences of their rout, since the Norman force in Dover was not strong enough to hunt down the broken rebels along all their scattered lines of retreat.[^[200]]

With his kingdom outwardly restored to order, but simmering with suppressed revolt, William set sail from Dieppe on the 6th of December, and landed at Winchelsea on the following day. Queen Matilda was still left in charge of Normandy, but her eldest son, Robert, was now associated with her in the government, and Roger de Beaumont, who had been the leading member of her council during her regency in 1066, on this occasion accompanied his lord to England.[^[201]] The king kept his Christmas feast at Westminster; a ceremony in which the men of both races joined on an equal footing, and for the moment there may have seemed a possibility that the recent disorders had really been the last expiring efforts of English nationalism. Yet the prospect for the new year was in reality very threatening. The political situation in England at this time is well described by Ordericus Vitalis, who tells us that every district of which William had taken military possession lay at his command, but that in the extreme north and west men were only prepared to render such obedience as pleased themselves, wishing to be as independent of King William as they had formerly been independent of King Edward and his predecessors.[^[202]] This attitude, which supplies a partial explanation of the overthrow of England in 1066, and a partial justification of the harrying of Northumbria in 1069, supplies also a clue to the purpose underlying William’s ceaseless activity during the next two years. At Exeter, Stafford, and York, William was, in effect, teaching his new subjects that he would be content with nothing less than the unqualified submission of the whole land; that England was no longer to be a collection of semi-independent earldoms, but a coherent state, under the direct rule of a king identified with Wessex no more than with Northumbria or East Anglia. The union of England, thus brought at last into being, was no doubt achieved almost unconsciously under the dictation of the practical expediency of the moment, but this does not detract from the greatness of the work itself, nor from the strength and wisdom of the Conqueror whose memorial it is.

Meanwhile, danger from a distant quarter was threatening the Norman possession of England. Events which were matters of very recent history had proved that English politics were still an object of interest to the rulers of Norway and Denmark; and the present was an opportunity which could not fail to attract any Scandinavian prince who would emulate the glory of the great kings of the last generation. The death of Harold Hardrada, which had thrown the Norwegian claims on England into abeyance for a time, had left Swegn Estrithson, king of Denmark, unquestionably the most considerable personage in the Scandinavian world; and to him accordingly the English leaders, or such at least of them as were at liberty, had appealed for help during the preceding months.[^[203]] As a Dane himself and the nephew of Cnut, Swegn Estrithson could command the particular sympathy of the men of Northumbria and would not be unacceptable to the men of the southern Danelaw; no native claimant possessed similar advantages in respect to anything like so large a part of England. Swegn indeed, whose prevailing quality was a caution which contrasts strangely with the character of his Danish ancestors and of his great Norwegian rival, had delayed taking action up to the present, but it was the fear that a northern fleet might suddenly appear in the Humber which had really been the immediate cause of William’s return from Normandy.

At this moment, with the imminent probability of invasion hanging over the north and east of his kingdom, William was called away from his head-quarters at London by the necessity of suppressing a dangerous rising in the extreme west. It is probable that William’s rule had not yet been commonly recognised beyond the eastern border of Devonshire, although on the evidence of writs we know that Somerset was already showing him ostensible obedience. But the main interest of the following episode lies in the strangely independent attitude adopted by the city of Exeter. In the eleventh century the capital of Devon could undoubtedly claim to rank with York, Norwich, and Winchester among the half-dozen most powerful cities in England. With its strong fortifications which made it in a sense the key of the Damnonian peninsula, commanding also important trade routes between England, Ireland, and Brittany, Exeter in English hands would be a standing menace to the Norman rule scarcely less formidable than an independent York. The temper of the citizens was violently anti-Norman, and they proceeded to take energetic measures towards making good their defence, going so far as to impress into their service such foreign merchants within the city as were able to bear arms. We are also told that they tried to induce other cities to join them in resisting the foreign king, and it is not impossible that they may have drawn reinforcements from the opposite shore of Brittany. It was of the first importance for William to crush a revolt of this magnitude before it had time to spread, but before taking action, and probably in order to test the truth of the reports which had come to him as to what was going on in Devonshire, he sent to demand that the chief men of Exeter should take the oath of allegiance to him. They in reply proposed a curious compromise, saying that they were willing to pay the customary dues of their city to the king, but that they would not swear allegiance to him nor admit him within their walls. This was almost equivalent to defiance and elicited from William the remark that it was not his custom to have subjects on such terms. Negotiations in fact ceased; Devonshire became a hostile country, and William marched from London, making the experiment, doubly bold at such a crisis, of calling out the native fyrd to assist in the reduction of their countrymen.

