Note 16 — Chapter XXV
Edgar Taylor translation
This confession may appear to be an odd commentary on the tenor of Wace's preceding history of the events leading to the conquest. It was perhaps in some quarters unpalatable here, for Duchesne's MS. reads directly the opposite:
'Engleterre ai cunquise a dreit.'
Orderic gives the confession, but less explicitly, thus: 'Neminem Anglici regni constituo hæredem.... Fasces igitur hujus regni, quod cum tot peccatis obtinui, nulli audeo tradere nisi Deo solo.' See the note on this passage in Lyttleton's Hen. II. vol. i. 397. Possibly William's admission would not, in his day, be understood as being at variance with any of the details given by Wace and other Norman historians. Harold, as we have seen, is treated as assuming with his brother Gurth the perfect moral and legal validity of his title as against William, and yet as shrinking from a personal contest with one to whom he had de facto, though by stratagem, become bound in allegiance. And William might, in a similar train of reasoning, maintain all the facts asserted by the Normans, bearing on the moral justice of the case as between him and Harold, and his personal right to punish treason in his man, and yet admit that Harold, having obtained by the gift of Edward, and by election and consecration, a strictly legal title, his eviction was tortuous, and could give his conqueror no right except that of force—none that he could lawfully transmit. Benoit states his title by conquest, not in the mitigated sense in which that word has been used by some of our legal antiquaries, but in its harshest application:
Deu regne est mais la seignori As eirs estraiz de Normendie: CUNQUISE l'unt cum chevalier Au FER TRENCHANT e al acier.
His account of William's speech is in our appendix.