The Project Gutenberg EBook of William the Conqueror, by E. A. Freeman

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Title: William the Conqueror

Author: E. A. Freeman

Release Date: October, 1997  [EBook #1066]
[This file was first posted on February 12, 1998]
[Most recently updated: June 28, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR ***




Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




William the Conqueror




Contents

Introduction
The Early Years of William
William's First Visit to England
The Reign of William in Normandy
Harold's Oat to William
The Negotiations of Duke William
William's Invasion of England
The Conquest of England
The Settlement of England
The Revolts against William
The Last Years of William



CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION



The history of England, like the land and its people, has been
specially insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences
from without.  No land has owed more than England to the personal
action of men not of native birth.  Britain was truly called
another world, in opposition to the world of the European mainland,
the world of Rome.  In every age the history of Britain is the
history of an island, of an island great enough to form a world of
itself.  In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain, we are
speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and Teutons
parted from their kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under the
common influences of an island world.  The land has seen several
settlements from outside, but the settlers have always been brought
under the spell of their insular position.  Whenever settlement has
not meant displacement, the new comers have been assimilated by the
existing people of the land.  When it has meant displacement, they
have still become islanders, marked off from those whom they left
behind by characteristics which were the direct result of
settlement in an island world.

The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England,
has been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated
from without.  But each of those elements has done somewhat to
modify the mass into which it was absorbed.  The English land and
nation are not as they might have been if they had never in later
times absorbed the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the German
Palatine.  Still less are they as they might have been, if they had
not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements of the Dane and
the Norman.  Both were assimilated; but both modified the character
and destiny of the people into whose substance they were absorbed.
The conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully lost in
the greater mass of the English people; still we can never be as if
the Norman had never come among us.  We ever bear about us the
signs of his presence.  Our colonists have carried those signs with
them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and
Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a
conqueror.  But that those signs of his presence hold the place
which they do hold in our mixed political being, that, badges of
conquest as they are, no one feels them to be badges of conquest--
all this comes of the fact that, if the Norman came as a conqueror,
he came as a conqueror of a special, perhaps almost of an unique
kind.  The Norman Conquest of England has, in its nature and in its
results, no exact parallel in history.  And that it has no exact
parallel in history is largely owing to the character and position
of the man who wrought it.  That the history of England for the
last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come
of the personal character of a single man.  That we are what we are
to this day largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when
our national destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single
man, and that that man was William, surnamed at different stages of
his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great.

With perfect fitness then does William the Norman, William the
Norman Conqueror of England, take his place in a series of English
statesmen.  That so it should be is characteristic of English
history.  Our history has been largely wrought for us by men who
have come in from without, sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as
the opposite of conquerors; but in whatever character they came,
they had to put on the character of Englishmen, and to make their
work an English work.  From whatever land they came, on whatever
mission they came, as statesmen they were English.  William, the
greatest of his class, is still but a member of a class.  Along
with him we must reckon a crowd of kings, bishops, and high
officials in many ages of our history.  Theodore of Tarsus and Cnut
of Denmark, Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta, Randolf Flambard
and Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Anjou and Simon of Montfort, are
all written on a list of which William is but the foremost.  The
largest number come in William's own generation and in the
generations just before and after it.  But the breed of England's
adopted children and rulers never died out.  The name of William
the Deliverer stands, if not beside that of his namesake the
Conqueror, yet surely alongside of the lawgiver from Anjou.  And we
count among the later worthies of England not a few men sprung from
other lands, who did and are doing their work among us, and who, as
statesmen at least, must count as English.  As we look along the
whole line, even among the conquering kings and their immediate
instruments, their work never takes the shape of the rooting up of
the earlier institutions of the land.  Those institutions are
modified, sometimes silently by the mere growth of events,
sometimes formally and of set purpose.  Old institutions get new
names; new institutions are set up alongside of them.  But the old
ones are never swept away; they sometimes die out; they are never
abolished.  This comes largely of the absorbing and assimilating
power of the island world.  But it comes no less of personal
character and personal circumstances, and pre-eminently of the
personal character of the Norman Conqueror and of the circumstances
in which he found himself.


Our special business now is with the personal acts and character of
William, and above all with his acts and character as an English
statesman.  But the English reign of William followed on his
earlier Norman reign, and its character was largely the result of
his earlier Norman reign.  A man of the highest natural gifts, he
had gone through such a schooling from his childhood upwards as
falls to the lot of few princes.  Before he undertook the conquest
of England, he had in some sort to work the conquest of Normandy.
Of the ordinary work of a sovereign in a warlike age, the defence
of his own land, the annexation of other lands, William had his
full share.  With the land of his overlord he had dealings of the
most opposite kinds.  He had to call in the help of the French king
to put down rebellion in the Norman duchy, and he had to drive back
more than one invasion of the French king at the head of an united
Norman people.  He added Domfront and Maine to his dominions, and
the conquest of Maine, the work as much of statesmanship as of
warfare, was the rehearsal of the conquest of England.  There,
under circumstances strangely like those of England, he learned his
trade as conqueror, he learned to practise on a narrower field the
same arts which he afterwards practised on a wider.  But after all,
William's own duchy was his special school; it was his life in his
own duchy which specially helped to make him what he was.
Surrounded by trials and difficulties almost from his cradle, he
early learned the art of enduring trials and overcoming
difficulties; he learned how to deal with men; he learned when to
smite and when to spare; and it is not a little to his honour that,
in the long course of such a reign as his, he almost always showed
himself far more ready to spare than to smite.

Before then we can look at William as an English statesman, we must
first look on him in the land in which he learned the art of
statesmanship.  We must see how one who started with all the
disadvantages which are implied in his earlier surname of the
Bastard came to win and to deserve his later surnames of the
Conqueror and the Great.



CHAPTER II--THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM--A.D. 1028-1051



If William's early reign in Normandy was his time of schooling for
his later reign in England, his school was a stern one, and his
schooling began early.  His nominal reign began at the age of seven
years, and his personal influence on events began long before he
had reached the usual years of discretion.  And the events of his
minority might well harden him, while they could not corrupt him in
the way in which so many princes have been corrupted.  His whole
position, political and personal, could not fail to have its effect
in forming the man.  He was Duke of the Normans, sixth in
succession from Rolf, the founder of the Norman state.  At the time
of his accession, rather more than a hundred and ten years had
passed since plunderers, occasionally settlers, from Scandinavia,
had changed into acknowledged members of the Western or Karolingian
kingdom.  The Northmen, changed, name and thing, into NORMANS, were
now in all things members of the Christian and French-speaking
world.  But French as the Normans of William's day had become,
their relation to the kings and people of France was not a friendly
one.  At the time of the settlement of Rolf, the western kingdom of
the Franks had not yet finally passed to the Duces Francorum at
Paris; Rolf became the man of the Karolingian king at Laon.  France
and Normandy were two great duchies, each owning a precarious
supremacy in the king of the West-Franks.  On the one hand,
Normandy had been called into being by a frightful dismemberment of
the French duchy, from which the original Norman settlement had
been cut off.  France had lost in Rouen one of her greatest cities,
and she was cut off from the sea and from the lower course of her
own river.  On the other hand, the French and the Norman dukes had
found their interest in a close alliance; Norman support had done
much to transfer the crown from Laon to Paris, and to make the Dux
Francorum and the Rex Francorum the same person.  It was the
adoption of the French speech and manners by the Normans, and their
steady alliance with the French dukes, which finally determined
that the ruling element in Gaul should be Romance and not Teutonic,
and that, of its Romance elements, it should be French and not
Aquitanian.  If the creation of Normandy had done much to weaken
France as a duchy, it had done not a little towards the making of
France as a kingdom.  Laon and its crown, the undefined influence
that went with the crown, the prospect of future advance to the
south, had been bought by the loss of Rouen and of the mouth of the
Seine.

There was much therefore at the time of William's accession to keep
the French kings and the Norman dukes on friendly terms.  The old
alliance had been strengthened by recent good offices.  The
reigning king, Henry the First, owed his crown to the help of
William's father Robert.  On the other hand, the original ground of
the alliance, mutual support against the Karolingian king, had
passed away.  A King of the French reigning at Paris was more
likely to remember what the Normans had cost him as duke than what
they had done for him as king.  And the alliance was only an
alliance of princes.  The mutual dislike between the people of the
two countries was strong.  The Normans had learned French ways, but
French and Normans had not become countrymen.  And, as the fame of
Normandy grew, jealousy was doubtless mingled with dislike.
William, in short, inherited a very doubtful and dangerous state of
relations towards the king who was at once his chief neighbour and
his overlord.

More doubtful and dangerous still were the relations which the
young duke inherited towards the people of his own duchy and the
kinsfolk of his own house.  William was not as yet the Great or the
Conqueror, but he was the Bastard from the beginning.  There was
then no generally received doctrine as to the succession to
kingdoms and duchies.  Everywhere a single kingly or princely house
supplied, as a rule, candidates for the succession.  Everywhere,
even where the elective doctrine was strong, a full-grown son was
always likely to succeed his father.  The growth of feudal notions
too had greatly strengthened the hereditary principle.  Still no
rule had anywhere been laid down for cases where the late prince
had not left a full-grown son.  The question as to legitimate birth
was equally unsettled.  Irregular unions of all kinds, though
condemned by the Church, were tolerated in practice, and were
nowhere more common than among the Norman dukes.  In truth the
feeling of the kingliness of the stock, the doctrine that the king
should be the son of a king, is better satisfied by the succession
of the late king's bastard son than by sending for some distant
kinsman, claiming perhaps only through females.  Still bastardy, if
it was often convenient to forget it, could always be turned
against a man.  The succession of a bastard was never likely to be
quite undisputed or his reign to be quite undisturbed.

Now William succeeded to his duchy under the double disadvantage of
being at once bastard and minor.  He was born at Falaise in 1027 or
1028, being the son of Robert, afterwards duke, but then only Count
of Hiesmois, by Herleva, commonly called Arletta, the daughter of
Fulbert the tanner.  There was no pretence of marriage between his
parents; yet his father, when he designed William to succeed him,
might have made him legitimate, as some of his predecessors had
been made, by a marriage with his mother.  In 1028 Robert succeeded
his brother Richard in the duchy.  In 1034 or 1035 he determined to
go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  He called on his barons to swear
allegiance to his bastard of seven years old as his successor in
case he never came back.  Their wise counsel to stay at home, to
look after his dominions and to raise up lawful heirs, was
unheeded.  Robert carried his point.  The succession of young
William was accepted by the Norman nobles, and was confirmed by the
overlord Henry King of the French.  The arrangement soon took
effect.  Robert died on his way back before the year 1035 was out,
and his son began, in name at least, his reign of fifty-two years
over the Norman duchy.

The succession of one who was at once bastard and minor could
happen only when no one else had a distinctly better claim William
could never have held his ground for a moment against a brother of
his father of full age and undoubted legitimacy.  But among the
living descendants of former dukes some were themselves of doubtful
legitimacy, some were shut out by their profession as churchmen,
some claimed only through females.  Robert had indeed two half-
brothers, but they were young and their legitimacy was disputed; he
had an uncle, Robert Archbishop of Rouen, who had been legitimated
by the later marriage of his parents.  The rival who in the end
gave William most trouble was his cousin Guy of Burgundy, son of a
daughter of his grandfather Richard the Good.  Though William's
succession was not liked, no one of these candidates was generally
preferred to him.  He therefore succeeded; but the first twelve
years of his reign were spent in the revolts and conspiracies of
unruly nobles, who hated the young duke as the one representative
of law and order, and who were not eager to set any one in his
place who might be better able to enforce them.

Nobility, so variously defined in different lands, in Normandy took
in two classes of men.  All were noble who had any kindred or
affinity, legitimate or otherwise, with the ducal house.  The
natural children of Richard the Fearless were legitimated by his
marriage with their mother Gunnor, and many of the great houses of
Normandy sprang from her brothers and sisters.  The mother of
William received no such exaltation as this.  Besides her son, she
had borne to Robert a daughter Adelaide, and, after Robert's death,
she married a Norman knight named Herlwin of Conteville.  To him,
besides a daughter, she bore two sons, Ode and Robert.  They rose
to high posts in Church and State, and played an important part in
their half-brother's history.  Besides men whose nobility was of
this kind, there were also Norman houses whose privileges were
older than the amours or marriages of any duke, houses whose
greatness was as old as the settlement of Rolf, as old that is as
the ducal power itself.  The great men of both these classes were
alike hard to control.  A Norman baron of this age was well
employed when he was merely rebelling against his prince or waging
private war against a fellow baron.  What specially marks the time
is the frequency of treacherous murders wrought by men of the
highest rank, often on harmless neighbours or unsuspecting guests.
But victims were also found among those guardians of the young duke
whose faithful discharge of their duties shows that the Norman
nobility was not wholly corrupt.  One indeed was a foreign prince,
Alan Count of the Bretons, a grandson of Richard the Fearless
through a daughter.  Two others, the seneschal Osbern and Gilbert
Count of Eu, were irregular kinsmen of the duke.  All these were
murdered, the Breton count by poison.  Such a childhood as this
made William play the man while he was still a child.  The helpless
boy had to seek for support of some kind.  He got together the
chief men of his duchy, and took a new guardian by their advice.
But it marks the state of things that the new guardian was one of
the murderers of those whom he succeeded.  This was Ralph of Wacey,
son of William's great-uncle, Archbishop Robert.  Murderer as he
was, he seems to have discharged his duty faithfully.  There are
men who are careless of general moral obligations, but who will
strictly carry out any charge which appeals to personal honour.
Anyhow Ralph's guardianship brought with it a certain amount of
calm.  But men, high in the young duke's favour, were still
plotting against him, and they presently began to plot, not only
against their prince but against their country.  The disaffected
nobles of Normandy sought for a helper against young William in his
lord King Henry of Paris.

The art of diplomacy had never altogether slumbered since much
earlier times.  The king who owed his crown to William's father,
and who could have no ground of offence against William himself,
easily found good pretexts for meddling in Norman affairs.  It was
not unnatural in the King of the French to wish to win back a sea-
board which had been given up more than a hundred years before to
an alien power, even though that power had, for much more than half
of that time, acted more than a friendly part towards France.  It
was not unnatural that the French people should cherish a strong
national dislike to the Normans and a strong wish that Rouen should
again be a French city.  But such motives were not openly avowed
then any more than now.  The alleged ground was quite different.
The counts of Chartres were troublesome neighbours to the duchy,
and the castle of Tillieres had been built as a defence against
them.  An advance of the King's dominions had made Tillieres a
neighbour of France, and, as a neighbour, it was said to be a
standing menace.  The King of the French, acting in concert with
the disaffected party in Normandy, was a dangerous enemy, and the
young Duke and his counsellors determined to give up Tillieres.
Now comes the first distinct exercise of William's personal will.
We are without exact dates, but the time can be hardly later than
1040, when William was from twelve to thirteen years old.  At his
special request, the defender of Tillieres, Gilbert Crispin, who at
first held out against French and Normans alike, gave up the castle
to Henry.  The castle was burned; the King promised not to repair
it for four years.  Yet he is said to have entered Normandy, to
have laid waste William's native district of Hiesmois, to have
supplied a French garrison to a Norman rebel named Thurstan, who
held the castle of Falaise against the Duke, and to have ended by
restoring Tillieres as a menace against Normandy.  And now the boy
whose destiny had made him so early a leader of men had to bear his
first arms against the fortress which looked down on his birth-
place.  Thurstan surrendered and went into banishment.  William
could set down his own Falaise as the first of a long list of towns
and castles which he knew how to win without shedding of blood.

When we next see William's distinct personal action, he is still
young, but no longer a child or even a boy.  At nineteen or
thereabouts he is a wise and valiant man, and his valour and wisdom
are tried to the uttermost.  A few years of comparative quiet were
chiefly occupied, as a quiet time in those days commonly was, with
ecclesiastical affairs.  One of these specially illustrates the
state of things with which William had to deal.  In 1042, when the
Duke was about fourteen, Normandy adopted the Truce of God in its
later shape.  It no longer attempted to establish universal peace;
it satisfied itself with forbidding, under the strongest
ecclesiastical censures, all private war and violence of any kind
on certain days of the week.  Legislation of this kind has two
sides.  It was an immediate gain if peace was really enforced for
four days in the week; but that which was not forbidden on the
other three could no longer be denounced as in itself evil.  We are
told that in no land was the Truce more strictly observed than in
Normandy.  But we may be sure that, when William was in the fulness
of his power, the stern weight of the ducal arm was exerted to
enforce peace on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as on Thursdays and
Fridays.

It was in the year 1047 that William's authority was most
dangerously threatened and that he was first called on to show in
all their fulness the powers that were in him.  He who was to be
conqueror of Maine and conqueror of England was first to be
conqueror of his own duchy.  The revolt of a large part of the
country, contrasted with the firm loyalty of another part, throws a
most instructive light on the internal state of the duchy.  There
was, as there still is, a line of severance between the districts
which formed the first grant to Rolf and those which were
afterwards added.  In these last a lingering remnant of old
Teutonic life had been called into fresh strength by new
settlements from Scandinavia.  At the beginning of the reign of
Richard the Fearless, Rouen, the French-speaking city, is
emphatically contrasted with Bayeux, the once Saxon city and land,
now the headquarters of the Danish speech.  At that stage the
Danish party was distinctly a heathen party.  We are not told
whether Danish was still spoken so late as the time of William's
youth.  We can hardly believe that the Scandinavian gods still kept
any avowed worshippers.  But the geographical limits of the revolt
exactly fall in with the boundary which had once divided French and
Danish speech, Christian and heathen worship.  There was a wide
difference in feeling on the two sides of the Dive.  The older
Norman settlements, now thoroughly French in tongue and manners,
stuck faithfully to the Duke; the lands to the west rose against
him.  Rouen and Evreux were firmly loyal to William; Saxon Bayeux
and Danish Coutances were the headquarters of his enemies.

When the geographical division took this shape, we are surprised at
the candidate for the duchy who was put forward by the rebels.
William was a Norman born and bred; his rival was in every sense a
Frenchman.  This was William's cousin Guy of Burgundy, whose
connexion with the ducal house was only by the spindle-side.  But
his descent was of uncontested legitimacy, which gave him an excuse
for claiming the duchy in opposition to the bastard grandson of the
tanner.  By William he had been enriched with great possessions,
among which was the island fortress of Brionne in the Risle.  The
real object of the revolt was the partition of the duchy.  William
was to be dispossessed; Guy was to be duke in the lands east of
Dive; the great lords of Western Normandy were to be left
independent.  To this end the lords of the Bessin and the Cotentin
revolted, their leader being Neal, Viscount of Saint-Sauveur in the
Cotentin.  We are told that the mass of the people everywhere
wished well to their duke; in the common sovereign lay their only
chance of protection against their immediate lords.  But the lords
had armed force of the land at their bidding.  They first tried to
slay or seize the Duke himself, who chanced to be in the midst of
them at Valognes.  He escaped; we hear a stirring tale of his
headlong ride from Valognes to Falaise.  Safe among his own people,
he planned his course of action.  He first sought help of the man
who could give him most help, but who had most wronged him.  He
went into France; he saw King Henry at Poissy, and the King engaged
to bring a French force to William's help under his own command.

This time Henry kept his promise.  The dismemberment of Normandy
might have been profitable to France by weakening the power which
had become so special an object of French jealousy; but with a king
the common interest of princes against rebellious barons came
first.  Henry came with a French army, and fought well for his ally
on the field of Val-es-dunes.  Now came the Conqueror's first
battle, a tourney of horsemen on an open table-land just within the
land of the rebels between Caen and Mezidon.  The young duke fought
well and manfully; but the Norman writers allow that it was French
help that gained him the victory.  Yet one of the many anecdotes of
the battle points to a source of strength which was always ready to
tell for any lord against rebellious vassals.  One of the leaders
of the revolt, Ralph of Tesson, struck with remorse and stirred by
the prayers of his knights, joined the Duke just before the battle.
He had sworn to smite William wherever he found him, and he
fulfilled his oath by giving the Duke a harmless blow with his
glove.  How far an oath to do an unlawful act is binding is a
question which came up again at another stage of William's life.

The victory at Val-es-dunes was decisive, and the French King,
whose help had done so much to win it, left William to follow it
up.  He met with but little resistance except at the stronghold of
Brionne.  Guy himself vanishes from Norman history.  William had
now conquered his own duchy, and conquered it by foreign help.  For
the rest of his Norman reign he had often to strive with enemies at
home, but he had never to put down such a rebellion again as that
of the lords of western Normandy.  That western Normandy, the
truest Normandy, had to yield to the more thoroughly Romanized
lands to the east.  The difference between them never again takes a
political shape.  William was now lord of all Normandy, and able to
put down all later disturbers of the peace.  His real reign now
begins; from the age of nineteen or twenty, his acts are his own.
According to his abiding practice, he showed himself a merciful
conqueror.  Through his whole reign he shows a distinct
unwillingness to take human life except in fair fighting on the
battle-field.  No blood was shed after the victory of Val-es-dunes;
one rebel died in bonds; the others underwent no harder punishment
than payment of fines, giving of hostages, and destruction of their
castles.  These castles were not as yet the vast and elaborate
structures which arose in after days.  A single strong square
tower, or even a defence of wood on a steep mound surrounded by a
ditch, was enough to make its owner dangerous.  The possession of
these strongholds made every baron able at once to defy his prince
and to make himself a scourge to his neighbours.  Every season of
anarchy is marked by the building of castles; every return of order
brings with it their overthrow as a necessary condition of peace.


Thus, in his lonely and troubled childhood, William had been
schooled for the rule of men.  He had now, in the rule of a smaller
dominion, in warfare and conquest on a smaller scale, to be
schooled for the conquest and the rule of a greater dominion.
William had the gifts of a born ruler, and he was in no way
disposed to abuse them.  We know his rule in Normandy only through
the language of panegyric; but the facts speak for themselves.  He
made Normandy peaceful and flourishing, more peaceful and
flourishing perhaps than any other state of the European mainland.
He is set before us as in everything a wise and beneficent ruler,
the protector of the poor and helpless, the patron of commerce and
of all that might profit his dominions.  For defensive wars, for
wars waged as the faithful man of his overlord, we cannot blame
him.  But his main duty lay at home.  He still had revolts to put
down, and he put them down.  But to put them down was the first of
good works.  He had to keep the peace of the land, to put some
cheek on the unruly wills of those turbulent barons on whom only an
arm like his could put any cheek.  He had, in the language of his
day, to do justice, to visit wrong with sure and speedy punishment,
whoever was the wrong-doer.  If a ruler did this first of duties
well, much was easily forgiven him in other ways.  But William had
as yet little to be forgiven.  Throughout life he steadily
practised some unusual virtues.  His strict attention to religion
was always marked.  And his religion was not that mere lavish
bounty to the Church which was consistent with any amount of
cruelty or license.  William's religion really influenced his life,
public and private.  He set an unusual example of a princely
household governed according to the rules of morality, and he dealt
with ecclesiastical matters in the spirit of a true reformer.  He
did not, like so many princes of his age, make ecclesiastical
preferments a source of corrupt gain, but promoted good men from
all quarters.  His own education is not likely to have received
much attention; it is not clear whether he had mastered the rarer
art of writing or the more usual one of reading; but both his
promotion of learned churchmen and the care given to the education
of some of his children show that he at least valued the best
attainments of his time.  Had William's whole life been spent in
the duties of a Norman duke, ruling his duchy wisely, defending it
manfully, the world might never have known him for one of its
foremost men, but his life on that narrower field would have been
useful and honourable almost without a drawback.  It was the fatal
temptation of princes, the temptation to territorial
aggrandizement, which enabled him fully to show the powers that
were in him, but which at the same time led to his moral
degradation.  The defender of his own land became the invader of
other lands, and the invader could not fail often to sink into the
oppressor.  Each step in his career as Conqueror was a step
downwards.  Maine was a neighbouring land, a land of the same
speech, a land which, if the feelings of the time could have
allowed a willing union, would certainly have lost nothing by an
union with Normandy.  England, a land apart, a land of speech,
laws, and feelings, utterly unlike those of any part of Gaul, was
in another case.  There the Conqueror was driven to be the
oppressor.  Wrong, as ever, was punished by leading to further
wrong.

With the two fields, nearer and more distant, narrower and wider,
on which William was to appear as Conqueror he has as yet nothing
to do.  It is vain to guess at what moment the thought of the
English succession may have entered his mind or that of his
advisers.  When William began his real reign after Val-es-dunes,
Norman influence was high in England.  Edward the Confessor had
spent his youth among his Norman kinsfolk; he loved Norman ways and
the company of Normans and other men of French speech.  Strangers
from the favoured lands held endless posts in Church and State;
above all, Robert of Jumieges, first Bishop of London and then
Archbishop of Canterbury, was the King's special favourite and
adviser.  These men may have suggested the thought of William's
succession very early.  On the other hand, at this time it was by
no means clear that Edward might not leave a son of his own.  He
had been only a few years married, and his alleged vow of chastity
is very doubtful.  William's claim was of the flimsiest kind.  By
English custom the king was chosen out of a single kingly house,
and only those who were descended from kings in the male line were
counted as members of that house.  William was not descended, even
in the female line, from any English king; his whole kindred with
Edward was that Edward's mother Emma, a daughter of Richard the
Fearless, was William's great-aunt.  Such a kindred, to say nothing
of William's bastardy, could give no right to the crown according
to any doctrine of succession that ever was heard of.  It could at
most point him out as a candidate for adoption, in case the
reigning king should be disposed and allowed to choose his
successor.  William or his advisers may have begun to weigh this
chance very early; but all that is really certain is that William
was a friend and favourite of his elder kinsman, and that events
finally brought his succession to the English crown within the
range of things that might be.

But, before this, William was to show himself as a warrior beyond
the bounds of his own duchy, and to take seizin, as it were, of his
great continental conquest.  William's first war out of Normandy
was waged in common with King Henry against Geoffrey Martel Count
of Anjou, and waged on the side of Maine.  William undoubtedly owed
a debt of gratitude to his overlord for good help given at Val-es-
dunes, and excuses were never lacking for a quarrel between Anjou
and Normandy.  Both powers asserted rights over the intermediate
land of Maine.  In 1048 we find William giving help to Henry in a
war with Anjou, and we hear wonderful but vague tales of his
exploits.  The really instructive part of the story deals with two
border fortresses on the march of Normandy and Maine.  Alencon lay
on the Norman side of the Sarthe; but it was disloyal to Normandy.
Brionne was still holding out for Guy of Burgundy.  The town was a
lordship of the house of Belleme, a house renowned for power and
wickedness, and which, as holding great possessions alike of
Normandy and of France, ranked rather with princes than with
ordinary nobles.  The story went that William Talvas, lord of
Belleme, one of the fiercest of his race, had cursed William in his
cradle, as one by whom he and his should be brought to shame.  Such
a tale set forth the noblest side of William's character, as the
man who did something to put down such enemies of mankind as he who
cursed him.  The possessions of William Talvas passed through his
daughter Mabel to Roger of Montgomery, a man who plays a great part
in William's history; but it is the disloyalty of the burghers, not
of their lord, of which we hear just now.  They willingly admitted
an Angevin garrison.  William in return laid siege to Domfront on
the Varenne, a strong castle which was then an outpost of Maine
against Normandy.  A long skirmishing warfare, in which William won
for himself a name by deeds of personal prowess, went on during the
autumn and winter (1048-49).  One tale specially illustrates more
than one point in the feelings of the time.  The two princes,
William and Geoffrey, give a mutual challenge; each gives the other
notice of the garb and shield that he will wear that he may not be
mistaken.  The spirit of knight-errantry was coming in, and we see
that William himself in his younger days was touched by it.  But we
see also that coat-armour was as yet unknown.  Geoffrey and his
host, so the Normans say, shrink from the challenge and decamp in
the night, leaving the way open for a sudden march upon Alencon.
The disloyal burghers received the duke with mockery of his birth.
They hung out skins, and shouted, "Hides for the Tanner."  Personal
insult is always hard for princes to bear, and the wrath of William
was stirred up to a pitch which made him for once depart from his
usual moderation towards conquered enemies.  He swore that the men
who had jeered at him should be dealt with like a tree whose
branches are cut off with the pollarding-knife.  The town was taken
by assault, and William kept his oath.  The castle held out; the
hands and feet of thirty-two pollarded burghers of Alencon were
thrown over its walls, and the threat implied drove the garrison to
surrender on promise of safety for life and limb.  The defenders of
Domfront, struck with fear, surrendered also, and kept their arms
as well as their lives and limbs.  William had thus won back his
own rebellious town, and had enlarged his borders by his first
conquest.  He went farther south, and fortified another castle at
Ambrieres; but Ambrieres was only a temporary conquest.  Domfront
has ever since been counted as part of Normandy.  But, as
ecclesiastical divisions commonly preserve the secular divisions of
an earlier time, Domfront remained down to the great French
Revolution in the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of Le Mans.


William had now shown himself in Maine as conqueror, and he was
before long to show himself in England, though not yet as
conqueror.  If our chronology is to be trusted, he had still in
this interval to complete his conquest of his own duchy by securing
the surrender of Brionne; and two other events, both
characteristic, one of them memorable, fill up the same time.
William now banished a kinsman of his own name, who held the great
county of Mortain, Moretoliam or Moretonium, in the diocese of
Avranches, which must be carefully distinguished from Mortagne-en-
Perche, Mauritania or Moretonia in the diocese of Seez.  This act,
of somewhat doubtful justice, is noteworthy on two grounds.  First,
the accuser of the banished count was one who was then a poor
serving-knight of his own, but who became the forefather of a house
which plays a great part in English history, Robert surnamed the
Bigod.  Secondly, the vacant county was granted by William to his
own half-brother Robert.  He had already in 1048 bestowed the
bishopric of Bayeux on his other half-brother Odo, who cannot at
that time have been more than twelve years old.  He must therefore
have held the see for a good while without consecration, and at no
time of his fifty years' holding of it did he show any very
episcopal merits.  This was the last case in William's reign of an
old abuse by which the chief church preferments in Normandy had
been turned into means of providing for members, often unworthy
members, of the ducal family; and it is the only one for which
William can have been personally responsible.  Both his brothers
were thus placed very early in life among the chief men of
Normandy, as they were in later years to be placed among the chief
men of England.  But William's affection for his brothers, amiable
as it may have been personally, was assuredly not among the
brighter parts of his character as a sovereign.

The other chief event of this time also concerns the domestic side
of William's life.  The long story of his marriage now begins.  The
date is fixed by one of the decrees of the council of Rheims held
in 1049 by Pope Leo the Ninth, in which Baldwin Count of Flanders
is forbidden to give his daughter to William the Norman.  This
implies that the marriage was already thought of, and further that
it was looked on as uncanonical.  The bride whom William sought,
Matilda daughter of Baldwin the Fifth, was connected with him by
some tie of kindred or affinity which made a marriage between them
unlawful by the rules of the Church.  But no genealogist has yet
been able to find out exactly what the canonical hindrance was.  It
is hard to trace the descent of William and Matilda up to any
common forefather.  But the light which the story throws on
William's character is the same in any case.  Whether he was
seeking a wife or a kingdom, he would have his will, but he could
wait for it.  In William's doubtful position, a marriage with the
daughter of the Count of Flanders would be useful to him in many
ways; and Matilda won her husband's abiding love and trust.
Strange tales are told of William's wooing.  Tales are told also of
Matilda's earlier love for the Englishman Brihtric, who is said to
have found favour in her eyes when he came as envoy from England to
her father's court.  All that is certain is that the marriage had
been thought of and had been forbidden before the next important
event in William's life that we have to record.

