Chapter VIII · THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.[497] A.D. 1028–1051. (continued 2)

Herlwin’s government as Abbot.

In this valley it was that Herlwin finally fixed his infant settlement, devoting to it his own small possessions in the valley itself, and obtaining from Count Gilbert a grant of the adjoining wood, one of the most precious possessions of the lordship of Brionne.^[656] There Herlwin built his first church, and added a wooden cloister, which he afterwards exchanged for one of stone.^[657] There he ruled his house in peace and wisdom, his knowledge of the outer world, and especially 222his familiarity with the laws of Normandy, standing him, we are told, in good stead.^[658] Bec seemed destined to the ordinary lot of a monastic house—to a short succession of men of primitive zeal and primitive virtue, followed by a period of worldly prosperity, leading to its usual results of coldness and laxity. And such doubtless would have been its fate, the glory of Bec would have been as transitory as that of other monastic houses, but for the appearance of |Effects of the admission of Lanfranc.| one illustrious man, who came to be enrolled as a private member of the brotherhood, and who gave Bec for a while a special and honourable character with which hardly any other monastery in Christendom could compare. Abbot |Herlwin’s death. 1078.| Herlwin survived his first conversion forty-four years;^[659] his first humble church was pulled down and rebuilt, and |The church consecrated by Lanfranc. 1077.| the new fabric was hallowed in his presence by one whom he had himself received to the monastic order, one who had made Bec the light of the world, and who then returned to his old home in all the greatness of the Patriarch of the nations beyond the sea.^[660] If the first origin of the house was owing to the simple devotion of its founder and Abbot Herlwin, its lasting fame and splendour were no less owing to the varied learning and soaring genius of its renowned Prior Lanfranc.

Origin and character of Lanfranc.

The future Primate of England was one of the most illustrious witnesses to that feature in the Norman character which made the men of that race welcome strangers from every quarter, and which led to the settlement of so many eminent men of various nations, both in Normandy itself and in the conquered lands of Britain and 223Sicily.^[661] In the days of Richard the Good, monks and priests had flocked into Normandy, even from such distant lands as Greece and Armenia, and the Norman Duke had kept up a close intercourse even with the monks of Mount Sinai.^[662] The first great teacher of Bec came from a nearer, though |His birth at Pavia. 1005.| still a distant, region. Lanfranc, Prior of Bec, Abbot of Saint Stephen’s, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a native of the Lombard city of Pavia, and was born of a family which, though perhaps not technically noble, was at any rate |His learning;| eminent and honourable.^[663] He was full of all the secular learning of the time, and his range of study seems to have taken in the unusual accomplishment of a knowledge of Greek.^[664] A knowledge of that tongue was then probably less rare than it became somewhat later, and it is an accomplishment which might be looked for in Italy, even in the northern part of the peninsula, more naturally than 224|his knowledge of Greek,| in any country north of the Alps. At the time of Lanfranc’s birth and youth, a large part of Southern Italy was still subject to the Eastern Emperors, and the use of the Greek language survived, both in Sicily and on the main land, long after the establishment of the Norman dynasty. A knowledge of that tongue must therefore have been highly expedient for those who were likely to have any intercourse, diplomatic or commercial, with the parts of Italy where it was spoken; still we cannot suppose that its acquirement formed any part of the ordinary course of study |and of Civil Law.| of a Lombard scholar. But the great object of Lanfranc’s study was one specially adapted to the Imperialist city where he was born, the study of the Civil Law. It was an hereditary calling in his family; his father Hanbald had been a lawyer of distinction,^[665] and his son more than maintained the credit of his house. As a pleader, he was eminently successful; the veterans of the courts could not resist the eloquence and the learning with which he spoke, and his legal opinions were accepted as decisive by the magistrates of his native city.^[666] His father died while Lanfranc was still young, and his honours and offices were offered to his son.^[667] Why a man who had such fair prospects at home should have forsaken that home for the distant and barbarous Normandy, it is not easy to guess.^[668] We are told only that he heard that Normandy was a land which 225|He opens a school at Avranches. 1039.| lacked learning, and that its young Duke was disposed to give encouragement to learned men.^[669] At all events, early in the period of anarchy which formed the early years of the reign of William, Lanfranc came into Normandy with a following of scholars, and opened a school in the episcopal city of Avranches.^[670] The cathedral church of that |1172.| city beheld in after times the penance by which the greatest successor of William atoned for his share in the death of the most renowned among the successors of Lanfranc. But the glory of Avranches has passed away. From it, alone among the seven episcopal towns of Normandy, minster and Bishoprick have wholly vanished.^[671] But, for those few years of the life of Lanfranc, Avranches must have been an intellectual centre without a rival on this side of the Alps. The fame of the great teacher was spread abroad, and scholars flocked to him from all quarters. But as yet his learning was wholly secular; his pursuits were peaceful, but he thought perhaps less of divine things than Herlwin had thought when he rode after Count Gilbert to battle. At last divine grace touched his heart; a sudden conversion made him resolve to embrace the monastic |He becomes a monk at Bec. 1042.| profession. He left Avranches suddenly, without giving any notice to his friends and scholars, and set forth to seek for the poorest and most lowly monastery that could be found, for one which his own fame had never reached.^[672] A happy accident led him to Bec, which then 226fully answered his ideal.^[673] Received as a monk by Abbot Herlwin, he strove to hide himself from the world; he even at one time thought of leaving the monastery, and leading a life of utter solitude in the wilderness.^[674] But the |He becomes Prior. 1045.| Abbot required him on his obedience to remain, and he was advanced to the dignity of Prior.^[675] He had already proved his fitness to command by his readiness to obey. His predecessor in the Priorship, an unlearned man, had bidden him, when reading in the refectory, to shorten the second syllable of docere. The great scholar did as he was bid, deeming holy obedience to be something higher than the rules of Donatus.^[676] But such necessity was not long laid upon him; such a light as his could not long be hid under a bushel; his fame was again spread abroad, and, with it, the fame of the house in which he sojourned. Clerks and scholars, men of noble birth, even sons of princes, flocked to profit by the instruction of the learned Prior, and enriched the Abbey with costly gifts for his sake.^[677] 227The society increased so fast that the buildings were found to be too small, and the site not healthy enough for so great a multitude.^[678] By the persuasion of Lanfranc, Herlwin was induced to change his abode once more, and to raise a third house, larger and more stately than either of its predecessors,^[679] but still within the same valley and |His favour with William.| upon the banks of the same beck. At last the name of the Prior of Bec reached the ears of Duke William himself. Lanfranc became his trusted counsellor,^[680] and we shall presently find him acting zealously and successfully on his sovereign’s behalf, in pursuit of the object which, next to the Crown of England, was nearest to William’s heart. |He appears at the Synods of Rome and Vercelli. 1049, 1050.| The fame of Lanfranc soon spread beyond the bounds of Normandy; he appeared, as we have already seen, at a succession of synods, as the champion of the received doctrine of the Church.^[681] The theological position of Lanfranc I leave to be discussed by others;^[682] it is enough to say that, summoned before Pope and Council as a suspected heretic, he came away from Rome and Vercelli with the reputation of the most profound and most orthodox doctor of his time.^[683]

