Ctoelbe
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
WILLIAM THE CONQUEBOB
BY
EDWAED A. FKEEMAN
D.C.L., LL.D.
BEGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OK OXFORD
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1888
All rights reserved
PKEFACE
THIS small volume, written as the first of a series, is
meant to fill quite another place from the Short History
of the Norman Conquest, by the same author. That was
a narrative of events reaching over a considerable time.
This is the portrait of a man in his personal character,
a man whose life takes up only a part of the time
treated of in the other work. We have now to look
on William as one who, though stranger and conqueror,
is yet worthily entitled to a place on the list of English
statesmen. There is perhaps no man before or after
him whose personal character and personal will have
had so direct an effect on the course which the laws and
constitution of England have taken since his time.
Norman as a Conqueror, as a statesman he is English,
and, on this side of him at least, he worthily begins
the series.
16 ST. GILES', OXFORD,
6lk February 1888.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION . . . * .
CHAPTER II
THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM
CHAPTER III
WILLIAM'S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND .
CHAPTER IV
THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY .... 34
CHAPTER V
HAROLD'S OATH TO WILLIAM 51
CHAPTER VI
THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER VII PAOE
WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND 82
CHAPTER VIII
THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND . . . \. . .100
CHAPTER IX
THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND 122
CHAPTER X
THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM 147
CHAPTER XI
THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM . 181
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
THE history of England, like the land and its people,
has been specially insular, and yet no land has under-
gone 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 displace-
ment, 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
as B
7-?
2 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Hugue-
not, 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
i. INTRODUCTION. 3
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 oppo-
site 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, Eandolf Flambard and Eoger 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
4 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
line, even among the conquering kings and their imme-
diate 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 Nor-
man 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 Eng-
lish 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. W T ith the land of his over-
lord 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
i. INTRODUCTION. 5
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 prac-
tised 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. Sur-
rounded by trials and difficulties almost from his cradle,
he early learned the art of enduring trials and over"
coming 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 cor-
rupted. 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 Eolf,
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 Scan-
dinavia, 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 settle-
CHAP. ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 7
ment of Kolf, 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 ; Nor-
man support had done much to transfer the crown from
Laon to Paris, and to make the Dux Francorum and the
Eex 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 unde-
fined 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
8 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 king-
doms 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 suc-
ceed 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 com-
mon than among the Norman dukes. In truth the feeling
of the kingliness of the stock, the doctrine that the king
n. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 9
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 Eobert,
afterwards duke, but then only Count of Hiesmois,
by Herleva, commonly called Arietta, 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 mar-
riage with his mother. In 1028 Eobert succeeded his
brother Eichard in the duchy. In 1034 or 1035 he de-
termined 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.
Eobert carried his point. The succession of young
William was accepted by the Norman nobles, and was con-
firmed by the overlord Henry King of the French. The
arrangement soon took effect. Eobert 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 dis-
10 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
tinctly 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 pro-
fession 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 legiti-
mated 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 con-
spiracies 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 Nor-
mandy 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, Odo and Robert. They rose to high
ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 11
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 sup-
port 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, Arch-
bishop 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.
12 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, CHAP.
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 pre-
texts for meddling in Norman affairs. It was not un-
natural 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 un-
natural 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
ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 13
be hardly later than 1040, when William was from twelve
to thirteen years old. At his special request, the de-
fender 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 restor-
ing 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 sur-
rendered 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
14 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 ful-
ness 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 em-
phatically contrasted with Bayeux, the once Saxon city
and land, now the head-quarters 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
ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 15
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 head-
quarters 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 Eisle. 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 Nor-
mandy 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
16 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
tale of his headlong ride fnom 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 dismember-
ment 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, Ealph 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 re-
ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 17
sistance 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 Komanized 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
C
18 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 them-
selves. He made Normandy peaceful and nourishing,
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 can-
not 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 check on
the unruly wills of those turbulent barons on whom only
an arm like his could put any check. 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 con-
sistent 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
ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 19
ecclesiastical matters in the spirit of a true reformer.