Was William's Flemish marriage in any way connected with his hopes
of succession to the English crown?  Had there been any available
bride for him in England, it might have been for his interest to
seek for her there.  But it should be noticed, though no ancient
writer points out the fact, that Matilda was actually descended
from Alfred in the female line; so that William's children, though
not William himself, had some few drops of English blood in their
veins.  William or his advisers, in weighing every chance which
might help his interests in the direction of England, may have
reckoned this piece of rather ancient genealogy among the
advantages of a Flemish alliance.  But it is far more certain that,
between the forbidding of the marriage and the marriage itself, a
direct hope of succession to the English crown had been opened to
the Norman duke.



CHAPTER III--WILLIAM'S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND--A.D. 1051-1052



While William was strengthening himself in Normandy, Norman
influence in England had risen to its full height.  The king was
surrounded by foreign favourites.  The only foreign earl was his
nephew Ralph of Mentes, the son of his sister Godgifu.  But three
chief bishoprics were held by Normans, Robert of Canterbury,
William of London, and Ulf of Dorchester.  William bears a good
character, and won the esteem of Englishmen; but the unlearned Ulf
is emphatically said to have done "nought bishoplike."  Smaller
preferments in Church and State, estates in all parts of the
kingdom, were lavishly granted to strangers.  They built castles,
and otherwise gave offence to English feeling.  Archbishop Robert,
above all, was ever plotting against Godwine, Earl of the West-
Saxons, the head of the national party.  At last, in the autumn of
1051, the national indignation burst forth.  The immediate occasion
was a visit paid to the King by Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had
just married the widowed Countess Godgifu.  The violent dealings of
his followers towards the burghers of Dover led to resistance on
their part, and to a long series of marches and negotiations, which
ended in the banishment of Godwine and his son, and the parting of
his daughter Edith, the King's wife, from her husband.  From
October 1051 to September 1052, the Normans had their own way in
England.  And during that time King Edward received a visitor of
greater fame than his brother-in-law from Boulogne in the person of
his cousin from Rouen.

Of his visit we only read that "William Earl came from beyond sea
with mickle company of Frenchmen, and the king him received, and as
many of his comrades as to him seemed good, and let him go again."
Another account adds that William received great gifts from the
King.  But William himself in several documents speaks of Edward as
his lord; he must therefore at some time have done to Edward an act
of homage, and there is no time but this at which we can conceive
such an act being done.  Now for what was the homage paid?  Homage
was often paid on very trifling occasions, and strange conflicts of
allegiance often followed.  No such conflict was likely to arise if
the Duke of the Normans, already the man of the King of the French
for his duchy, became the man of the King of the English on any
other ground.  Betwixt England and France there was as yet no
enmity or rivalry.  England and France became enemies afterwards
because the King of the English and the Duke of the Normans were
one person.  And this visit, this homage, was the first step
towards making the King of the English and the Duke of the Normans
the same person.  The claim William had to the English crown rested
mainly on an alleged promise of the succession made by Edward.
This claim is not likely to have been a mere shameless falsehood.
That Edward did make some promise to William--as that Harold, at a
later stage, did take some oath to William--seems fully proved by
the fact that, while such Norman statements as could be denied were
emphatically denied by the English writers, on these two points the
most patriotic Englishmen, the strongest partisans of Harold, keep
a marked silence.  We may be sure therefore that some promise was
made; for that promise a time must be found, and no time seems
possible except this time of William's visit to Edward.  The date
rests on no direct authority, but it answers every requirement.
Those who spoke of the promise as being made earlier, when William
and Edward were boys together in Normandy, forgot that Edward was
many years older than William.  The only possible moment earlier
than the visit was when Edward was elected king in 1042.  Before
that time he could hardly have thought of disposing of a kingdom
which was not his, and at that time he might have looked forward to
leaving sons to succeed him.  Still less could the promise have
been made later than the visit.  From 1053 to the end of his life
Edward was under English influences, which led him first to send
for his nephew Edward from Hungary as his successor, and in the end
to make a recommendation in favour of Harold.  But in 1051-52
Edward, whether under a vow or not, may well have given up the hope
of children; he was surrounded by Norman influences; and, for the
only time in the last twenty-four years of their joint lives, he
and William met face to face.  The only difficulty is one to which
no contemporary writer makes any reference.  If Edward wished to
dispose of his crown in favour of one of his French-speaking
kinsmen, he had a nearer kinsman of whom he might more naturally
have thought.  His own nephew Ralph was living in England and
holding an English earldom.  He had the advantage over both William
and his own older brother Walter of Mantes, in not being a reigning
prince elsewhere.  We can only say that there is evidence that
Edward did think of William, that there is no evidence that he ever
thought of Ralph.  And, except the tie of nearer kindred,
everything would suggest William rather than Ralph.  The personal
comparison is almost grotesque; and Edward's early associations and
the strongest influences around him, were not vaguely French but
specially Norman.  Archbishop Robert would plead for his own native
sovereign only.  In short, we may be as nearly sure as we can be of
any fact for which there is no direct authority, that Edward's
promise to William was made at the time of William's visit to
England, and that William's homage to Edward was done in the
character of a destined successor to the English crown.

William then came to England a mere duke and went back to Normandy
a king expectant.  But the value of his hopes, to the value of the
promise made to him, are quite another matter.  Most likely they
were rated on both sides far above their real value.  King and duke
may both have believed that they were making a settlement which the
English nation was bound to respect.  If so, Edward at least was
undeceived within a few months.


The notion of a king disposing of his crown by his own act belongs
to the same range of ideas as the law of strict hereditary
succession.  It implies that kingship is a possession and not an
office.  Neither the heathen nor the Christian English had ever
admitted that doctrine; but it was fast growing on the continent.
Our forefathers had always combined respect for the kingly house
with some measure of choice among the members of that house.
Edward himself was not the lawful heir according to the notions of
a modern lawyer; for he was chosen while the son of his elder
brother was living.  Every English king held his crown by the gift
of the great assembly of the nation, though the choice of the
nation was usually limited to the descendants of former kings, and
though the full-grown son of the late king was seldom opposed.
Christianity had strengthened the election principle.  The king
lost his old sanctity as the son of Woden; he gained a new sanctity
as the Lord's anointed.  But kingship thereby became more
distinctly an office, a great post, like a bishopric, to which its
holder had to be lawfully chosen and admitted by solemn rites.  But
of that office he could be lawfully deprived, nor could he hand it
on to a successor either according to his own will or according to
any strict law of succession.  The wishes of the late king, like
the wishes of the late bishop, went for something with the
electors.  But that was all.  All that Edward could really do for
his kinsmen was to promise to make, when the time came, a
recommendation to the Witan in his favour.  The Witan might then
deal as they thought good with a recommendation so unusual as to
choose to the kingship of England a man who was neither a native
nor a conqueror of England nor the descendant of any English king.

When the time came, Edward did make a recommendation to the Witan,
but it was not in favour of William.  The English influences under
which he was brought during his last fourteen years taught him
better what the law of England was and what was the duty of an
English king.  But at the time of William's visit Edward may well
have believed that he could by his own act settle his crown on his
Norman kinsman as his undoubted successor in case he died without a
son.  And it may be that Edward was bound by a vow not to leave a
son.  And if Edward so thought, William naturally thought so yet
more; he would sincerely believe himself to be the lawful heir of
the crown of England, the sole lawful successor, except in one
contingency which was perhaps impossible and certainly unlikely.

The memorials of these times, so full on some points, are meagre on
others.  Of those writers who mention the bequest or promise none
mention it at any time when it is supposed to have happened; they
mention it at some later time when it began to be of practical
importance.  No English writer speaks of William's claim till the
time when he was about practically to assert it; no Norman writer
speaks of it till he tells the tale of Harold's visit and oath to
William.  We therefore cannot say how far the promise was known
either in England or on the continent.  But it could not be kept
altogether hid, even if either party wished it to be hid.  English
statesmen must have known of it, and must have guided their policy
accordingly, whether it was generally known in the country or not.
William's position, both in his own duchy and among neighbouring
princes, would be greatly improved if he could be looked upon as a
future king.  As heir to the crown of England, he may have more
earnestly wooed the descendant of former wearers of the crown; and
Matilda and her father may have looked more favourably on a suitor
to whom the crown of England was promised.  On the other hand, the
existence of such a foreign claimant made it more needful than ever
for Englishmen to be ready with an English successor, in the royal
house or out of it, the moment the reigning king should pass away.


It was only for a short time that William could have had any
reasonable hope of a peaceful succession.  The time of Norman
influence in England was short.  The revolution of September 1052
brought Godwine back, and placed the rule of England again in
English hands.  Many Normans were banished, above all Archbishop
Robert and Bishop Ulf.  The death of Godwine the next year placed
the chief power in the hands of his son Harold.  This change
undoubtedly made Edward more disposed to the national cause.  Of
Godwine, the man to whom he owed his crown, he was clearly in awe;
to Godwine's sons he was personally attached.  We know not how
Edward was led to look on his promise to William as void.  That he
was so led is quite plain.  He sent for his nephew the AEtheling
Edward from Hungary, clearly as his intended successor.  When the
AEtheling died in 1057, leaving a son under age, men seem to have
gradually come to look to Harold as the probable successor.  He
clearly held a special position above that of an ordinary earl; but
there is no need to suppose any formal act in his favour till the
time of the King's death, January 5, 1066.  On his deathbed Edward
did all that he legally could do on behalf of Harold by
recommending him to the Witan for election as the next king.  That
he then either made a new or renewed an old nomination in favour of
William is a fable which is set aside by the witness of the
contemporary English writers.  William's claim rested wholly on
that earlier nomination which could hardly have been made at any
other time than his visit to England.


We have now to follow William back to Normandy, for the remaining
years of his purely ducal reign.  The expectant king had doubtless
thoughts and hopes which he had not had before.  But we can guess
at them only:  they are not recorded.



CHAPTER IV--THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY--A.D. 1052-1063



If William came back from England looking forward to a future
crown, the thought might even then flash across his mind that he
was not likely to win that crown without fighting for it.  As yet
his business was still to fight for the duchy of Normandy.  But he
had now to fight, not to win his duchy, but only to keep it.  For
five years he had to strive both against rebellious subjects and
against invading enemies, among whom King Henry of Paris is again
the foremost.  Whatever motives had led the French king to help
William at Val-es-dunes had now passed away.  He had fallen back on
his former state of abiding enmity towards Normandy and her duke.
But this short period definitely fixed the position of Normandy and
her duke in Gaul and in Europe.  At its beginning William is still
the Bastard of Falaise, who may or may not be able to keep himself
in the ducal chair, his right to which is still disputed.  At the
end of it, if he is not yet the Conqueror and the Great, he has
shown all the gifts that were needed to win him either name.  He is
the greatest vassal of the French crown, a vassal more powerful
than the overlord whose invasions of his duchy he has had to drive
back.

These invasions of Normandy by the King of the French and his
allies fall into two periods.  At first Henry appears in Normandy
as the supporter of Normans in open revolt against their duke.  But
revolts are personal and local; there is no rebellion like that
which was crushed at Val-es-dunes, spreading over a large part of
the duchy.  In the second period, the invaders have no such
starting-point.  There are still traitors; there are still rebels;
but all that they can do is to join the invaders after they have
entered the land.  William is still only making his way to the
universal good will of his duchy:  but he is fast making it.

There is, first of all, an obscure tale of a revolt of an unfixed
date, but which must have happened between 1048 and 1053.  The
rebel, William Busac of the house of Eu, is said to have defended
the castle of Eu against the duke and to have gone into banishment
in France.  But the year that followed William's visit to England
saw the far more memorable revolt of William Count of Arques.  He
had drawn the Duke's suspicions on him, and he had to receive a
ducal garrison in his great fortress by Dieppe.  But the garrison
betrayed the castle to its own master.  Open revolt and havoc
followed, in which Count William was supported by the king and by
several other princes.  Among them was Ingelram Count of Ponthieu,
husband of the duke's sister Adelaide.  Another enemy was Guy Count
of Gascony, afterwards Duke William the Eighth of Aquitaine.  What
quarrel a prince in the furthest corner of Gaul could have with the
Duke of the Normans does not appear; but neither Count William nor
his allies could withstand the loyal Normans and their prince.
Count Ingelram was killed; the other princes withdrew to devise
greater efforts against Normandy.  Count William lost his castle
and part of his estates, and left the duchy of his free will.  The
Duke's politic forbearance at last won him the general good will of
his subjects.  We hear of no more open revolts till that of
William's own son many years after.  But the assaults of foreign
enemies, helped sometimes by Norman traitors, begin again the next
year on a greater scale.


William the ruler and warrior had now a short breathing-space.  He
had doubtless come back from England more bent than ever on his
marriage with Matilda of Flanders.  Notwithstanding the decree of a
Pope and a Council entitled to special respect, the marriage was
celebrated, not very long after William's return to Normandy, in
the year of the revolt of William of Arques.  In the course of the
year 1053 Count Baldwin brought his daughter to the Norman frontier
at Eu, and there she became the bride of William.  We know not what
emboldened William to risk so daring a step at this particular
time, or what led Baldwin to consent to it.  If it was suggested by
the imprisonment of Pope Leo by William's countrymen in Italy, in
the hope that a consent to the marriage would be wrung out of the
captive pontiff, that hope was disappointed.  The marriage raised
much opposition in Normandy.  It was denounced by Archbishop Malger
of Rouen, the brother of the dispossessed Count of Arques.  His
character certainly added no weight to his censures; but the same
act in a saint would have been set down as a sign of holy boldness.
Presently, whether for his faults or for his merits, Malger was
deposed in a synod of the Norman Church, and William found him a
worthier successor in the learned and holy Maurilius.  But a
greater man than Malger also opposed the marriage, and the
controversy thus introduces us to one who fills a place second only
to that of William himself in the Norman and English history of the
time.

This was Lanfranc of Pavia, the lawyer, the scholar, the model
monk, the ecclesiastical statesman, who, as prior of the newly
founded abbey of Bec, was already one of the innermost counsellors
of the Duke.  As duke and king, as prior, abbot, and archbishop,
William and Lanfranc ruled side by side, each helping the work of
the other till the end of their joint lives.  Once only, at this
time, was their friendship broken for a moment.  Lanfranc spoke
against the marriage, and ventured to rebuke the Duke himself.
William's wrath was kindled; he ordered Lanfranc into banishment
and took a baser revenge by laying waste part of the lands of the
abbey.  But the quarrel was soon made up.  Lanfranc presently left
Normandy, not as a banished man, but as the envoy of its sovereign,
commissioned to work for the confirmation of the marriage at the
papal court.  He worked, and his work was crowned with success, but
not with speedy success.  It was not till six years after the
marriage, not till the year 1059, that Lanfranc obtained the wished
for confirmation, not from Leo, but from his remote successor
Nicolas the Second.  The sin of those who had contracted the
unlawful union was purged by various good works, among which the
foundation of the two stately abbeys of Caen was conspicuous.

This story illustrates many points in the character of William and
of his time.  His will is not to be thwarted, whether in a matter
of marriage or of any other.  But he does not hurry matters; he
waits for a favourable opportunity.  Something, we know not what,
must have made the year 1053 more favourable than the year 1049.
We mark also William's relations to the Church.  He is at no time
disposed to submit quietly to the bidding of the spiritual power,
when it interferes with his rights or even when it crosses his
will.  Yet he is really anxious for ecclesiastical reform; he
promotes men like Maurilius and Lanfranc; perhaps he is not
displeased when the exercise of ecclesiastical discipline, in the
case of Malger, frees him from a troublesome censor.  But the worse
side of him also comes out.  William could forgive rebels, but he
could not bear the personal rebuke even of his friend.  Under this
feeling he punishes a whole body of men for the offence of one.  To
lay waste the lands of Bec for the rebuke of Lanfranc was like an
ordinary prince of the time; it was unlike William, if he had not
been stirred up by a censure which touched his wife as well as
himself.  But above all, the bargain between William and Lanfranc
is characteristic of the man and the age.  Lanfranc goes to Rome to
support a marriage which he had censured in Normandy.  But there is
no formal inconsistency, no forsaking of any principle.  Lanfranc
holds an uncanonical marriage to be a sin, and he denounces it.  He
does not withdraw his judgement as to its sinfulness.  He simply
uses his influence with a power that can forgive the sin to get it
forgiven.

While William's marriage was debated at Rome, he had to fight hard
in Normandy.  His warfare and his negotiations ended about the same
time, and the two things may have had their bearing on one another.
William had now to undergo a new form of trial.  The King of the
French had never put forth his full strength when he was simply
backing Norman rebels.  William had now, in two successive
invasions, to withstand the whole power of the King, and of as many
of his vassals as the King could bring to his standard.  In the
first invasion, in 1054, the Norman writers speak rhetorically of
warriors from Burgundy, Auvergne, and Gascony; but it is hard to
see any troops from a greater distance than Bourges.  The princes
who followed Henry seem to have been only the nearer vassals of the
Crown.  Chief among them are Theobald Count of Chartres, of a house
of old hostile to Normandy, and Guy the new Count of Ponthieu, to
be often heard of again.  If not Geoffrey of Anjou himself, his
subjects from Tours were also there.  Normandy was to be invaded on
two sides, on both banks of the Seine.  The King and his allies
sought to wrest from William the western part of Normandy, the
older and the more thoroughly French part.  No attack seems to have
been designed on the Bessin or the Cotentin.  William was to be
allowed to keep those parts of his duchy, against which he had to
fight when the King was his ally at Val-es-dunes.

The two armies entered Normandy; that which was to act on the left
of the Seine was led by the King, the other by his brother Odo.
Against the King William made ready to act himself; eastern
Normandy was left to its own loyal nobles.  But all Normandy was
now loyal; the men of the Saxon and Danish lands were as ready to
fight for their duke against the King as they had been to fight
against King and Duke together.  But William avoided pitched
battles; indeed pitched battles are rare in the continental warfare
of the time.  War consists largely in surprises, and still more in
the attack and defence of fortified places.  The plan of William's
present campaign was wholly defensive; provisions and cattle were
to be carried out of the French line of march; the Duke on his
side, the other Norman leaders on the other side, were to watch the
enemy and attack them at any favourable moment.  The commanders
east of the Seine, Count Robert of Eu, Hugh of Gournay, William
Crispin, and Walter Giffard, found their opportunity when the
French had entered the unfortified town of Mortemer and had given
themselves up to revelry.  Fire and sword did the work.  The whole
French army was slain, scattered, or taken prisoners.  Ode escaped;
Guy of Ponthieu was taken.  The Duke's success was still easier.
The tale runs that the news from Mortemer, suddenly announced to
the King's army in the dead of the night, struck them with panic,
and led to a hasty retreat out of the land.

This campaign is truly Norman; it is wholly unlike the simple
warfare of England.  A traitorous Englishman did nothing or helped
the enemy; a patriotic Englishman gave battle to the enemy the
first time he had a chance.  But no English commander of the
eleventh century was likely to lay so subtle a plan as this, and,
if he had laid such a plan, he would hardly have found an English
army able to carry it out.  Harold, who refused to lay waste a rood
of English ground, would hardly have looked quietly on while many
roods of English ground were wasted by the enemy.  With all the
valour of the Normans, what before all things distinguished them
from other nations was their craft.  William could indeed fight a
pitched battle when a pitched battle served his purpose; but he
could control himself, he could control his followers, even to the
point of enduring to look quietly on the havoc of their own land
till the right moment.  He who could do this was indeed practising
for his calling as Conqueror.  And if the details of the story,
details specially characteristic, are to be believed, William
showed something also of that grim pleasantry which was another
marked feature in the Norman character.  The startling message
which struck the French army with panic was deliberately sent with
that end.  The messenger sent climbs a tree or a rock, and, with a
voice as from another world, bids the French awake; they are
sleeping too long; let them go and bury their friends who are lying
dead at Mortemer.  These touches bring home to us the character of
the man and the people with whom our forefathers had presently to
deal.  William was the greatest of his race, but he was essentially
of his race; he was Norman to the backbone.

Of the French army one division had been surprised and cut to
pieces, the other had left Normandy without striking a blow.  The
war was not yet quite over; the French still kept Tillieres;
William accordingly fortified the stronghold of Breteuil as a cheek
upon it.  And he entrusted the command to a man who will soon be
memorable, his personal friend William, son of his old guardian
Osbern.  King Henry was now glad to conclude a peace on somewhat
remarkable terms.  William had the king's leave to take what he
could from Count Geoffrey of Anjou.  He now annexed Cenomannian--
that is just now Angevin--territory at more points than one, but
chiefly on the line of his earlier advances to Domfront and
Ambrieres.  Ambrieres had perhaps been lost; for William now sent
Geoffrey a challenge to come on the fortieth day.  He came on the
fortieth day, and found Ambrieres strongly fortified and occupied
by a Norman garrison.  With Geoffrey came the Breton prince Ode,
and William or Peter Duke of Aquitaine.  They besieged the castle;
but Norman accounts add that they all fled on William's approach to
relieve it.

Three years of peace now followed, but in 1058 King Henry, this
time in partnership with Geoffrey of Anjou, ventured another
invasion of Normandy.  He might say that he had never been fairly
beaten in his former campaign, but that he had been simply cheated
out of the land by Norman wiles.  This time he had a second
experience of Norman wiles and of Norman strength too.  King and
Count entered the land and ravaged far and wide.  William, as
before, allowed the enemy to waste the land.  He watched and
followed them till he found a favourable moment for attack.  The
people in general zealously helped the Duke's schemes, but some
traitors of rank were still leagued with the Count of Anjou.  While
William bided his time, the invaders burned Caen.  This place, so
famous in Norman history, was not one of the ancient cities of the
land.  It was now merely growing into importance, and it was as yet
undefended by walls or castle.  But when the ravagers turned
eastward, William found the opportunity that he had waited for.  As
the French were crossing the ford of Varaville on the Dive, near
the mouth of that river, he came suddenly on them, and slaughtered
a large part of the army under the eyes of the king who had already
crossed.  The remnant marched out of Normandy.

Henry now made peace, and restored Tillieres.  Not long after, in
1060, the King died, leaving his young son Philip, who had been
already crowned, as his successor, under the guardianship of
William's father-in-law Baldwin.  Geoffrey of Anjou and William of
Aquitaine also died, and the Angevin power was weakened by the
division of Geoffrey's dominions between his nephews.  William's
position was greatly strengthened, now that France, under the new
regent, had become friendly, while Anjou was no longer able to do
mischief.  William had now nothing to fear from his neighbours, and
the way was soon opened for his great continental conquest.  But
what effect had these events on William's views on England?  About
the time of the second French invasion of Normandy Earl Harold
became beyond doubt the first man in England, and for the first
time a chance of the royal succession was opened to him.  In 1057,
the year before Varaville, the AEtheling Edward, the King's
selected successor, died soon after his coming to England; in the
same year died the King's nephew Earl Ralph and Leofric Earl of the
Mercians, the only Englishmen whose influence could at all compare
with that of Harold.  Harold's succession now became possible; it
became even likely, if Edward should die while Edgar the son of the
AEtheling was still under age.  William had no shadow of excuse for
interfering, but he doubtless was watching the internal affairs of
England.  Harold was certainly watching the affairs of Gaul.  About
this time, most likely in the year 1058, he made a pilgrimage to
Rome, and on his way back he looked diligently into the state of
things among the various vassals of the French crown.  His exact
purpose is veiled in ambiguous language; but we can hardly doubt
that his object was to contract alliances with the continental
enemies of Normandy.  Such views looked to the distant future, as
William had as yet been guilty of no unfriendly act towards
England.  But it was well to come to an understanding with King
Henry, Count Geoffrey, and Duke William of Aquitaine, in case a
time should come when their interests and those of England would be
the same.  But the deaths of all those princes must have put an end
to all hopes of common action between England and any Gaulish
power.  The Emperor Henry also, the firm ally of England, was dead.
It was now clear that, if England should ever have to withstand a
Norman attack, she would have to withstand it wholly by her own
strength, or with such help as she might find among the kindred
powers of the North.


William's great continental conquest is drawing nigh; but between
the campaign of Varaville and the campaign of Le Mans came the
tardy papal confirmation of William's marriage.  The Duke and
Duchess, now at last man and wife in the eye of the Church, began
to carry out the works of penance which were allotted to them.  The
abbeys of Caen, William's Saint Stephen's, Matilda's Holy Trinity,
now began to arise.  Yet, at this moment of reparation, one or two
facts seem to place William's government of his duchy in a less
favourable light than usual.  The last French invasion was followed
by confiscations and banishments among the chief men of Normandy.
Roger of Montgomery and his wife Mabel, who certainly was capable
of any deed of blood or treachery, are charged with acting as false
accusers.  We see also that, as late as the day of Varaville, there
were Norman traitors.  Robert of Escalfoy had taken the Angevin
side, and had defended his castle against the Duke.  He died in a
strange way, after snatching an apple from the hand of his own
wife.  His nephew Arnold remained in rebellion three years, and was
simply required to go to the wars in Apulia.  It is hard to believe
that the Duke had poisoned the apple, if poisoned it was; but
finding treason still at work among his nobles, he may have too
hastily listened to charges against men who had done him good
service, and who were to do him good service again.

Five years after the combat at Varaville, William really began to
deserve, though not as yet to receive, the name of Conqueror.  For
he now did a work second only to the conquest of England.  He won
the city of Le Mans and the whole land of Maine.  Between the tale
of Maine and the tale of England there is much of direct likeness.
Both lands were won against the will of their inhabitants; but both
conquests were made with an elaborate show of legal right.
William's earlier conquests in Maine had been won, not from any
count of Maine, but from Geoffrey of Anjou, who had occupied the
country to the prejudice of two successive counts, Hugh and
Herbert.  He had further imprisoned the Bishop of Le Mans, Gervase
of the house of Belleme, though the King of the French had at his
request granted to the Count of Anjou for life royal rights over
the bishopric of Le Mans.  The bishops of Le Mans, who thus, unlike
the bishops of Normandy, held their temporalities of the distant
king and not of the local count, held a very independent position.
The citizens of Le Mans too had large privileges and a high spirit
to defend them; the city was in a marked way the head of the
district.  Thus it commonly carried with it the action of the whole
country.  In Maine there were three rival powers, the prince, the
Church, and the people.  The position of the counts was further
weakened by the claims to their homage made by the princes on
either side of them in Normandy and Anjou; the position of the
Bishop, vassal, till Gervase's late act, of the King only, was
really a higher one.  Geoffrey had been received at Le Mans with
the good will of the citizens, and both Bishop and Count sought
shelter with William.  Gervase was removed from the strife by
promotion to the highest place in the French kingdom, the
archbishopric of Rheims.  The young Count Herbert, driven from his
county, commended himself to William.  He became his man; he agreed
to hold his dominions of him, and to marry one of his daughters.
If he died childless, his father-in-law was to take the fief into
his own hands.  But to unite the old and new dynasties, Herbert's
youngest sister Margaret was to marry William's eldest son Robert.
If female descent went for anything, it is not clear why Herbert
passed by the rights of his two elder sisters, Gersendis, wife of
Azo Marquess of Liguria, and Paula, wife of John of La Fleche on
the borders of Maine and Anjou.  And sons both of Gersendis and of
Paula did actually reign at Le Mans, while no child either of
Herbert or of Margaret ever came into being.

If Herbert ever actually got possession of his country, his
possession of it was short.  He died in 1063 before either of the
contemplated marriages had been carried out.  William therefore
stood towards Maine as he expected to stand with regard to England.
The sovereign of each country had made a formal settlement of his
dominions in his favour.  It was to be seen whether those who were
most immediately concerned would accept that settlement.  Was the
rule either of Maine or of England to be handed over in this way,
like a mere property, without the people who were to be ruled
speaking their minds on the matter?  What the people of England
said to this question in 1066 we shall hear presently; what the
people of Maine said in 1063 we hear now.  We know not why they had
submitted to the Angevin count; they had now no mind to merge their
country in the dominions of the Norman duke.  The Bishop was
neutral; but the nobles and the citizens of Le Mans were of one
mind in refusing William's demand to be received as count by virtue
of the agreement with Herbert.  They chose rulers for themselves.
Passing by Gersendis and Paula and their sons, they sent for
Herbert's aunt Biota and her husband Walter Count of Mantes.
Strangely enough, Walter, son of Godgifu daughter of AEthelred, was
a possible, though not a likely, candidate for the rule of England
as well as of Maine.  The people of Maine are not likely to have
thought of this bit of genealogy.  But it was doubtless present to
the minds alike of William and of Harold.

William thus, for the first but not for the last time, claimed the
rule of a people who had no mind to have him as their ruler.  Yet,
morally worthless as were his claims over Maine, in the merely
technical way of looking at things, he had more to say than most
princes have who annex the lands of their neighbours.  He had a
perfectly good right by the terms of the agreement with Herbert.
And it might be argued by any who admitted the Norman claim to the
homage of Maine, that on the failure of male heirs the country
reverted to the overlord.  Yet female succession was now coming in.
Anjou had passed to the sons of Geoffrey's sister; it had not
fallen back to the French king.  There was thus a twofold answer to
William's claim, that Herbert could not grant away even the rights
of his sisters, still less the rights of his people.  Still it was
characteristic of William that he had a case that might be
plausibly argued.  The people of Maine had fallen back on the old
Teutonic right.  They had chosen a prince connected with the old
stock, but who was not the next heir according to any rule of
succession.  Walter was hardly worthy of such an exceptional
honour; he showed no more energy in Maine than his brother Ralph
had shown in England.  The city was defended by Geoffrey, lord of
Mayenne, a valiant man who fills a large place in the local
history.  But no valour or skill could withstand William's plan of
warfare.  He invaded Maine in much the same sort in which he had
defended Normandy.  He gave out that he wished to win Maine without
shedding man's blood.  He fought no battles; he did not attack the
city, which he left to be the last spot that should be devoured.
He harried the open country, he occupied the smaller posts, till
the citizens were driven, against Geoffrey's will, to surrender.
William entered Le Mans; he was received, we are told, with joy.
When men make the best of a bad bargain, they sometimes persuade
themselves that they are really pleased.  William, as ever, shed no
blood; he harmed none of the men who had become his subjects; but
Le Mans was to be bridled; its citizens needed a castle and a
Norman garrison to keep them in their new allegiance.  Walter and
Biota surrendered their claims on Maine and became William's guests
at Falaise.  Meanwhile Geoffrey of Mayenne refused to submit, and
withstood the new Count of Maine in his stronghold.  William laid
siege to Mayenne, and took it by the favoured Norman argument of
fire.  All Maine was now in the hands of the Conqueror.

William had now made a greater conquest than any Norman duke had
made before him.  He had won a county and a noble city, and he had
won them, in the ideas of his own age, with honour.  Are we to
believe that he sullied his conquest by putting his late
competitors, his present guests, to death by poison?  They died
conveniently for him, and they died in his own house.  Such a death
was strange; but strange things do happen.  William gradually came
to shrink from no crime for which he could find a technical
defence; but no advocate could have said anything on behalf of the
poisoning of Walter and Biota.  Another member of the house of
Maine, Margaret the betrothed of his son Robert, died about the
same time; and her at least William had every motive to keep alive.
One who was more dangerous than Walter, if he suffered anything,
only suffered banishment.  Of Geoffrey of Mayenne we hear no more
till William had again to fight for the possession of Maine.


William had thus, in the year 1063, reached the height of his power
and fame as a continental prince.  In a conquest on Gaulish soil he
had rehearsed the greater conquest which he was before long to make
beyond sea.  Three years, eventful in England, outwardly uneventful
in Normandy, still part us from William's second visit to our
shores.  But in the course of these three years one event must have
happened, which, without a blow being struck or a treaty being
signed, did more for his hopes than any battle or any treaty.  At
some unrecorded time, but at a time which must come within these
years, Harold Earl of the West-Saxons became the guest and the man
of William Duke of the Normans.