The monastery of Ouche or Saint Evroul.

228The monastery of Ouche or Saint Evroul had, as far as the eleventh century was concerned, an origin of a different kind from that of Bec; but its story is really little more than that of Bec carried back into an earlier age. That is to say, while Bec was altogether a new foundation, Saint Evroul was, like many other religious houses both in England and Normandy, a restoration of an earlier one. In both countries the Scandinavian invaders had destroyed or pillaged countless churches and monasteries. Many of these last, sometimes after complete destruction, sometimes after dragging on a feeble existence during the intermediate time, rose again, like Crowland and Jumièges, in more than their former greatness. But the case of Saint Evroul was a peculiar one. Its temporary fall was owing, not to the devastations of heathen Northmen, but to the wars between Christian |Story of Ebrulf or Evroul. 575.| Normandy and Christian France. The history of its founder, Ebrulf or Evroul, a saint of the sixth century, is, in many respects, a forestalling of the history of Herlwin of Bec.^[684] Of noble birth in the city of Bayeux,—perhaps therefore of Saxon, rather than of either Frankish or Gaulish, blood,—high in favour at the court of Hlothar the son of Hlodwig, he lived, even as a layman, the life of a saint.^[685] At last he forsook the world; his wife and himself both took monastic vows; but Ebrulf, as Lanfranc had wished to do, presently forsook his monastery for a deeper seclusion. With three companions only, he sought out a lonely spot by the river Charenton, close by the forest of Ouche, on the borders of the dioceses of Lisieux, Evreux, 229and Seez. There he lived a hermit’s life, adorned, as we are told, by many miracles,^[686] and his cell, like the cell of Guthlac at Crowland, became the small beginning of a |Monastery of Saint Evroul; it escapes the Danish ravages;| famous monastery. The secluded site of the house saved it from the ravages of the Northmen, and the votaries of Saint Evroul, with almost unique good luck, remained undisturbed, while Hasting and Rolf were overthrowing so many holy places of their brethren elsewhere.^[687] But, during the troubled minority of Richard the Fearless, when King Lewis of Laôn and Duke Hugh of Paris were invading the defenceless Duchy,^[688] the monks of Saint Evroul received two seemingly honourable, but, as it |but is pillaged by Hugh the Great. 943.| turned out, highly dangerous, guests. These were Herlwin, Abbot of Saint Peter’s at Orleans, the Chancellor of Hugh the Great, and Ralph of Drangy his Chamberlain.^[689] Both, we are told, were men of great piety, but they showed their piety in a strange fashion. Soon after their visit, Duke Hugh gave orders for the ravage of that part of Normandy. His devout officers either despised or scrupled at plunder of a more vulgar kind;^[690] they remembered the 230hospitality of the monks of Saint Evroul, and requited it by carrying off all the ornaments of their church, including, what they most valued, the relics of their founder and other saints. The holy spoil was duly shared among various churches of the Duchy of France,^[691] and a large |The monastery forsaken.| body of the monks of Saint Evroul followed the objects of their veneration. A few however remained behind, and the brotherhood still dragged on a feeble existence for some time. At last the house of Saint Evroul was utterly forsaken and forgotten, and miracles were needed to point |The church restored by Restold.| out the spot where it had stood. A pious priest^[692] from Beauvais, Restold by name, moved by a divine vision, came and dwelt on the spot, and found benefactors willing to repair the ruined church.^[693] At last one special benefactor |Geroy and his family.| arose. Geroy, a man of great valour and piety, was lord of Escalfoy by the forest of Ouche, and of Montreuil near the Dive.^[694] Of mingled French and Breton extraction, he had been attached to the fortunes of the elder William of Belesme, probably as a vassal of some of the estates held by him under the Crown of France. In a |c. 1015.| fight against Count Herbert of Maine, when William and all the rest of his followers had fled, Geroy regained the day by his single valour.^[695] In return for this exploit, William introduced him at the court of Richard the Good, by whom he was allowed to succeed to the lordships already 231spoken of.^[696] They had been the property of Helgo, a Norman noble, to whose daughter Geroy had been betrothed, but the marriage was hindered by the premature death of the bride.^[697] By another wife he had a numerous family, many of whom were distinguished in Norman |William son of Geroy.| history.^[698] He was himself succeeded by his second son William who, like his father, was attached to the house of Belesme, and also distinguished himself in the war with Maine.^[699] He had however to contend for the possession of his estates against the violence of Count Gilbert of Brionne, a man who, on this as on some other occasions,^[700] seems to have failed to carry into his private relations those principles of honourable conduct which in so marked a way distinguished his administration of public affairs. William was a brave soldier and a faithful vassal, ready to undergo any personal loss on behalf of his lord or of 232his friend.^[701] He was also bountiful to the Church, though he strictly maintained the ecclesiastical privileges of his own lordships.^[702] Twice he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, once during the height of his prosperity, and once after the great misfortune which clouded his later days. For |Blinded by William Talvas.| he it was whom the fierce Talvas, in defiance of every tie of gratitude, of hospitality, and of feudal honour, blinded and mutilated when he came as a guest to his bridal.^[703] The daughter of Talvas too, the cruel Mabel, pursued the house of Geroy throughout life with unrelenting hatred.^[704] |He grants Saint Evroul to Bec.| In his old age he became a monk at Bec, a house to which he had already been a benefactor.^[705] He had given to Herlwin and his monks the lands of Saint Evroul and the church lately restored by Restold. It now became a cell to the Abbey, inhabited by a small body of monks with Lanfranc at their head.^[706] But presently William’s nephews, Hugh and Robert of Grantmesnil,^[707] were designing the foundation of a monastery near the lordship on the Oudon from which they took their name. 233Of these two brothers, Robert became a monk of Saint Evroul; of Hugh we shall hear again in the history both |Restoration of Saint Evroul. 1050.| of Normandy and of England. Their pious uncle approved of the design, but pointed out that the site which they had chosen was lacking in the two great monastic necessaries of wood and water.^[708] Let them rather join with him in restoring to its ancient splendour the fallen house of Saint Evroul, placed on a spot suited for every monastic want.^[709] Uncle and nephews joined their energies and their purses; the rights of Bec over the church and lands were exchanged for another estate, and the new Saint Evroul arose with the full licence of Duke William, of Archbishop Malger, and of the other Prelates of Normandy. Monks were brought from Jumièges, and a brother of |1050.| that house, Theodoric by name, became the first Abbot of the new foundation.^[710] But the house seems to have been |1058.| far less fortunate than Bec in its rulers. Theodoric after a while laid aside his office, driven to resignation, it is said, by the cabals of the co-founder Robert of Grantmesnil, who, having made his profession in the house, had obtained |1059.| the rank of Prior.^[711] Robert was chosen to the |1063.| Abbotship, but, a few years after, he was himself deposed, 234or driven to resignation, by Duke William,^[712] and long controversies followed between him and his successor Osbern.^[713]