He did not, like so many princes of his age, make ecclesi-
astical preferments a source of corrupt gain, but pro-
moted 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, nar-
rower and wider, on which William was to appear as
20 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
Conqueror he has as yet nothing to do. It is vain to
guess at what moment the thought of the English succes-
sion 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 kins-
folk; 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, Kobert 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 chas-
tity 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
ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 21
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 com-
mon with King Henry against Geoffrey Martel Count of
Anjou, and waged on the side of Maine. William un-
doubtedly 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 Nor-
mandy and Maine. Alen9on 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 pos-
sessions 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 Eoger of Montgomery, a man who plays a
22 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Ale^on. 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 modera-
tion 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 sur-
render on promise of safety for life and limb. The
ii. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 23
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 con-
quest. Domfront has ever since been counted as part of
Normandy. But, as ecclesiastical divisions commonly
preserve the secular divisions of an earlier time, Dom-
front 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 con-
queror, and he was before long to show himself in
England, though not yet as conqueror. If our chrono-
logy is to be trusted, he had still in this interval to com-
plete his conquest of his own duchy by securing the
surrender of Brionne ; and two other events, both charac-
teristic, 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 Mare-
tonium, in the diocese of Avranches, which must be care-
fully distinguished from Mortagne-en-Perche, Mauritania
or Moretonia in the diocese of Seez. This act, of some-
what 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-
24 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 prefer-
ments in Normandy had been turned into means of pro-
viding 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 affec-
tion for his brothers, amiable as it may have been per-
sonally, 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
ir. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM. 25
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 im-
portant event in William's life that we have to record.
Was William's Flemish marriage in any way con-
nected with his hopes of succession to the English
crown 1 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 suc-
cession to the English crown had been opened to the
Norman duke.
CHAPTER IIL
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 negoti-
CHAP. in. WILLIAM'S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 27
ations, 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 Kouen.
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 1 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, be-
came 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 suc-
cession made by Edward. This claim is not likely to
have been a mere shameless falsehood. That Edward
28 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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,
in. WILLIAM'S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 29
he had a nearer kinsman of whom he might more natur-
ally 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 else-
where. 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 influ-
ences 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 settle-
ment 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
30 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 elec-
tion 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 kins-
men 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 recom-
mendation 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 recommend-
ation to the Witan, but it was not in favour of William.
The English influences under which he was brought
in. WILLIAM'S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 31
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 suc-
cessor 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 law-
ful 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 Avriter 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. AVilliam'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
32 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
more favourably on a suitor to whom the crown of Eng-
land 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 JEtheling Edward from
Hungary, clearly as his intended successor. When the
^Etheling 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
in. WILLIAM'S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 33
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 with-
out 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
THAP. iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 35
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 Nor-
mans 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 in-
vaders 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 fol-
lowed, 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 Aqui-
taine. What quarrel a prince in the furthest corner of
Gaul could have with the Duke of the Normans does
36 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 con-
sent 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
iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 37
a saint would have been set down as a sign of holy bold-
ness. 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 Bee, 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 confirma-
tion 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 mar-
riage, not till the year 1059, that Lanfranc obtained the
Avished 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.
38 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 bid-
ding 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 pun-
ishes a whole body of men for the offence of one. To
lay waste the lands of Bee 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 uncanon-
ical 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.
iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 39
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 Nor-
mandy, 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 ;
40 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 de-
fence 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, scat-
tered, or taken prisoners. Odo escaped ; Guy of Ponthieu
was taken. The Duke's success was still easier. The
tale runs that the news from Mortemer, suddenly an-
nounced 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
iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 41
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 in-
deed fight a pitched battle when a pitched battle served
his purpose ; but he could control himself, he could con-
trol 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 char-
acter. 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 essen-
tially 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 forti-
fied the stronghold of Breteuil as a check 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.