The men of Exeter, on hearing the news of William’s approach, began to fear that they had gone too far; and, as the king drew near, the chief men of the city came out to meet him, bringing hostages and making a complete capitulation. William halted four miles from the city, but the envoys on their return found that their fellow-citizens, unwilling apparently to trust to the king’s mercy, were making preparations for a continued resistance, and they threw in their lot with their townsmen. William was filled with fury on hearing the news. His position was indeed sufficiently difficult. It was the depth of winter; part of his army was composed of Englishmen whose loyalty might not survive an unexpected check to his arms, and Swegn of Denmark might land in the east at any moment. Before investing the city William tried a piece of intimidation, and when the army had moved up to the walls, one of the hostages was deliberately blinded in front of the gate. But it would seem that the determination of the citizens was only strengthened by the ghastly sight, and for eighteen days William was detained before the gates of Exeter, despite his constant endeavours either to carry the walls by assault or to undermine them.

At last, after many of his men had fallen in the attack, it would seem that the Conqueror for once in his life was driven to offer terms to the defenders of a revolted city. The details of the closing scene of the siege are not very clear; but it is probable that the more important citizens were now, as earlier in the struggle, in favour of submission, and that they persuaded their fellows to take advantage of King William’s offer of peace. They had indeed a particular reason for trying to secure the royal favour, for the chief burden of taxation in any town fell naturally upon its wealthier inhabitants, and on the present occasion William seems to have given a promise that the customary payments due to the king from the town should not be increased. The poorer folk of Exeter secured a free pardon and a pledge of security for life and property, but the conduct of their leaders undoubtedly implies a certain lack of disinterested zeal for the national cause; and the native chronicler significantly remarks that the citizens gave up the town “because the thegns had betrayed them.” The other side of the picture is shown by Ordericus Vitalis, who describes how “a procession of the most beautiful maidens, the elders of the city, and the clergy carrying their sacred books and holy vessels” went out to meet the king, and made submission to him. It has been conjectured with great probability that the real object of the procession was to obtain from the king an oath to observe the terms of the capitulation sworn on the said “sacred books and holy vessels,” and in any case the witness of Domesday Book shows that Exeter suffered no fiscal penalty for its daring resistance. To keep the men of Exeter in hand for the future a castle was built and entrusted to Baldwin de Meules, the son of Count Gilbert of Brionne, but this was no mark of particular disfavour, for it was universally a matter of policy for William to guard against civic revolts by the foundation of precautionary fortresses.[^[204]]

One immediate consequence of the fall of Exeter was the flight and final exile of one of the two greatest ladies in England at this time. Gytha, the niece of Cnut, and the widow of Earl Godwine, through whom Harold had inherited a strain of royal blood, had taken refuge in Exeter, and now, before William had entered the city, made her escape by water with a number of other women, who probably feared the outrages which were likely to occur upon the entry of the northern army. They must have rounded the Land’s End, and sailed up the Bristol Channel, for they next appear as taking up their quarters on a dismal island known as the Flat Holme, off the coast of Glamorgan. Here they stayed for a long while, but at last in despair the fugitives left their cheerless refuge and sailed without molestation to Flanders, where they landed, and were hospitably entertained at St. Omer. Nothing more is recorded of the countess; but her daughter Gunhild entered the monastic life and died in peace in Flanders in 1087, some two months before the great enemy of her house expired at Rouen.