I have given a sketch of the origin of these two famous monasteries, partly because their stories bring before us so many members of the leading Norman families, but mainly |Connexion of the religious movement in Normandy with the Conquest of England.| as illustrating the great religious movement which was then at work in Normandy, and which was not without its share in bringing about the Conquest of England. When we come to a later stage in our history, we shall see with what art William, and his trusty counsellor Lanfranc, contrived to appeal to the religious feelings of the Normans, to represent the English King as a sinner against the local saints of Normandy, and to represent the Conquest of England as a holy war undertaken to chastise the ungodly. Such a vein of sentiment could hardly have been safely appealed to except at a time when there was a great religious stir in the national mind. One side of this movement is shown in the foundation of so many monasteries, in the zeal with which men gave of their substance for their erection, in the eagerness with which men, often the same men, pressed to become members of the holy brotherhoods. But a still more honourable fruit of the religious mind of Normandy, one however which Normandy only shared with many other parts of Europe, is to be found in the acceptance during this period of the famous Truce of God.

The Truce of God.

This extraordinary institution is the most speaking witness, at once to the ferocity of the times, and also to 235the deep counter feeling which underlaid men’s minds. Clergy and laity alike felt that the state of things which they saw daily before their eyes was a standing sin against God and man, repugnant alike to natural humanity and to the precepts of the Christian religion. States were everywhere so subdivided, governments were everywhere so weak, that, in most parts of Europe, every man who had the needful force at his command simply did that which was right in his own eyes. We cannot doubt that in those parts of Britain where the authority of the English Kings was really established, the evil was smaller than it was in any part of Gaul.^[714] Neither can we doubt that in Normandy, during the minority of William, the evil was even greater than it was in other parts of Gaul. But the extreme disorder of that minority was simply an exaggerated form of what might be called the normal state of things throughout the greater part of Western |Private war.| Europe. Every man claimed the right of private war against every other man who was not bound to him by any special tie as his lord or his vassal. And the distinction between private war and mere robbery and murder was not always very sharply drawn. It is clear that, in such a state of things, an utterly unscrupulous man, to whom warfare, however unjust, was a mere trifle, had a decided advantage over his more peaceable neighbours. A few such men as William Talvas might throw a whole province into disorder; and men who were in no way naturally disposed to wrong or violence were necessarily driven to constant warfare in sheer self-defence. The poor and the weak were of course the chief victims; when one gentleman harried the lands of another, the immediate tillers of the earth must have suffered far more severely 236than their master. It was the tenants of Herlwin, rather than Herlwin himself, who had most bitterly to complain |Undercurrent against the violence of the time.| of the ravages of Count Gilbert.^[715] The lower classes then had especial reason to curse the lawlessness of the times; yet we can well believe that there were many men of higher rank, who were dragged into these wretched contests against their own will, and who would have been well pleased to keep their swords sheathed, save when the lawful command of their sovereign required them to be drawn. These two contending feelings can always be traced side by side. Every attempt to put any kind of check on the violence of the times was always received with general good will; and yet the practical result of so many praiseworthy attempts was, after all, something extremely small. The men who were ready to keep the peace, and to observe the rules made to preserve it, were left in a manner at the mercy of those who refused to obey any rule whatsoever. Whatever laws were made to preserve the peace, the peaceable man was still, as before, driven to fight in his own defence. Still the movement in favour of law and order was a very remarkable and a very general one. The call to observe peace towards Christians at home was a call, quite as general, though much more gradual, than the call to wage war against the |Comparison between the Truce of God and the Crusades.| Infidels in other lands. But the call to the Crusade fell in with every side of the temper of the times; the proclamation of the Truce of God fell in with only one, and that its least powerful, side. Good and bad men alike were led by widely different motives to rush to the Holy War. The men who endeavoured to obey the Truce of God must often have found themselves the helpless victims of those who despised it.