42 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 forti-
fied and occupied by a Norman garrison. With
Geoffrey came the Breton prince Odo, 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 for-
mer 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
iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 43
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 weak-
ened 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 Wil-
liam's views on England 1 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 ^Etheling Edward, the King's selected successor,
died soon after his coming to England ; in the same
year died the King's nephew Earl Ealph 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 ^Etheling was still under age. William
44 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 un-
friendly 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 cam-
paign 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
iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 45
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.
46 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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
iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 47
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 sove-
reign 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 agree-
ment 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 ^Ethelred, 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
48 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 look-
ing 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 agree-
ment 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 succes-
sion. 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 war-
fare. He invaded Maine in much the same sort in
which he had defended Normandy. He gave out that
iv. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY. 49
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 sub-
jects ; 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
fertile 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 com-
petitors, 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,
E
50 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP. iv.
died about the same time ; and her at least WiDiam had
every motive to keep alive. One who was more danger-
ous 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.
CHAPTEE 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 Wil-
liam 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 un-
friendly to William ; still he may, in the course of that
journey, have visited Normandy as well as France or
52 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Koman 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 Nor-
mandy, 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 with-
out 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 months ; 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
v. HAROLD'S OATH TO WILLIAM. 53
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 Nor-
man 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
54 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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.
v. HAEOLD'S OATH TO WILLIAM. 55
He would be honestly indignant at Guy's base treatment
of Harold, and he would feel it his part as Guy's over-
lord 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 grati-
tude 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 solem-
56 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
nity, 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 relics assumes
that, in case of breach of the oath, every holy person to
whose relics despite has been done will become the per-
sonal 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 per-
sonally clear from the guilt, he does not scruple to put
another man under special temptation, and, while believ-
ing 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 some-
thing 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
v. HAROLD'S OATH TO WILLIAM. 57
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 sup-
porter of William would have been to lose the crown for
himself without gaining it for William. Others in Eng-
land 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
58 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 some-
thing much simpler. Next to the universal agreement
about the marriage comes the very general agreement
that Harold became William's man. In these two state-
ments 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 for-
bidding 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.
v. HAROLD'S OATH TO WILLIAM. 59
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 dis-
charged 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 for-
ward 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 Eng-
land 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
60 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
fuller obligations which Harold would surely have re-
fused. 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 mar-
riage. 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 uElfgar 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
v. HAROLD'S OATH TO WILLIAM. 61
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 Lanf ranc 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 spirit-
ual 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 Eng-
land 1 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 in-
terest. 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.
62 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.V.
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 Northumber-
land against Harold's brother Tostig, and the reconcilia-
tion 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 Arch-
bishop of York in Edward's new church at West-
minster. Northumberland refused to acknowledge him ;
but the malcontents were won over by the coming of
the king and his friend Saint Wulfstan Bishop of Wor-
64 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
cester. It was most likely now, as a seal of this recon-
ciliation, 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 accord-
ing 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 ques-
tion. 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 cere-
mony 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 archi-
episcopal rank, only from the usurping Benedict the
Tenth. It was therefore good policy in Harold to be
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 65
crowned by Ealdred, to whose position there was no ob-
jection. 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 arch-
bishops, 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 coron-
ation, 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 quali-
fied candidate. Its only known members were the
children of the ^Etheling 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 Ed-
gar the heir by birth. But those who called him an
F
66 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
usurper at the time called him so as keeping out Wil-
liam 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 Eng-
lish 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. Ed-
gar 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
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 67
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 every-
body 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
68 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
Eoman 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 Arch-
deacon Hildebrand, the future Gregory the Seventh. If
William outwitted the world, Hildebrand outwitted
William. William's appeal to the Pope to decide be-
tween 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 con-
vinced, 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
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 69
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 per-
suasion, 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 Bee convince mankind that the worse
cause was the better 1 We must always remember the
transitional character of the age. England was in poli-
tical 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 Eng-
land 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
70 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
sons crowned in their lifetime. So with the great fiefs
of the crown. The notion of kingship as an office con-
ferred 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 suc-
cessor. 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 hered-
itary 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
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 71
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 opposi-
tion 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 be-
queathed 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.