It is likely enough that Gytha chose the Flat Holme as her place of refuge with the hope of joining in a movement which at this time was gathering head among the English exiles in Ireland. It is at least certain that, before the summer was over, three of Harold’s illegitimate sons, who had spent the previous year with the king of Dublin, suddenly entered the Devon seas with fifty-four ships. They harassed the south coast of the Bristol Channel, and even made bold to enter the Avon and attack Bristol itself, but were driven off without much difficulty by the citizens of the wealthy port, and sailing back disembarked at some unknown point on the coast of Somerset. Here they were caught and soundly beaten by the Somersetshire natives under the leadership of Ednoth, an Englishman who had been master of the horse to Edward the Confessor, but who was clearly ready to do loyal service to the new king. Ednoth was killed in the battle, but the raiders were compelled to take to their ships, and after a brief spell of desultory ravage along the coast they sailed back to Ireland, having done nothing to weaken the Norman grip upon the south-west of England, but gaining sufficient plunder to induce them to repeat their expedition in the course of the following year.[^[205]]

It was well for William that even at the cost of some loss of prestige he had gained possession of Exeter in the first months of 1068, for the remainder of the year saw a general outburst of revolt against the Norman rule. Before returning to the east of England, William made an armed demonstration in Cornwall; and it was very possibly at this time that he established his half-brother, Count Robert of Mortain, in a territorial position in that Celtic land which shows that the Conqueror was quite willing upon occasions to create compact fiefs according to the continental model. Count Robert was never invested with any formal earldom of Cornwall, but in the western peninsula he occupied a position of greater territorial strength, if of lower official rank, than that held by his brother, Bishop Odo, in his distant shire of Kent. The revolt of Exeter had no doubt taught William that it would be advisable to take any future rising in Devonshire in the rear by turning Cornwall into a single Norman estate, and his own presence with an army in the west at this time would go far to simplify the preliminary work of confiscation.

His Cornish progress over, King William marched eastwards, disbanded the fyrd, and kept his Easter feast (March 23d) at Winchester. For a few weeks the land was at peace, and during this breathing space the Duchess Matilda came across into England, and was crowned at Westminster on Whitsunday (May 11th), by Ealdred, archbishop of York. The event was a clear expression of William’s desire to reign as an English king, for Matilda stayed in England, and her fourth son, Henry, who was born early in the next year, possessed in English eyes the precedence, which by Anglo-Saxon custom belonged to the son of a crowned king and his lady, born in the land. Robert, the destined heir of Normandy, seems to have remained in charge of the duchy, and Richard, the Conqueror’s second son, probably accompanied his mother across the Channel. By a fortunate chance, we happen to know with exactitude the names of those who were present at the Whitsuntide festival,[^[206]] and the list is significant. Among the members of the clerical estate the Norman hierarchy supplied the bishops of Bayeux, Lisieux, and Coutances, but the arch-bishops of Canterbury and York and the bishops of Exeter, Ramsbury, Wells, and London were all of English appointment, although the last four of them were of foreign birth, and the eight abbots who were present were also men of King Edward’s day. The laymen who attended the ceremony formed a more heterogeneous group; Edwin, Morcar, and Waltheof seem strangely out of place side by side with the counts of Mortain and Eu; with William Fitz Osbern, Roger de Montgomery and Richard, the son of Count Gilbert of Brionne. The company which came together in Westminster Abbey on that Whitsunday supplies a striking picture of the old order which was changing but had not yet given place to the new, and it is a notable thing that the ancestress of all Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart kings should have been crowned in the sight of men who had held the highest place in the realm in the last days of independent England.