A movement on behalf of peace and good will towards 237|The form taken by the movement necessarily ecclesiastical.| men could not fail in those days to assume an ecclesiastical form. As of old the Amphiktyonic Council, the great religious synod of Greece, strove to put some bounds to the horrors of war as waged between Greek and Greek,^[716] so now, in the same spirit, a series of Christian synods strove, by means of ecclesiastical decrees and ecclesiastical censures, to put some bounds to the horrors of war as |Moderation of the reform attempted.| waged between Christian and Christian. And at both times the spiritual power showed its wisdom in not attempting too much. War was not wholly forbidden in either case, for such a precept would have been hopelessly impossible to carry out. But certain extreme measures were to be avoided, certain classes of persons were to be respected, certain holy seasons were to be kept altogether free from warfare. Such at least was the form in which the Truce of God was preached in Normandy. But Normandy was one of the last countries to receive the Truce, and it seems not to have appeared there in its earliest shape. It would rather seem as if the first attempts at its establishment had tried to compass too much, and as if later preachers of peace had been driven to content themselves with a much less close approach to |The Truce first preached in Aquitaine. 1034.| universal brotherhood. The movement began in Aquitaine, and the vague and rhetorical language of our authority would seem to imply that all war, at any rate all private war, was forbidden under pain of ecclesiastical censures.^[717] It must not be forgotten that, in that age, it 238|Difficulty of defining public and private war.| must have been exceedingly difficult to draw the distinction between public and private war. In England indeed, where an efficient constitutional system existed, the distinction was plain. Except when sudden invasion required the immediate action of the local power, no war could be lawful which was not decreed by the King and his Witan. There might be rebellions and civil wars, but there was no recognized private warfare in the continental sense. But in Gaul it would have been impossible to deny the right of war and peace to the great vassals of the Crown, to the sovereigns of Normandy and Aquitaine. And, if the vassals of the Crown might make war on each other, on what principle could the same right be refused to their vassals, to the Lords of Alençon and Brionne? Among the endless links of the feudal chain, it was hard to find the exact point where sovereignty ended and where simple property began. A preacher therefore who denounced private war must have had some difficulty in |Enthusiastic reception of the Truce.| so doing without denouncing war altogether. But the doctrine, hard as it might be to carry out in practice, was rapturously received at its first announcement. As the first preaching of the Crusade was met with one universal cry of “God wills it,” so the Bishops, Abbots, and other preachers of the Truce were met with a like universal cry of Peace, Peace, Peace.^[718] Men bound themselves to God and to one another to abstain from all wrong and violence, and they engaged solemnly to renew the 239obligation every five years.^[719] From Aquitaine the movement spread through Burgundy, royal and ducal.^[720] But it seems to have been gradually found that the establishment |Relaxation about 1041.| of perfect peace on earth was hopeless. After seven years from the first preaching of peace, we find the requirements of its apostles greatly relaxed. It was found vain to forbid all war, even all private war. All that was now attempted was to forbid violence of every kind from the evening of Wednesday till the morning of Monday.^[721] It |Reception of the Truce in Burgundy and Lotharingia.| was in this shape that the Truce was first preached in northern and eastern Gaul. The days of Christ’s supper, of His passion, of His rest in the grave and His resurrection, were all to be kept free from strife and bloodshed. The Burgundian Bishops were zealous in the cause; so especially was Richard, Bishop of Verdun in Lotharingia.^[722] But Bishop Gerard of Cambray maintained, on the other 240|Opposition of Gerard of Cambray.| hand, that the whole affair was no concern of the ecclesiastical power. It was, he argued, the business of temporal rulers to fight, and the business of spiritual men to pray; the pious scheme of his brethren could never be carried out, and the attempt to enforce it could lead only to an increase of false-swearing.^[723] This Prelate, in his worldly wisdom, seems to have looked deeper into the hearts of the men of his time than his more hopeful and enthusiastic brethren. At last the new teaching reached Normandy. The luxury of mutual destruction was dear to the Norman mind; for a long time any restraint upon it was strongly resisted, and even the preaching of Bishop Richard himself had for a long time no effect.^[724] Miracles were needed to convince so stiff-necked a generation, but at last the apostolic labours of Hagano, the successor of Richard, |The Truce received at the Councils of Caen [1042],| brought even Normandy to a better mind.^[725] The young Duke and his counsellors were urgent in behalf of the Truce, and it was at last received by the Clergy and Laity of Normandy in the famous Council held for that purpose at Caen.^[726] We are told that it was most carefully 241observed;^[727] but, nearly forty years after, when the long reign of William was drawing towards its end, it had to be |and Lillebonne [1080].| again ordained in another Council at Lillebonne, and all the powers of the State, ecclesiastical and temporal, were called on to help in enforcing its observance.^[728]