CHAPTER V--HAROLD'S OATH TO WILLIAM--A.D. 1064?



The lord of Normandy and Maine could now stop and reckon his
chances of becoming lord of England also.  While our authorities
enable us to put together a fairly full account of both Norman and
English events, they throw no light on the way in which men in
either land looked at events in the other.  Yet we might give much
to know what William and Harold at this time thought of one
another.  Nothing had as yet happened to make the two great rivals
either national or personal enemies.  England and Normandy were at
peace, and the great duke and the great earl had most likely had no
personal dealings with one another.  They were rivals in the sense
that each looked forward to succeed to the English crown whenever
the reigning king should die.  But neither had as yet put forward
his claim in any shape that the other could look on as any formal
wrong to himself.  If William and Harold had ever met, it could
have been only during Harold's journey in Gaul.  Whatever
negotiations Harold made during that journey were negotiations
unfriendly to William; still he may, in the course of that journey,
have visited Normandy as well as France or Anjou.  It is hard to
avoid the thought that the tale of Harold's visit to William, of
his oath to William, arose out of something that happened on
Harold's way back from his Roman pilgrimage.  To that journey we
can give an approximate date.  Of any other journey we have no date
and no certain detail.  We can say only that the fact that no
English writer makes any mention of any such visit, of any such
oath, is, under the circumstances, the strongest proof that the
story of the visit and the oath has some kind of foundation.  Yet
if we grant thus much, the story reads on the whole as if it
happened a few years later than the English earl's return from
Rome.

It is therefore most likely that Harold did pay a second visit to
Gaul, whether a first or a second visit to Normandy, at some time
nearer to Edward's death than the year 1058.  The English writers
are silent; the Norman writers give no date or impossible dates;
they connect the visit with a war in Britanny; but that war is
without a date.  We are driven to choose the year which is least
rich in events in the English annals.  Harold could not have paid a
visit of several months to Normandy either in 1063 or in 1065.  Of
those years the first was the year of Harold's great war in Wales,
when he found how the Britons might be overcome by their own arms,
when he broke the power of Gruffydd, and granted the Welsh kingdom
to princes who became the men of Earl Harold as well as of King
Edward.  Harold's visit to Normandy is said to have taken place in
the summer and autumn mouths; but the summer and autumn of 1065
were taken up by the building and destruction of Harold's hunting-
seat in Wales and by the greater events of the revolt and
pacification of Northumberland.  But the year 1064 is a blank in
the English annals till the last days of December, and no action of
Harold's in that year is recorded.  It is therefore the only
possible year among those just before Edward's death.  Harold's
visit and oath to William may very well have taken place in that
year; but that is all.

We know as little for certain as to the circumstances of the visit
or the nature of the oath.  We can say only that Harold did
something which enabled William to charge him with perjury and
breach of the duty of a vassal.  It is inconceivable in itself, and
unlike the formal scrupulousness of William's character, to fancy
that he made his appeal to all Christendom without any ground at
all.  The Norman writers contradict one another so thoroughly in
every detail of the story that we can look on no part of it as
trustworthy.  Yet such a story can hardly have grown up so near to
the alleged time without some kernel of truth in it.  And herein
comes the strong corroborative witness that the English writers,
denying every other charge against Harold, pass this one by without
notice.  We can hardly doubt that Harold swore some oath to William
which he did not keep.  More than this it would be rash to say
except as an avowed guess.

As our nearest approach to fixing the date is to take that year
which is not impossible, so, to fix the occasion of the visit, we
can only take that one among the Norman versions which is also not
impossible.  All the main versions represent Harold as wrecked on
the coast of Ponthieu, as imprisoned, according to the barbarous
law of wreck, by Count Guy, and as delivered by the intervention of
William.  If any part of the story is true, this is.  But as to the
circumstances which led to the shipwreck there is no agreement.
Harold assuredly was not sent to announce to William a devise of
the crown in his favour made with the consent of the Witan of
England and confirmed by the oaths of Stigand, Godwine, Siward, and
Leofric.  Stigand became Archbishop in September 1052:  Godwine
died at Easter 1053.  The devise must therefore have taken place,
and Harold's journey must have taken place, within those few most
unlikely months, the very time when Norman influence was
overthrown.  Another version makes Harold go, against the King's
warnings, to bring back his brother Wulfnoth and his nephew Hakon,
who had been given as hostages on the return of Godwine, and had
been entrusted by the King to the keeping of Duke William.  This
version is one degree less absurd; but no such hostages are known
to have been given, and if they were, the patriotic party, in the
full swing of triumph, would hardly have allowed them to be sent to
Normandy.  A third version makes Harold's presence the result of
mere accident.  He is sailing to Wales or Flanders, or simply
taking his pleasure in the Channel, when he is cast by a storm on
the coast of Ponthieu.  Of these three accounts we may choose the
third as the only one that is possible.  It is also one out of
which the others may have grown, while it is hard to see how the
third could have arisen out of either of the others.  Harold then,
we may suppose, fell accidentally into the clutches of Guy, and was
rescued from them, at some cost in ransom and in grants of land, by
Guy's overlord Duke William.

The whole story is eminently characteristic of William.  He would
be honestly indignant at Guy's base treatment of Harold, and he
would feel it his part as Guy's overlord to redress the wrong.  But
he would also be alive to the advantage of getting his rival into
his power on so honourable a pretext.  Simply to establish a claim
to gratitude on the part of Harold would be something.  But he
might easily do more, and, according to all accounts, he did more.
Harold, we are told, as the Duke's friend and guest, returns the
obligation under which the Duke has laid him by joining him in one
or more expeditions against the Bretons.  The man who had just
smitten the Bret-Welsh of the island might well be asked to fight,
and might well be ready to fight, against the Bret-Welsh of the
mainland.  The services of Harold won him high honour; he was
admitted into the ranks of Norman knighthood, and engaged to marry
one of William's daughters.  Now, at any time to which we can fix
Harold's visit, all William's daughters must have been mere
children.  Harold, on the other hand, seems to have been a little
older than William.  Yet there is nothing unlikely in the
engagement, and it is the one point in which all the different
versions, contradicting each other on every other point, agree
without exception.  Whatever else Harold promises, he promises
this, and in some versions he does not promise anything else.

Here then we surely have the kernel of truth round which a mass of
fable, varying in different reports, has gathered.  On no other
point is there any agreement.  The place is unfixed; half a dozen
Norman towns and castles are made the scene of the oath.  The form
of the oath is unfixed; in some accounts it is the ordinary oath of
homage; in others it is an oath of fearful solemnity, taken on the
holiest relics.  In one well-known account, Harold is even made to
swear on hidden relics, not knowing on what he is swearing.  Here
is matter for much thought.  To hold that one form of oath or
promise is more binding than another upsets all true confidence
between man and man.  The notion of the specially binding nature of
the oath by relies assumes that, in case of breach of the oath,
every holy person to whose relies despite has been done will become
the personal enemy of the perjurer.  But the last story of all is
the most instructive.  William's formal, and more than formal,
religion abhorred a false oath, in himself or in another man.  But,
so long as he keeps himself personally clear from the guilt, he
does not scruple to put another man under special temptation, and,
while believing in the power of the holy relics, he does not
scruple to abuse them to a purpose of fraud.  Surely, if Harold did
break his oath, the wrath of the saints would fall more justly on
William.  Whether the tale be true or false, it equally illustrates
the feelings of the time, and assuredly its truth or falsehood
concerns the character of William far more than that of Harold.

What it was that Harold swore, whether in this specially solemn
fashion or in any other, is left equally uncertain.  In any case he
engages to marry a daughter of William--as to which daughter the
statements are endless--and in most versions he engages to do
something more.  He becomes the man of William, much as William had
become the man of Edward.  He promises to give his sister in
marriage to an unnamed Norman baron.  Moreover he promises to
secure the kingdom of England for William at Edward's death.
Perhaps he is himself to hold the kingdom or part of it under
William; in any case William is to be the overlord; in the more
usual story, William is to be himself the immediate king, with
Harold as his highest and most favoured subject.  Meanwhile Harold
is to act in William's interest, to receive a Norman garrison in
Dover castle, and to build other castles at other points.  But no
two stories agree, and not a few know nothing of anything beyond
the promise of marriage.

Now if William really required Harold to swear to all these things,
it must have been simply in order to have an occasion against him.
If Harold really swore to all of them, it must have been simply
because he felt that he was practically in William's power, without
any serious intention of keeping the oath.  If Harold took any such
oath, he undoubtedly broke it; but we may safely say that any guilt
on his part lay wholly in taking the oath, not in breaking it.  For
he swore to do what he could not do, and what it would have been a
crime to do, if he could.  If the King himself could not dispose of
the crown, still less could the most powerful subject.  Harold
could at most promise William his "vote and interest," whenever the
election came.  But no one can believe that even Harold's influence
could have obtained the crown for William.  His influence lay in
his being the embodiment of the national feeling; for him to appear
as the supporter of William would have been to lose the crown for
himself without gaining it for William.  Others in England and in
Scandinavia would have been glad of it.  And the engagements to
surrender Dover castle and the like were simply engagements on the
part of an English earl to play the traitor against England.  If
William really called on Harold to swear to all this, he did so,
not with any hope that the oath would be kept, but simply to put
his competitor as far as possible in the wrong.  But most likely
Harold swore only to something much simpler.  Next to the universal
agreement about the marriage comes the very general agreement that
Harold became William's man.  In these two statements we have
probably the whole truth.  In those days men took the obligation of
homage upon themselves very easily.  Homage was no degradation,
even in the highest; a man often did homage to any one from whom he
had received any great benefit, and Harold had received a very
great benefit from William.  Nor did homage to a new lord imply
treason to the old one.  Harold, delivered by William from Guy's
dungeon, would be eager to do for William any act of friendship.
The homage would be little more than binding himself in the
strongest form so to do.  The relation of homage could be made to
mean anything or nothing, as might be convenient.  The man might
often understand it in one sense and the lord in another.  If
Harold became the man of William, he would look on the act as
little more than an expression of good will and gratitude towards
his benefactor, his future father-in-law, his commander in the
Breton war.  He would not look on it as forbidding him to accept
the English crown if it were offered to him.  Harold, the man of
Duke William, might become a king, if he could, just as William,
the man of King Philip, might become a king, if he could.  As
things went in those days, both the homage and the promise of
marriage were capable of being looked on very lightly.

But it was not in the temper or in the circumstances of William to
put any such easy meaning on either promise.  The oath might, if
needful, be construed very strictly, and William was disposed to
construe it very strictly.  Harold had not promised William a
crown, which was not his to promise; but he had promised to do that
which might be held to forbid him to take a crown which William
held to be his own.  If the man owed his lord any duty at all, it
was surely his duty not to thwart his lord's wishes in such a
matter.  If therefore, when the vacancy of the throne came, Harold
took the crown himself, or even failed to promote William's claim
to it, William might argue that he had not rightly discharged the
duty of a man to his lord.  He could make an appeal to the world
against the new king, as a perjured man, who had failed to help his
lord in the matter where his lord most needed his help.  And, if
the oath really had been taken on relics of special holiness, he
could further appeal to the religious feelings of the time against
the man who had done despite to the saints.  If he should be driven
to claim the crown by arms, he could give the war the character of
a crusade.  All this in the end William did, and all this, we may
be sure, he looked forward to doing, when he caused Harold to
become his man.  The mere obligation of homage would, in the
skilful hands of William and Lanfranc, be quite enough to work on
men's minds, as William wished to work on them.  To Harold
meanwhile and to those in England who heard the story, the
engagement would not seem to carry any of these consequences.  The
mere homage then, which Harold could hardly refuse, would answer
William's purpose nearly as well as any of these fuller obligations
which Harold would surely have refused.  And when a man older than
William engaged to marry William's child-daughter, we must bear in
mind the lightness with which such promises were made.  William
could not seriously expect that this engagement would be kept, if
anything should lead Harold to another marriage.  The promise was
meant simply to add another count to the charges against Harold
when the time should come.  Yet on this point it is not clear that
the oath was broken.  Harold undoubtedly married Ealdgyth, daughter
of AElfgar and widow of Gruffydd, and not any daughter of William.
But in one version Harold is made to say that the daughter of
William whom he had engaged to marry was dead.  And that one of
William's daughters did die very early there seems little doubt.


Whatever William did Lanfranc no doubt at least helped to plan.
The Norman duke was subtle, but the Italian churchman was subtler
still.  In this long series of schemes and negotiations which led
to the conquest of England, we are dealing with two of the greatest
recorded masters of statecraft.  We may call their policy dishonest
and immoral, and so it was.  But it was hardly more dishonest and
immoral than most of the diplomacy of later times.  William's
object was, without any formal breach of faith on his own part, to
entrap Harold into an engagement which might be understood in
different senses, and which, in the sense which William chose to
put upon it, Harold was sure to break.  Two men, themselves of
virtuous life, a rigid churchman and a layman of unusual religious
strictness, do not scruple to throw temptation in the way of a
fellow man in the hope that he will yield to that temptation.  They
exact a promise, because the promise is likely to be broken, and
because its breach would suit their purposes.  Through all
William's policy a strong regard for formal right as he chose to
understand formal right, is not only found in company with much
practical wrong, but is made the direct instrument of carrying out
that wrong.  Never was trap more cunningly laid than that in which
William now entangled Harold.  Never was greater wrong done without
the breach of any formal precept of right.  William and Lanfranc
broke no oath themselves, and that was enough for them.  But it was
no sin in their eyes to beguile another into engagements which he
would understand in one way and they in another; they even, as
their admirers tell the story, beguile him into engagements at once
unlawful and impossible, because their interests would be promoted
by his breach of those engagements.  William, in short, under the
spiritual guidance of Lanfranc, made Harold swear because he
himself would gain by being able to denounce Harold as perjured.

The moral question need not be further discussed; but we should
greatly like to know how far the fact of Harold's oath, whatever
its nature, was known in England?  On this point we have no
trustworthy authority.  The English writers say nothing about the
whole matter; to the Norman writers this point was of no interest.
No one mentions this point, except Harold's romantic biographer at
the beginning of the thirteenth century.  His statements are of no
value, except as showing how long Harold's memory was cherished.
According to him, Harold formally laid the matter before the Witan,
and they unanimously voted that the oath--more, in his version,
than a mere oath of homage--was not binding.  It is not likely that
such a vote was ever formally passed, but its terms would only
express what every Englishman would feel.  The oath, whatever its
terms, had given William a great advantage; but every Englishman
would argue both that the oath, whatever its terms, could not
hinder the English nation from offering Harold the crown, and that
it could not bind Harold to refuse the crown if it should be so
offered.



CHAPTER VI--THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM--JANUARY-OCTOBER 1066



If the time that has been suggested was the real time of Harold's
oath to William, its fulfilment became a practical question in
little more than a year.  How the year 1065 passed in Normandy we
have no record; in England its later months saw the revolt of
Northumberland against Harold's brother Tostig, and the
reconciliation which Harold made between the revolters and the king
to the damage of his brother's interests.  Then came Edward's
sickness, of which he died on January 5, 1066.  He had on his
deathbed recommended Harold to the assembled Witan as his successor
in the kingdom.  The candidate was at once elected.  Whether
William, Edgar, or any other, was spoken of we know not; but as to
the recommendation of Edward and the consequent election of Harold
the English writers are express.  The next day Edward was buried,
and Harold was crowned in regular form by Ealdred Archbishop of
York in Edward's new church at Westminster.  Northumberland refused
to acknowledge him; but the malcontents were won over by the coming
of the king and his friend Saint Wulfstan Bishop of Worcester.  It
was most likely now, as a seal of this reconciliation, that Harold
married Ealdgyth, the sister of the two northern earls Edwin and
Morkere, and the widow of the Welsh king Gruffydd.  He doubtless
hoped in this way to win the loyalty of the earls and their
followers.

The accession of Harold was perfectly regular according to English
law.  In later times endless fables arose; but the Norman writers
of the time do not deny the facts of the recommendation, election,
and coronation.  They slur them over, or, while admitting the mere
facts, they represent each act as in some way invalid.  No writer
near the time asserts a deathbed nomination of William; they speak
only of a nomination at some earlier time.  But some Norman writers
represent Harold as crowned by Stigand Archbishop of Canterbury.
This was not, in the ideas of those times, a trifling question.  A
coronation was then not a mere pageant; it was the actual admission
to the kingly office.  Till his crowning and anointing, the
claimant of the crown was like a bishop-elect before his
consecration.  He had, by birth or election, the sole right to
become king; it was the coronation that made him king.  And as the
ceremony took the form of an ecclesiastical sacrament, its validity
might seem to depend on the lawful position of the officiating
bishop.  In England to perform that ceremony was the right and duty
of the Archbishop of Canterbury; but the canonical position of
Stigand was doubtful.  He had been appointed on the flight of
Robert; he had received the pallium, the badge of arch-episcopal
rank, only from the usurping Benedict the Tenth.  It was therefore
good policy in Harold to be crowned by Ealdred, to whose position
there was no objection.  This is the only difference of fact
between the English and Norman versions at this stage.  And the
difference is easily explained.  At William's coronation the king
walked to the altar between the two archbishops, but it was Ealdred
who actually performed the ceremony.  Harold's coronation doubtless
followed the same order.  But if Stigand took any part in that
coronation, it was easy to give out that he took that special part
on which the validity of the rite depended.

Still, if Harold's accession was perfectly lawful, it was none the
less strange and unusual.  Except the Danish kings chosen under
more or less of compulsion, he was the first king who did not
belong to the West-Saxon kingly house.  Such a choice could be
justified only on the ground that that house contained no qualified
candidate.  Its only known members were the children of the
AEtheling Edward, young Edgar and his sisters.  Now Edgar would
certainly have been passed by in favour of any better qualified
member of the kingly house, as his father had been passed by in
favour of King Edward.  And the same principle would, as things
stood, justify passing him by in favour of a qualified candidate
not of the kingly house.  But Edgar's right to the crown is never
spoken of till a generation or two later, when the doctrines of
hereditary right had gained much greater strength, and when Henry
the Second, great-grandson through his mother of Edgar's sister
Margaret, insisted on his descent from the old kings.  This
distinction is important, because Harold is often called an
usurper, as keeping out Edgar the heir by birth.  But those who
called him an usurper at the time called him so as keeping out
William the heir by bequest.  William's own election was out of the
question.  He was no more of the English kingly house than Harold;
he was a foreigner and an utter stranger.  Had Englishmen been
minded to choose a foreigner, they doubtless would have chosen
Swegen of Denmark.  He had found supporters when Edward was chosen;
he was afterwards appealed to to deliver England from William.  He
was no more of the English kingly house than Harold or William; but
he was grandson of a man who had reigned over England,
Northumberland might have preferred him to Harold; any part of
England would have preferred him to William.  In fact any choice
that could have been made must have had something strange about it.
Edgar himself, the one surviving male of the old stock, besides his
youth, was neither born in the land nor the son of a crowned king.
Those two qualifications had always been deemed of great moment; an
elaborate pedigree went for little; actual royal birth went for a
great deal.  There was now no son of a king to choose.  Had there
been even a child who was at once a son of Edward and a sister's
son of Harold, he might have reigned with his uncle as his guardian
and counsellor.  As it was, there was nothing to do but to choose
the man who, though not of kingly blood, had ruled England well for
thirteen years.

The case thus put seemed plain to every Englishman, at all events
to every man in Wessex, East-Anglia, and southern Mercia.  But it
would not seem so plain in OTHER lands.  To the greater part of
Western Europe William's claim might really seem the better.
William himself doubtless thought his own claim the better; he
deluded himself as he deluded others.  But we are more concerned
with William as a statesman; and if it be statesmanship to adapt
means to ends, whatever the ends may be, if it be statesmanship to
make men believe that the worse cause is the better, then no man
ever showed higher statesmanship than William showed in his great
pleading before all Western Christendom.  It is a sign of the times
that it was a pleading before all Western Christendom.  Others had
claimed crowns; none had taken such pains to convince all mankind
that the claim was a good one.  Such an appeal to public opinion
marks on one side a great advance.  It was a great step towards the
ideas of International Law and even of European concert.  It showed
that the days of mere force were over, that the days of subtle
diplomacy had begun.  Possibly the change was not without its dark
side; it may be doubted whether a change from force to fraud is
wholly a gain.  Still it was an appeal from the mere argument of
the sword to something which at least professed to be right and
reason.  William does not draw the sword till he has convinced
himself and everybody else that he is drawing it in a just cause.
In that age the appeal naturally took a religious shape.  Herein
lay its immediate strength; herein lay its weakness as regarded the
times to come.  William appealed to Emperor, kings, princes,
Christian men great and small, in every Christian land.  He would
persuade all; he would ask help of all.  But above all he appealed
to the head of Christendom, the Bishop of Rome.  William in his own
person could afford to do so; where he reigned, in Normandy or in
England, there was no fear of Roman encroachments; he was fully
minded to be in all causes and over all persons within his
dominions supreme.  While he lived, no Pope ventured to dispute his
right.  But by acknowledging the right of the Pope to dispose of
crowns, or at least to judge as to the right to crowns, he prepared
many days of humiliation for kings in general and specially for his
own successors.  One man in Western Europe could see further than
William, perhaps even further than Lanfranc.  The chief counsellor
of Pope Alexander the Second was the Archdeacon Hildebrand, the
future Gregory the Seventh.  If William outwitted the world,
Hildebrand outwitted William.  William's appeal to the Pope to
decide between two claimants for the English crown strengthened
Gregory not a little in his daring claim to dispose of the crowns
of Rome, of Italy, and of Germany.  Still this recognition of Roman
claims led more directly to the humiliation of William's successor
in his own kingdom.  Moreover William's successful attempt to
represent his enterprise as a holy war, a crusade before crusades
were heard of, did much to suggest and to make ready the way for
the real crusades a generation later.  It was not till after
William's death that Urban preached the crusade, but it was during
William's life that Gregory planned it.

The appeal was strangely successful.  William convinced, or seemed
to convince, all men out of England and Scandinavia that his claim
to the English crown was just and holy, and that it was a good work
to help him to assert it in arms.  He persuaded his own subjects;
he certainly did not constrain them.  He persuaded some foreign
princes to give him actual help, some to join his muster in person;
he persuaded all to help him so far as not to hinder their subjects
from joining him as volunteers.  And all this was done by sheer
persuasion, by argument good or bad.  In adapting of means to ends,
in applying to each class of men that kind of argument which best
suited it, the diplomacy, the statesmanship, of William was
perfect.  Again we ask, How far was it the statesmanship of
William, how far of Lanfranc?  But a prince need not do everything
with his own hands and say everything with his own tongue.  It was
no small part of the statesmanship of William to find out Lanfranc,
to appreciate him and to trust him.  And when two subtle brains
were at work, more could be done by the two working in partnership
than by either working alone.

By what arguments did the Duke of the Normans and the Prior of Bec
convince mankind that the worse cause was the better?  We must
always remember the transitional character of the age.  England was
in political matters in advance of other Western lands; that is, it
lagged behind other Western lands.  It had not gone so far on the
downward course.  It kept far more than Gaul or even Germany of the
old Teutonic institutions, the substance of which later ages have
won back under new shapes.  Many things were understood in England
which are now again understood everywhere, but which were no longer
understood in France or in the lands held of the French crown.  The
popular election of kings comes foremost.  Hugh Capet was an
elective king as much as Harold; but the French kings had made
their crown the most strictly hereditary of all crowns.  They
avoided any interregnum by having their sons crowned in their
lifetime.  So with the great fiefs of the crown.  The notion of
kingship as an office conferred by the nation, of a duchy or county
as an office held under the king, was still fully alive in England;
in Gaul it was forgotten.  Kingdom, duchies, counties, had all
become possessions instead of offices, possessions passing by
hereditary succession of some kind.  But no rule of hereditary
succession was universally or generally accepted.  To this day the
kingdoms of Europe differ as to the question of female succession,
and it is but slowly that the doctrine of representation has ousted
the more obvious doctrine of nearness of kin.  All these points
were then utterly unsettled; crowns, save of course that of the
Empire, were to pass by hereditary right; only what was hereditary
right?  At such a time claims would be pressed which would have
seemed absurd either earlier or later.  To Englishmen, if it seemed
strange to elect one who was not of the stock of Cerdic, it seemed
much more strange to be called on to accept without election, or to
elect as a matter of course, one who was not of the stock of Cerdic
and who was a stranger into the bargain.  Out of England it would
not seem strange when William set forth that Edward, having no
direct heirs, had chosen his near kinsman William as his successor.
Put by itself, that statement had a plausible sound.  The
transmission of a crown by bequest belongs to the same range of
ideas as its transmission by hereditary right; both assume the
crown to be a property and not an office.  Edward's nomination of
Harold, the election of Harold, the fact that William's kindred to
Edward lay outside the royal line of England, the fact that there
was, in the person of Edgar, a nearer kinsman within that royal
line, could all be slurred over or explained away or even turned to
William's profit.  Let it be that Edward on his death-bed had
recommended Harold, and that the Witan had elected Harold.  The
recommendation was wrung from a dying man in opposition to an
earlier act done when he was able to act freely.  The election was
brought about by force or fraud; if it was free, it was of no force
against William's earlier claim of kindred and bequest.  As for
Edgar, as few people in England thought of him, still fewer out of
England would have ever heard of him.  It is more strange that the
bastardy of William did not tell against him, as it had once told
in his own duchy.  But this fact again marks the transitional age.
Altogether the tale that a man who was no kinsman of the late king
had taken to himself the crown which the king had bequeathed to a
kinsman, might, even without further aggravation, be easily made to
sound like a tale of wrong.

But the case gained tenfold strength when William added that the
doer of the wrong was of all men the one most specially bound not
to do it.  The usurper was in any case William's man, bound to act
in all things for his lord.  Perhaps he was more; perhaps he had
directly sworn to receive William as king.  Perhaps he had promised
all this with an oath of special solemnity.  It would be easy to
enlarge on all these further counts as making up an amount of guilt
which William not only had the right to chastise, but which he
would be lacking in duty if he failed to chastise.  He had to
punish the perjurer, to avenge the wrongs of the saints.  Surely
all who should help him in so doing would be helping in a righteous
work.

The answer to all this was obvious.  Putting the case at the very
worst, assuming that Harold had sworn all that he is ever said to
have sworn, assuming that he swore it in the most solemn way in
which he is ever said to have sworn it, William's claim was not
thereby made one whit better.  Whatever Harold's own guilt might
be, the people of England had no share in it.  Nothing that Harold
had done could bar their right to choose their king freely.  Even
if Harold declined the crown, that would not bind the electors to
choose William.  But when the notion of choosing kings had begun to
sound strange, all this would go for nothing.  There would be no
need even to urge that in any case the wrong done by Harold to
William gave William a casus belli against Harold, and that
William, if victorious, might claim the crown of England, as a
possession of Harold's, by right of conquest.  In fact William
never claimed the crown by conquest, as conquest is commonly
understood.  He always represented himself as the lawful heir,
unhappily driven to use force to obtain his rights.  The other
pleas were quite enough to satisfy most men out of England and
Scandinavia.  William's work was to claim the crown of which he was
unjustly deprived, and withal to deal out a righteous chastisement
on the unrighteous and ungodly man by whom he had been deprived of
it.

In the hands of diplomatists like William and Lanfranc, all these
arguments, none of which had in itself the slightest strength, were
enough to turn the great mass of continental opinion in William's
favour.  But he could add further arguments specially adapted to
different classes of minds.  He could hold out the prospect of
plunder, the prospect of lands and honours in a land whose wealth
was already proverbial.  It might of course be answered that the
enterprise against England was hazardous and its success unlikely.
But in such matters, men listen rather to their hopes than to their
fears.  To the Normans it would be easy, not only to make out a
case against Harold, but to rake up old grudges against the English
nation.  Under Harold the son of Cnut, Alfred, a prince half Norman
by birth, wholly Norman by education, the brother of the late king,
the lawful heir to the crown, had been betrayed and murdered by
somebody.  A widespread belief laid the deed to the charge of the
father of the new king.  This story might easily be made a ground
of national complaint by Normandy against England, and it was easy
to infer that Harold had some share in the alleged crime of
Godwine.  It was easy to dwell on later events, on the driving of
so many Normans out of England, with Archbishop Robert at their
head.  Nay, not only had the lawful primate been driven out, but an
usurper had been set in his place, and this usurping archbishop had
been made to bestow a mockery of consecration on the usurping king.
The proposed aggression on England was even represented as a
missionary work, undertaken for the good of the souls of the
benighted islanders.  For, though the English were undoubtedly
devout after their own fashion, there was much in the
ecclesiastical state of England which displeased strict churchmen
beyond sea, much that William, when he had the power, deemed it his
duty to reform.  The insular position of England naturally parted
it in many things from the usages and feelings of the mainland, and
it was not hard to get up a feeling against the nation as well as
against its king.  All this could not really strengthen William's
claim; but it made men look more favourably on his enterprise.


The fact that the Witan were actually in session at Edward's death
had made it possible to carry out Harold's election and coronation
with extreme speed.  The electors had made their choice before
William had any opportunity of formally laying his claim before
them.  This was really an advantage to him; he could the better
represent the election and coronation as invalid.  His first step
was of course to send an embassy to Harold to call on him even now
to fulfil his oath.  The accounts of this embassy, of which we have
no English account, differ as much as the different accounts of the
oath.  Each version of course makes William demand and Harold
refuse whatever it had made Harold swear.  These demands and
refusals range from the resignation of the kingdom to a marriage
with William's daughter.  And it is hard to separate this embassy
from later messages between the rivals.  In all William demands,
Harold refuses; the arguments on each side are likely to be
genuine.  Harold is called on to give up the crown to William, to
hold it of William, to hold part of the kingdom of William, to
submit the question to the judgement of the Pope, lastly, if he
will do nothing else, at least to marry William's daughter.
Different writers place these demands at different times,
immediately after Harold's election or immediately before the
battle.  The last challenge to a single combat between Harold and
William of course appears only on the eve of the battle.  Now none
of these accounts come from contemporary partisans of Harold; every
one is touched by hostile feeling towards him.  Thus the
constitutional language that is put into his mouth, almost
startling from its modern sound, has greater value.  A King of the
English can do nothing without the consent of his Witan.  They gave
him the kingdom; without their consent, he cannot resign it or
dismember it or agree to hold it of any man; without their consent,
he cannot even marry a foreign wife.  Or he answers that the
daughter of William whom he promised to marry is dead, and that the
sister whom he promised to give to a Norman is dead also.  Harold
does not deny the fact of his oath--whatever its nature; he
justifies its breach because it was taken against is will, and
because it was in itself of no strength, as binding him to do
impossible things.  He does not deny Edward's earlier promise to
William; but, as a testament is of no force while the testator
liveth, he argues that it is cancelled by Edward's later nomination
of himself.  In truth there is hardly any difference between the
disputants as to matters of fact.  One side admits at least a
plighting of homage on the part of Harold; the other side admits
Harold's nomination and election.  The real difference is as to the
legal effect of either.  Herein comes William's policy.  The
question was one of English law and of nothing else, a matter for
the Witan of England and for no other judges.  William, by
ingeniously mixing all kinds of irrelevant issues, contrived to
remove the dispute from the region of municipal into that of
international law, a law whose chief representative was the Bishop
of Rome.  By winning the Pope to his side, William could give his
aggression the air of a religious war; but in so doing, he
unwittingly undermined the throne that he was seeking and the
thrones of all other princes.