72 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Lan-
franc, 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 pros-
pect of plunder, the prospect of lands and honours in a
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 73
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 wide-spread 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 Kobert 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.
74 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
All this could not really strengthen William's claim;
but it made men look more favourably on his enter-
prise.
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
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 75
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 ; with-
out 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
his 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, con-
trived to remove the dispute from the region of municipal
into that of international law, a law whose chief repre-
sentative 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
76 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Con-
stantinople or Cordova, But the letter lived, to come
to light again on occasion. The Ee volution of 1399
was a falling back on the doctrines of 1066, and the
Revolution of 1688 was a falling back on the doc-
trines 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 ingeni-
ous 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
VT. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 77
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 Gemdt of 1047. There
is the earliest recorded instance of a debate on a ques-
tion 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 expecta-
tion 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 au-
78 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
thority 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
Lanf ranc might well be pleading at Eome 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 con-
fused, 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 Nor-
man 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.
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 79
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 Brit-
anny took this moment for bringing up his own for-
gotten 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 Eoman 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
80 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 acknow-
ledging that his case was at least doubtful. The judge-
ment of Alexander or of Hildebrand was given for
William. Harold was declared to be an usurper, per-
haps 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 Eoman See and more regular payment of its tem-
poral 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
Eome as a judge in any matters. The precedent by
which Hildebrand, under another name, took on him to
dispose of a higher crown that 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,
vi. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. 81
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 or 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 Eng-
lish people had chosen the foremost man among them-
selves. 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 West-
minster. Then in the words of the Chronicler, "it
was known to him that William Bastard, King Ed-
ward'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,
CHAP. vii. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 83
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 Ful-
forcl was fought on September 20th and that of Stam-
fordbridge on September 25th. William landed on
September 28th, and the battle of Senlac was fought on
October 1 4th. 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,
84 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Nor-
way 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 rest-
less a spirit in annoying the common enemy. It is also
certain that Tostig was with the Norwegian fleet in Sep-
tember, and that he died at Stamfordbridge. We know
also that he was in Scotland between May and Septem-
ber. It is therefore hard to believe that Tostig had so
great a hand in stirring up Harold Hardrada to his ex-
pedition 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.
vii. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 85
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 en-
camped. 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 en-
abled 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 with-
out 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 per-
haps some small encounters by sea. At last, early in Sep-
86 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
tember, 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 Eng-
land; 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 Stain-
fordbridge, 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
vn. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 87
perjurer. Now that he was in England, it became a
trial of generalship between him and Harold. Wil-
liam'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 in-
vasion, 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
88 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 satis-
fied 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 explana-
tion 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 re-
fused 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
vii. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 89
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 chal-
90 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
lenge 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 war-
fare. 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 byCnut,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 Nor-
mans 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
vii. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 91
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 there-
fore 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 horse-
men 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,
92 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, CHAP.
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 dis-
posed 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
9
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
vii. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 93
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 con-
quered, 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 ^Ethelings. 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 candi-
date, 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 prepara-
tion 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,
94 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 sup-
port 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
Eomney 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
vii. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 95
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, march-
ing 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
96 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 West-
minster 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 corona-
tion of Harold. Nothing that was needed for a lawful
vir. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 97
crowning Avas 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 ac-
cepted 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 fol-
lowed 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
H
98 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
sound policy to act as king of the whole land, to exer-
cise 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 obedi-
ence 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
vii. WILLIAM'S INVASION OF ENGLAND. 99
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 under-
went 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.