The men who laboured to put even this small check on the violence of the times are worthy of eternal honour, and it is probable that the institution of the Truce of God really did something for a while to lessen the frightful anarchy into which Normandy had fallen. But we can hardly doubt that a far more effectual check was supplied by the increasing strength of William’s government, as he drew nearer to manhood, and more and more fully displayed the stern and vigorous determination of his character. But neither the one nor the other could avail wholly to preserve Normandy for some years to come |Wide spread conspiracy against William. 1047.| either from civil war or from foreign invasion. A far more deeply spread conspiracy than any that we have as yet heard of was now formed against the Duke. We have now reached one of the great epochs in the life of the Conqueror; we shall soon have to tell of his first battle 242and his first victory. Within a few years after the proclamation of the Truce of God, not this or that isolated Baron, but the whole of the most Norman part of Normandy |Intrigues of Guy of Burgundy.| rose in open revolt against its sovereign. The prime mover in the rebellion was Guy of Burgundy.^[729] He |His friendship with the Duke, and his large possessions.| had been brought up with the Duke as his friend and kinsman,^[730] and he had received large possessions from his bounty. Among other broad lands, he held Vernon, the border fortress on the Seine, so often taken and retaken in the wars between France and Normandy. He held also Brionne, the castle on the Risle, lately the home of William’s faithful guardian Count Gilbert.^[731] But the old jealousy was never lulled to sleep; the sway of the Bastard was insupportable, and, the greater the qualities that William displayed, the more insupportable was it doubtless felt to be. William had now reached manhood. After such a discipline as he had gone through, his nineteen years of life had given him all the caution and experience of a far more advanced age. He was as ready and as able to show himself a born leader of men as Cnut had been at the same time of life.^[732] The turbulent spirits of Normandy began to feel that they had found a master; unless a blow were struck in time, the days of anarchy and licence, the days of castle-building and oppression, would |He plots with the lords of the Bessin and Côtentin.| soon be over. Guy of Brionne therefore found many ready listeners, especially among the great lords of the true Norman land west of the Dive. He, the lawful heir of their Dukes, no bastard, no tanner’s grandson, but sprung of a lawful marriage between the princely houses 243of Burgundy and Normandy, claimed the Duchy as his right by birth.^[733] But, if the lords of the Bessin and the |Scheme for a division of the Duchy.| Côtentin would aid him in dispossessing the Bastard, he would willingly share the land with them.^[734] This most probably means that he would content himself with the more purely French parts of the Duchy, the original grant to Rolf, and would leave the Barons of the later settlements in the enjoyment of independence. We can thus understand, what at first sight seems puzzling, why the cause of Guy was taken up with such zeal. Otherwise it is hard to see why the chiefs of any part of Normandy, and, above all, the chiefs of this more strictly Scandinavian part, should cast aside a prince who was at any rate a native Norman, in favour of one whose connexion with Normandy was only by the spindle side, and who must have seemed |Geographical division of Parties;| in their eyes little better than a Frenchman. We can thus also understand the geographical division of parties during the war which followed. William is faithfully supported by the French districts to the East; by Rouen and the 244|Rouen and the French lands loyal to William.| whole land to the right of the Dive. These are the districts which the division between Guy and the confederate Lords would have given to the Burgundian prince, and which no doubt armed zealously against any such arrangement. To them the overthrow of William’s authority meant their own handing over to a foreign ruler. But to |Bayeux and the Danish lands join the rebellion.| the inhabitants, at any rate to the great lords, of the Lower Normandy, the Scandinavian land, it would seem that the struggle against the ducal power was simply a struggle for renewed independence. We are told that the sympathies of the mass of the people, even in the Bessin and the Côtentin, lay with William.^[735] This is quite possible. The peasant revolt may well have left behind it some root of abiding bitterness, bitterness which would show itself far more strongly against the immediate lords of the soil than against the distant sovereign, who is, in such cases, always looked to as a possible protector. But the great lords of the western districts joined eagerly in the rebellion; and the smaller gentry, willingly or unwillingly, followed their banners. The descendants of the second colony of Rolf,^[736] of the colonies of William Longsword and Harold Blaatand, drew the sword against the domination of the districts which, even a hundred years before, had become French.^[737] Saxon Bayeux and Danish Coutances rose against Romanized Rouen and Evreux. We know not whether the old speech and the old worship may not still have lingered in some out-of-the-way corners; it is certain that the difference in feeling between the two districts was still living and working, just as the outward difference is still to this day stamped on their inhabitants. |Rebel leaders;| The foremost men of western Normandy at once attached themselves to Guy, and joined zealously in his plans. First in the revolt was Nigel or Neal of Saint Saviour, 245Viscount^[738] of Coutances, the son of the chief who had, forty-six |Neal of Saint Saviour.| years before, beaten back the host of Æthelred.^[739] The elder Neal had died, full of years, during the days of anarchy,^[740] and his son was destined to an equally long possession of his honours. In the very heart of his peninsula stood his castle by the Ouve, already consecrated by a small college of Canons, the foundation of his grandfather Roger, soon to give way to his own famous Abbey of Saint Saviour.^[741] This point formed the natural centre of the whole conspiracy. From that castle, Neal, the ruler of the Côtentin, commanded the whole of that varied region, its rich meads, its hills and valleys, its rocks and marshes, the dreary landes by the great minster of Lessay, the cliffs which look down on the fortress of Cæsar, and which had stood as beacons to guide the sails of Harold Blaatand to the rescue.^[742] The Viscount of Saint Saviour now became the chief leader of the rebellion, won over by the promises and gifts of Guy, who did not scruple to rob his mother of her possessions, and to bestow them on his ally.^[743] With Neal 246|Randolf, Viscount of Bayeux.| stood Randolf, Viscount of Bayeux, who, from his castle of Brichessart, held the same sway over the Saxons of the Bessin which Neal held over the Danes of the Côtentin.^[744] |Hamon Dentatus.| In the same company was Hamon, lord of Thorigny, lord too of the steep of Creuilly, where a vast fabric of later times has displaced his ancient donjon, and where the adjoining church bears witness to the splendour and bounty of the generation immediately following his own.^[745] Some personal peculiarity entitled him to bear, in the language of our Latin chroniclers, one of the most glorious cognomina of old Rome, and Hamon Dentatus became the forefather of men famous in British as well as in Norman history.^[746] One loyal chronicler, in his zeal, speaks of the rebel by the strange name of Antichrist;^[747] but, as in the case of Thurstan of Falaise, the stain was wiped out in the next generation. His son, Robert Fitz-Hamon, was destined to set the seal to the work of Offa and of Harold, to press down the yoke for ever upon the necks of the southern Cymry, and to surround his princely fortress of 247Cardiff with the lowlier castles of his twelve homagers of |Grimbald of Plessis.| the land of Morganwg. Hardly less famous was a third Baron from the Saxon land, Grimbald of Plessis, whose ancestors and whose descendants have won no renown, but whose own name still remains impressed upon his fortress, and whose sister’s son became the forefather of a mighty house in England. Of her stock came William of Albini, who, like the Tudor of later days, won the love of a widowed Queen, and whose name still lives among his works in the fortresses of Arundel and Castle Rising.^[748] By the help of these men the claims of the Burgundian became widely acknowledged. They swore to support his rights, and to deprive the Bastard of the Duchy which he had invaded, whether by force of arms or by the baser acts |Preparations for the revolt.| of treachery. They put their castles into a state of thorough defence; they stored them for a campaign or a siege,^[749] and made ready for the most extensive and thoroughly organized revolt which the troubled reign of the young Duke had yet beheld.