The answers which Harold either made, or which writers of his time
thought that he ought to have made, are of the greatest moment in
our constitutional history.  The King is the doer of everything;
but he can do nothing of moment without the consent of his Witan.
They can say Yea or Nay to every proposal of the King.  An
energetic and popular king would get no answer but Yea to whatever
he chose to ask.  A king who often got the answer of Nay, Nay, was
in great danger of losing his kingdom.  The statesmanship of
William knew how to turn this constitutional system, without making
any change in the letter, into a despotism like that of
Constantinople or Cordova.  But the letter lived, to come to light
again on occasion.  The Revolution of 1399 was a falling back on
the doctrines of 1066, and the Revolution of 1688 was a falling
back on the doctrines of 1399.  The principle at all three periods
is that the power of the King is strictly limited by law, but that,
within the limits which the law sets to his power, he acts
according to his own discretion.  King and Witan stand out as
distinct powers, each of which needs the assent of the other to its
acts, and which may always refuse that assent.  The political work
of the last two hundred years has been to hinder these direct
collisions between King and Parliament by the ingenious
conventional device of a body of men who shall be in name the
ministers of the Crown, but in truth the ministers of one House of
Parliament.  We do not understand our own political history, still
less can we understand the position and the statesmanship of the
Conqueror, unless we fully take in what the English constitution in
the eleventh century really was, how very modern-sounding are some
of its doctrines, some of its forms.  Statesmen of our own day
might do well to study the meagre records of the Gemot of 1047.
There is the earliest recorded instance of a debate on a question
of foreign policy.  Earl Godwine proposes to give help to Denmark,
then at war with Norway.  He is outvoted on the motion of Earl
Leofric, the man of moderate politics, who appears as leader of the
party of non-intervention.  It may be that in some things we have
not always advanced in the space of eight hundred years.


The negotiations of William with his own subjects, with foreign
powers, and with the Pope, are hard to arrange in order.  Several
negotiations were doubtless going on at the same time.  The embassy
to Harold would of course come first of all.  Till his demand had
been made and refused, William could make no appeal elsewhere.  We
know not whether the embassy was sent before or after Harold's
journey to Northumberland, before or after his marriage with
Ealdgyth.  If Harold was already married, the demand that he should
marry William's daughter could have been meant only in mockery.
Indeed, the whole embassy was so far meant in mockery that it was
sent without any expectation that its demands would be listened to.
It was sent to put Harold, from William's point of view, more
thoroughly in the wrong, and to strengthen William's case against
him.  It would therefore be sent at the first moment; the only
statement, from a very poor authority certainly, makes the embassy
come on the tenth day after Edward's death.  Next after the embassy
would come William's appeal to his own subjects, though Lanfranc
might well be pleading at Rome while William was pleading at
Lillebonne.  The Duke first consulted a select company, who
promised their own services, but declined to pledge any one else.
It was held that no Norman was bound to follow the Duke in an
attempt to win for himself a crown beyond the sea.  But voluntary
help was soon ready.  A meeting of the whole baronage of Normandy
was held at Lillebonne.  The assembly declined any obligation which
could be turned into a precedent, and passed no general vote at
all.  But the barons were won over one by one, and each promised
help in men and ships according to his means.

William had thus, with some difficulty, gained the support of his
own subjects; but when he had once gained it, it was a zealous
support.  And as the flame spread from one part of Europe to
another, the zeal of Normandy would wax keener and keener.  The
dealings of William with foreign powers are told us in a confused,
piecemeal, and sometimes contradictory way.  We hear that embassies
went to the young King Henry of Germany, son of the great Emperor,
the friend of England, and also to Swegen of Denmark.  The Norman
story runs that both princes promised William their active support.
Yet Swegen, the near kinsman of Harold, was a friend of England,
and the same writer who puts this promise into his mouth makes him
send troops to help his English cousin.  Young Henry or his
advisers could have no motive for helping William; but subjects of
the Empire were at least not hindered from joining his banner.  To
the French king William perhaps offered the bait of holding the
crown of England of him; but Philip is said to have discouraged
William's enterprise as much as he could.  Still he did not hinder
French subjects from taking a part in it.  Of the princes who held
of the French crown, Eustace of Boulogne, who joined the muster in
person, and Guy of Ponthieu, William's own vassal, who sent his
son, seem to have been the only ones who did more than allow the
levying of volunteers in their dominions.  A strange tale is told
that Conan of Britanny took this moment for bringing up his own
forgotten pretensions to the Norman duchy.  If William was going to
win England, let him give up Normandy to him.  He presently, the
tale goes, died of a strange form of poisoning, in which it is
implied that William had a hand.  This is the story of Walter and
Biota over again.  It is perhaps enough to say that the Breton
writers know nothing of the tale.

But the great negotiation of all was with the Papal court.  We
might have thought that the envoy would be Lanfranc, so well
skilled in Roman ways; but William perhaps needed him as a constant
adviser by his own person.  Gilbert, Archdeacon of Lisieux, was
sent to Pope Alexander.  No application could better suit papal
interests than the one that was now made; but there were some moral
difficulties.  Not a few of the cardinals, Hildebrand tells us
himself, argued, not without strong language towards Hildebrand,
that the Church had nothing to do with such matters, and that it
was sinful to encourage a claim which could not be enforced without
bloodshed.  But with many, with Hildebrand among them, the notion
of the Church as a party or a power came before all thoughts of its
higher duties.  One side was carefully heard; the other seems not
to have been heard at all.  We hear of no summons to Harold, and
the King of the English could not have pleaded at the Pope's bar
without acknowledging that his case was at least doubtful.  The
judgement of Alexander or of Hildebrand was given for William.
Harold was declared to be an usurper, perhaps declared
excommunicated.  The right to the English crown was declared to be
in the Duke of the Normans, and William was solemnly blessed in the
enterprise in which he was at once to win his own rights, to
chastise the wrong-doer, to reform the spiritual state of the
misguided islanders, to teach them fuller obedience to the Roman
See and more regular payment of its temporal dues.  William gained
his immediate point; but his successors on the English throne paid
the penalty.  Hildebrand gained his point for ever, or for as long
a time as men might be willing to accept the Bishop of Rome as a
judge in any matters.  The precedent by which Hildebrand, under
another name, took on him to dispose of a higher crown than that of
England was now fully established.

As an outward sign of papal favour, William received a consecrated
banner and a ring containing a hair of Saint Peter.  Here was
something for men to fight for.  The war was now a holy one.  All
who were ready to promote their souls' health by slaughter and
plunder might flock to William's standard, to the standard of Saint
Peter.  Men came from most French-speaking lands, the Normans of
Apulia and Sicily being of course not slow to take up the quarrel
of their kinsfolk.  But, next to his own Normandy, the lands which
sent most help were Flanders, the land of Matilda, and Britanny,
where the name of the Saxon might still be hateful.  We must never
forget that the host of William, the men who won England, the men
who settled in England, were not an exclusively Norman body.  Not
Norman, but FRENCH, is the name most commonly opposed to ENGLISH,
as the name of the conquering people.  Each Norman severally would
have scorned that name for himself personally; but it was the only
name that could mark the whole of which he and his countrymen
formed a part.  Yet, if the Normans were but a part, they were the
greatest and the noblest part; their presence alone redeemed the
enterprise from being a simple enterprise of brigandage.  The
Norman Conquest was after all a Norman Conquest; men of other lands
were merely helpers.  So far as it was not Norman, it was Italian;
the subtle wit of Lombard Lanfranc and Tuscan Hildebrand did as
much to overthrow us as the lance and bow of Normandy.



CHAPTER VII--WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND--AUGUST-DECEMBER 1066



The statesmanship of William had triumphed.  The people of England
had chosen their king, and a large part of the world had been won
over by the arts of a foreign prince to believe that it was a
righteous and holy work to set him on the throne to which the
English people had chosen the foremost man among themselves.  No
diplomatic success was ever more thorough.  Unluckily we know
nothing of the state of feeling in England while William was
plotting and pleading beyond the sea.  Nor do we know how much men
in England knew of what was going on in other lands, or what they
thought when they heard of it.  We know only that, after Harold had
won over Northumberland, he came back and held the Easter Gemot at
Westminster.  Then in the words of the Chronicler, "it was known to
him that William Bastard, King Edward's kinsman, would come hither
and win this land."  This is all that our own writers tell us about
William Bastard, between his peaceful visit to England in 1052 and
his warlike visit in 1066.  But we know that King Harold did all
that man could do to defeat his purposes, and that he was therein
loyally supported by the great mass of the English nation, we may
safely say by all, save his two brothers-in-law and so many as they
could influence.

William's doings we know more fully.  The military events of this
wonderful year there is no need to tell in detail.  But we see that
William's generalship was equal to his statesmanship, and that it
was met by equal generalship on the side of Harold.  Moreover, the
luck of William is as clear as either his statesmanship or his
generalship.  When Harold was crowned on the day of the Epiphany,
he must have felt sure that he would have to withstand an invasion
of England before the year was out.  But it could not have come
into the mind of Harold, William, or Lanfranc, or any other man,
that he would have to withstand two invasions of England at the
same moment.

It was the invasion of Harold of Norway, at the same time as the
invasion of William, which decided the fate of England.  The issue
of the struggle might have gone against England, had she had to
strive against one enemy only; as it was, it was the attack made by
two enemies at once which divided her strength, and enabled the
Normans to land without resistance.  The two invasions came as
nearly as possible at the same moment.  Harold Hardrada can hardly
have reached the Yorkshire coast before September; the battle of
Fulford was fought on September 20th and that of Stamfordbridge on
September 25th.  William landed on September 28th, and the battle
of Senlac was fought on October 14th.  Moreover William's fleet was
ready by August 12th; his delay in crossing was owing to his
waiting for a favourable wind.  When William landed, the event of
the struggle in the North could not have been known in Sussex.  He
might have had to strive, not with Harold of England, but with
Harold of Norway as his conqueror.

At what time of the year Harold Hardrada first planned his invasion
of England is quite uncertain.  We can say nothing of his doings
till he is actually afloat.  And with the three mighty forms of
William and the two Harolds on the scene, there is something at
once grotesque and perplexing in the way in which an English
traitor flits about among them.  The banished Tostig, deprived of
his earldom in the autumn of 1065, had then taken refuge in
Flanders.  He now plays a busy part, the details of which are lost
in contradictory accounts.  But it is certain that in May 1066 he
made an ineffectual attack on England.  And this attack was most
likely made with the connivance of William.  It suited William to
use Tostig as an instrument, and to encourage so restless a spirit
in annoying the common enemy.  It is also certain that Tostig was
with the Norwegian fleet in September, and that he died at
Stamfordbridge.  We know also that he was in Scotland between May
and September.  It is therefore hard to believe that Tostig had so
great a hand in stirring up Harold Hardrada to his expedition as
the Norwegian story makes out.  Most likely Tostig simply joined
the expedition which Harold Hardrada independently planned.  One
thing is certain, that, when Harold of England was attacked by two
enemies at once, it was not by two enemies acting in concert.  The
interests of William and of Harold of Norway were as much opposed
to one another as either of them was to the interests of Harold of
England.

One great difficulty beset Harold and William alike.  Either in
Normandy or in England it was easy to get together an army ready to
fight a battle; it was not easy to keep a large body of men under
arms for any long time without fighting.  It was still harder to
keep them at once without fighting and without plundering.  What
William had done in this way in two invasions of Normandy, he was
now called on to do on a greater scale.  His great and motley army
was kept during a great part of August and September, first at the
Dive, then at Saint Valery, waiting for the wind that was to take
it to England.  And it was kept without doing any serious damage to
the lands where they were encamped.  In a holy war, this time was
of course largely spent in appeals to the religious feelings of the
army.  Then came the wonderful luck of William, which enabled him
to cross at the particular moment when he did cross.  A little
earlier or later, he would have found his landing stoutly disputed;
as it was, he landed without resistance.  Harold of England, not
being able, in his own words, to be everywhere at once, had done
what he could.  He and his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine undertook
the defence of southern England against the Norman; the earls of
the North, his brothers-in-law Edwin and Morkere, were to defend
their own land against the Norwegians.  His own preparations were
looked on with wonder.  To guard the long line of coast against the
invader, he got together such a force both by sea and land as no
king had ever got together before, and he kept it together for a
longer time than William did, through four months of inaction, save
perhaps some small encounters by sea.  At last, early in September,
provisions failed; men were no doubt clamouring to go back for the
harvest, and the great host had to be disbanded.  Could William
have sailed as soon as his fleet was ready, he would have found
southern England thoroughly prepared to meet him.  Meanwhile the
northern earls had clearly not kept so good watch as the king.
Harold Hardrada harried the Yorkshire coast; he sailed up the Ouse,
and landed without resistance.  At last the earls met him in arms
and were defeated by the Northmen at Fulford near York.  Four days
later York capitulated, and agreed to receive Harold Hardrada as
king.  Meanwhile the news reached Harold of England; he got
together his housecarls and such other troops as could be mustered
at the moment, and by a march of almost incredible speed he was
able to save the city and all northern England.  The fight of
Stamfordbridge, the defeat and death of the most famous warrior of
the North, was the last and greatest success of Harold of England.
But his northward march had left southern England utterly
unprotected.  Had the south wind delayed a little longer, he might,
before the second enemy came, have been again on the South-Saxon
coast.  As it was, three days after Stamfordbridge, while Harold of
England was still at York, William of Normandy landed without
opposition at Pevensey.

Thus wonderfully had an easy path into England been opened for
William.  The Norwegian invasion had come at the best moment for
his purposes, and the result had been what he must have wished.
With one Harold he must fight, and to fight with Harold of England
was clearly best for his ends.  His work would not have been done,
if another had stepped in to chastise the perjurer.  Now that he
was in England, it became a trial of generalship between him and
Harold.  William's policy was to provoke Harold to fight at once.
It was perhaps Harold's policy--so at least thought Gyrth--to
follow yet more thoroughly William's own example in the French
invasions.  Let him watch and follow the enemy, let him avoid all
action, and even lay waste the land between London and the south
coast, and the strength of the invaders would gradually be worn
out.  But it might have been hard to enforce such a policy on men
whose hearts were stirred by the invasion, and one part of whom,
the King's own thegns and housecarls, were eager to follow up their
victory over the Northern with a yet mightier victory over the
Norman.  And Harold spoke as an English king should speak, when he
answered that he would never lay waste a single rood of English
ground, that he would never harm the lands or the goods of the men
who had chosen him to be their king.  In the trial of skill between
the two commanders, each to some extent carried his point.
William's havoc of a large part of Sussex compelled Harold to march
at once to give battle.  But Harold was able to give battle at a
place of his own choosing, thoroughly suited for the kind of
warfare which he had to wage.

Harold was blamed, as defeated generals are blamed, for being too
eager to fight and not waiting for more troops.  But to any one who
studies the ground it is plain that Harold needed, not more troops,
but to some extent better troops, and that he would not have got
those better troops by waiting.  From York Harold had marched to
London, as the meeting-place for southern and eastern England, as
well as for the few who actually followed him from the North and
those who joined him on the march.  Edwin and Morkere were bidden
to follow with the full force of their earldoms.  This they took
care not to do.  Harold and his West-Saxons had saved them, but
they would not strike a blow back again.  Both now and earlier in
the year they doubtless aimed at a division of the kingdom, such as
had been twice made within fifty years.  Either Harold or William
might reign in Wessex and East-Anglia; Edwin should reign in
Northumberland and Mercia.  William, the enemy of Harold but no
enemy of theirs, might be satisfied with the part of England which
was under the immediate rule of Harold and his brothers, and might
allow the house of Leofric to keep at least an under-kingship in
the North.  That the brother earls held back from the King's muster
is undoubted, and this explanation fits in with their whole conduct
both before and after.  Harold had thus at his command the picked
men of part of England only, and he had to supply the place of
those who were lacking with such forces as he could get.  The lack
of discipline on the part of these inferior troops lost Harold the
battle.  But matters would hardly have been mended by waiting for
men who had made up their minds not to come.

The messages exchanged between King and Duke immediately before the
battle, as well as at an earlier time, have been spoken of already.
The challenge to single combat at least comes now.  When Harold
refused every demand, William called on Harold to spare the blood
of his followers, and decide his claims by battle in his own
person.  Such a challenge was in the spirit of Norman
jurisprudence, which in doubtful cases looked for the judgement of
God, not, as the English did, by the ordeal, but by the personal
combat of the two parties.  Yet this challenge too was surely given
in the hope that Harold would refuse it, and would thereby put
himself, in Norman eyes, yet more thoroughly in the wrong.  For the
challenge was one which Harold could not but refuse.  William
looked on himself as one who claimed his own from one who
wrongfully kept him out of it.  He was plaintiff in a suit in which
Harold was defendant; that plaintiff and defendant were both
accompanied by armies was an accident for which the defendant, who
had refused all peaceful means of settlement, was to blame.  But
Harold and his people could not look on the matter as a mere
question between two men.  The crown was Harold's by the gift of
the nation, and he could not sever his own cause from the cause of
the nation.  The crown was his; but it was not his to stake on the
issue of a single combat.  If Harold were killed, the nation might
give the crown to whom they thought good; Harold's death could not
make William's claim one jot better.  The cause was not personal,
but national.  The Norman duke had, by a wanton invasion, wronged,
not the King only, but every man in England, and every man might
claim to help in driving him out.  Again, in an ordinary wager of
battle, the judgement can be enforced; here, whether William slew
Harold or Harold slew William, there was no means of enforcing the
judgement except by the strength of the two armies.  If Harold
fell, the English army were not likely to receive William as king;
if William fell, the Norman army was still less likely to go
quietly out of England.  The challenge was meant as a mere blind;
it would raise the spirit of William's followers; it would be
something for his poets and chroniclers to record in his honour;
that was all.


The actual battle, fought on Senlac, on Saint Calixtus' day, was
more than a trial of skill and courage between two captains and two
armies.  It was, like the old battles of Macedonian and Roman, a
trial between two modes of warfare.  The English clave to the old
Teutonic tactics.  They fought on foot in the close array of the
shield-wall.  Those who rode to the field dismounted when the fight
began.  They first hurled their javelins, and then took to the
weapons of close combat.  Among these the Danish axe, brought in by
Cnut, had nearly displaced the older English broadsword.  Such was
the array of the housecarls and of the thegns who had followed
Harold from York or joined him on his march.  But the treason of
Edwin and Morkere had made it needful to supply the place of the
picked men of Northumberland with irregular levies, armed almost
anyhow.  Of their weapons of various kinds the bow was the rarest.
The strength of the Normans lay in the arms in which the English
were lacking, in horsemen and archers.  These last seem to have
been a force of William's training; we first hear of the Norman
bowmen at Varaville.  These two ways of fighting were brought each
one to perfection by the leaders on each side.  They had not yet
been tried against one another.  At Stamfordbridge Harold had
defeated an enemy whose tactics were the same as his own.  William
had not fought a pitched battle since Val-es-dunes in his youth.
Indeed pitched battles, such as English and Scandinavian warriors
were used to in the wars of Edmund and Cnut, were rare in
continental warfare.  That warfare mainly consisted in the attack
and defence of strong places, and in skirmishes fought under their
walls.  But William knew how to make use of troops of different
kinds and to adapt them to any emergency.  Harold too was a man of
resources; he had gained his Welsh successes by adapting his men to
the enemy's way of fighting.  To withstand the charge of the Norman
horsemen, Harold clave to the national tactics, but he chose for
the place of battle a spot where those tactics would have the
advantage.  A battle on the low ground would have been favourable
to cavalry; Harold therefore occupied and fenced in a hill, the
hill of Senlac, the site in after days of the abbey and town of
Battle, and there awaited the Norman attack.  The Norman horsemen
had thus to make their way up the hill under the shower of the
English javelins, and to meet the axes as soon as they reached the
barricade.  And these tactics were thoroughly successful, till the
inferior troops were tempted to come down from the hill and chase
the Bretons whom they had driven back.  This suggested to William
the device of the feigned flight; the English line of defence was
broken, and the advantage of ground was lost.  Thus was the great
battle lost.  And the war too was lost by the deaths of Harold and
his brothers, which left England without leaders, and by the
unyielding valour of Harold's immediate following.  They were slain
to a man, and south-eastern England was left defenceless.


William, now truly the Conqueror in the vulgar sense, was still far
from having full possession of his conquest.  He had military
possession of part of one shire only; he had to look for further
resistance, and he met with not a little.  But his combined luck
and policy served him well.  He could put on the form of full
possession before he had the reality; he could treat all further
resistance as rebellion against an established authority; he could
make resistance desultory and isolated.  William had to subdue
England in detail; he had never again to fight what the English
Chroniclers call a folk-fight.  His policy after his victory was
obvious.  Still uncrowned, he was not, even in his own view, king,
but he alone had the right to become king.  He had thus far been
driven to maintain his rights by force; he was not disposed to use
force any further, if peaceful possession was to be had.  His
course was therefore to show himself stern to all who withstood
him, but to take all who submitted into his protection and favour.
He seems however to have looked for a speedier submission than
really happened.  He waited a while in his camp for men to come in
and acknowledge him.  As none came, he set forth to win by the
strong arm the land which he claimed of right.

Thus to look for an immediate submission was not unnatural; fully
believing in the justice of his own cause, William would believe in
it all the more after the issue of the battle.  God, Harold had
said, should judge between himself and William, and God had judged
in William's favour.  With all his clear-sightedness, he would
hardly understand how differently things looked in English eyes.
Some indeed, specially churchmen, specially foreign churchmen, now
began to doubt whether to fight against William was not to fight
against God.  But to the nation at large William was simply as
Hubba, Swegen, and Cnut in past times.  England had before now been
conquered, but never in a single fight.  Alfred and Edmund had
fought battle after battle with the Dane, and men had no mind to
submit to the Norman because he had been once victorious.  But
Alfred and Edmund, in alternate defeat and victory, lived to fight
again; their people had not to choose a new king; the King had
merely to gather a new army.  But Harold was slain, and the first
question was how to fill his place.  The Witan, so many as could be
got together, met to choose a king, whose first duty would be to
meet William the Conqueror in arms.  The choice was not easy.
Harold's sons were young, and not born AEthelings.  His brothers,
of whom Gyrth at least must have been fit to reign, had fallen with
him.  Edwin and Morkere were not at the battle, but they were at
the election.  But schemes for winning the crown for the house of
Leofric would find no favour in an assembly held in London.  For
lack of any better candidate, the hereditary sentiment prevailed.
Young Edgar was chosen.  But the bishops, it is said, did not
agree; they must have held that God had declared in favour of
William.  Edwin and Morkere did agree; but they withdrew to their
earldoms, still perhaps cherishing hopes of a divided kingdom.
Edgar, as king-elect, did at least one act of kingship by
confirming the election of an abbot of Peterborough; but of any
general preparation for warfare there is not a sign.  The local
resistance which William met with shows that, with any combined
action, the case was not hopeless.  But with Edgar for king, with
the northern earls withdrawing their forces, with the bishops at
least lukewarm, nothing could be done.  The Londoners were eager to
fight; so doubtless were others; but there was no leader.  So far
from there being another Harold or Edmund to risk another battle,
there was not even a leader to carry out the policy of Fabius and
Gyrth.

Meanwhile the Conqueror was advancing, by his own road and after
his own fashion.  We must remember the effect of the mere slaughter
of the great battle.  William's own army had suffered severely:  he
did not leave Hastings till he had received reinforcements from
Normandy.  But to England the battle meant the loss of the whole
force of the south-eastern shires.  A large part of England was
left helpless.  William followed much the same course as he had
followed in Maine.  A legal claimant of the crown, it was his
interest as soon as possible to become a crowned king, and that in
his kinsman's church at Westminster.  But it was not his interest
to march straight on London and demand the crown, sword in hand.
He saw that, without the support of the northern earls, Edgar could
not possibly stand, and that submission to himself was only a
question of time.  He therefore chose a roundabout course through
those south-eastern shires which were wholly without means of
resisting him.  He marched from Sussex into Kent, harrying the land
as he went, to frighten the people into submission.  The men of
Romney had before the battle cut in pieces a party of Normans who
had fallen into their hands, most likely by sea.  William took some
undescribed vengeance for their slaughter.  Dover and its castle,
the castle which, in some accounts, Harold had sworn to surrender
to William, yielded without a blow.  Here then he was gracious.
When some of his unruly followers set fire to the houses of the
town, William made good the losses of their owners.  Canterbury
submitted; from thence, by a bold stroke, he sent messengers who
received the submission of Winchester.  He marched on, ravaging as
he went, to the immediate neighbourhood of London, but keeping ever
on the right bank of the Thames.  But a gallant sally of the
citizens was repulsed by the Normans, and the suburb of Southwark
was burned.  William marched along the river to Wallingford.  Here
he crossed, receiving for the first time the active support of an
Englishman of high rank, Wiggod of Wallingford, sheriff of
Oxfordshire.  He became one of a small class of Englishmen who were
received to William's fullest favour, and kept at least as high a
position under him as they had held before.  William still kept on,
marching and harrying, to the north of London, as he had before
done to the south.  The city was to be isolated within a cordon of
wasted lands.  His policy succeeded.  As no succours came from the
North, the hearts of those who had chosen them a king failed at the
approach of his rival.  At Berkhampstead Edgar himself, with
several bishops and chief men, came to make their submission.  They
offered the crown to William, and, after some debate, he accepted
it.  But before he came in person, he took means to secure the
city.  The beginnings of the fortress were now laid which, in the
course of William's reign, grew into the mighty Tower of London.

It may seem strange that when his great object was at last within
his grasp, William should have made his acceptance of it a matter
of debate.  He claims the crown as his right; the crown is offered
to him; and yet he doubts about taking it.  Ought he, he asks, to
take the crown of a kingdom of which he has not as yet full
possession?  At that time the territory of which William had even
military possession could not have stretched much to the north-west
of a line drawn from Winchester to Norwich.  Outside that line men
were, as William is made to say, still in rebellion.  His scruples
were come over by an orator who was neither Norman nor English, but
one of his foreign followers, Haimer Viscount of Thouars.  The
debate was most likely got up at William's bidding, but it was not
got up without a motive.  William, ever seeking outward legality,
seeking to do things peaceably when they could be done peaceably,
seeking for means to put every possible enemy in the wrong, wished
to make his acceptance of the English crown as formally regular as
might be.  Strong as he held his claim to be by the gift of Edward,
it would be better to be, if not strictly chosen, at least
peacefully accepted, by the chief men of England.  It might some
day serve his purpose to say that the crown had been offered to
him, and that he had accepted it only after a debate in which the
chief speaker was an impartial stranger.  Having gained this point
more, William set out from Berkhampstead, already, in outward form,
King-elect of the English.

The rite which was to change him from king-elect into full king
took place in Eadward's church of Westminster on Christmas day,
1066, somewhat more than two months after the great battle,
somewhat less than twelve months after the death of Edward and the
coronation of Harold.  Nothing that was needed for a lawful
crowning was lacking.  The consent of the people, the oath of the
king, the anointing by the hands of a lawful metropolitan, all were
there.  Ealdred acted as the actual celebrant, while Stigand took
the second place in the ceremony.  But this outward harmony between
the nation and its new king was marred by an unhappy accident.
Norman horsemen stationed outside the church mistook the shout with
which the people accepted the new king for the shout of men who
were doing him damage.  But instead of going to his help, they
began, in true Norman fashion, to set fire to the neighbouring
houses.  The havoc and plunder that followed disturbed the
solemnities of the day and were a bad omen for the new reign.  It
was no personal fault of William's; in putting himself in the hands
of subjects of such new and doubtful loyalty, he needed men near at
hand whom he could trust.  But then it was his doing that England
had to receive a king who needed foreign soldiers to guard him.


William was now lawful King of the English, so far as outward
ceremonies could make him so.  But he knew well how far he was from
having won real kingly authority over the whole kingdom.  Hardly a
third part of the land was in his obedience.  He had still, as he
doubtless knew, to win his realm with the edge of the sword.  But
he could now go forth to further conquests, not as a foreign
invader, but as the king of the land, putting down rebellion among
his own subjects.  If the men of Northumberland should refuse to
receive him, he could tell them that he was their lawful king,
anointed by their own archbishop.  It was sound policy to act as
king of the whole land, to exercise a semblance of authority where
he had none in fact.  And in truth he was king of the whole land,
so far as there was no other king.  The unconquered parts of the
land were in no mood to submit; but they could not agree on any
common plan of resistance under any common leader.  Some were still
for Edgar, some for Harold's sons, some for Swegen of Denmark.
Edwin and Morkere doubtless were for themselves.  If one common
leader could have been found even now, the throne of the foreign
king would have been in no small danger.  But no such leader came:
men stood still, or resisted piecemeal, so the land was conquered
piecemeal, and that under cover of being brought under the
obedience of its lawful king.


Now that the Norman duke has become an English king, his career as
an English statesman strictly begins, and a wonderful career it is.
Its main principle was to respect formal legality wherever he
could.  All William's purposes were to be carried out, as far as
possible, under cover of strict adherence to the law of the land of
which he had become the lawful ruler.  He had sworn at his crowning
to keep the laws of the land, and to rule his kingdom as well as
any king that had gone before him.  And assuredly he meant to keep
his oath.  But a foreign king, at the head of a foreign army, and
who had his foreign followers to reward, could keep that oath only
in its letter and not in its spirit.  But it is wonderful how
nearly he came to keep it in the letter.  He contrived to do his
most oppressive acts, to deprive Englishmen of their lands and
offices, and to part them out among strangers, under cover of
English law.  He could do this.  A smaller man would either have
failed to carry out his purposes at all, or he could have carried
them out only by reckless violence.  When we examine the
administration of William more in detail, we shall see that its
effects in the long run were rather to preserve than to destroy our
ancient institutions.  He knew the strength of legal fictions; by
legal fictions he conquered and he ruled.  But every legal fiction
is outward homage to the principle of law, an outward protest
against unlawful violence.  That England underwent a Norman
Conquest did in the end only make her the more truly England.  But
that this could be was because that conquest was wrought by the
Bastard of Falaise and by none other.



CHAPTER VIII--THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND--DECEMBER 1066-MARCH 1070



The coronation of William had its effect in a moment.  It made him
really king over part of England; it put him into a new position
with regard to the rest.  As soon as there was a king, men flocked
to swear oaths to him and become his men.  They came from shires
where he had no real authority.  It was most likely now, rather
than at Berkhampstead, that Edwin and Morkere at last made up their
minds to acknowledge some king.  They became William's men and
received again their lands and earldoms as his grant.  Other chief
men from the North also submitted and received their lands and
honours again.  But Edwin and Morkere were not allowed to go back
to their earldoms.  William thought it safer to keep them near
himself, under the guise of honour--Edwin was even promised one of
his daughters in marriage--but really half as prisoners, half as
hostages.  Of the two other earls, Waltheof son of Siward, who held
the shires of Northampton and Huntingdon, and Oswulf who held the
earldom of Bernicia or modern Northumberland, we hear nothing at
this moment.  As for Waltheof, it is strange if he were not at
Senlac; it is strange if he were there and came away alive.  But we
only know that he was in William's allegiance a few months later.
Oswulf must have held out in some marked way.  It was William's
policy to act as king even where he had no means of carrying out
his kingly orders.  He therefore in February 1067 granted the
Bernician earldom to an Englishman named Copsige, who had acted as
Tostig's lieutenant.  This implies the formal deprivation of
Oswulf.  But William sent no force with the new earl, who had to
take possession as he could.  That is to say, of two parties in a
local quarrel, one hoped to strengthen itself by making use of
William's name.  And William thought that it would strengthen his
position to let at least his name be heard in every corner of the
kingdom.  The rest of the story stands rather aloof from the main
history.  Copsige got possession of the earldom for a moment.  He
was then killed by Oswulf and his partisans, and Oswulf himself was
killed in the course of the year by a common robber.  At Christmas,
1067, William again granted or sold the earldom to another of the
local chiefs, Gospatric.  But he made no attempt to exercise direct
authority in those parts till the beginning of the year 1069.