This solemn inauguration of the new dynasty can have been passed but a few weeks before William had to resume the dreary task of suppressing his irreconcilable subjects. After a year and a half of acquiescence in the Norman rule, Earls Edwin and Morcar suddenly made a spasmodic attempt to raise the country against the foreigners. Their position at William’s court must have been ignominious at the best, and although, as we have seen, the king had promised one of his daughters in marriage to Edwin, he had withheld her up to the present in deference to the jealousy which his Normans felt for the favoured Englishman. Under the smart of their personal grievances, Edwin and his brother broke away from the court, and headed a revolt which, although general in character, seems to have received most support in Morcar’s earldom of Northumbria. The rising is also marked by a revival of the alliance between the house of Leofric and the Welsh princes which had been an occasional cause of disquiet during the Confessor’s reign; for Bleddyn, the king of North Wales, came to the assistance of Edwin and Morcar,[^[207]] as in the previous year he had joined the Herefordshire raid of Edric the Wild. The rising was the occasion for a general secession of the leading Englishmen from William’s court, for Edgar the Etheling and his mother and sisters, together with Marleswegen and many prominent Northumbrians, headed by Gospatric, their newly appointed earl, probably fearing that they might be held implicated in the guilt of Edwin and Morcar, made a speedy departure for the north country.[^[208]]

The focus of disturbance was evidently the city of York. It is not probable that William had hitherto made any systematic attempt to establish Norman rule beyond the Humber, but we get a glimpse of the venerable Archbishop Aldred making strenuous efforts to restrain the violence of the men of his city. His protestations were useless, and while the Northumbrians were enthusiastically preparing for war after the manner of their ancestors, William was taking steps which brought the revolt to an end within a few weeks without the striking of a single blow.

It is in connection with these events that Orderic makes the observations which have already been quoted about the part played by the Norman castle in thwarting the bravest efforts of insurgent Englishmen. Some of the greatest fortresses of medieval England derive their origin from the defensive posts founded by William during the war of 1068. “In consequence of these commotions,” said Orderic, “the King carefully surveyed the most inaccessible points in the country, and, selecting suitable places, fortified them against the raids of the enemy.”[^[209]] But besides these “inaccessible points” we have seen that William made it a matter of regular policy to plant a castle in all the greater boroughs and along all the more important lines of road in the country, and, the present campaign affords an excellent example of his practice in this matter. The first fortress recorded as having been built at this time was the humble earthwork which developed in the next two centuries into the magnificent castle of Warwick. Henry de Beaumont, son of the Roger de Beaumont who had been Queen Matilda’s adviser in 1066, was placed in command of it, and the Conqueror marched northward; but, possibly before he had left the Avon valley, Edwin and Morcar, now as ever unable to follow a consistent course of action, suddenly abandoned their own cause and made an ignominious submission. The surrender of the rebel leaders did not affect the king’s movements; he continued his advance, probably harrying the plain of Leicester as he passed across it, and at Nottingham, on a precipitous cliff overhanging the town, he placed another castle, commanding the Trent valley at the point where the river is crossed by one of the great roads from London to the north of England. The march was resumed without delay, and at some point on the road north of Nottingham the army was met by the citizens of York, bringing the keys of their city, and offering to give hostages for their future good behaviour. The defection of Edwin and Morcar had deprived the rising of its nominal leaders, and the military occupation of Nottingham had threatened to isolate the revolted area; but it is also probable that William’s rapid movements had surprised the defenders of the northern capital before their preparations were completed. At York itself a certain Archil, who was regarded by the Normans as the most powerful man in Northumbria, came in to William and gave his son as a hostage, and on the line of the city walls, at the junction of the rivers Ouse and Foss, there arose the third castle of this campaign, now represented only by the mound on which rests the famous medieval keep known as “Clifford’s Tower.” The fortress was garrisoned with picked men, but its castellan, Robert Fitz Richard, is only known to us through the circumstances of his death in the next year.