The revolt began, as an earlier revolt had begun,^[750] with a treacherous attempt to seize or murder the Duke, in which Grimbald seems to have been the immediate agent.^[751] |Attempt to seize William at Valonges.| The opportunity was tempting, as William was now at a point in Neal’s own Viscounty, at no great distance from his own castle. He was at Valognes, the old town so rich in Roman remains, and the rich and fanciful outline of whose Gothic cupola is one of the most striking objects in 248the architecture of the district. Perhaps some scent of the coming danger had reached him, and he had ventured into the enemy’s country in order to search out matters for himself. But, in any case, he did not neglect the chosen amusement to which he and his race were given up, even beyond other men of their time. Several days had been spent in the employment of William’s favourite weapon the bow^[752] against either savage or harmless victims. At |William warned by his fool.| last, one night, when all his party, except his immediate household, had left him, while he was yet in his first sleep, Gallet his fool, like his uncle Walter at an earlier stage of his life,^[753] burst into his room, staff in hand, and aroused him. If he did not arise and flee for his life, he would never leave the Côtentin a living man. The Duke arose, |His escape.| half dressed in haste, leaped on his horse, seemingly alone, and rode for his life all that night. A bright moon guided him, and he pressed on till he reached the estuary formed by the rivers Ouve and Vire. There the ebbing tide supplied a ford, which was afterwards known as the Duke’s Way. William crossed in safety, and landed in the district of Bayeux, near the church of Saint Clement. He entered the building, and prayed for God’s help on his way. His natural course would now have been to strike for Bayeux; but the city was in the hands of his enemies; he determined therefore to keep the line between Bayeux and the sea, and thus to take his chance of reaching the loyal districts. As the sun rose, he drew near to the church and castle of Rye,^[754] the dwelling-place of a faithful vassal named Hubert. The Lord of Rye was standing at 249his own gate, between the church and the mound on which his castle was raised.^[755] William was still urging on |His reception by Hubert of Rye.| his foaming horse past the gate; but Hubert knew and stopped his sovereign, and asked the cause of this headlong ride. He heard that the Duke was flying for his life before his enemies. He welcomed his prince to his house, he set him on a fresh horse, he bade his three sons ride by his side, and never leave him till he was safely lodged |He reaches Falaise.| in his own castle of Falaise.^[756] The command of their father was faithfully executed by his loyal sons. We are not surprised to hear that the house of Rye rose high in William’s favour; and we can hardly grudge them their share in the lands of England, when we find that Eudes the son of Hubert, the King’s Dapifer and Sheriff of Essex, was not only the founder of the great house of Saint John at Colchester, but won a purer fame as one of the very few Normans in high authority who knew how to win the love and confidence of the conquered English.^[757]

Progress of the rebellion.