All this illustrates William's general course.  Crowned king over
the land, he would first strengthen himself in that part of the
kingdom which he actually held.  Of the passive disobedience of
other parts he would take no present notice.  In northern and
central England William could exercise no authority; but those
lands were not in arms against him, nor did they acknowledge any
other king.  Their earls, now his earls, were his favoured
courtiers.  He could afford to be satisfied with this nominal
kingship, till a fit opportunity came to make it real.  He could
afford to lend his name to the local enterprise of Copsige.  It
would at least be another count against the men of Bernicia that
they had killed the earl whom King William gave them.

Meanwhile William was taking very practical possession in the
shires where late events had given him real authority.  His policy
was to assert his rights in the strongest form, but to show his
mildness and good will by refraining from carrying them out to the
uttermost.  By right of conquest William claimed nothing.  He had
come to take his crown, and he had unluckily met with some
opposition in taking it.  The crown lands of King Edward passed of
course to his successor.  As for the lands of other men, in
William's theory all was forfeited to the crown.  The lawful heir
had been driven to seek his kingdom in arms; no Englishman had
helped him; many Englishmen had fought against him.  All then were
directly or indirectly traitors.  The King might lawfully deal with
the lands of all as his own.  But in the greater part of the
kingdom it was impossible, in no part was it prudent, to carry out
this doctrine in its fulness.  A passage in Domesday, compared with
a passage in the English Chronicles, shows that, soon after
William's coronation, the English as a body, within the lands
already conquered, redeemed their lands.  They bought them back at
a price, and held them as a fresh grant from King William.  Some
special offenders, living and dead, were exempted from this favour.
The King took to himself the estates of the house of Godwine, save
those of Edith, the widow of his revered predecessor, whom it was
his policy to treat with all honour.  The lands too of those who
had died on Senlac were granted back to their heirs only of special
favour, sometimes under the name of alms.  Thus, from the beginning
of his reign, William began to make himself richer than any king
that had been before him in England or than any other Western king
of his day.  He could both punish his enemies and reward his
friends.  Much of what he took he kept; much he granted away,
mainly to his foreign followers, but sometimes also to Englishmen
who had in any way won his favour.  Wiggod of Wallingford was one
of the very few Englishmen who kept and received estates which put
them alongside of the great Norman landowners.  The doctrine that
all land was held of the King was now put into a practical shape.
All, Englishmen and strangers, not only became William's subjects,
but his men and his grantees.  Thus he went on during his whole
reign.  There was no sudden change from the old state of things to
the new.  After the general redemption of lands, gradually carried
out as William's power advanced, no general blow was dealt at
Englishmen as such.  They were not, like some conquered nations,
formally degraded or put under any legal incapacities in their own
land.  William simply distinguished between his loyal and his
disloyal subjects, and used his opportunities for punishing the
disloyal and rewarding the loyal.  Such punishments and rewards
naturally took the shape of confiscations and grants of land.  If
punishment was commonly the lot of the Englishman, and reward was
the lot of the stranger, that was only because King William treated
all men as they deserved.  Most Englishmen were disloyal; most
strangers were loyal.  But disloyal strangers and loyal Englishmen
fared according to their deserts.  The final result of this
process, begun now and steadily carried on, was that, by the end of
William's reign, the foreign king was surrounded by a body of
foreign landowners and office-bearers of foreign birth.  When, in
the early days of his conquest, he gathered round him the great men
of his realm, it was still an English assembly with a sprinkling of
strangers.  By the end of his reign it had changed, step by step,
into an assembly of strangers with a sprinkling of Englishmen.

This revolution, which practically transferred the greater part of
the soil of England to the hands of strangers, was great indeed.
But it must not be mistaken for a sudden blow, for an irregular
scramble, for a formal proscription of Englishmen as such.
William, according to his character and practice, was able to do
all this gradually, according to legal forms, and without drawing
any formal distinction between natives and strangers.  All land was
held of the King of the English, according to the law of England.
It may seem strange how such a process of spoliation, veiled under
a legal fiction, could have been carried out without resistance.
It was easier because it was gradual and piecemeal.  The whole
country was not touched at once, nor even the whole of any one
district.  One man lost his land while his neighbour kept his, and
he who kept his land was not likely to join in the possible plots
of the other.  And though the land had never seen so great a
confiscation, or one so largely for the behoof of foreigners, yet
there was nothing new in the thing itself.  Danes had settled under
Cnut, and Normans and other Frenchmen under Edward.  Confiscation
of land was the everyday punishment for various public and private
crimes.  In any change, such as we should call a change of
ministry, as at the fall and the return of Godwine, outlawry and
forfeiture of lands was the usual doom of the weaker party, a
milder doom than the judicial massacres of later ages.  Even a
conquest of England was nothing new, and William at this stage
contrasted favourably with Cnut, whose early days were marked by
the death of not a few.  William, at any rate since his crowning,
had shed the blood of no man.  Men perhaps thought that things
might have been much worse, and that they were not unlikely to
mend.  Anyhow, weakened, cowed, isolated, the people of the
conquered shires submitted humbly to the Conqueror's will.  It
needed a kind of oppression of which William himself was never
guilty to stir them into actual revolt.


The provocation was not long in coming.  Within three months after
his coronation, William paid a visit to his native duchy.  The
ruler of two states could not be always in either; he owed it to
his old subjects to show himself among them in his new character;
and his absence might pass as a sign of the trust he put in his new
subjects.  But the means which he took to secure their obedience
brought out his one weak point.  We cannot believe that he really
wished to goad the people into rebellion; yet the choice of his
lieutenants might seem almost like it.  He was led astray by
partiality for his brother and for his dearest friend.  To Bishop
Ode of Bayeux, and to William Fitz-Osbern, the son of his early
guardian, he gave earldoms, that of Kent to Odo, that of Hereford
to William.  The Conqueror was determined before all things that
his kingdom should be united and obedient; England should not be
split up like Gaul and Germany; he would have no man in England
whose formal homage should carry with it as little of practical
obedience as his own homage to the King of the French.  A Norman
earl of all Wessex or all Mercia might strive after such a
position.  William therefore forsook the old practice of dividing
the whole kingdom into earldoms.  In the peaceful central shires he
would himself rule through his sheriffs and other immediate
officers; he would appoint earls only in dangerous border districts
where they were needed as military commanders.  All William's earls
were in fact marquesses, guardians of a march or frontier.  Ode had
to keep Kent against attacks from the continent; William Fitz-
Osbern had to keep Herefordshire against the Welsh and the
independent English.  This last shire had its own local warfare.
William's authority did not yet reach over all the shires beyond
London and Hereford; but Harold had allowed some of Edward's Norman
favourites to keep power there.  Hereford then and part of its
shire formed an isolated part of William's dominions, while the
lands around remained unsubdued.  William Fitz-Osbern had to guard
this dangerous land as earl.  But during the King's absence both he
and Ode received larger commissions as viceroys over the whole
kingdom.  Ode guarded the South and William the North and North-
East.  Norwich, a town dangerous from its easy communication with
Denmark, was specially under his care.  The nominal earls of the
rest of the land, Edwin, Morkere, and Waltheof, with Edgar, King of
a moment, Archbishop Stigand, and a number of other chief men,
William took with him to Normandy.  Nominally his cherished friends
and guests, they went in truth, as one of the English Chroniclers
calls them, as hostages.

William's stay in Normandy lasted about six months.  It was chiefly
devoted to rejoicings and religious ceremonies, but partly to
Norman legislation.  Rich gifts from the spoils of England were
given to the churches of Normandy; gifts richer still were sent to
the Church of Rome whose favour had wrought so much for William.
In exchange for the banner of Saint Peter, Harold's standard of the
Fighting-man was sent as an offering to the head of all churches.
While William was in Normandy, Archbishop Maurilius of Rouen died.
The whole duchy named Lanfranc as his successor; but he declined
the post, and was himself sent to Rome to bring the pallium for the
new archbishop John, a kinsman of the ducal house.  Lanfranc
doubtless refused the see of Rouen only because he was designed for
a yet greater post in England; the subtlest diplomatist in Europe
was not sent to Rome merely to ask for the pallium for Archbishop
John.

Meanwhile William's choice of lieutenants bore its fruit in
England.  They wrought such oppression as William himself never
wrought.  The inferior leaders did as they thought good, and the
two earls restrained them not.  The earls meanwhile were in one
point there faithfully carrying out the policy of their master in
the building of castles; a work, which specially when the work of
Ode and William Fitz-Osbern, is always spoken of by the native
writers with marked horror.  The castles were the badges and the
instruments of the Conquest, the special means of holding the land
in bondage.  Meanwhile tumults broke forth in various parts.  The
slaughter of Copsige, William's earl in Northumberland, took place
about the time of the King's sailing for Normandy.  In independent
Herefordshire the leading Englishman in those parts, Eadric, whom
the Normans called the Wild, allied himself with the Welsh, harried
the obedient lands, and threatened the castle of Hereford.  Nothing
was done on either side beyond harrying and skirmishes; but
Eadric's corner of the land remained unsubdued.  The men of Kent
made a strange foreign alliance with Eustace of Boulogne, the
brother-in-law of Edward, the man whose deeds had led to the great
movement of Edward's reign, to the banishment and the return of
Godwine.  He had fought against England on Senlac, and was one of
four who had dealt the last blow to the wounded Harold.  But the
oppression of Ode made the Kentishmen glad to seek any help against
him.  Eustace, now William's enemy, came over, and gave help in an
unsuccessful attack on Dover castle.  Meanwhile in the obedient
shires men were making ready for revolt; in the unsubdued lands
they were making ready for more active defence.  Many went beyond
sea to ask for foreign help, specially in the kindred lands of
Denmark and Northern Germany.  Against this threatening movement
William's strength lay in the incapacity of his enemies for
combined action.  The whole land never rose at once, and Danish
help did not come at the times or in the shape when it could have
done most good.


The news of these movements brought William back to England in
December.  He kept the Midwinter feast and assembly at Westminster;
there the absent Eustace was, by a characteristic stroke of policy,
arraigned as a traitor.  He was a foreign prince against whom the
Duke of the Normans might have led a Norman army.  But he had also
become an English landowner, and in that character he was
accountable to the King and Witan of England.  He suffered the
traitor's punishment of confiscation of lands.  Afterwards he
contrived to win back William's favour, and he left great English
possessions to his second wife and his son.  Another stroke of
policy was to send an embassy to Denmark, to ward off the hostile
purposes of Swegen, and to choose as ambassador an English prelate
who had been in high favour with both Edward and Harold,
AEthelsige, Abbot of Ramsey.  It came perhaps of his mission that
Swegen practically did nothing for two years.  The envoy's own life
was a chequered one.  He lost William's favour, and sought shelter
in Denmark.  He again regained William's favour--perhaps by some
service at the Danish court--and died in possession of his abbey.

It is instructive to see how in this same assembly William bestowed
several great offices.  The earldom of Northumberland was vacant by
the slaughter of two earls, the bishopric of Dorchester by the
peaceful death of its bishop.  William had no real authority in any
part of Northumberland, or in more than a small part of the diocese
of Dorchester.  But he dealt with both earldom and bishopric as in
his own power.  It was now that he granted Northumberland to
Gospatric.  The appointment to the bishopric was the beginning of a
new system.  Englishmen were now to give way step by step to
strangers in the highest offices and greatest estates of the land.
He had already made two Norman earls, but they were to act as
military commanders.  He now made an English earl, whose earldom
was likely to be either nominal or fatal.  The appointment of
Remigius of Fecamp to the see of Dorchester was of more real
importance.  It is the beginning of William's ecclesiastical reign,
the first step in William's scheme of making the Church his
instrument in keeping down the conquered.  While William lived, no
Englishman was appointed to a bishopric.  As bishoprics became
vacant by death, foreigners were nominated, and excuses were often
found for hastening a vacancy by deprivation.  At the end of
William's reign one English bishop only was left.  With abbots, as
having less temporal power than bishops, the rule was less strict.
Foreigners were preferred, but Englishmen were not wholly shut out.
And the general process of confiscation and regrant of lands was
vigorously carried out.  The Kentish revolt and the general
movement must have led to many forfeitures and to further grants to
loyal men of either nation.  As the English Chronicles pithily puts
it, "the King gave away every man's land."


William could soon grant lands in new parts of England.  In
February 1068 he for the first time went forth to warfare with
those whom he called his subjects, but who had never submitted to
him.  In the course of the year a large part of England was in arms
against him.  But there was no concert; the West rose and the North
rose; but the West rose first, and the North did not rise till the
West had been subdued.  Western England threw off the purely
passive state which had lasted through the year 1067.  Hitherto
each side had left the other alone.  But now the men of the West
made ready for a more direct opposition to the foreign government.
If they could not drive William out of what he had already won,
they would at least keep him from coming any further.  Exeter, the
greatest city of the West, was the natural centre of resistance;
the smaller towns, at least of Devonshire and Dorset entered into a
league with the capital.  They seem to have aimed, like Italian
cities in the like case, at the formation of a civic confederation,
which might perhaps find it expedient to acknowledge William as an
external lord, but which would maintain perfect internal
independence.  Still, as Gytha, widow of Godwine, mother of Harold,
was within the walls of Exeter, the movement was doubtless also in
some sort on behalf of the House of Godwine.  In any case, Exeter
and the lands and towns in its alliance with Exeter strengthened
themselves in every way against attack.

Things were not now as on the day of Senlac, when Englishmen on
their own soil withstood one who, however he might cloke his
enterprise, was to them simply a foreign invader.  But William was
not yet, as he was in some later struggles, the de facto king of
the whole land, whom all had acknowledged, and opposition to whom
was in form rebellion.  He now held an intermediate position.  He
was still an invader; for Exeter had never submitted to him; but
the crowned King of the English, peacefully ruling over many
shires, was hardly a mere invader; resistance to him would have the
air of rebellion in the eyes of many besides William and his
flatterers.  And they could not see, what we plainly see, what
William perhaps dimly saw, that it was in the long run better for
Exeter, or any other part of England, to share, even in conquest,
the fate of the whole land, rather than to keep on a precarious
independence to the aggravation of the common bondage.  This we
feel throughout; William, with whatever motive, is fighting for the
unity of England.  We therefore cannot seriously regret his
successes.  But none the less honour is due to the men whom the
duty of the moment bade to withstand him.  They could not see
things as we see them by the light of eight hundred years.

The movement evidently stirred several shires; but it is only of
Exeter that we hear any details.  William never used force till he
had tried negotiation.  He sent messengers demanding that the
citizens should take oaths to him and receive him within their
walls.  The choice lay now between unconditional submission and
valiant resistance.  But the chief men of the city chose a middle
course which could gain nothing.  They answered as an Italian city
might have answered a Swabian Emperor.  They would not receive the
King within their walls; they would take no oaths to him; but they
would pay him the tribute which they had paid to earlier kings.
That is, they would not have him as king, but only as overlord over
a commonwealth otherwise independent.  William's answer was short;
"It is not my custom to take subjects on those conditions."  He set
out on his march; his policy was to overcome the rebellious English
by the arms of the loyal English.  He called out the fyrd, the
militia, of all or some of the shires under his obedience.  They
answered his call; to disobey it would have needed greater courage
than to wield the axe on Senlac.  This use of English troops became
William's custom in all his later wars, in England and on the
mainland; but of course he did not trust to English troops only.
The plan of the campaign was that which had won Le Mans and London.
The towns of Dorset were frightfully harried on the march to the
capital of the West.  Disunion at once broke out; the leading men
in Exeter sent to offer unconditional submission and to give
hostages.  But the commonalty disowned the agreement;
notwithstanding the blinding of one of the hostages before the
walls, they defended the city valiantly for eighteen days.  It was
only when the walls began to crumble away beneath William's mining-
engines that the men of Exeter at last submitted to his mercy.  And
William's mercy could be trusted.  No man was harmed in life, limb,
or goods.  But, to hinder further revolts, a castle was at once
begun, and the payments made by the city to the King were largely
raised.

Gytha, when the city yielded, withdrew to the Steep Holm, and
thence to Flanders.  Her grandsons fled to Ireland; from thence, in
the course of the same year and the next, they twice landed in
Somerset and Devonshire.  The Irish Danes who followed them could
not be kept back from plunder.  Englishmen as well as Normans
withstood them, and the hopes of the House of Godwine came to an
end.


On the conquest of Exeter followed the submission of the whole
West.  All the land south of the Thames was now in William's
obedience.  Gloucestershire seems to have submitted at the same
time; the submission of Worcestershire is without date.  A vast
confiscation of lands followed, most likely by slow degrees.  Its
most memorable feature is that nearly all Cornwall was granted to
William's brother Robert Count of Mortain.  His vast estate grew
into the famous Cornish earldom and duchy of later times.  Southern
England was now conquered, and, as the North had not stirred during
the stirring of the West, the whole land was outwardly at peace.
William now deemed it safe to bring his wife to share his new
greatness.  The Duchess Matilda came over to England, and was
hallowed to Queen at Westminster by Archbishop Ealdred.  We may
believe that no part of his success gave William truer pleasure.
But the presence of the Lady was important in another way.  It was
doubtless by design that she gave birth on English soil to her
youngest son, afterwards the renowned King Henry the First.  He
alone of William's children was in any sense an Englishman.  Born
on English ground, son of a crowned King and his Lady, Englishmen
looked on him as a countryman.  And his father saw the wisdom of
encouraging such a feeling.  Henry, surnamed in after days the
Clerk, was brought up with special care; he was trained in many
branches of learning unusual among the princes of his age, among
them in a thorough knowledge of the tongue of his native land.


The campaign of Exeter is of all William's English campaigns the
richest in political teaching.  We see how near the cities of
England came for a moment--as we shall presently see a chief city
of northern Gaul--to running the same course as the cities of Italy
and Provence.  Signs of the same tendency may sometimes be
suspected elsewhere, but they are not so clearly revealed.
William's later campaigns are of the deepest importance in English
history; they are far richer in recorded personal actors than the
siege of Exeter; but they hardly throw so much light on the
character of William and his statesmanship.  William is throughout
ever ready, but never hasty--always willing to wait when waiting
seems the best policy--always ready to accept a nominal success
when there is a chance of turning it into a real one, but never
accepting nominal success as a cover for defeat, never losing an
inch of ground without at once taking measures to recover it.  By
this means, he has in the former part of 1068 extended his dominion
to the Land's End; before the end of the year he extends it to the
Tees.  In the next year he has indeed to win it back again; but he
does win it back and more also.  Early in 1070 he was at last, in
deed as well as in name, full King over all England.

The North was making ready for war while the war in the West went
on, but one part of England did nothing to help the other.  In the
summer the movement in the North took shape.  The nominal earls
Edwin, Morkere, and Gospatric, with the AEtheling Edgar and others,
left William's court to put themselves at the head of the movement.
Edwin was specially aggrieved, because the king had promised him
one of his daughters in marriage, but had delayed giving her to
him.  The English formed alliances with the dependent princes of
Wales and Scotland, and stood ready to withstand any attack.
William set forth; as he had taken Exeter, he took Warwick, perhaps
Leicester.  This was enough for Edwin and Morkere.  They submitted,
and were again received to favour.  More valiant spirits withdrew
northward, ready to defend Durham as the last shelter of
independence, while Edgar and Gospatric fled to the court of
Malcolm of Scotland.  William went on, receiving the submission of
Nottingham and York; thence he turned southward, receiving on his
way the submission of Lincoln, Cambridge, and Huntingdon.  Again he
deemed it his policy to establish his power in the lands which he
had already won rather than to jeopard matters by at once pressing
farther.  In the conquered towns he built castles, and he placed
permanent garrisons in each district by granting estates to his
Norman and other followers.  Different towns and districts suffered
in different degrees, according doubtless to the measure of
resistance met with in each.  Lincoln and Lincolnshire were on the
whole favourably treated.  An unusual number of Englishmen kept
lands and offices in city and shire.  At Leicester and Northampton,
and in their shires, the wide confiscations and great destruction
of houses point to a stout resistance.  And though Durham was still
untouched, and though William had assuredly no present purpose of
attacking Scotland, he found it expedient to receive with all
favour a nominal submission brought from the King of Scots by the
hands of the Bishop of Durham.

If William's policy ever seems less prudent than usual, it was at
the beginning of the next year, 1069.  The extreme North still
stood out.  William had twice commissioned English earls of
Northumberland to take possession if they could.  He now risked the
dangerous step of sending a stranger.  Robert of Comines was
appointed to the earldom forfeited by the flight of Gospatric.
While it was still winter, he went with his force to Durham.  By
help of the Bishop, he was admitted into the city, but he and his
whole force were cut off by the people of Durham and its
neighbourhood.  Robert's expedition in short led only to a revolt
of York, where Edgar was received and siege was laid to the castle.
William marched in person with all speed; he relieved the castle;
he recovered the city and strengthened it by a second castle on the
other side of the river.  Still he thought it prudent to take no
present steps against Durham.  Soon after this came the second
attempt of Harold's sons in the West.

Later in this year William's final warfare for the kingdom began.
In August, 1069 the long-promised help from Denmark came.  Swegen
sent his brother Osbeorn and his sons Harold and Cnut, at the head
of the whole strength of Denmark and of other Northern lands.  If
the two enterprises of Harold's sons had been planned in concert
with their Danish kinsmen, the invaders or deliverers from opposite
sides had failed to act together.  Nor are Swegen's own objects
quite clear.  He sought to deliver England from William and his
Normans, but it is not so plain in whose interest he acted.  He
would naturally seek the English crown for himself or for one of
his sons; the sons of Harold he would rather make earls than kings.
But he could feel no interest in the kingship of Edgar.  Yet, when
the Danish fleet entered the Humber, and the whole force of the
North came to meet it, the English host had the heir of Cerdic at
its head.  It is now that Waltheof the son of Siward, Earl of
Northampton and Huntingdon, first stands out as a leading actor.
Gospatric too was there; but this time not Edwin and Morkere.
Danes and English joined and marched upon York; the city was
occupied; the castles were taken; the Norman commanders were made
prisoners, but not till they had set fire to the city and burned
the greater part of it, along with the metropolitan minster.  It is
amazing to read that, after breaking down the castles, the English
host dispersed, and the Danish fleet withdrew into the Humber.

England was again ruined by lack of concert.  The news of the
coming of the Danes led only to isolated movements which were put
down piecemeal.  The men of Somerset and Dorset and the men of
Devonshire and Cornwall were put down separately, and the movement
in Somerset was largely put down by English troops.  The citizens
of Exeter, as well as the Norman garrison of the castle, stood a
siege on behalf of William.  A rising on the Welsh border under
Eadric led only to the burning of Shrewsbury; a rising in
Staffordshire was held by William to call for his own presence.
But he first marched into Lindesey, and drove the crews of the
Danish ships across into Holderness; there he left two Norman
leaders, one of them his brother Robert of Mortain and Cornwall; he
then went westward and subdued Staffordshire, and marched towards
York by way of Nottingham.  A constrained delay by the Aire gave
him an opportunity for negotiation with the Danish leaders.
Osbeorn took bribes to forsake the English cause, and William
reached and entered York without resistance.  He restored the
castles and kept his Christmas in the half-burned city.  And now
William forsook his usual policy of clemency.  The Northern shires
had been too hard to win.  To weaken them, he decreed a merciless
harrying of the whole land, the direct effects of which were seen
for many years, and which left its mark on English history for
ages.  Till the growth of modern industry reversed the relative
position of Northern and Southern England, the old Northumbrian
kingdom never fully recovered from the blow dealt by William, and
remained the most backward part of the land.  Herein comes one of
the most remarkable results of William's coming.  His greatest work
was to make England a kingdom which no man henceforth thought of
dividing.  But the circumstances of his conquest of Northern
England ruled that for several centuries the unity of England
should take the form of a distinct preponderance of Southern
England over Northern.  William's reign strengthened every tendency
that way, chiefly by the fearful blow now dealt to the physical
strength and well-being of the Northern shires.  From one side
indeed the Norman Conquest was truly a Saxon conquest.  The King of
London and Winchester became more fully than ever king over the
whole land.


The Conqueror had now only to gather in what was still left to
conquer.  But, as military exploits, none are more memorable than
the winter marches which put William into full possession of
England.  The lands beyond Tees still held out; in January 1070 he
set forth to subdue them.  The Earls Waltheof and Gospatric made
their submission, Waltheof in person, Gospatric by proxy.  William
restored both of them to their earldoms, and received Waltheof to
his highest favour, giving him his niece Judith in marriage.  But
he systematically wasted the land, as he had wasted Yorkshire.  He
then returned to York, and thence set forth to subdue the last city
and shire that held out.  A fearful march led him to the one
remaining fragment of free England, the unconquered land of
Chester.  We know not how Chester fell; but the land was not won
without fighting, and a frightful harrying was the punishment.  In
all this we see a distinct stage of moral downfall in the character
of the Conqueror.  Yet it is thoroughly characteristic.  All is
calm, deliberate, politic.  William will have no more revolts, and
he will at any cost make the land incapable of revolt.  Yet, as
ever, there is no blood shed save in battle.  If men died of
hunger, that was not William's doing; nay, charitable people like
Abbot AEthelwig of Evesham might do what they could to help the
sufferers.  But the lawful king, kept so long out of his kingdom,
would, at whatever price, be king over the whole land.  And the
great harrying of the northern shires was the price paid for
William's kingship over them.

At Chester the work was ended which had begun at Pevensey.  Less
than three years and a half, with intervals of peace, had made the
Norman invader king over all England.  He had won the kingdom; he
had now to keep it.  He had for seventeen years to deal with
revolts on both sides of the sea, with revolts both of Englishmen
and of his own followers.  But in England his power was never
shaken; in England he never knew defeat.  His English enemies he
had subdued; the Danes were allowed to remain and in some sort to
help in his work by plundering during the winter.  The King now
marched to the Salisbury of that day, the deeply fenced hill of Old
Sarum.  The men who had conquered England were reviewed in the
great plain, and received their rewards.  Some among them had by
failures of duty during the winter marches lost their right to
reward.  Their punishment was to remain under arms forty days
longer than their comrades.  William could trust himself to the
very mutineers whom he had picked out for punishment.  He had now
to begin his real reign; and the champion of the Church had before
all things to reform the evil customs of the benighted islanders,
and to give them shepherds of their souls who might guide them in
the right way,



CHAPTER IX--THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND--1070-1086



England was now fully conquered, and William could for a moment sit
down quietly to the rule of the kingdom that he had won.  The time
that immediately followed is spoken of as a time of comparative
quiet, and of less oppression than the times either before or
after.  Before and after, warfare, on one side of the sea or the
other, was the main business.  Hitherto William has been winning
his kingdom in arms.  Afterwards he was more constantly called away
to his foreign dominions, and his absence always led to greater
oppression in England.  Just now he had a moment of repose, when he
could give his mind to the affairs of Church and State in England.
Peace indeed was not quite unbroken.  Events were tending to that
famous revolt in the Fenland which is perhaps the best remembered
part of William's reign.  But even this movement was merely local,
and did not seriously interfere with William's government.  He was
now striving to settle the land in peace, and to make his rule as
little grievous to the conquered as might be.  The harrying of
Northumberland showed that he now shrank from no harshness that
would serve his ends; but from mere purposeless oppression he was
still free.  Nor was he ever inclined to needless change or to that
scorn of the conquered which meaner conquerors have often shown.
He clearly wished both to change and to oppress as little as he
could.  This is a side of him which has been greatly misunderstood,
largely through the book that passes for the History of Ingulf
Abbot of Crowland.  Ingulf was William's English secretary; a real
history of his writing would be most precious.  But the book that
goes by his name is a forgery not older than the fourteenth
century, and is in all points contradicted by the genuine documents
of the time.  Thus the forger makes William try to abolish the
English language and order the use of French in legal writings.
This is pure fiction.  The truth is that, from the time of
William's coming, English goes out of use in legal writings, but
only gradually, and not in favour of French.  Ever since the coming
of Augustine, English and Latin had been alternative tongues; after
the coming of William English becomes less usual, and in the course
of the twelfth century it goes out of use in favour of Latin.
There are no French documents till the thirteenth century, and in
that century English begins again.  Instead of abolishing the
English tongue, William took care that his English-born son should
learn it, and he even began to learn it himself.  A king of those
days held it for his duty to hear and redress his subjects'
complaints; he had to go through the land and see for himself that
those who acted in his name did right among his people.  This
earlier kings had done; this William wished to do; but he found his
ignorance of English a hindrance.  Cares of other kinds checked his
English studies, but he may have learned enough to understand the
meaning of his own English charters.  Nor did William try, as he is
often imagined to have done, to root out the ancient institutions
of England, and to set up in their stead either the existing
institutions of Normandy or some new institutions of his own
devising.  The truth is that with William began a gradual change in
the laws and customs of England, undoubtedly great, but far less
than is commonly thought.  French names have often supplanted
English, and have made the amount of change seem greater than it
really was.  Still much change did follow on the Norman Conquest,
and the Norman Conquest was so completely William's own act that
all that came of it was in some sort his act also.  But these
changes were mainly the gradual results of the state of things
which followed William's coming; they were but very slightly the
results of any formal acts of his.  With a foreign king and
foreigners in all high places, much practical change could not fail
to follow, even where the letter of the law was unchanged.  Still
the practical change was less than if the letter of the law had
been changed as well.  English law was administered by foreign
judges; the foreign grantees of William held English land according
to English law.  The Norman had no special position as a Norman; in
every rank except perhaps the very highest and the very lowest, he
had Englishmen to his fellows.  All this helped to give the Norman
Conquest of England its peculiar character, to give it an air of
having swept away everything English, while its real work was to
turn strangers into Englishmen.  And that character was impressed
on William's work by William himself.  The king claiming by legal
right, but driven to assert his right by the sword, was unlike both
the foreign king who comes in by peaceful succession and the
foreign king who comes in without even the pretext of law.  The
Normans too, if born soldiers, were also born lawyers, and no man
was more deeply impressed with the legal spirit than William
himself.  He loved neither to change the law nor to transgress the
law, and he had little need to do either.  He knew how to make the
law his instrument, and, without either changing or transgressing
it, to use it to make himself all-powerful.  He thoroughly enjoyed
that system of legal fictions and official euphemisms which marks
his reign.  William himself became in some sort an Englishman, and
those to whom he granted English lands had in some sort to become
Englishmen in order to hold them.  The Norman stepped into the
exact place of the Englishman whose land he held; he took his
rights and his burthens, and disputes about those rights and
burthens were judged according to English law by the witness of
Englishmen.  Reigning over two races in one land, William would be
lord of both alike, able to use either against the other in case of
need.  He would make the most of everything in the feelings and
customs of either that tended to strengthen his own hands.  And, in
the state of things in which men then found themselves, whatever
strengthened William's hands strengthened law and order in his
kingdom.

There was therefore nothing to lead William to make any large
changes in the letter of the English law.  The powers of a King of
the English, wielded as he knew how to wield them, made him as
great as he could wish to be.  Once granting the original wrong of
his coming at all and bringing a host of strangers with him, there
is singularly little to blame in the acts of the Conqueror.  Of
bloodshed, of wanton interference with law and usage, there is
wonderfully little.  Englishmen and Normans were held to have
settled down in peace under the equal protection of King William.
The two races were drawing together; the process was beginning
which, a hundred years later, made it impossible, in any rank but
the highest and the lowest, to distinguish Norman from Englishman.
Among the smaller landowners and the townsfolk this intermingling
had already begun, while earls and bishops were not yet so
exclusively Norman, nor had the free churls of England as yet sunk
so low as at a later stage.  Still some legislation was needed to
settle the relations of the two races.  King William proclaimed the
"renewal of the law of King Edward."  This phrase has often been
misunderstood; it is a common form when peace and good order are
restored after a period of disturbance.  The last reign which is
looked back to as to a time of good government becomes the standard
of good government, and it is agreed between king and people,
between contending races or parties, that things shall be as they
were in the days of the model ruler.  So we hear in Normandy of the
renewal of the law of Rolf, and in England of the renewal of the
law of Cnut.  So at an earlier time Danes and Englishmen agreed in
the renewal of the law of Edgar.  So now Normans and Englishmen
agreed in the renewal of the law of Edward.  There was no code
either of Edward's or of William's making.  William simply bound
himself to rule as Edward had ruled.  But in restoring the law of
King Edward, he added, "with the additions which I have decreed for
the advantage of the people of the English."