CHAPTEE 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 Mor-
kere 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, Wal-
theof 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
CHAP. vin. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 101
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
102 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 pos-
session 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 ful-
ness. 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
vin. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 103
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 English-
men 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 con-
quered nations, formally degraded or put under any legal
incapacities in their own land. William simply distin-
guished 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
104 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 mis-
taken 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 pun-
vin. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 105
ishment 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 Odo 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
106 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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. Odo had to keep Kent against attacks
from the continent; William Fitz-Osbern had to keep Here-
fordshire 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. Here-
ford 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 Odo received larger commissions as viceroys
over the whole kingdom. Odo 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
viir. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 107
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 cere-
monies, but partly to Norman legislation. Eich gifts
from the spoils of England were given to the churches
of Normandy ; gifts richer still were sent to the Church
of Eome 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 kins-
man 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 pal-
lium 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 Odo 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 Con-
108 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
quest, 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 Here-
ford. 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 oppres-
sion of Odo 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
YIII. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 109
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 con-
fiscation 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, vEthelsige, Abbot of Eamsey.
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
110 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 im-
portance. 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 vigor-
ously 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 Eng-
land. 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
viir. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND; 111
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 al-
ready 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 con-
federation, which might perhaps find it expedient to ac-
knowledge 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
112 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Eng-
land. 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 messen-
gers 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 over-
lord 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
viii. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 113
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 agree-
ment ; notwithstanding the blinding of one of the host-
ages 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 Devon-
shire. 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
i
114 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 con-
quered, and, as the North had not stirred during the stir-
ring 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 Eng-
land, and was hallowed to Queen at Westminster by Arch-
bishop 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
vin. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 115
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 states-
manship. 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 JEtheling 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 Eng-
lish 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
116 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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, receiv-
ing 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 Lincoln-
shire 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 submis-
sion 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 com-
missioned English earls of Northumberland to take pos-
session if they could. He now risked the dangerous
step of sending a stranger. Robert of Cornwall was
appointed to the earldom forfeited by the flight of
viii. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 117
Gospatric. While it was still winter, he went with his
force to Durham. By help of the Bishop, he was ad-
mitted 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 pre-
sent 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 H umber, 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
118 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 move-
ment 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 Christ-
mas 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
vin. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 119
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 conies 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
120 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 ^thelwig 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 Eng-
land 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
viii. THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 121
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.
CHAPTEK 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 king-
dom 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 domin-
ions, 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 un-
broken. 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 con-
quered as might be. The harrying of Northumberland
showed that he now shrank from no harshness that would
CHAP. ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 123
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 Eng-
lish 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, Eng-
lish 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 cen-
tury 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
124 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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.
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 125
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 succes-
sion 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 Xorman stepped into the exact place of the Eng-
lishman 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
126 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Nor-
man from Englishman. Among the smaller landowners
and the townsfolk this intermingling had already begun,
while earls and bishops were not yet so exclusively Nor-
man, 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 com-
mon 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 makincr. William
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 127
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 ad-
vantage 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 enact-
ments are set up by the side of the old ones. And
these words describe, not only William's actual legisla-
tion, 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 witenagemdt. 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.
128 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
And this has come because our Conqueror was, both by
his disposition and his circumstances, led to act as a pre-
server 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, pro-
vided 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 un-
known 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
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 129
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 judge-
ment 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 French-
man 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,
or 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 remark-
able unwillingness to put any man to death, except
K
130 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 suffer-
ing 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
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 131
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 exac-
tions of money, in his character alike of sovereign and
of landlord. We read of his sharp practice in dealing
Avith 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 taxa-
tion, we must remember that William's exactions, how-
ever heavy at the time, were a step in the direction of
regular government. In those days all taxation was dis-
liked. Direct taking of the subject's money by the Bang
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 work-
ing 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
132 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
small, just as in the city communities of Greece and
Italy, the community itself was a chief landowner. The
nation had its folkland, its agerpublicus, 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 booJcland. 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, even lay estates 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 Eandolf Flambard devised a system-