250The Bessin and the Côtentin were now in open rebellion. We are told that men cursed the rebels, and wished well to the Duke in their hearts. But the revolted Barons had for the time the upper hand. They seized on the ducal revenues within their districts, and robbed and slew many who still clave to their allegiance. The dominion of the male line of Rolf, the very existence of Normandy as an united state, seemed in jeopardy. William did not venture to meet his enemies with the forces of the districts which |He seeks help of the King of the French.| still remained faithful. He was driven to seek for foreign aid, and he sought it in a quarter where one would think that nothing short of despair could have led him to think of seeking for it. He craved help of one who was indeed bound to grant it by every official and by every personal tie, but who had hitherto acted towards William only as a faithless enemy, ready to grasp at any advantage, however mean and treacherous. The Duke of the Normans, driven to such humiliation by the intrigues of an ungrateful kinsman, crossed the French border, and made his suit to his |Henry comes to his help in person.| Lord King Henry at Poissy.^[758] He met with favour in the eyes of his suzerain; a French army, with the King at its head, was soon ready to march to the support of Duke William against his rebels. It is hard to see why Henry, 251whose whole earlier and later conduct is of so opposite a kind, stood forth for this once faithfully to discharge the duties of an honourable overlord towards an injured |His probable motives.| vassal. One would have thought that a revolt which, above all others, tended to the dismemberment of Normandy would have been hailed by Henry as exactly falling in with the interests of the suzerain power. Instead of the one strong and united state which had hitherto cut him off from the whole coast from Britanny to Ponthieu, there was now a chance of the establishment of two or three small principalities, each insignificant in itself, and all probably hostile to one another. Such states would run a fair risk of being recovered one by one by their overlord. Henry had himself in past years encroached on the Norman territory, and he had not scrupled to give encouragement to Norman traitors against their own sovereign. Yet the common interest of princes may have led him to see that it was bad policy to abet open rebellion, and he may have doubted whether the aggrandizement of the mutinous Barons of the Bessin and the Côtentin would be any real gain to France. Such neighbours might prove far more turbulent as vassals, and might not be much more easy to subdue as enemies, than the comparatively firm and orderly government of the Dukes of Rouen. At all events French aid was freely granted to the princely suppliant.^[759] The King set forth at the head of his army 252to join the troops which William had gathered from the loyal districts, and to share with them in a decisive encounter with the rebel forces.

Battle of Val-ès-dunes, 1047;

The French and the loyal Normans joined their forces some miles to the east of Caen, in the neighbourhood of the memorable field of Val-ès-dunes. The spot is not one specially attractive in itself; it is not one of those spots which seem marked out by the hand of nature as specially designed to become the scene of great historical events. But we shall see that, for the purposes of the particular battle which was fought there, no ground could have been better suited. Nor, at first sight, does the fight of Val-ès-dunes, an engagement of cavalry between two Norman factions, seem to have any claim to a place among the |its importance in the life of William.| great battles of history. But Val-ès-dunes was the first pitched battle of the Conqueror; it was the field on which he first won a right to that lofty title, and the lessons which he learned there stood him in good stead on a far more awful day. And, more than this, it was there that William conquered his own land and his own people, and by that earlier conquest both schooled and strengthened himself for his mightier conquest beyond the sea. Normandy had first to be firmly grasped, and her fierce Barons to be brought under the yoke, before the hand of William could be stretched forth to fix its grasp on England, and to press the yoke upon the necks of her people. In a word, the strife with Randolf and Neal and their revolted provinces was the needful forerunner of the strife with Harold and his Kingdom. The tourney of Norman horsemen upon the open slope of Val-ès-dunes was William’s school of fence for the sterner clashing of axe and spear upon the palisaded heights of Senlac.

Val-ès-dunes a battle between Romanized and Teutonic Normandy.

253And there is another aspect in which the two battles have a common feature. Val-ès-dunes, no less than Senlac, was a struggle between the Roman and the Teuton. The fact was not indeed forced in the same way upon men’s minds by the outward contrast of language, of tactics, of every badge of national difference. Still it is none the less true that, at Val-ès-dunes, the old Scandinavian blood of Normandy found its match, and more than its match, in the power of France and of the French portions of the Norman Duchy. Danish Coutances and Saxon Bayeux were brought face to face with Romanized |District which supported William.| Rouen and Evreux and with royal Paris itself. From all the lands east of the Dive men flocked to the Ducal standard. The episcopal cities of Lisieux and Evreux, along with primatial Rouen, sent forth their loyal burghers, and the men of the surrounding districts pressed no less eagerly to the muster. They came, according to the old division, which the suppression of the peasant revolt had not wholly broken up, arranged in companies which still retained the name of communes, suggesting the freedom which they had perhaps not wholly lost.^[760] From beyond the Seine came the troops of Caux, and from the south of the Duchy came the men of Auge, and of Duke Robert’s County of Hiesmes. And who can doubt that foremost among them all were the burghers of William’s own Falaise, zealous on behalf of a Prince who was also their own immediate countryman? But the whole west of Normandy, the land where the old Norman speech and spirit had longest lingered, was arrayed on the side of the rebels. Except the contingent of his own birthplace and its neighbourhood, no part of the Duke’s force seems to have come from the lands west of the Dive; all else came 254from the old domain of Rolf, the oldest, but, then as now, not the most Norman Normandy.^[761]

Description of the field of battle.