These few words are indeed weighty.  The little legislation of
William's reign takes throughout the shape of additions.  Nothing
old is repealed; a few new enactments are set up by the side of the
old ones.  And these words describe, not only William's actual
legislation, but the widest general effect of his coming.  The
Norman Conquest did little towards any direct abolition of the
older English laws or institutions.  But it set up some new
institutions alongside of old ones; and it brought in not a few
names, habits, and ways of looking at things, which gradually did
their work.  In England no man has pulled down; many have added and
modified.  Our law is still the law of King Edward with the
additions of King William.  Some old institutions took new names;
some new institutions with new names sprang up by the side of old
ones.  Sometimes the old has lasted, sometimes the new.  We still
have a king and not a roy; but he gathers round him a parliament
and not a vitenagemot.  We have a sheriff and not a viscount; but
his district is more commonly called a county than a shire.  But
county and shire are French and English for the same thing, and
"parliament" is simply French for the "deep speech" which King
William had with his Witan.  The National Assembly of England has
changed its name and its constitution more than once; but it has
never been changed by any sudden revolution, never till later times
by any formal enactment.  There was no moment when one kind of
assembly supplanted another.  And this has come because our
Conqueror was, both by his disposition and his circumstances, led
to act as a preserver and not as a destroyer.

The greatest recorded acts of William, administrative and
legislative, come in the last days of his reign.  But there are
several enactments of William belonging to various periods of his
reign, and some of them to this first moment of peace.  Here we
distinctly see William as an English statesman, as a statesman who
knew how to work a radical change under conservative forms.  One
enactment, perhaps the earliest of all, provided for the safety of
the strangers who had come with him to subdue and to settle in the
land.  The murder of a Norman by an Englishman, especially of a
Norman intruder by a dispossessed Englishman, was a thing that
doubtless often happened.  William therefore provides for the
safety of those whom he calls "the men whom I brought with me or
who have come after me;" that is, the warriors of Senlac, Exeter,
and York.  These men are put within his own peace; wrong done to
them is wrong done to the King, his crown and dignity.  If the
murderer cannot be found, the lord and, failing him, the hundred,
must make payment to the King.  Of this grew the presentment of
Englishry, one of the few formal badges of distinction between the
conquering and the conquered race.  Its practical need could not
have lasted beyond a generation or two, but it went on as a form
ages after it had lost all meaning.  An unknown corpse, unless it
could be proved that the dead man was English, was assumed to be
that of a man who had come with King William, and the fine was
levied.  Some other enactments were needed when two nations lived
side by side in the same land.  As in earlier times, Roman and
barbarian each kept his own law, so now for some purposes the
Frenchman--"Francigena"--and the Englishman kept their own law.
This is chiefly with regard to the modes of appealing to God's
judgement in doubtful cases.  The English did this by ordeal, the
Normans by wager of battle.  When a man of one nation appealed a
man of the other, the accused chose the mode of trial.  If an
Englishman appealed a Frenchman and declined to prove his charge
either way, the Frenchman might clear himself by oath.  But these
privileges were strictly confined to Frenchmen who had come with
William and after him.  Frenchmen who had in Edward's time settled
in England as the land of their own choice, reckoned as Englishmen.
Other enactments, fresh enactments of older laws, touched both
races.  The slave trade was rife in its worst form; men were sold
out of the land, chiefly to the Danes of Ireland.  Earlier kings
had denounced the crime, and earlier bishops had preached against
it.  William denounced it again under the penalty of forfeiture of
all lands and goods, and Saint Wulfstan, the Bishop of Worcester,
persuaded the chief offenders, Englishmen of Bristol, to give up
their darling sin for a season.  Yet in the next reign Anselm and
his synod had once more to denounce the crime under spiritual
penalties, when they had no longer the strong arm of William to
enforce them.

Another law bears more than all the personal impress of William.
In it he at once, on one side, forestalls the most humane theories
of modern times, and on the other sins most directly against them.
His remarkable unwillingness to put any man to death, except among
the chances of the battle-field, was to some extent the feeling of
his age.  With him the feeling takes the shape of a formal law.  He
forbids the infliction of death for any crime whatever.  But those
who may on this score be disposed to claim the Conqueror as a
sympathizer will be shocked at the next enactment.  Those crimes
which kings less merciful than William would have punished with
death are to be punished with loss of eyes or other foul and cruel
mutilations.  Punishments of this kind now seem more revolting than
death, though possibly, now as then, the sufferer himself might
think otherwise.  But in those days to substitute mutilation for
death, in the case of crimes which were held to deserve death, was
universally deemed an act of mercy.  Grave men shrank from sending
their fellow-creatures out of the world, perhaps without time for
repentance; but physical sympathy with physical suffering had
little place in their minds.  In the next century a feeling against
bodily mutilation gradually comes in; but as yet the mildest and
most thoughtful men, Anselm himself, make no protest against it
when it is believed to be really deserved.  There is no sign of any
general complaint on this score.  The English Chronicler applauds
the strict police of which mutilation formed a part, and in one
case he deliberately holds it to be the fitting punishment of the
offence.  In fact, when penal settlements were unknown and legal
prisons were few and loathsome, there was something to be said for
a punishment which disabled the criminal from repeating his
offence.  In William's jurisprudence mutilation became the ordinary
sentence of the murderer, the robber, the ravisher, sometimes also
of English revolters against William's power.  We must in short
balance his mercy against the mercy of Kirk and Jeffreys.

The ground on which the English Chronicler does raise his wail on
behalf of his countrymen is the special jurisprudence of the
forests and the extortions of money with which he charges the
Conqueror.  In both these points the royal hand became far heavier
under the Norman rule.  In both William's character grew darker as
he grew older.  He is charged with unlawful exactions of money, in
his character alike of sovereign and of landlord.  We read of his
sharp practice in dealing with the profits of the royal demesnes.
He would turn out the tenant to whom he had just let the land, if
another offered a higher rent.  But with regard to taxation, we
must remember that William's exactions, however heavy at the time,
were a step in the direction of regular government.  In those days
all taxation was disliked.  Direct taking of the subject's money by
the King was deemed an extraordinary resource to be justified only
by some extraordinary emergency, to buy off the Danes or to hire
soldiers against them.  Men long after still dreamed that the King
could "live of his own," that he could pay all expenses of his
court and government out of the rents and services due to him as a
landowner, without asking his people for anything in the character
of sovereign.  Demands of money on behalf of the King now became
both heavier and more frequent.  And another change which had long
been gradually working now came to a head.  When, centuries later,
the King was bidden to "live of his own," men had forgotten that
the land of the King had once been the land of the nation.  In all
Teutonic communities, great and small, just as in the city
communities of Greece and Italy, the community itself was a chief
landowner.  The nation had its folkland, its ager publicus, the
property of no one man but of the whole state.  Out of this, by the
common consent, portions might be cut off and booked--granted by a
written document--to particular men as their own bookland.  The
King might have his private estate, to be dealt with at his own
pleasure, but of the folkland, the land of the nation, he was only
the chief administrator, bound to act by the advice of his Witan.
But in this case more than in others, the advice of the Witan could
not fail to become formal; the folkland, ever growing through
confiscations, ever lessening through grants, gradually came to be
looked on as the land of the King, to be dealt with as he thought
good.  We must not look for any change formally enacted; but in
Edward's day the notion of folkland, as the possession of the
nation and not of the King, could have been only a survival, and in
William's day even the survival passed away.  The land which was
practically the land of King Edward became, as a matter of course,
Terra Regis, the land of King William.  That land was now enlarged
by greater confiscations and lessened by greater grants than ever.
For a moment, every lay estate had been part of the land of
William.  And far more than had been the land of the nation
remained the land of the King, to be dealt with as he thought good.

In the tenure of land William seems to have made no formal change.
But the circumstances of his reign gave increased strength to
certain tendencies which had been long afloat.  And out of them, in
the next reign, the malignant genius of Randolf Flambard devised a
systematic code of oppression.  Yet even in his work there is
little of formal change.  There are no laws of William Rufus.  The
so called feudal incidents, the claims of marriage, wardship, and
the like, on the part of the lord, the ancient heriot developed
into the later relief, all these things were in the germ under
William, as they had been in the germ long before him.  In the
hands of Randolf Flambard they stiffen into established custom;
their legal acknowledgement comes from the charter of Henry the
First which promises to reform their abuses.  Thus the Conqueror
clearly claimed the right to interfere with the marriages of his
nobles, at any rate to forbid a marriage to which he objected on
grounds of policy.  Under Randolf Flambard this became a regular
claim, which of course was made a means of extorting money.  Under
Henry the claim is regulated and modified, but by being regulated
and modified, it is legally established.

The ordinary administration of the kingdom went on under William,
greatly modified by the circumstances of his reign, but hardly at
all changed in outward form.  Like the kings that were before him,
he "wore his crown" at the three great feasts, at Easter at
Winchester, at Pentecost at Westminster, at Christmas at
Gloucester.  Like the kings that were before him, he gathered
together the great men of the realm, and when need was, the small
men also.  Nothing seems to have been changed in the constitution
or the powers of the assembly; but its spirit must have been
utterly changed.  The innermost circle, earls, bishops, great
officers of state and household, gradually changed from a body of
Englishmen with a few strangers among them into a body of strangers
among whom two or three Englishmen still kept their places.  The
result of their "deep speech" with William was not likely to be
other than an assent to William's will.  The ordinary freeman did
not lose his abstract right to come and shout "Yea, yea," to any
addition that King William made to the law of King Edward.  But
there would be nothing to tempt him to come, unless King William
thought fit to bid him.  But once at least William did gather
together, if not every freeman, at least all freeholders of the
smallest account.  On one point the Conqueror had fully made up his
mind; on one point he was to be a benefactor to his kingdom through
all succeeding ages.  The realm of England was to be one and
indivisible.  No ruler or subject in the kingdom of England should
again dream that that kingdom could be split asunder.  When he
offered Harold the underkingship of the realm or of some part of
it, he did so doubtless only in the full conviction that the offer
would be refused.  No such offer should be heard of again.  There
should be no such division as had been between Cnut and Edmund,
between Harthacnut and the first Harold, such as Edwin and Morkere
had dreamed of in later times.  Nor should the kingdom be split
asunder in that subtler way which William of all men best
understood, the way in which the Frankish kingdoms, East and West,
had split asunder.  He would have no dukes or earls who might
become kings in all but name, each in his own duchy or earldom.  No
man in his realm should be to him as he was to his overlord at
Paris.  No man in his realm should plead duty towards an immediate
lord as an excuse for breach of duty towards the lord of that
immediate lord.  Hence William's policy with regard to earldoms.
There was to be nothing like the great governments which had been
held by Godwine, Leofric, and Siward; an Earl of the West-Saxons or
the Northumbrians was too like a Duke of the Normans to be endured
by one who was Duke of the Normans himself.  The earl, even of the
king's appointment, still represented the separate being of the
district over which he was set.  He was the king's representative
rather than merely his officer; if he was a magistrate and not a
prince, he often sat in the seat of former princes, and might
easily grow into a prince.  And at last, at the very end of his
reign, as the finishing of his work, he took the final step that
made England for ever one.  In 1086 every land-owner in England
swore to be faithful to King William within and without England and
to defend him against his enemies.  The subject's duty to the King
was to any duty which the vassal might owe to any inferior lord.
When the King was the embodiment of national unity and orderly
government, this was the greatest of all steps in the direction of
both.  Never did William or any other man act more distinctly as an
English statesman, never did any one act tell more directly towards
the later making of England, than this memorable act of the
Conqueror.  Here indeed is an addition which William made to the
law of Edward for the truest good of the English folk.  And yet no
enactment has ever been more thoroughly misunderstood.  Lawyer
after lawyer has set down in his book that, at the assembly of
Salisbury in 1086, William introduced "the feudal system."  If the
words "feudal system" have any meaning, the object of the law now
made was to hinder any "feudal system" from coming into England.
William would be king of a kingdom, head of a commonwealth,
personal lord of every man in his realm, not merely, like a King of
the French, external lord of princes whose subjects owed him no
allegiance.  This greatest monument of the Conqueror's
statesmanship was carried into effect in a special assembly of the
English nation gathered on the first day of August 1086 on the
great plain of Salisbury.  Now, perhaps for the first time, we get
a distinct foreshadowing of Lords and Commons.  The Witan, the
great men of the realm, and "the landsitting men," the whole body
of landowners, are now distinguished.  The point is that William
required the personal presence of every man whose personal
allegiance he thought worth having.  Every man in the mixed
assembly, mixed indeed in race and speech, the King's own men and
the men of other lords, took the oath and became the man of King
William.  On that day England became for ever a kingdom one and
indivisible, which since that day no man has dreamed of parting
asunder.


The great assembly of 1086 will come again among the events of
William's later reign; it comes here as the last act of that
general settlement which began in 1070.  That settlement, besides
its secular side, has also an ecclesiastical side of a somewhat
different character.  In both William's coming brought the island
kingdom into a closer connexion with the continent; and brought a
large displacement of Englishmen and a large promotion of
strangers.  But on the ecclesiastical side, though the changes were
less violent, there was a more marked beginning of a new state of
things.  The religious missionary was more inclined to innovate
than the military conqueror.  Here William not only added but
changed; on one point he even proclaimed that the existing law of
England was bad.  Certainly the religious state of England was
likely to displease churchmen from the mainland.  The English
Church, so directly the child of the Roman, was, for that very
reason, less dependent on her parent.  She was a free colony, not a
conquered province.  The English Church too was most distinctly
national; no land came so near to that ideal state of things in
which the Church is the nation on its religious side.  Papal
authority therefore was weaker in England than elsewhere, and a
less careful line was drawn between spiritual and temporal things
and jurisdictions.  Two friendly powers could take liberties with
each other.  The national assemblies dealt with ecclesiastical as
well as with temporal matters; one indeed among our ancient laws
blames any assembly that did otherwise.  Bishop and earl sat
together in the local Gemot, to deal with many matters which,
according to continental ideas, should have been dealt with in
separate courts.  And, by what in continental eyes seemed a strange
laxity of discipline, priests, bishops, members of capitular
bodies, were often married.  The English diocesan arrangements were
unlike continental models.  In Gaul, by a tradition of Roman date,
the bishop was bishop of the city.  His diocese was marked by the
extent of the civil jurisdiction of the city.  His home, his head
church, his bishopstool in the head church, were all in the city.
In Teutonic England the bishop was commonly bishop, not of a city
but of a tribe or district; his style was that of a tribe; his
home, his head church, his bishopstool, might be anywhere within
the territory of that tribe.  Still, on the greatest point of all,
matters in England were thoroughly to William's liking; nowhere did
the King stand forth more distinctly as the Supreme Governor of the
Church.  In England, as in Normandy, the right of the sovereign to
the investiture of ecclesiastical benefices was ancient and
undisputed.  What Edward had freely done, William went on freely
doing, and Hildebrand himself never ventured on a word of
remonstrance against a power which he deemed so wrongful in the
hands of his own sovereign.  William had but to stand on the rights
of his predecessors.  When Gregory asked for homage for the crown
which he had in some sort given, William answered indeed as an
English king.  What the kings before him had done for or paid to
the Roman see, that would he do and pay; but this no king before
him had ever done, nor would he be the first to do it.  But while
William thus maintained the rights of his crown, he was willing and
eager to do all that seemed needful for ecclesiastical reform.  And
the general result of his reform was to weaken the insular
independence of England, to make her Church more like the other
Churches of the West, and to increase the power of the Roman
Bishop.

William had now a fellow-worker in his taste.  The subtle spirit
which had helped to win his kingdom was now at his side to help him
to rule it.  Within a few months after the taking of Chester
Lanfranc sat on the throne of Augustine.  As soon as the actual
Conquest was over, William began to give his mind to ecclesiastical
matters.  It might look like sacrilege when he caused all the
monasteries of England to be harried.  But no harm was done to the
monks or to their possessions.  The holy houses were searched for
the hoards which the rich men of England, fearing the new king, had
laid up in the monastic treasuries.  William looked on these hoards
as part of the forfeited goods of rebels, and carried them off
during the Lent of 1070.  This done, he sat steadily down to the
reform of the English Church.

He had three papal legates to guide him, one of whom, Ermenfrid,
Bishop of Sitten, had come in on a like errand in the time of
Edward.  It was a kind of solemn confirmation of the Conquest,
when, at the assembly held at Winchester in 1070, the King's crown
was placed on his head by Ermenfrid.  The work of deposing English
prelates and appointing foreign successors now began.  The primacy
of York was regularly vacant; Ealdred had died as the Danes sailed
up the Humber to assault or to deliver his city.  The primacy of
Canterbury was to be made vacant by the deposition of Stigand.  His
canonical position had always been doubtful; neither Harold nor
William had been crowned by him; yet William had treated him
hitherto with marked courtesy, and he had consecrated at least one
Norman bishop, Remigius of Dorchester.  He was now deprived both of
the archbishopric and of the bishopric of Winchester which he held
with it, and was kept under restraint for the rest of his life.
According to foreign canonical rules the sentence may pass as just;
but it marked a stage in the conquest of England when a stout-
hearted Englishman was removed from the highest place in the
English Church to make way for the innermost counsellor of the
Conqueror.  In the Pentecostal assembly, held at Windsor, Lanfranc
was appointed archbishop; his excuses were overcome by his old
master Herlwin of Bec; he came to England, and on August 15, 1070
he was consecrated to the primacy.

Other deprivations and appointments took place in these assemblies.
The see of York was given to Thomas, a canon of Bayeux, a man of
high character and memorable in the local history of his see.  The
abbey of Peterborough was vacant by the death of Brand, who had
received the staff from the uncrowned Eadgar.  It was only by rich
gifts that he had turned away the wrath of William from his house.
The Fenland was perhaps already stirring, and the Abbot of
Peterborough might have to act as a military commander.  In this
case the prelate appointed, a Norman named Turold, was accordingly
more of a soldier than of a monk.  From these assemblies of 1070
the series of William's ecclesiastical changes goes on.  As the
English bishops die or are deprived, strangers take their place.
They are commonly Normans, but Walcher, who became Bishop of Durham
in 1071, was one of those natives of Lorraine who had been largely
favoured in Edward's day.  At the time of William's death Wulfstan
was the only Englishman who kept a bishopric.  Even his deprivation
had once been thought of.  The story takes a legendary shape, but
it throws an important light on the relations of Church and State
in England.  In an assembly held in the West Minster Wulfstan is
called on by William and Lanfranc to give up his staff.  He
refuses; he will give it back to him who gave it, and places it on
the tomb of his dead master Edward.  No of his enemies can move it.
The sentence is recalled, and the staff yields to his touch.
Edward was not yet a canonized saint; the appeal is simply from the
living and foreign king to the dead and native king.  This legend,
growing up when Western Europe was torn in pieces by the struggle
about investitures, proves better than the most authentic documents
how the right which Popes denied to Emperors was taken for granted
in the case of an English king.  But, while the spoils of England,
temporal and spiritual, were thus scattered abroad among men of the
conquering race, two men at least among them refused all share in
plunder which they deemed unrighteous.  One gallant Norman knight,
Gulbert of Hugleville, followed William through all his campaigns,
but when English estates were offered as his reward, he refused to
share in unrighteous gains, and went back to the lands of his
fathers which he could hold with a good conscience.  And one monk,
Wimund of Saint-Leutfried, not only refused bishoprics and abbeys,
but rebuked the Conqueror for wrong and robbery.  And William bore
no grudge against his censor, but, when the archbishopric of Rouen
became vacant, he offered it to the man who had rebuked him.  Among
the worthies of England Gulbert and Wimund can hardly claim a
place, but a place should surely be theirs among the men whom
England honours.


The primacy of Lanfranc is one of the most memorable in our
history.  In the words of the parable put forth by Anselm in the
next reign, the plough of the English Church was for seventeen
years drawn by two oxen of equal strength.  By ancient English
custom the Archbishop of Canterbury was the King's special
counsellor, the special representative of his Church and people.
Lanfranc cannot be charged with any direct oppression; yet in the
hands of a stranger who had his spiritual conquest to make, the
tribunitian office of former archbishops was lost in that of chief
minister of the sovereign.  In the first action of their joint
rule, the interest of king and primate was the same.  Lanfranc
sought for a more distinct acknowledgement of the superiority of
Canterbury over the rival metropolis of York.  And this fell in
with William's schemes for the consolidation of the kingdom.  The
political motive is avowed.  Northumberland, which had been so hard
to subdue and which still lay open to Danish invaders or
deliverers, was still dangerous.  An independent Archbishop of York
might consecrate a King of the Northumbrians, native or Danish, who
might grow into a King of the English.  The Northern metropolitan
had unwillingly to admit the superiority, and something more, of
the Southern.  The caution of William and his ecclesiastical
adviser reckoned it among possible chances that even Thomas of
Bayeux might crown an invading Cnut or Harold in opposition to his
native sovereign and benefactor.

For some of his own purposes, William had perhaps chosen his
minister too wisely.  The objects of the two colleagues were not
always the same.  Lanfranc, sprung from Imperialist Pavia, was no
zealot for extravagant papal claims.  The caution with which he
bore himself during the schism which followed the strife between
Gregory and Henry brought on him more than one papal censure.  Yet
the general tendency of his administration was towards the growth
of ecclesiastical, and even of papal, claims.  William never
dreamed of giving up his ecclesiastical supremacy or of exempting
churchmen from the ordinary power of the law.  But the division of
the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the increased frequency
of synods distinct from the general assemblies of the realm--even
though the acts of those synods needed the royal assent--were steps
towards that exemption of churchmen from the civil power which was
asserted in one memorable saying towards the end of William's own
reign.  William could hold his own against Hildebrand himself; yet
the increased intercourse with Rome, the more frequent presence of
Roman Legates, all tended to increase the papal claims and the
deference yielded to them.  William refused homage to Gregory; but
it is significant that Gregory asked for it.  It was a step towards
the day when a King of England was glad to offer it.  The increased
strictness as to the marriage of the clergy tended the same way.
Lanfranc did not at once enforce the full rigour of Hildebrand's
decrees.  Marriage was forbidden for the future; the capitular
clergy had to part from their wives; but the vested interest of the
parish priest was respected.  In another point William directly
helped to undermine his own authority and the independence of his
kingdom.  He exempted his abbey of the Battle from the authority of
the diocesan bishop.  With this began a crowd of such exemptions,
which, by weakening local authority, strengthened the power of the
Roman see.  All these things helped on Hildebrand's great scheme
which made the clergy everywhere members of one distinct and
exclusive body, with the Roman Bishop at their head.  Whatever
tended to part the clergy from other men tended to weaken the
throne of every king.  While William reigned with Lanfranc at his
side, these things were not felt; but the seed was sown for the
controversy between Henry and Thomas and for the humiliation of
John.

Even those changes of Lanfranc's primacy which seem of purely
ecclesiastical concern all helped, in some way to increase the
intercourse between England and the continent or to break down some
insular peculiarity.  And whatever did this increased the power of
Rome.  Even the decree of 1075 that bishoprics should be removed to
the chief cities of their dioceses helped to make England more like
Gaul or Italy.  So did the fancy of William's bishops and abbots
for rebuilding their churches on a greater scale and in the last
devised continental style.  All tended to make England less of
another world.  On the other hand, one insular peculiarity well
served the purposes of the new primate.  Monastic chapters in
episcopal churches were almost unknown out of England.  Lanfranc,
himself a monk, favoured monks in this matter also.  In several
churches the secular canons were displaced by monks.  The corporate
spirit of the regulars, and their dependence on Rome, was far
stronger than that of the secular clergy.  The secular chapters
could be refractory, but the disputes between them and their
bishops were mainly of local importance; they form no such part of
the general story of ecclesiastical and papal advance as the long
tale of the quarrel between the archbishops and the monks of Christ
Church.

Lanfranc survived William, and placed the crown on the head of his
successor.  The friendship between king and archbishop remained
unbroken through their joint lives.  Lanfranc's acts were William's
acts; what the Primate did must have been approved by the King.
How far William's acts were Lanfranc's acts it is less easy to say.
But the Archbishop was ever a trusted minister, and a trusted
counsellor, and in the King's frequent absences from England, he
often acted as his lieutenant.  We do not find him actually taking
a part in warfare, but he duly reports military successes to his
sovereign.  It was William's combined wisdom and good luck to
provide himself with a counsellor than whom for his immediate
purposes none could be better.  A man either of a higher or a lower
moral level than Lanfranc, a saint like Anselm or one of the mere
worldly bishops of the time, would not have done his work so well.
William needed an ecclesiastical statesman, neither unscrupulous
nor over-scrupulous, and he found him in the lawyer of Pavia, the
doctor of Avranches, the monk of Bec, the abbot of Saint Stephen's.
If Lanfranc sometimes unwittingly outwitted both his master and
himself, if his policy served the purposes of Rome more than suited
the purposes of either, that is the common course of human affairs.
Great men are apt to forget that systems which they can work
themselves cannot be worked by smaller men.  From this error
neither William nor Lanfranc was free.  But, from their own point
of view, it was their only error.  Their work was to subdue
England, soul and body; and they subdued it.  That work could not
be done without great wrong:  but no other two men of that day
could have done it with so little wrong.  The shrinking from
needless and violent change which is so strongly characteristic of
William, and less strongly of Lanfranc also, made their work at the
time easier to be done; in the course of ages it made it easier to
be undone.



CHAPTER X--THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM--1070-1086



The years which saw the settlement of England, though not years of
constant fighting like the two years between the march to Exeter
and the fall of Chester, were not years of perfect peace.  William
had to withstand foes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes
in his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his
first wound in personal conflict.  Nothing shook his firm hold
either on duchy or kingdom; but in his later years his good luck
forsook him.  And men did not fail to connect this change in his
future with a change in himself, above all with one deed of blood
which stands out as utterly unlike all his other recorded acts.

But the amount of warfare which William had to go through in these
later years was small compared with the great struggles of his
earlier days.  There is no tale to tell like the war of Val-es-
dunes, like the French invasions of Normandy, like the campaigns
that won England.  One event only of the earlier time is repeated
almost as exactly as an event can be repeated.  William had won
Maine once; he had now to win it again, and less thoroughly.  As
Conqueror his work is done; a single expedition into Wales is the
only campaign of this part of his life that led to any increase of
territory.

When William sat down to the settlement of his kingdom after the
fall of Chester, he was in the strictest sense full king over all
England.  For the moment the whole land obeyed him; at no later
moment did any large part of the land fail to obey him.  All
opposition was now revolt.  Men were no longer keeping out an
invader; when they rose, they rose against a power which, however
wrongfully, was the established government of the land.  Two such
movements took place.  One was a real revolt of Englishmen against
foreign rule.  The other was a rebellion of William's own earls in
their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King.
Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale.
More important in the general story, though less striking in
detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and
near the isle of Britain.  With the crown of the West-Saxon kings,
he had taken up their claims to supremacy over the whole island,
and probably beyond it.  And even without such claims, border
warfare with his Welsh and Scottish neighbours could not be
avoided.  Counting from the completion of the real conquest of
England in 1070, there were in William's reign three distinct
sources of disturbance.  There were revolts within the kingdom of
England.  There was border warfare in Britain.  There were revolts
in William's continental dominions.  And we may add actual foreign
warfare or threats of foreign warfare, affecting William, sometimes
in his Norman, sometimes in his English character.

With the affairs of Wales William had little personally to do.  In
this he is unlike those who came immediately before and after him.
In the lives of Harold and of William Rufus personal warfare
against the Welsh forms an important part.  William the Great
commonly left this kind of work to the earls of the frontier, to
Hugh of Chester, Roger of Shrewsbury, and to his early friend
William of Hereford, so long as that fierce warrior's life lasted.
These earls were ever at war with the Welsh princes, and they
extended the English kingdom at their cost.  Once only did the King
take a personal share in the work, when he entered South Wales, in
1081.  We hear vaguely of his subduing the land and founding
castles; we see more distinctly that he released many subjects who
were in British bondage, and that he went on a religious pilgrimage
to Saint David's.  This last journey is in some accounts connected
with schemes for the conquest of Ireland.  And in one most
remarkable passage of the English Chronicle, the writer for once
speculates as to what might have happened but did not.  Had William
lived two years longer, he would have won Ireland by his wisdom
without weapons.  And if William had won Ireland either by wisdom
or by weapons, he would assuredly have known better how to deal
with it than most of those who have come after him.  If any man
could have joined together the lands which God has put asunder,
surely it was he.  This mysterious saying must have a reference to
some definite act or plan of which we have no other record.  And
some slight approach to the process of winning Ireland without
weapons does appear in the ecclesiastical intercourse between
England and Ireland which now begins.  Both the native Irish
princes and the Danes of the east coast begin to treat Lanfranc as
their metropolitan, and to send bishops to him for consecration.
The name of the King of the English is never mentioned in the
letters which passed between the English primate and the kings and
bishops of Ireland.  It may be that William was biding his time for
some act of special wisdom; but our speculations cannot go any
further than those of the Peterborough Chronicler.

Revolt within the kingdom and invasion from without both began in
the year in which the Conquest was brought to an end.  William's
ecclesiastical reforms were interrupted by the revolt of the
Fenland.  William's authority had never been fully acknowledged in
that corner of England, while he wore his crown and held his
councils elsewhere.  But the place where disturbances began, the
abbey of Peterborough, was certainly in William's obedience.  The
warfare made memorable by the name of Hereward began in June 1070,
and a Scottish harrying of Northern England, the second of five
which are laid to the charge of Malcolm, took place in the same
year, and most likely about the same time.  The English movement is
connected alike with the course of the Danish fleet and with the
appointment of Turold to the abbey of Peterborough.  William had
bribed the Danish commanders to forsake their English allies, and
he allowed them to ravage the coast.  A later bribe took them back
to Denmark; but not till they had shown themselves in the waters of
Ely.  The people, largely of Danish descent, flocked to them,
thinking, as the Chronicler says, that they would win the whole
land.  The movement was doubtless in favour of the kingship of
Swegen.  But nothing was done by Danes and English together save to
plunder Peterborough abbey.  Hereward, said to have been the nephew
of Turold's English predecessor, doubtless looked on the holy
place, under a Norman abbot, as part of the enemy's country.