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 133
atic code of oppression. Yet even in his work there
is little of formal change. There are no laws of William
Kufus. 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 mar-
riage to which he objected on grounds of policy. Under
Eandolf 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 Win-
chester, 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
134 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 sub-
ject 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 Hartha-
cnut 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
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 135
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
all his enemies. The subject's duty to the King was to
override 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 Eng-
lish statesman, never did any one act tell more directly
towards the later making of England, than this memor-
able 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 as-
sembly 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
136 WILLIAM THE CONQUEEOR. CHAP.
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 monu-
ment 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 distin-
guished. The point is that William required the per-
sonal 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 Eng-
land 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 promo-
tion 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 mis-
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 137
sionary 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 Eoman, was, for that very reason, less dependent
on her parent. She was a free colony, not a con-
quered 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 juris-
dictions. Two friendly powers could take liberties with
each other. The national assemblies dealt with ecclesias-
tical as well as with temporal matters ; one indeed among
our ancient laws blames any assembly that did other-
wise. Bishop and earl sat together in the local Gemdt,
to deal with many matters which, according to con-
tinental 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 Eoman 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,
188 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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; no-
where 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 task. 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 ecclesi-
astical matters. It might look like sacrilege when he
caused all the monasteries of England to be harried.
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 139
But no harm was done to the monks or to their posses-
sions. 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 vacaa,t ; 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
140
the Pentecostal assembly, held at Windsor, Lanfranc
was appointed archbishop ; his excuses were overcome
by his old master Herlwin of Bee ; 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 de-
privation 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 re-
fuses; he will give it back to him who gave it, and
places it on the tomb of his dead master Edward. No
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 141
efforts 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 Eouen 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 memor-
able 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 Arch-
142 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
bishop 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 con-
quest to make, the tribunitian office of former arch-
bishops 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. Nort-
humberland, 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 bene-
factor.
For some of his own purposes, William had per-
haps 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 extra-
vagant 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 ad-
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 143
ministration was towards the growth of ecclesiastical, and
even of papal, claims. William never dreamed of giving
up his ecclesiastical supremacy or of exempting church-
men 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 ex-
emption 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 Eoman
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 Eng-
land was glad to offer it. The increased strictness as to
the marriage of the clergy tended the same way. Lan-
franc did not at once enforce the full rigour of Hilde-
brand'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 ex-
clusive body, with the Roman Bishop at their head.
144 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 contro-
versy between Henry and Thomas and for the humilia-
tion 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 peculi-
arity 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
ix. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 145
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 fre-
quent 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 Bee, the abbot of Saint Stephen's. If Lanfranc some-
times 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
L
146 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP. ix.
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
asjes 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 in-
vasions of Normandy, like the campaigns that won Eng-
land. 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
148 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 govern-
ment 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 149
to do. In this he is unlike those who came immediately
before and after him. In the lives of Harold and of
William Ruf us 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, Avhen 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
English 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 remark-
able 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 ap-
proach 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
150 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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.
Eevolt 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 inter-
rupted by the revolt of the Fenland. William's authority
was never 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 com-
manders 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 move-
ment was doubtless in favour of the kingship of Swegen.
But nothing was done by Danes and English together
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 151
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 English-
men 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 de-
fended, 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
152 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Eobert 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 ^Etheling 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 153
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 pro-
cess 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 mean-
while 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 main-
land ; 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 Here-
fordshire, 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
154 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Eng-
lish, 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 Scot-
land. 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 lord-
ships, 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 Lon-
don 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 155
than that of most of his actions. It is not easy to say
why Grospatric 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 im-
prisonment, 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 Mercians or the Northumbrians in the old sense,
whether English or Norman. But the defence of the
northern frontier needed an earl to rule Northumber-
land 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 any-
thing 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
156 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Nor-
mans; his position was perhaps higher than any but
the King's born kinsmen. But the whole tale of Wal-
theof 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 con-
science, 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 157
Bishop Walcher, a reforming prelate with whom Wal-
theof 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 Nor-
mandy, 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 Eichildis, the guardian of his young son Arnulf,
and his brother Eobert 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 Eichildis. Meanwhile, Matilda was acting
as regent of Normandy, with Earl William of Here-
ford as her counsellor. Eichildis sought help of her son's
two overlords, King Henry of Germany and King
Philip of France. Philip came in person ; the Ger-
man 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 over-
thrown by Eobert the Frisian in the battle of Cassel.
Arnulf and Earl William were killed ; Philip made
158 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 impres-
sion 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 contem-
porary German writers are strangely unlike one an-
other. 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, pro-
mising 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 en-
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 159
gaged in an Hungarian war, heard that the famous Arch-
bishop Hanno of Koln had leagued with William JBostar
so is his earliest surname written King of the Eng-
lish, 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 suc-
cessor 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
160 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 North-
ern 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 be-
tween 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 Nor-
mandy. 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 161
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 English-
men, 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 Con-
queror 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 sub-
mission. The new commune was abolished, but the Con-
queror swore to observe all the ancient rights of the city.
M
162 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Eobert 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 163
away his life in Flanders ; but Bishop Odo 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 pre-
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 settle-
ment 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. Wil-
liam 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
164 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 English-
man 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 165
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 com-
pany, 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 1 Weighing the accounts, it would
seem that, in the excitement of the bride-ale, he con-
sented to the treason, but that he thought better of it
166 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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.
Ealph, 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 167
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
Odo and Geoffrey ; the English people everywhere were
against the rebels. For this revolt offered no attraction
to English feeling had the undertaking been less hope-
less, 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, what-
ever 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.
168 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
At the Midwinter Gemdt of 1075-1076 Koger and
Waltheof were brought to trial. Ealph was condemned
in absence, like Eustace of Boulogne. Roger was
sentenced to forfeiture and imprisonment for life.
Waltheof made his defence; his sentence was de-
ferred ; he was kept at Winchester in a straiter im-
prisonment than before. At the Pentecostal Gem6t 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 ques-
tions hard to answer. It is not enough to say that
Waltheof was an Englishman, that it was William's
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 169
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 im-
prisonment, would have been enough. While other
Englishmen lost lands, honours, at most liberty, Wal-
theof 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 hus-
band 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 feel-
ing. 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.
170 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 con-
temporaries 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. Un-
failing 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 judge-
ment 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 171
of ancient exaggeration and a good deal of modern
misconception. The word forest is often misunder-
stood. 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 de-
struction 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 exag-
gerates 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
172 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
in William's character. The harrying of Northumber-
land was in itself a far greater crime, and involved far
more of human wretchedness. But it is not remem-
bered 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 Nort-
humberland 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 punish-
ment 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 Eichard, a youth of great promise, whose pro-
longed 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
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 173
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. An-
other 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 Wil-
liam 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 feel-
ing 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
174 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Odo 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 Nor-
man 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 Gem6t 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.
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 175
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 blind-
ing or mutilation of a few ringleaders. But William
was in Normandy in the midst of domestic and poli-
tical cares. He sent his brother Odo 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
176 WILLIAM THE CONQTJEROB. CHAP.
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 oppres-
sions 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,
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 177
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 Eobert 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
Eobert, his horse smitten by an arrow, the Conqueror
fell to the ground, and was saved only by an English-
man, 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
Kufus 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
N
178 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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. Eobert gained no special glory in Scotland ;
a second quarrel with his father followed, and Eobert
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 check, 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
Eobert.
The two next years, 1081-1082, William was in Eng-
land. 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; ac-
cording 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.
x. THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM. 179
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-Su-
sanne 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 pur-
chased 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
180 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP. x.