The name of Hereward has gathered round it such a mass of fiction,
old and new, that it is hard to disentangle the few details of his
real history.  His descent and birth-place are uncertain; but he
was assuredly a man of Lincolnshire, and assuredly not the son of
Earl Leofric.  For some unknown cause, he had been banished in the
days of Edward or of Harold.  He now came back to lead his
countrymen against William.  He was the soul of the movement of
which the abbey of Ely became the centre.  The isle, then easily
defensible, was the last English ground on which the Conqueror was
defied by Englishmen fighting for England.  The men of the Fenland
were zealous; the monks of Ely were zealous; helpers came in from
other parts of England.  English leaders left their shelter in
Scotland to share the dangers of their countrymen; even Edwin and
Morkere at last plucked up heart to leave William's court and join
the patriotic movement.  Edwin was pursued; he was betrayed by
traitors; he was overtaken and slain, to William's deep grief, we
are told.  His brother reached the isle, and helped in its defence.
William now felt that the revolt called for his own presence and
his full energies.  The isle was stoutly attacked and stoutly
defended, till, according to one version, the monks betrayed the
stronghold to the King.  According to another, Morkere was induced
to surrender by promises of mercy which William failed to fulfil.
In any case, before the year 1071 was ended, the isle of Ely was in
William's hands.  Hereward alone with a few companions made their
way out by sea.  William was less merciful than usual; still no man
was put to death.  Some were mutilated, some imprisoned; Morkere
and other chief men spent the rest of their days in bonds.  The
temper of the Conqueror had now fearfully hardened.  Still he could
honour a valiant enemy; those who resisted to the last fared best.
All the legends of Hereward's later days speak of him as admitted
to William's peace and favour.  One makes him die quietly, another
kills him at the hands of Norman enemies, but not at William's
bidding or with William's knowledge.  Evidence a little better
suggests that he bore arms for his new sovereign beyond the sea;
and an entry in Domesday also suggests that he held lands under
Count Robert of Mortain in Warwickshire.  It would suit William's
policy, when he received Hereward to his favour, to make him
exchange lands near to the scene of his exploits for lands in a
distant shire held under the lordship of the King's brother.

Meanwhile, most likely in the summer months of 1070, Malcolm
ravaged Cleveland, Durham, and other districts where there must
have been little left to ravage.  Meanwhile the AEtheling Edgar and
his sisters, with other English exiles, sought shelter in Scotland,
and were hospitably received.  At the same time Gospatric, now
William's earl in Northumberland, retaliated by a harrying of
Scottish Cumberland, which provoked Malcolm to greater cruelties.
It was said that there was no house in Scotland so poor that it had
not an English bondman.  Presently some of Malcolm's English guests
joined the defenders of Ely; those of highest birth stayed in
Scotland, and Malcolm, after much striving, persuaded Margaret the
sister of Edgar to become his wife.  Her praises are written in
Scottish history, and the marriage had no small share in the
process which made the Scottish kings and the lands which formed
their real kingdom practically English.  The sons and grandsons of
Margaret, sprung of the Old-English kingly house, were far more
English within their own realm than the Norman and Angevin kings of
Southern England.  But within the English border men looked at
things with other eyes.  Thrice again did Malcolm ravage England;
two and twenty years later he was slain in his last visit of havoc.
William meanwhile and his earls at least drew to themselves some
measure of loyalty from the men of Northern England as the
guardians of the land against the Scot.

For the present however Malcolm's invasion was only avenged by
Gospatric's harrying in Cumberland.  The year 1071 called William
to Ely; in the early part of 1072 his presence was still needed on
the mainland; in August he found leisure for a march against
Scotland.  He went as an English king, to assert the rights of the
English crown, to avenge wrongs done to the English land; and on
such an errand Englishmen followed him gladly.  Eadric, the
defender of Herefordshire, had made his peace with the King, and he
now held a place of high honour in his army.  But if William met
with any armed resistance on his Scottish expedition, it did not
amount to a pitched battle.  He passed through Lothian into
Scotland; he crossed Forth and drew near to Tay, and there, by the
round tower of Abernethy, the King of Scots swore oaths and gave
hostages and became the man of the King of the English.  William
might now call himself, like his West-Saxon predecessors, Bretwalda
and Basileus of the isle of Britain.  This was the highest point of
his fortune.  Duke of the Normans, King of the English, he was
undisputed lord from the march of Anjou to the narrow sea between
Caithness and Orkney.

The exact terms of the treaty between William's royal vassal and
his overlord are unknown.  But one of them was clearly the removal
of Edgar from Scotland.  Before long he was on the continent.
William had not yet learned that Edgar was less dangerous in
Britain than in any other part of the world, and that he was safest
of all in William's own court.  Homage done and hostages received,
the Lord of all Britain returned to his immediate kingdom.  His
march is connected with many legendary stories.  In real history it
is marked by the foundation of the castle of Durham, and by the
Conqueror's confirmation of the privileges of the palatine bishops.
If all the earls of England had been like the earls of Chester, and
all the bishops like the bishops of Durham, England would assuredly
have split up, like Germany, into a loose federation of temporal
and spiritual princes.  This it was William's special work to
hinder; but he doubtless saw that the exceptional privileges of one
or two favoured lordships, standing in marked contrast to the rest,
would not really interfere with his great plan of union.  And
William would hardly have confirmed the sees of London or
Winchester in the privileges which he allowed to the distant see of
Durham.  He now also made a grant of earldoms, the object of which
is less clear than that of most of his actions.  It is not easy to
say why Gospatric was deprived of his earldom.  His former acts of
hostility to William had been covered by his pardon and
reappointment in 1069; and since then he had acted as a loyal, if
perhaps an indiscreet, guardian of the land.  Two greater earldoms
than his had become vacant by the revolt, the death, the
imprisonment, of Edwin and Morkere.  But these William had no
intention of filling.  He would not have in his realm anything so
dangerous as an earl of the Mercian's or the Northumbrians in the
old sense, whether English or Norman.  But the defence of the
northern frontier needed an earl to rule Northumberland in the
later sense, the land north of the Tyne.  And after the fate of
Robert of Comines, William could not as yet put a Norman earl in so
perilous a post.  But the Englishman whom he chose was open to the
same charges as the deposed Gospatric.  For he was Waltheof the son
of Siward, the hero of the storm of York in 1069.  Already Earl of
Northampton and Huntingdon, he was at this time high in the King's
personal favour, perhaps already the husband of the King's niece.
One side of William's policy comes out here.  Union was sometimes
helped by division.  There were men whom William loved to make
great, but whom he had no mind to make dangerous.  He gave them
vast estates, but estates for the most part scattered over
different parts of the kingdom.  It was only in the border earldoms
and in Cornwall that he allowed anything at all near to the
lordship of a whole shire to be put in the hands of a single man.
One Norman and one Englishman held two earldoms together; but they
were earldoms far apart.  Roger of Montgomery held the earldoms of
Shrewsbury and Sussex, and Waltheof to his midland earldom of
Northampton and Huntingdon now added the rule of distant
Northumberland.  The men who had fought most stoutly against
William were the men whom he most willingly received to favour.
Eadric and Hereward were honoured; Waltheof was honoured more
highly.  He ranked along with the greatest Normans; his position
was perhaps higher than any but the King's born kinsmen.  But the
whole tale of Waltheof is a problem that touches the character of
the king under whom he rose and fell.  Lifted up higher than any
other man among the conquered, he was the one man whom William put
to death on a political charge.  It is hard to see the reasons for
either his rise or his fall.  It was doubtless mainly his end which
won him the abiding reverence of his countrymen.  His valour and
his piety are loudly praised.  But his valour we know only from his
one personal exploit at York; his piety was consistent with a base
murder.  In other matters, he seems amiable, irresolute, and of a
scrupulous conscience, and Northumbrian morality perhaps saw no
great crime in a murder committed under the traditions of a
Northumbrian deadly feud.  Long before Waltheof was born, his
grandfather Earl Ealdred had been killed by a certain Carl.  The
sons of Carl had fought by his side at York; but, notwithstanding
this comradeship, the first act of Waltheof's rule in
Northumberland was to send men to slay them beyond the bounds of
his earldom.  A crime that was perhaps admired in Northumberland
and unheard of elsewhere did not lose him either the favour of the
King or the friendship of his neighbour Bishop Walcher, a reforming
prelate with whom Waltheof acted in concert.  And when he was
chosen as the single exception to William's merciful rule, it was
not for this undoubted crime, but on charges of which, even if
guilty, he might well have been forgiven.


The sojourn of William on the continent in 1072 carries us out of
England and Normandy into the general affairs of Europe.  Signs may
have already showed themselves of what was coming to the south of
Normandy; but the interest of the moment lay in the country of
Matilda.  Flanders, long the firm ally of Normandy, was now to
change into a bitter enemy.  Count Baldwin died in 1067; his
successor of the same name died three years later, and a war
followed between his widow Richildis, the guardian of his young son
Arnulf, and his brother Robert the Frisian.  Robert had won fame in
the East; he had received the sovereignty of Friesland--a name
which takes in Holland and Zealand--and he was now invited to
deliver Flanders from the oppressions of Richildis.  Meanwhile,
Matilda was acting as regent of Normandy, with Earl William of
Hereford as her counsellor.  Richildis sought help of her son's two
overlords, King Henry of Germany and King Philip of France.  Philip
came in person; the German succours were too late.  From Normandy
came Earl William with a small party of knights.  The kings had
been asked for armies; to the Earl she offered herself, and he came
to fight for his bride.  But early in 1071 Philip, Arnulf, and
William, were all overthrown by Robert the Frisian in the battle of
Cassel.  Arnulf and Earl William were killed; Philip made peace
with Robert, henceforth undisputed Count of Flanders.

All this brought King William to the continent, while the invasion
of Malcolm was still unavenged.  No open war followed between
Normandy and Flanders; but for the rest of their lives Robert and
William were enemies, and each helped the enemies of the other.
William gave his support to Baldwin brother of the slain Arnulf,
who strove to win Flanders from Robert.  But the real interest of
this episode lies in the impression which was made in the lands
east of Flanders.  In the troubled state of Germany, when Henry the
Fourth was striving with the Saxons, both sides seem to have looked
to the Conqueror of England with hope and with fear.  On this
matter our English and Norman authorities are silent, and the
notices in the contemporary German writers are strangely unlike one
another.  But they show at least that the prince who ruled on both
sides of the sea was largely in men's thoughts.  The Saxon enemy of
Henry describes him in his despair as seeking help in Denmark,
France, Aquitaine, and also of the King of the English, promising
him the like help, if he should ever need it.  William and Henry
had both to guard against Saxon enmity, but the throne at
Winchester stood firmer than the throne at Goslar.  But the
historian of the continental Saxons puts into William's mouth an
answer utterly unsuited to his position.  He is made, when in
Normandy, to answer that, having won his kingdom by force, he fears
to leave it, lest he might not find his way back again.  Far more
striking is the story told three years later by Lambert of
Herzfeld.  Henry, when engaged in an Hungarian war, heard that the
famous Archbishop Hanno of Koln had leagued with William Bostar--so
is his earliest surname written--King of the English, and that a
vast army was coming to set the island monarch on the German
throne.  The host never came; but Henry hastened back to guard his
frontier against BARBARIANS.  By that phrase a Teutonic writer can
hardly mean the insular part of William's subjects.

Now assuredly William never cherished, as his successor probably
did, so wild a dream as that of a kingly crowning at Aachen, to be
followed perhaps by an imperial crowning at Rome.  But that such
schemes were looked on as a practical danger against which the
actual German King had to guard, at least shows the place which the
Conqueror of England held in European imagination.

For the three or four years immediately following the surrender of
Ely, William's journeys to and fro between his kingdom and his
duchy were specially frequent.  Matilda seems to have always stayed
in Normandy; she is never mentioned in England after the year of
her coronation and the birth of her youngest son, and she commonly
acted as regent of the duchy.  In the course of 1072 we see William
in England, in Normandy, again in England, and in Scotland.  In
1073 he was called beyond sea by a formidable movement.  His great
continental conquest had risen against him; Le Mans and all Maine
were again independent.  City and land chose for them a prince who
came by female descent from the stock of their ancient counts.
This was Hugh the son of Azo Marquess of Liguria and of Gersendis
the sister of the last Count Herbert.  The Normans were driven out
of Le Mans; Azo came to take possession in the name of his son, but
he and the citizens did not long agree.  He went back, leaving his
wife and son under the guardianship of Geoffrey of Mayenne.
Presently the men of Le Mans threw off princely rule altogether and
proclaimed the earliest commune in Northern Gaul.  Here then, as at
Exeter, William had to strive against an armed commonwealth, and,
as at Exeter, we specially wish to know what were to be the
relations between the capital and the county at large.  The mass of
the people throughout Maine threw themselves zealously into the
cause of the commonwealth.  But their zeal might not have lasted
long, if, according to the usual run of things in such cases, they
had simply exchanged the lordship of their hereditary masters for
the corporate lordship of the citizens of Le Mans.  To the nobles
the change was naturally distasteful.  They had to swear to the
commune, but many of them, Geoffrey for one, had no thought of
keeping their oaths.  Dissensions arose; Hugh went back to Italy;
Geoffrey occupied the castle of Le Mans, and the citizens dislodged
him only by the dangerous help of the other prince who claimed the
overlordship of Maine, Count Fulk of Anjou.

If Maine was to have a master from outside, the lord of Anjou
hardly promised better than the lord of Normandy.  But men in
despair grasp at anything.  The strange thing is that Fulk
disappears now from the story; William steps in instead.  And it
was at least as much in his English as in his Norman character that
the Duke and King won back the revolted land.  A place in his army
was held by English warriors, seemingly under the command of
Hereward himself.  Men who had fought for freedom in their own land
now fought at the bidding of their Conqueror to put down freedom in
another land.  They went willingly; the English Chronicler
describes the campaign with glee, and breaks into verse--or
incorporates a contemporary ballad--at the tale of English victory.
Few men of that day would see that the cause of Maine was in truth
the cause of England.  If York and Exeter could not act in concert
with one another, still less could either act in concert with Le
Mans.  Englishmen serving in Maine would fancy that they were
avenging their own wrongs by laying waste the lands of any man who
spoke the French tongue.  On William's part, the employment of
Englishmen, the employment of Hereward, was another stroke of
policy.  It was more fully following out the system which led
Englishmen against Exeter, which led Eadric and his comrades into
Scotland.  For in every English soldier whom William carried into
Maine he won a loyal English subject.  To men who had fought under
his banners beyond the sea he would be no longer the Conqueror but
the victorious captain; they would need some very special
oppression at home to make them revolt against the chief whose
laurels they had helped to win.  As our own gleeman tells the tale,
they did little beyond harrying the helpless land; but in
continental writers we can trace a regular campaign, in which we
hear of no battles, but of many sieges.  William, as before,
subdued the land piecemeal, keeping the city for the last.  When he
drew near to Le Mans, its defenders surrendered at his summons, to
escape fire and slaughter by speedy submission.  The new commune
was abolished, but the Conqueror swore to observe all the ancient
rights of the city.

All this time we have heard nothing of Count Fulk.  Presently we
find him warring against nobles of Maine who had taken William's
part, and leaguing with the Bretons against William himself.  The
King set forth with his whole force, Norman and English; but peace
was made by the mediation of an unnamed Roman cardinal, abetted, we
are told, by the chief Norman nobles.  Success against confederated
Anjou and Britanny might be doubtful, with Maine and England
wavering in their allegiance, and France, Scotland, and Flanders,
possible enemies in the distance.  The rights of the Count of Anjou
over Maine were formally acknowledged, and William's eldest son
Robert did homage to Fulk for the county.  Each prince stipulated
for the safety and favour of all subjects of the other who had
taken his side.  Between Normandy and Anjou there was peace during
the rest of the days of William; in Maine we shall see yet another
revolt, though only a partial one.

William went back to England in 1073.  In 1074 he went to the
continent for a longer absence.  As the time just after the first
completion of the Conquest is spoken of as a time when Normans and
English were beginning to sit down side by side in peace, so the
years which followed the submission of Ely are spoken of as a time
of special oppression.  This fact is not unconnected with the
King's frequent absences from England.  Whatever we say of
William's own position, he was a check on smaller oppressors.
Things were always worse when the eye of the great master was no
longer watching.  William's one weakness was that of putting
overmuch trust in his immediate kinsfolk and friends.  Of the two
special oppressors, William Fitz-Osbern had thrown away his life in
Flanders; but Bishop Ode was still at work, till several years
later his king and brother struck him down with a truly righteous
blow.

The year 1074, not a year of fighting, was pro-eminently a year of
intrigue.  William's enemies on the continent strove to turn the
representative of the West-Saxon kings to help their ends.  Edgar
flits to and fro between Scotland and Flanders, and the King of the
French tempts him with the offer of a convenient settlement on the
march of France, Normandy, and Flanders.  Edgar sets forth from
Scotland, but is driven back by a storm; Malcolm and Margaret then
change their minds, and bid him make his peace with King William.
William gladly accepts his submission; an embassy is sent to bring
him with all worship to the King in Normandy.  He abides for
several years in William's court contented and despised, receiving
a daily pension and the profits of estates in England of no great
extent which the King of a moment held by the grant of a rival who
could afford to be magnanimous.


Edgar's after-life showed that he belonged to that class of men
who, as a rule slothful and listless, can yet on occasion act with
energy, and who act most creditably on behalf of others.  But
William had no need to fear him, and he was easily turned into a
friend and a dependant.  Edgar, first of Englishmen by descent, was
hardly an Englishman by birth.  William had now to deal with the
Englishman who stood next to Edgar in dignity and far above him in
personal estimation.  We have reached the great turning-point in
William's reign and character, the black and mysterious tale of the
fate of Waltheof.  The Earl of Northumberland, Northampton, and
Huntingdon, was not the only earl in England of English birth.  The
earldom of the East-Angles was held by a born Englishman who was
more hateful than any stranger.  Ralph of Wader was the one
Englishman who had fought at William's side against England.  He
often passes for a native of Britanny, and he certainly held lands
and castles in that country; but he was Breton only by the mother's
side.  For Domesday and the Chronicles show that he was the son of
an elder Earl Ralph, who had been staller or master of the horse in
Edward's days, and who is expressly said to have been born in
Norfolk.  The unusual name suggests that the elder Ralph was not of
English descent.  He survived the coming of William, and his son
fought on Senlac among the countrymen of his mother.  This treason
implies an unrecorded banishment in the days of Edward or Harold.
Already earl in 1069, he had in that year acted vigorously for
William against the Danes.  But he now conspired against him along
with Roger, the younger son of William Fitz-Osbern, who had
succeeded his father in the earldom of Hereford, while his Norman
estates had passed to his elder brother William.  What grounds of
complaint either Ralph or Roger had against William we know not;
but that the loyalty of the Earl of Hereford was doubtful
throughout the year 1074 appears from several letters of rebuke and
counsel sent to him by the Regent Lanfranc.  At last the wielder of
both swords took to his spiritual arms, and pronounced the Earl
excommunicate, till he should submit to the King's mercy and make
restitution to the King and to all men whom he had wronged.  Roger
remained stiff-necked under the Primate's censure, and presently
committed an act of direct disobedience.  The next year, 1075, he
gave his sister Emma in marriage to Earl Ralph.  This marriage the
King had forbidden, on some unrecorded ground of state policy.
Most likely he already suspected both earls, and thought any tie
between them dangerous.  The notice shows William stepping in to
do, as an act of policy, what under his successors became a matter
of course, done with the sole object of making money.  The bride-
ale--the name that lurks in the modern shape of bridal--was held at
Exning in Cambridgeshire; bishops and abbots were guests of the
excommunicated Roger; Waltheof was there, and many Breton comrades
of Ralph.  In their cups they began to plot how they might drive
the King out of the kingdom.  Charges, both true and false, were
brought against William; in a mixed gathering of Normans, English,
and Bretons, almost every act of William's life might pass as a
wrong done to some part of the company, even though some others of
the company were his accomplices.  Above all, the two earls Ralph
and Roger made a distinct proposal to their fellow-earl Waltheof.
King William should be driven out of the land; one of the three
should be King; the other two should remain earls, ruling each over
a third of the kingdom.  Such a scheme might attract earls, but no
one else; it would undo William's best and greatest work; it would
throw back the growing unity of the kingdom by all the steps that
it had taken during several generations.

Now what amount of favour did Waltheof give to these schemes?
Weighing the accounts, it would seem that, in the excitement of the
bride-ale, he consented to the treason, but that he thought better
of it the next morning.  He went to Lanfranc, at once regent and
ghostly father, and confessed to him whatever he had to confess.
The Primate assigned his penitent some ecclesiastical penances; the
Regent bade the Earl go into Normandy and tell the whole tale to
the King.  Waltheof went, with gifts in hand; he told his story and
craved forgiveness.  William made light of the matter, and kept
Waltheof with him, but seemingly not under restraint, till he came
back to England.

Meanwhile the other two earls were in open rebellion.  Ralph, half
Breton by birth and earl of a Danish land, asked help in Britanny
and Denmark.  Bretons from Britanny and Bretons settled in England
flocked to him.  King Swegen, now almost at the end of his reign
and life, listened to the call of the rebels, and sent a fleet
under the command of his son Cnut, the future saint, together with
an earl named Hakon.  The revolt in England was soon put down, both
in East and West.  The rebel earls met with no support save from
those who were under their immediate influence.  The country acted
zealously for the King.  Lanfranc could report that Earl Ralph and
his army were fleeing, and that the King's men, French and English,
were chasing them.  In another letter he could add, with some
strength of language, that the kingdom was cleansed from the filth
of the Bretons.  At Norwich only the castle was valiantly defended
by the newly married Countess Emma.  Roger was taken prisoner;
Ralph fled to Britanny; their followers were punished with various
mutilations, save the defenders of Norwich, who were admitted to
terms.  The Countess joined her husband in Britanny, and in days to
come Ralph did something to redeem so many treasons by dying as an
armed pilgrim in the first crusade.

The main point of this story is that the revolt met with no English
support whatever.  Not only did Bishop Wulfstan march along with
his fierce Norman brethren Ode and Geoffrey; the English people
everywhere were against the rebels.  For this revolt offered no
attraction to English feeling; had the undertaking been less
hopeless, nothing could have been gained by exchanging the rule of
William for that of Ralph or Roger.  It might have been different
if the Danes had played their part better.  The rebellion broke out
while William was in Normandy; it was the sailing of the Danish
fleet which brought him back to England.  But never did enterprise
bring less honour on its leaders than this last Danish voyage up
the Humber.  All that the holy Cnut did was to plunder the minster
of Saint Peter at York and to sail away.

His coming however seems to have altogether changed the King's
feelings with regard to Waltheof.  As yet he had not been dealt
with as a prisoner or an enemy.  He now came back to England with
the King, and William's first act was to imprison both Waltheof and
Roger.  The imprisonment of Roger, a rebel taken in arms, was a
matter of course.  As for Waltheof, whatever he had promised at the
bride-ale, he had done no disloyal act; he had had no share in the
rebellion, and he had told the King all that he knew.  But he had
listened to traitors, and it might be dangerous to leave him at
large when a Danish fleet, led by his old comrade Cnut, was
actually afloat.  Still what followed is strange indeed, specially
strange with William as its chief doer.

At the Midwinter Gemot of 1075-1076 Roger and Waltheof were brought
to trial.  Ralph was condemned in absence, like Eustace of
Boulogne.  Roger was sentenced to forfeiture and imprisonment for
life.  Waltheof made his defence; his sentence was deferred; he was
kept at Winchester in a straiter imprisonment than before.  At the
Pentecostal Gemot of 1076, held at Westminster, his case was again
argued, and he was sentenced to death.  On the last day of May the
last English earl was beheaded on the hills above Winchester.

Such a sentence and execution, strange at any time, is specially
strange under William.  Whatever Waltheof had done, his offence was
lighter than that of Roger; yet Waltheof has the heavier and Roger
the lighter punishment.  With Scroggs or Jeffreys on the bench, it
might have been argued that Waltheof's confession to the King did
not, in strictness of law, wipe out the guilt of his original
promise to the conspirators; but William the Great did not commonly
act after the fashion of Scroggs and Jeffreys.  To deprive Waltheof
of his earldom might doubtless be prudent; a man who had even
listened to traitors might be deemed unfit for such a trust.  It
might be wise to keep him safe under the King's eye, like Edwin,
Morkere, and Edgar.  But why should he be picked out for death,
when the far more guilty Roger was allowed to live?  Why should he
be chosen as the one victim of a prince who never before or after,
in Normandy or in England, doomed any man to die on a political
charge?  These are questions hard to answer.  It is not enough to
say that Waltheof was an Englishman, that it was William's policy
gradually to get rid of Englishmen in high places, and that the
time was now come to get rid of the last.  For such a policy
forfeiture, or at most imprisonment, would have been enough.  While
other Englishmen lost lands, honours, at most liberty, Waltheof
alone lost his life by a judicial sentence.  It is likely enough
that many Normans hungered for the lands and honours of the one
Englishman who still held the highest rank in England.  Still
forfeiture without death might have satisfied even them.  But
Waltheof was not only earl of three shires; he was husband of the
King's near kinswoman.  We are told that Judith was the enemy and
accuser of her husband.  This may have touched William's one weak
point.  Yet he would hardly have swerved from the practice of his
whole life to please the bloody caprice of a niece who longed for
the death of her husband.  And if Judith longed for Waltheof's
death, it was not from a wish to supply his place with another.
Legend says that she refused a second husband offered her by the
King; it is certain that she remained a widow.

Waltheof's death must thus remain a mystery, an isolated deed of
blood unlike anything else in William's life.  It seems to have
been impolitic; it led to no revolt, but it called forth a new
burst of English feeling.  Waltheof was deemed the martyr of his
people; he received the same popular canonization as more than one
English patriot.  Signs and wonders were wrought at his tomb at
Crowland, till displays of miraculous power which were so
inconsistent with loyalty and good order were straitly forbidden.
The act itself marks a stage in the downward course of William's
character.  In itself, the harrying of Northumberland, the very
invasion of England, with all the bloodshed that they caused, might
be deemed blacker crimes than the unjust death of a single man.
But as human nature stands, the less crime needs a worse man to do
it.  Crime, as ever, led to further crime and was itself the
punishment of crime.  In the eyes of William's contemporaries the
death of Waltheof, the blackest act of William's life, was also its
turning-point.  From the day of the martyrdom on Saint Giles' hill
the magic of William's name and William's arms passed away.
Unfailing luck no longer waited on him; after Waltheof's death he
never, till his last campaign of all, won a battle or took a town.
In this change of William's fortunes the men of his own day saw the
judgement of God upon his crime.  And in the fact at least they
were undoubtedly right.  Henceforth, though William's real power
abides unshaken, the tale of his warfare is chiefly a tale of petty
defeats.  The last eleven years of his life would never have won
him the name of Conqueror.  But in the higher walk of policy and
legislation never was his nobler surname more truly deserved.
Never did William the Great show himself so truly great as in these
later years.


The death of Waltheof and the popular judgement on it suggest
another act of William's which cannot have been far from it in
point of time, and about which men spoke in his own day in the same
spirit.  If the judgement of God came on William for the beheading
of Waltheof, it came on him also for the making of the New Forest.
As to that forest there is a good deal of ancient exaggeration and
a good deal of modern misconception.  The word forest is often
misunderstood.  In its older meaning, a meaning which it still
keeps in some parts, a forest has nothing to do with trees.  It is
a tract of land put outside the common law and subject to a
stricter law of its own, and that commonly, probably always, to
secure for the King the freer enjoyment of the pleasure of hunting.
Such a forest William made in Hampshire; the impression which it
made on men's minds at the time is shown by its having kept the
name of the New Forest for eight hundred years.  There is no reason
to think that William laid waste any large tract of specially
fruitful country, least of all that he laid waste a land thickly
inhabited; for most of the Forest land never can have been such.
But it is certain from Domesday and the Chronicle that William did
afforest a considerable tract of land in Hampshire; he set it apart
for the purposes of hunting; he fenced it in by special and cruel
laws--stopping indeed short of death--for the protection of his
pleasures, and in this process some men lost their lands, and were
driven from their homes.  Some destruction of houses is here
implied; some destruction of churches is not unlikely.  The popular
belief, which hardly differs from the account of writers one degree
later than Domesday and the Chronicle, simply exaggerates the
extent of destruction.  There was no such wide-spread laying waste
as is often supposed, because no such wide-spread laying waste was
needed.  But whatever was needed for William's purpose was done;
and Domesday gives us the record.  And the act surely makes, like
the death of Waltheof, a downward stage in William's character.
The harrying of Northumberland was in itself a far greater crime,
and involved far more of human wretchedness.  But it is not
remembered in the same way, because it has left no such abiding
memorial.  But here again the lesser crime needed a worse man to do
it.  The harrying of Northumberland was a crime done with a
political object; it was the extreme form of military severity; it
was not vulgar robbery done with no higher motive than to secure
the fuller enjoyment of a brutal sport.  To this level William had
now sunk.  It was in truth now that hunting in England finally took
the character of a mere sport.  Hunting was no new thing; in an
early state of society it is often a necessary thing.  The hunting
of Alfred is spoken of as a grave matter of business, as part of
his kingly duty.  He had to make war on the wild beasts, as he had
to make war on the Danes.  The hunting of William is simply a
sport, not his duty or his business, but merely his pleasure.  And
to this pleasure, the pleasure of inflicting pain and slaughter, he
did not scruple to sacrifice the rights of other men, and to guard
his enjoyment by ruthless laws at which even in that rough age men
shuddered.

For this crime the men of his day saw the punishment in the strange
and frightful deaths of his offspring, two sons and a grandson, on
the scene of his crime.  One of these himself he saw, the death of
his second son Richard, a youth of great promise, whose prolonged
life might have saved England from the rule of William Rufus.  He
died in the Forest, about the year 1081, to the deep grief of his
parents.  And Domesday contains a touching entry, how William gave
back his land to a despoiled Englishman as an offering for
Richard's soul.


The forfeiture of three earls, the death of one, threw their
honours and estates into the King's hands.  Another fresh source of
wealth came by the death of the Lady Edith, who had kept her royal
rank and her great estates, and who died while the proceedings
against Waltheof were going on.  It was not now so important for
William as it had been in the first years of the Conquest to reward
his followers; he could now think of the royal hoard in the first
place.  Of the estates which now fell in to the Crown large parts
were granted out.  The house of Bigod, afterwards so renowned as
Earls of Norfolk, owe their rise to their forefather's share in the
forfeited lands of Earl Ralph.  But William kept the greater part
to himself; one lordship in Somerset, part of the lands of the
Lady, he gave to the church of Saint Peter at Rome.  Of the three
earldoms, those of Hereford and East-Anglia were not filled up; the
later earldoms of those lands have no connexion with the earls of
William's day.  Waltheof's southern earldoms of Northampton and
Huntingdon became the dowry of his daughter Matilda; that of
Huntingdon passed to his descendants the Kings of Scots.  But
Northumberland, close on the Scottish border, still needed an earl;
but there is something strange in the choice of Bishop Walcher of
Durham.  It is possible that this appointment was a concession to
English feeling stirred to wrath at the death of Waltheof.  The
days of English earls were over, and a Norman would have been
looked on as Waltheof's murderer.  The Lotharingian bishop was a
stranger; but he was not a Norman, and he was no oppressor of
Englishmen.  But he was strangely unfit for the place.  Not a
fighting bishop like Ode and Geoffrey, he was chiefly devoted to
spiritual affairs, specially to the revival of the monastic life,
which had died out in Northern England since the Danish invasions.
But his weak trust in unworthy favourites, English and foreign, led
him to a fearful and memorable end.  The Bishop was on terms of
close friendship with Ligulf, an Englishman of the highest birth
and uncle by marriage to Earl Waltheof.  He had kept his estates;
but the insolence of his Norman neighbours had caused him to come
and live in the city of Durham near his friend the Bishop.  His
favour with Walcher roused the envy of some of the Bishop's
favourites, who presently contrived his death.  The Bishop
lamented, and rebuked them; but he failed to "do justice," to
punish the offenders sternly and speedily.  He was therefore
believed to be himself guilty of Ligulf's death.  One of the most
striking and instructive events of the time followed.  On May 14,
1080, a full Gemot of the earldom was held at Gateshead to deal
with the murder of Ligulf.  This was one of those rare occasions
when a strong feeling led every man to the assembly.  The local
Parliament took its ancient shape of an armed crowd, headed by the
noblest Englishmen left in the earldom.  There was no vote, no
debate; the shout was "Short rede good rede, slay ye the Bishop."
And to that cry, Walcher himself and his companions, the murderers
of Ligulf among them, were slaughtered by the raging multitude who
had gathered to avenge him.