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 XL
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 king-
dom 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 Odo, 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,
182 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Odo 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 Odo for all his crimes. He had left him
as the lieutenant of his kingdom, and he had shown him-
self 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, Wil-
liam asked of his wise men.
He had to answer himself ; no other man dared to
speak. William then gave his judgement. The com-
mon 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
xi. THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM. 183
1083 he hastened from the death-bed of his wife to the
siege of Sainte-Susanne, and thence to the Midwinter
Gem6t 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 Wal-
theof 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 Eobert 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 Eng-
lish 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
184 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Nor-
mans. 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 ac-
cording 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 Gem6t 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
xi. THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM. 185
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 Win-
chester and Westminster. An extraordinary assembly
was held in the plain of Salisbury on the first day of
186 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, CHAP.
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 con-
fiscation, 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
xi. THE LAST YEAES OF WILLIAM. 187
are a little startled to find it incidentally set forth in so
many words in a case of no special importance. A priest
named Eobert 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 par-
ticular estate, so the principle that no man could hold
lands except by the King's grant (" Non licet terrain
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
188 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 par-
ticular 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 dis-
tinct 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 wonder-
fully instructive; but from the formulae alone no one
xi. THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM. 189
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 offend-
ers. Of these unlawful holdings of land, marked in the
technical language of the Survey as invasiones and occupa-
tiones, 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 in-
vasit" mean no more than that the canons of Saint
190 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
Paul's church in London held lands to which the Com-
missioners 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 dis-
putes 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 dis-
pute 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 ante-
cessor 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
xi. THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM. 191
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 Con-
queror, 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
192 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 sur-
render 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 Alen-
<jon 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. Eiding 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
xr. THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM. 193
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. Keligious
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
194 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Odo 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. Odo 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.
Kobert, the banished rebel, might seem to have forfeited
all claims to the succession. But the doctrine of heredi-
tary right had strengthened during the sixty years of
William's life. He is made to say that, though he fore-
sees the wretchedness of any land over which Eobert
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 Eufus, it must be re-
membered, still under the tutelage of his father and
Lanfranc had not yet shown his bad qualities ; he was
xi. THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM. 195
known as yet only as the dutiful son who fought for his
father against the rebel Eobert. 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 ^Etheling 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 know-
ledge 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 Eufus, 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 over-
throw, 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
196 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 Con-
queror 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 Con-
queror to a place among English statesmen, and to a
place in their highest rank Further than this we can-
not 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
xi. THE LAST YEAES OF WILLIAM. 197
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 leav-
ing 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 king-
doms 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,
198 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP.
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 con-
quest 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. Wil-
liam 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 with-
out any formal change in the nature of English king-
ship, 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 Eng-
lish 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 institu-
tions 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 con-
tinental lands. But the despotism of the crown called
forth the national spirit in a conscious and antagonistic
xi. THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM. 199
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 an-
other revolution, again at once conservative and pro-
gressive. 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 character-
istic 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 Avrought in
200 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. CHAP. xi.
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 preefuit 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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Third Edition, with New Preface. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d.
The Office of the Historical Professor. An Inaugural Lec-
ture read in the Museum at Oxford, October 15, 1884. Crown 8vo. 2s.
Disestablishment and Disendowment. "What are they ?
Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. is.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON.
Lectures to American Audiences. Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d.
CONTENTS: I. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES (i)
Old, Middle, and New England (2) The English Name (3) The First
Voyage and the Second (4) The Old England and the Second (5) The
English in their Second Home (6) The Second Voyage and the Third Home.
CONTENTS : II. THE PRACTICAL BEARING OF GENERAL EUROPEAN
HISTORY (i) Causes and their Effects (2) The Democratic City (3) The
Aristocratic City (4) The Ruling City and its Empire (5) The Elder and
the Newer England (6) Rome Transplanted.
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A 000677036 6