The riot in which Walcher died was no real revolt against William's
government.  Such a local rising against a local wrong might have
happened in the like case under Edward or Harold.  No government
could leave such a deed unpunished; but William's own ideas of
justice would have been fully satisfied by the blinding or
mutilation of a few ringleaders.  But William was in Normandy in
the midst of domestic and political cares.  He sent his brother Ode
to restore order, and his vengeance was frightful.  The land was
harried; innocent men were mutilated and put to death; others saved
their lives by bribes.  Earl after earl was set over a land so hard
to rule.  A certain Alberie was appointed, but he was removed as
unfit.  The fierce Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances tried his hand and
resigned.  At the time of William's death the earldom was held by
Geoffrey's nephew Robert of Mowbray, a stern and gloomy stranger,
but whom Englishmen reckoned among "good men," when he guarded the
marches of England against the Scot.


After the death of Waltheof William seems to have stayed in
Normandy for several years.  His ill luck now began.  Before the
year 1076 was out, he entered, we know not why, on a Breton
campaign.  But he was driven from Dol by the combined forces of
Britanny and France; Philip was ready to help any enemy of William.
The Conqueror had now for the first time suffered defeat in his own
person.  He made peace with both enemies, promising his daughter
Constance to Alan of Britanny.  But the marriage did not follow
till ten years later.  The peace with France, as the English
Chronicle says, "held little while;" Philip could not resist the
temptation of helping William's eldest son Robert when the reckless
young man rebelled against his father.  With most of the qualities
of an accomplished knight, Robert had few of those which make
either a wise ruler or an honest man.  A brave soldier, even a
skilful captain, he was no general; ready of speech and free of
hand, he was lavish rather than bountiful.  He did not lack
generous and noble feelings; but of a steady course, even in evil,
he was incapable.  As a ruler, he was no oppressor in his own
person; but sloth, carelessness, love of pleasure, incapacity to
say No, failure to do justice, caused more wretchedness than the
oppression of those tyrants who hinder the oppressions of others.
William would not set such an one over any part of his dominions
before his time, and it was his policy to keep his children
dependent on him.  While he enriched his brothers, he did not give
the smallest scrap of the spoils of England to his sons.  But
Robert deemed that he had a right to something greater than private
estates.  The nobles of Normandy had done homage to him as
William's successor; he had done homage to Fulk for Maine, as if he
were himself its count.  He was now stirred up by evil companions
to demand that, if his father would not give him part of his
kingdom--the spirit of Edwin and Morkere had crossed the sea--he
would at least give him Normandy and Maine.  William refused with
many pithy sayings.  It was not his manner to take off his clothes
till he went to bed.  Robert now, with a band of discontented young
nobles, plunged into border warfare against his father.  He then
wandered over a large part of Europe, begging and receiving money
and squandering all that he got.  His mother too sent him money,
which led to the first quarrel between William and Matilda after so
many years of faithful union.  William rebuked his wife for helping
his enemy in breach of his orders:  she pleaded the mother's love
for her first-born.  The mother was forgiven, but her messenger,
sentenced to loss of eyes, found shelter in a monastery.

At last in 1079 Philip gave Robert a settled dwelling-place in the
border-fortress of Gerberoi.  The strife between father and son
became dangerous.  William besieged the castle, to undergo before
its walls his second defeat, to receive his first wound, and that
at the hands of his own son.  Pierced in the hand by the lance of
Robert, his horse smitten by an arrow, the Conqueror fell to the
ground, and was saved only by an Englishman, Tokig, son of Wiggod
of Wallingford, who gave his life for his king.  It seems an early
softening of the tale which says that Robert dismounted and craved
his father's pardon; it seems a later hardening which says that
William pronounced a curse on his son.  William Rufus too, known as
yet only as the dutiful son of his father, was wounded in his
defence.  The blow was not only grievous to William's feelings as a
father; it was a serious military defeat.  The two wounded Williams
and the rest of the besiegers escaped how they might, and the siege
of Gerberoi was raised.

We next find the wise men of Normandy debating how to make peace
between father and son.  In the course of the year 1080 a peace was
patched up, and a more honourable sphere was found for Robert's
energies in an expedition into Scotland.  In the autumn of the year
of Gerberoi Malcolm had made another wasting inroad into
Northumberland.  With the King absent and Northumberland in
confusion through the death of Walcher, this wrong went unavenged
till the autumn of 1080.  Robert gained no special glory in
Scotland; a second quarrel with his father followed, and Robert
remained a banished man during the last seven years of William's
reign.

In this same year 1080 a synod of the Norman Church was held, the
Truce of God again renewed which we heard of years ago.  The forms
of outrage on which the Truce was meant to put a cheek, and which
the strong hand of William had put down more thoroughly than the
Truce would do, had clearly begun again during the confusions
caused by the rebellion of Robert.

The two next years, 1081-1082, William was in England.  His home
sorrows were now pressing heavily on him.  His eldest son was a
rebel and an exile; about this time his second son died in the New
Forest; according to one version, his daughter, the betrothed of
Edwin, who had never forgotten her English lover, was now promised
to the Spanish King Alfonso, and died--in answer to her own
prayers--before the marriage was celebrated.  And now the partner
of William's life was taken from him four years after his one
difference with her.  On November 3, 1083, Matilda died after a
long sickness, to her husband's lasting grief.  She was buried in
her own church at Caen, and churches in England received gifts from
William on behalf of her soul.

The mourner had soon again to play the warrior.  Nearly the whole
of William's few remaining years were spent in a struggle which in
earlier times he would surely have ended in a day.  Maine, city and
county, did not call for a third conquest; but a single baron of
Maine defied William's power, and a single castle of Maine held out
against him for three years.  Hubert, Viscount of Beaumont and
Fresnay, revolted on some slight quarrel.  The siege of his castle
of Sainte-Susanne went on from the death of Matilda till the last
year but one of William's reign.  The tale is full of picturesque
detail; but William had little personal share in it.  The best
captains of Normandy tried their strength in vain against this one
donjon on its rock.  William at last made peace with the subject
who was too strong for him.  Hubert came to England and received
the King's pardon.  Practically the pardon was the other way.

Thus for the last eleven years of his life William ceased to be the
Conqueror.  Engaged only in small enterprises, he was unsuccessful
in all.  One last success was indeed in store for him; but that was
to be purchased with his own life.  As he turned away in defeat
from this castle and that, as he felt the full bitterness of
domestic sorrow, he may have thought, as others thought for him,
that the curse of Waltheof, the curse of the New Forest, was ever
tracking his steps.  If so, his crimes were done in England, and
their vengeance came in Normandy.  In England there was no further
room for his mission as Conqueror; he had no longer foes to
overcome.  He had an act of justice to do, and he did it.  He had
his kingdom to guard, and he guarded it.  He had to take the great
step which should make his kingdom one for ever; and he had,
perhaps without fully knowing what he did, to bid the picture of
his reign be painted for all time as no reign before or after has
been painted.



CHAPTER XI--THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM--1081-1087



Of two events of these last years of the Conqueror's reign, events
of very different degrees of importance, we have already spoken.
The Welsh expedition of William was the only recorded fighting on
British ground, and that lay without the bounds of the kingdom of
England.  William now made Normandy his chief dwelling-place, but
he was constantly called over to England.  The Welsh campaign
proves his presence in England in 1081; he was again in England in
1082, but he went back to Normandy between the two visits.  The
visit of 1082 was a memorable one; there is no more characteristic
act of the Conqueror than the deed which marks it.  The cruelty and
insolence of his brother Ode, whom he had trusted so much more than
he deserved, had passed all bounds.  In avenging the death of
Walcher he had done deeds such as William never did himself or
allowed any other man to do.  And now, beguiled by a soothsayer who
said that one of his name should be the next Pope, he dreamed of
succeeding to the throne of Gregory the Seventh.  He made all kinds
of preparations to secure his succession, and he was at last about
to set forth for Italy at the head of something like an army.  His
schemes were by no means to the liking of his brother.  William
came suddenly over from Normandy, and met Ode in the Isle of Wight.
There the King got together as many as he could of the great men of
the realm.  Before them he arraigned Ode for all his crimes.  He
had left him as the lieutenant of his kingdom, and he had shown
himself the common oppressor of every class of men in the realm.
Last of all, he had beguiled the warriors who were needed for the
defence of England against the Danes and Irish to follow him on his
wild schemes in Italy.  How was he to deal with such a brother,
William asked of his wise men.

He had to answer himself; no other man dared to speak.  William
then gave his judgement.  The common enemy of the whole realm
should not be spared because he was the King's brother.  He should
be seized and put in ward.  As none dared to seize him, the King
seized him with his own hands.  And now, for the first time in
England, we hear words which were often heard again.  The bishop
stained with blood and sacrilege appealed to the privileges of his
order.  He was a clerk, a bishop; no man might judge him but the
Pope.  William, taught, so men said, by Lanfranc, had his answer
ready.  "I do not seize a clerk or a bishop; I seize my earl whom I
set over my kingdom."  So the Earl of Kent was carried off to a
prison in Normandy, and Pope Gregory himself pleaded in vain for
the release of the Bishop of Bayeux.

The mind of William was just now mainly given to the affairs of his
island kingdom.  In the winter of 1083 he hastened from the death-
bed of his wife to the siege of Sainte-Susanne, and thence to the
Midwinter Gemot in England.  The chief object of the assembly was
the specially distasteful one of laying on of a tax.  In the course
of the next year, six shillings was levied on every hide of land to
meet a pressing need.  The powers of the North were again
threatening; the danger, if it was danger, was greater than when
Waltheof smote the Normans in the gate at York.  Swegen and his
successor Harold were dead.  Cnut the Saint reigned in Denmark, the
son-in-law of Robert of Flanders.  This alliance with William's
enemy joined with his remembrance of his own two failures to stir
up the Danish king to a yearning for some exploit in England.
English exiles were still found to urge him to the enterprise.
William's conquest had scattered banished or discontented
Englishmen over all Europe.  Many had made their way to the Eastern
Rome; they had joined the Warangian guard, the surest support of
the Imperial throne, and at Dyrrhachion, as on Senlac, the axe of
England had met the lance of Normandy in battle.  Others had fled
to the North; they prayed Cnut to avenge the death of his kinsman
Harold and to deliver England from the yoke of men--so an English
writer living in Denmark spoke of them--of Roman speech.  Thus the
Greek at one end of Europe, the Norman at the other, still kept on
the name of Rome.  The fleet of Denmark was joined by the fleet of
Flanders; a smaller contingent was promised by the devout and
peaceful Olaf of Norway, who himself felt no call to take a share
in the work of war.

Against this danger William strengthened himself by the help of the
tax that he had just levied.  He could hardly have dreamed of
defending England against Danish invaders by English weapons only.
But he thought as little of trusting the work to his own Normans.
With the money of England he hired a host of mercenaries, horse and
foot, from France and Britanny, even from Maine where Hubert was
still defying him at Sainte-Susanne.  He gathered this force on the
mainland, and came back at its head, a force such as England had
never before seen; men wondered how the land might feed them all.
The King's men, French and English, had to feed them, each man
according to the amount of his land.  And now William did what
Harold had refused to do; he laid waste the whole coast that lay
open to attack from Denmark and Flanders.  But no Danes, no
Flemings, came.  Disputes arose between Cnut and his brother Olaf,
and the great enterprise came to nothing.  William kept part of his
mercenaries in England, and part he sent to their homes.  Cnut was
murdered in a church by his own subjects, and was canonized as
Sanctus Canutus by a Pope who could not speak the Scandinavian
name.

Meanwhile, at the Midwinter Gemot of 1085-1086, held in due form at
Gloucester, William did one of his greatest acts.  "The King had
mickle thought and sooth deep speech with his Witan about his land,
how it were set and with whilk men."  In that "deep speech," so
called in our own tongue, lurks a name well known and dear to every
Englishman.  The result of that famous parliament is set forth at
length by the Chronicler.  The King sent his men into each shire,
men who did indeed set down in their writ how the land was set and
of what men.  In that writ we have a record in the Roman tongue no
less precious than the Chronicles in our own.  For that writ became
the Book of Winchester, the book to which our fathers gave the name
of Domesday, the book of judgement that spared no man.

The Great Survey was made in the course of the first seven months
of the year 1086.  Commissioners were sent into every shire, who
inquired by the oaths of the men of the hundreds by whom the land
had been held in King Edward's days and what it was worth then, by
whom it was held at the time of the survey and what it was worth
then; and lastly, whether its worth could be raised.  Nothing was
to be left out.  "So sooth narrowly did he let spear it out, that
there was not a hide or a yard of land, nor further--it is shame to
tell, and it thought him no shame to do--an ox nor a cow nor a
swine was left that was not set in his writ."  This kind of
searching inquiry, never liked at any time, would be specially
grievous then.  The taking of the survey led to disturbances in
many places, in which not a few lives were lost.  While the work
was going on, William went to and fro till he knew thoroughly how
this land was set and of what men.  He had now a list of all men,
French and English, who held land in his kingdom.  And it was not
enough to have their names in a writ; he would see them face to
face.  On the making of the survey followed that great assembly,
that great work of legislation, which was the crown of William's
life as a ruler and lawgiver of England.  The usual assemblies of
the year had been held at Winchester and Westminster.  An
extraordinary assembly was held in the plain of Salisbury on the
first day of August.  The work of that assembly has been already
spoken of.  It was now that all the owners of land in the kingdom
became the men of the King; it was now that England became one,
with no fear of being again parted asunder.


The close connexion between the Great Survey and the law and the
oath of Salisbury is plain.  It was a great matter for the King to
get in the gold certainly and, we may add, fairly.  William would
deal with no man otherwise than according to law as he understood
the law.  But he sought for more than this.  He would not only know
what this land could be made to pay; he would know the state of his
kingdom in every detail; he would know its military strength; he
would know whether his own will, in the long process of taking from
this man and giving to that, had been really carried out.  Domesday
is before all things a record of the great confiscation, a record
of that gradual change by which, in less than twenty years, the
greater part of the land of England had been transferred from
native to foreign owners.  And nothing shows like Domesday in what
a formally legal fashion that transfer was carried out.  What were
the principles on which it was carried out, we have already seen.
All private property in land came only from the grant of King
William.  It had all passed into his hands by lawful forfeiture; he
might keep it himself; he might give it back to its old owner or
grant it to a new one.  So it was at the general redemption of
lands; so it was whenever fresh conquests or fresh revolts threw
fresh lands into the King's hands.  The principle is so thoroughly
taken for granted, that we are a little startled to find it
incidentally set forth in so many words in a case of no special
importance.  A priest named Robert held a single yardland in alms
of the King; he became a monk in the monastery of Stow-in-Lindesey,
and his yardland became the property of the house.  One hardly sees
why this case should have been picked out for a solemn declaration
of the general law.  Yet, as "the day on which the English redeemed
their lands" is spoken of only casually in the case of a particular
estate, so the principle that no man could hold lands except by the
King's grant ("Non licet terram alicui habere nisi regis concessu")
is brought in only to illustrate the wrongful dealing of Robert and
the monks of Stow in the case of a very small holding indeed.

All this is a vast system of legal fictions; for William's whole
position, the whole scheme of his government, rested on a system of
legal fictions.  Domesday is full of them; one might almost say
that there is nothing else there.  A very attentive study of
Domesday might bring out the fact that William was a foreign
conqueror, and that the book itself was a record of the process by
which he took the lands of the natives who had fought against him
to reward the strangers who had fought for him.  But nothing of
this kind appears on the surface of the record.  The great facts of
the Conquest are put out of sight.  William is taken for granted,
not only as the lawful king, but as the immediate successor of
Edward.  The "time of King Edward" and the "time of King William"
are the two times that the law knows of.  The compilers of the
record are put to some curious shifts to describe the time between
"the day when King Edward was alive and dead" and the day "when
King William came into England."  That coming might have been as
peaceful as the coming of James the First or George the First.  The
two great battles are more than once referred to, but only casually
in the mention of particular persons.  A very sharp critic might
guess that one of them had something to do with King William's
coming into England; but that is all.  Harold appears only as Earl;
it is only in two or three places that we hear of a "time of
Harold," and even of Harold "seizing the kingdom" and "reigning."
These two or three places stand out in such contrast to the general
language of the record that we are led to think that the scribe
must have copied some earlier record or taken down the words of
some witness, and must have forgotten to translate them into more
loyal formulae.  So in recording who held the land in King Edward's
day and who in King William's, there is nothing to show that in so
many cases the holder under Edward had been turned out to make room
for the holder under William.  The former holder is marked by the
perfectly colourless word "ancestor" ("antecessor"), a word as yet
meaning, not "forefather," but "predecessor" of any kind.  In
Domesday the word is most commonly an euphemism for "dispossessed
Englishman."  It is a still more distinct euphemism where the
Norman holder is in more than one place called the "heir" of the
dispossessed Englishmen.

The formulae of Domesday are the most speaking witness to the
spirit of outward legality which ruled every act of William.  In
this way they are wonderfully instructive; but from the formulae
alone no one could ever make the real facts of William's coming and
reign.  It is the incidental notices which make us more at home in
the local and personal life of this reign than of any reign before
or for a long time after.  The Commissioners had to report whether
the King's will had been everywhere carried out, whether every man,
great and small, French and English, had what the King meant him to
have, neither more nor less.  And they had often to report a state
of things different from what the King had meant to be.  Many men
had not all that King William had meant them to have, and many
others had much more.  Normans had taken both from Englishmen and
from other Normans.  Englishmen had taken from Englishmen; some had
taken from ecclesiastical bodies; some had taken from King William
himself; nay King William himself holds lands which he ought to
give up to another man.  This last entry at least shows that
William was fully ready to do right, according to his notions of
right.  So also the King's two brothers are set down among the
chief offenders.  Of these unlawful holdings of land, marked in the
technical language of the Survey as invasiones and occupationes,
many were doubtless real cases of violent seizure, without excuse
even according to William's reading of the law.  But this does not
always follow, even when the language of the Survey would seem to
imply it.  Words implying violence, per vim and the like, are used
in the legal language of all ages, where no force has been used,
merely to mark a possession as illegal.  We are startled at finding
the Apostle Paul set down as one of the offenders; but the words
"sanctus Paulus invasit" mean no more than that the canons of Saint
Paul's church in London held lands to which the Commissioners held
that they had no good title.  It is these cases where one man held
land which another claimed that gave opportunity for those personal
details, stories, notices of tenures and customs, which make
Domesday the most precious store of knowledge of the time.

One fruitful and instructive source of dispute comes from the way
in which the lands in this or that district were commonly granted
out.  The in-comer, commonly a foreigner, received all the lands
which such and such a man, commonly a dispossessed Englishman, held
in that shire or district.  The grantee stepped exactly into the
place of the antecessor; he inherited all his rights and all his
burthens.  He inherited therewith any disputes as to the extent of
the lands of the antecessor or as to the nature of his tenure.  And
new disputes arose in the process of transfer.  One common source
of dispute was when the former owner, besides lands which were
strictly his own, held lands on lease, subject to a reversionary
interest on the part of the Crown or the Church.  The lease or
sale--emere is the usual word--of Church lands for three lives to
return to the Church at the end of the third life was very common.
If the antecessor was himself the third life, the grantee, his
heir, had no claim to the land; and in any case he could take in
only with all its existing liabilities.  But the grantee often took
possession of the whole of the land held by the antecessor, as if
it were all alike his own.  A crowd of complaints followed from all
manner of injured persons and bodies, great and small, French and
English, lay and clerical.  The Commissioners seem to have fairly
heard all, and to have fairly reported all for the King to judge
of.  It is their care to do right to all men which has given us
such strange glimpses of the inner life of an age which had none
like it before or after.

The general Survey followed by the general homage might seem to
mark William's work in England, his work as an English statesman,
as done.  He could hardly have had time to redress the many cases
of wrong which the Survey laid before him; but he was able to wring
yet another tax out of the nation according to his new and more
certain register.  He then, for the last time, crossed to Normandy
with his new hoard.  The Chronicler and other writers of the time
dwell on the physical portents of these two years, the storms, the
fires, the plagues, the sharp hunger, the deaths of famous men on
both sides of the sea.  Of the year 1087, the last year of the
Conqueror, it needs the full strength of our ancient tongue to set
forth the signs and wonders.  The King had left England safe,
peaceful, thoroughly bowed down under the yoke, cursing the ruler
who taxed her and granted away her lands, yet half blessing him for
the "good frith" that he made against the murderer, the robber, and
the ravisher.  But the land that he had won was neither to see his
end nor to shelter his dust.  One last gleam of success was, after
so many reverses, to crown his arms; but it was success which was
indeed unworthy of the Conqueror who had entered Exeter and Le Mans
in peaceful triumph.  And the death-blow was now to come to him
who, after so many years of warfare, stooped at last for the first
time to cruel and petty havoc without an object.

The border-land of France and Normandy, the French Vexin, the land
of which Mantes is the capital, had always been disputed between
kingdom and duchy.  Border wars had been common; just at this time
the inroads of the French commanders at Mantes are said to have
been specially destructive.  William not only demanded redress from
the King, but called for the surrender of the whole Vexin.  What
followed is a familiar story.  Philip makes a foolish jest on the
bodily state of his great rival, unable just then to carry out his
threats.  "The King of the English lies in at Rouen; there will be
a great show of candles at his churching."  As at Alencon in his
youth, so now, William, who could pass by real injuries, was stung
to the uttermost by personal mockery.  By the splendour of God,
when he rose up again, he would light a hundred thousand candles at
Philip's cost.  He kept his word at the cost of Philip's subjects.
The ballads of the day told how he went forth and gathered the
fruits of autumn in the fields and orchards and vineyards of the
enemy.  But he did more than gather fruits; the candles of his
churching were indeed lighted in the burning streets of Mantes.
The picture of William the Great directing in person mere brutal
havoc like this is strange even after the harrying of
Northumberland and the making of the New Forest.  Riding to and fro
among the flames, bidding his men with glee to heap on the fuel,
gladdened at the sight of burning houses and churches, a false step
of his horse gave him his death-blow.  Carried to Rouen, to the
priory of Saint Gervase near the city, he lingered from August 15
to September 7, and then the reign and life of the Conqueror came
to an end.  Forsaken by his children, his body stripped and well
nigh forgotten, the loyalty of one honest knight, Herlwin of
Conteville, bears his body to his grave in his own church at Caen.
His very grave is disputed--a dispossessed antecessor claims the
ground as his own, and the dead body of the Conqueror has to wait
while its last resting-place is bought with money.  Into that
resting-place force alone can thrust his bulky frame, and the rites
of his burial are as wildly cut short as were the rites of his
crowning.  With much striving he had at last won his seven feet of
ground; but he was not to keep it for ever.  Religious warfare
broke down his tomb and scattered his bones, save one treasured
relic.  Civil revolution swept away the one remaining fragment.
And now, while we seek in vain beneath the open sky for the rifled
tombs of Harold and of Waltheof, a stone beneath the vault of Saint
Stephen's still tells us where the bones of William once lay but
where they lie no longer.


There is no need to doubt the striking details of the death and
burial of the Conqueror.  We shrink from giving the same trust to
the long tale of penitence which is put into the mouth of the dying
King.  He may, in that awful hour, have seen the wrong-doing of the
last one-and-twenty years of his life; he hardly threw his
repentance into the shape of a detailed autobiographical
confession.  But the more authentic sayings and doings of William's
death-bed enable us to follow his course as an English statesman
almost to his last moments.  His end was one of devotion, of
prayers and almsgiving, and of opening of the prison to them that
were bound.  All save one of his political prisoners, English and
Norman, he willingly set free.  Morkere and his companions from
Ely, Walfnoth son of Godwine, hostage for Harold's faith, Wulf son
of Harold and Ealdgyth, taken, we can hardly doubt, as a babe when
Chester opened its gates to William, were all set free; some indeed
were put in bonds again by the King's successor.  But Ode William
would not set free; he knew too well how many would suffer if he
were again let loose upon the world.  But love of kindred was still
strong; at last he yielded, sorely against his will, to the prayers
and pledges of his other brother.  Ode went forth from his prison,
again Bishop of Bayeux, soon again to be Earl of Kent, and soon to
prove William's foresight by his deeds.

William's disposal of his dominions on his death-bed carries on his
political history almost to his last breath.  Robert, the banished
rebel, might seem to have forfeited all claims to the succession.
But the doctrine of hereditary right had strengthened during the
sixty years of William's life.  He is made to say that, though he
foresees the wretchedness of any land over which Robert should be
the ruler, still he cannot keep him out of the duchy of Normandy
which is his birthright.  Of England he will not dare to dispose;
he leaves the decision to God, seemingly to Archbishop Lanfranc as
the vicar of God.  He will only say that his wish is for his son
William to succeed him in his kingdom, and he prays Lanfranc to
crown him king, if he deem such a course to be right.  Such a
message was a virtual nomination, and William the Red succeeded his
father in England, but kept his crown only by the help of loyal
Englishmen against Norman rebels.  William Rufus, it must be
remembered, still under the tutelage of his father and Lanfranc,
had not yet shown his bad qualities; he was known as yet only as
the dutiful son who fought for his father against the rebel Robert.
By ancient English law, that strong preference which was all that
any man could claim of right belonged beyond doubt to the youngest
of William's sons, the English AEtheling Henry.  He alone was born
in the land; he alone was the son of a crowned King and his Lady.
It is perhaps with a knowledge of what followed that William is
made to bid his youngest son wait while his eldest go before him;
that he left him landless, but master of a hoard of silver, there
is no reason to doubt.  English feeling, which welcomed Henry
thirteen years later, would doubtless have gladly seen his
immediate accession; but it might have been hard, in dividing
William's dominions, to have shut out the second son in favour of
the third.  And in the scheme of events by which conquered England
was to rise again, the reign of Rufus, at the moment the darkest
time of all, had its appointed share.


That England could rise again, that she could rise with a new life,
strengthened by her momentary overthrow, was before all things
owing to the lucky destiny which, if she was to be conquered, gave
her William the Great as her Conqueror.  It is as it is in all
human affairs.  William himself could not have done all that he
did, wittingly and unwittingly, unless circumstances had been
favourable to him; but favourable circumstances would have been
useless, unless there had been a man like William to take advantage
of them.  What he did, wittingly or unwittingly, he did by virtue
of his special position, the position of a foreign conqueror
veiling his conquest under a legal claim.  The hour and the man
were alike needed.  The man in his own hour wrought a work, partly
conscious, partly unconscious.  The more clearly any man
understands his conscious work, the more sure is that conscious
work to lead to further results of which he dreams not.  So it was
with the Conqueror of England.  His purpose was to win and to keep
the kingdom of England, and to hand it on to those who should come
after him more firmly united than it had ever been before.  In this
work his spirit of formal legality, his shrinking from needless
change, stood him in good stead.  He saw that as the kingdom of
England could best be won by putting forth a legal claim to it, so
it could best be kept by putting on the character of a legal ruler,
and reigning as the successor of the old kings seeking the unity of
the kingdom; he saw, from the example both of England and of other
lands, the dangers which threatened that unity; he saw what
measures were needed to preserve it in his own day, measures which
have preserved it ever since.  Here is a work, a conscious work,
which entitles the foreign Conqueror to a place among English
statesmen, and to a place in their highest rank.  Further than this
we cannot conceive William himself to have looked.  All that was to
come of his work in future ages was of necessity hidden from his
eyes, no less than from the eyes of smaller men.  He had assuredly
no formal purpose to make England Norman; but still less had he any
thought that the final outcome of his work would make England on
one side more truly English than if he had never crossed the sea.
In his ecclesiastical work he saw the future still less clearly.
He designed to reform what he deemed abuses, to bring the English
Church into closer conformity with the other Churches of the West;
he assuredly never dreamed that the issue of his reform would be
the strife between Henry and Thomas and the humiliation of John.
His error was that of forgetting that he himself could wield
powers, that he could hold forces in check, which would be too
strong for those who should come after him.  At his purposes with
regard to the relations of England and Normandy it would be vain to
guess.  The mere leaving of kingdom and duchy to different sons
would not necessarily imply that he designed a complete or lasting
separation.  But assuredly William did not foresee that England,
dragged into wars with France as the ally of Normandy, would remain
the lasting rival of France after Normandy had been swallowed up in
the French kingdom.  If rivalry between England and France had not
come in this way, it would doubtless have come in some other way;
but this is the way in which it did come about.  As a result of the
union of Normandy and England under one ruler, it was part of
William's work, but a work of which William had no thought.  So it
was with the increased connexion of every kind between England and
the continent of Europe which followed on William's coming.  With
one part of Europe indeed the connexion of England was lessened.
For three centuries before William's coming, dealings in war and
peace with the Scandinavian kingdoms had made up a large part of
English history.  Since the baffled enterprise of the holy Cnut,
our dealings with that part of Europe have been of only secondary
account.

But in our view of William as an English statesman, the main
feature of all is that spirit of formal legality of which we have
so often spoken.  Its direct effects, partly designed, partly
undesigned, have affected our whole history to this day.  It was
his policy to disguise the fact of conquest, to cause all the
spoils of conquest to be held, in outward form, according to the
ancient law of England.  The fiction became a fact, and the fact
greatly helped in the process of fusion between Normans and
English.  The conquering race could not keep itself distinct from
the conquered, and the form which the fusion took was for the
conquerors to be lost in the greater mass of the conquered.
William founded no new state, no new nation, no new constitution;
he simply kept what he found, with such modifications as his
position made needful.  But without any formal change in the nature
of English kingship, his position enabled him to clothe the crown
with a practical power such as it had never held before, to make
his rule, in short, a virtual despotism.  These two facts
determined the later course of English history, and they determined
it to the lasting good of the English nation.  The conservative
instincts of William allowed our national life and our national
institutions to live on unbroken through his conquest.  But it was
before all things the despotism of William, his despotism under
legal forms, which preserved our national institutions to all time.
As a less discerning conqueror might have swept our ancient laws
and liberties away, so under a series of native kings those laws
and liberties might have died out, as they died out in so many
continental lands.  But the despotism of the crown called forth the
national spirit in a conscious and antagonistic shape; it called
forth that spirit in men of both races alike, and made Normans and
English one people.  The old institutions lived on, to be clothed
with a fresh life, to be modified as changed circumstances might
make needful.  The despotism of the Norman kings, the peculiar
character of that despotism, enabled the great revolution of the
thirteenth century to take the forms, which it took, at once
conservative and progressive.  So it was when, more than four
centuries after William's day, England again saw a despotism
carried on under the forms of law.  Henry the Eighth reigned as
William had reigned; he did not reign like his brother despots on
the continent; the forms of law and freedom lived on.  In the
seventeenth century therefore, as in the thirteenth, the forms
stood ready to be again clothed with a new life, to supply the
means for another revolution, again at once conservative and
progressive.  It has been remarked a thousand times that, while
other nations have been driven to destroy and to rebuild the
political fabric, in England we have never had to destroy and to
rebuild, but have found it enough to repair, to enlarge, and to
improve.  This characteristic of English history is mainly owing to
the events of the eleventh century, and owing above all to the
personal agency of William.  As far as mortal man can guide the
course of things when he is gone, the course of our national
history since William's day has been the result of William's
character and of William's acts.  Well may we restore to him the
surname that men gave him in his own day.  He may worthily take his
place as William the Great alongside of Alexander, Constantine, and
Charles.  They may have wrought in some sort a greater work,
because they had a wider stage to work it on.  But no man ever
wrought a greater and more abiding work on the stage that fortune
gave him than he


"Qui dux Normannis, qui Caesar praefuit Anglis."


Stranger and conqueror, his deeds won him a right to a place on the
roll of English statesmen, and no man that came after him has won a
right to a higher place.




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