The field of battle lies just within the hostile country.^[762] South-east of Caen, in continuation of the high ground of Allemagne^[763] immediately south of the town, stretches a long, broad, and slightly elevated plain, sloping gently towards the east.^[764] It hardly deserves to be called a hill, and the indentations with which its sides are broken hardly deserve to be called valleys.^[765] Several villages and churches, Secqueville, Bellengreville, Billy, Chicheboville, form the boundaries of the field, but the plain itself is open and without any remarkable feature. A ridge somewhat higher than the rest of the ground, known as Mount Saint Lawrence, is the only conspicuous point of the plain itself, and this marks the western boundary of the actual battle-ground. The little stream of the Muance, a tributary of the Orne, bounds the plain to the south-east.^[766] To 255the north lies the high ground of Argences, over which William advanced with the troops of the loyal districts. The French auxiliaries, approaching from the south by way of Mezidon, first reached the little village of Valmeray, where a ruined tower of later date marks the site of the church of Saint Brice in which King Henry heard mass |Junction of the Ducal and French forces.| before the battle.^[767] Meanwhile the Duke’s forces crossed the Muance at the ford of Berengier,^[768] and at once joined the French. King and Duke now ranged their troops in the order in which it was most natural to meet an enemy advancing from the west. The Normans, who had come from the north, formed the right wing, while the French, coming from the south, naturally formed the left.^[769] There was pitched the royal standard, on which we are told that the presumption of the upstart house of Paris had dared to emblazon the eagle of Julius and Charles.^[770] King Henry and Duke William, each baton in hand,^[771] were now marshalling their troops, and the battle seemed about to begin, when, if we may trust our only detailed narrative of that day’s fight, one side was cheered and the other dispirited by an unlooked for incident.

Ralph of Tesson was lord of the forest of Cingueleiz, 256|Ralph of Tesson joins the Duke.| the forest some way to the south of Caen, between the rivers Orne and Lise, and his chief seat was at Harcourt Thury. He was a lord of great power, and his contingent is said to have mustered no less than a hundred and twenty knights with their banners and tokens.^[772] He had no ground of offence against the Duke; yet he had joined in the conspiracy, and had sworn on the saints at Bayeux to smite William wherever he found him.^[773] But his heart smote him when he found himself standing face to face against his lord in open battle. His knights too pressed around him, and reminded him of his homage and plighted faith, and how he who fought against his natural lord had no right to fief or honour.^[774] On the other hand the Viscounts Neal and Randolf pressed him to stand firmly by them, and promised great rewards as the price of his adherence. For a while he stood doubtful, keeping his 257troop apart from either army. We are told that the King and the Duke marked them as they stood, and that William told Henry that he knew them for the men of Ralph of Tesson, that their leader had no grudge against him, and that he believed that they would all soon be on his side. Presently the arguments of his own knights prevailed with Ralph; he bade them halt, and he himself spurred across the field, shouting as his war-cry the name of his lordship of Thury.^[775] He rode up to the Duke, he struck him with his glove, and so performed his oath to smite William wherever he found him.^[776] The Duke welcomed the returning penitent, and Ralph rode back to his men. His detachment stood aside for a space till the two hosts were engaged in the thick of the battle. He then watched his opportunity, and made a vigorous charge on the side of the Duke.

Character of the battle; a mere combat of cavalry.

Such an auspicious reinforcement might well stir up the spirits of the young Duke and his followers. Every man was eager for battle. A fierce combat of cavalry began. We have heard of the infantry of the communes as appearing at the ducal muster, but we hear nothing of them in the battle. We hear nothing of the Norman archers, who were to win so terrible a renown upon a later field. All is one vast tourney, mounted knights charging one another with shield, sword, and lance. The first great battle of William, like the first great battle of Alexander,^[777] was truly 258a battle of chivalry in every sense of the word, a hand to hand personal fight between mounted nobles on either side. On pressed the Duke, sword in hand, seeking out the perjured Viscounts,^[778] and shouting the war-cry of Normandy, “Dex aie.”^[779] On the same side rose the shout of “Montjoye-Saint-Denys,” the national war-cry of the French Kingdom. From the rebel host arose the names of various local saints, patrons of the castles and churches of the revolted leaders, Saint Sever, Saint Amand, and others of less renown.^[780] On the rebel left rode the men of the Bessin, on the right those of the Côtentin. The men of the peninsula thus came face to face with the |Personal exertions of King Henry.| royal troops; the King of the French, as in the old days of Lewis and Harold,^[781] had to meet in close fight with the fiercest and most unconquerable warriors of the Norman name. And well and bravely did King Henry do his duty on that one day of his life. Even in the Norman picture, it is around the King, rather than around the Duke, that the main storm of battle is made to centre. The knights now met on each side, lance to lance, and, when their lances were shivered, sword to sword. There was no difference of tactics, 259no contrast between one weapon and another; the fight of Val-ès-dunes was the sheer physical encounter of horse and man, the mere trial of personal strength and personal skill in knightly exercises. The King, as in such a fight any man of common courage must do, exposed himself freely to danger; but, as far as his personal adventures went, the royal share in the battle was somewhat unlucky. Once, if not twice, the King of the French, the overlord of Normandy, was hurled from his horse by the thrust of a Norman lance. A knight of the Côtentin first overthrew him by a sudden charge. The exploit was long remembered in the rhymes of his warlike province,^[782] but the hero of it purchased his renown with his life. The King was unhurt, but the report of such an accident might easily spread confusion among his army. Like more renowned warriors before and after, like Eadmund at Sherstone,^[783] like William at Senlac, it was needful that he should show himself to his followers, and wipe out the misfortune by fresh exploits. Henry was therefore soon again in the thickest of the fight; but, less fortunate than either Eadmund or William, the like mishap befell him a second time.^[784] The King presently encountered one of 260the three great chiefs of the rebellion; another thrust, dealt by the lance of Hamon, again laid Henry on the ground; but a well timed stroke from a French knight more than avenged this second overthrow; the Lord of Thorigny was carried off dead on his shield like an old Spartan.^[785]

The King honoured his valiant adversary, and, by his express order, Hamon was buried with all fitting splendour before the Church of Our Lady at Esquai on the Orne.^[786]

The King is thus made decidedly the most prominent figure in the picture, and, somewhat inglorious as were Henry’s personal experiences that day, it is to him and his Frenchmen that the Norman poet does not scruple to attribute the victory.^[787] The fight appears throughout as |Exploits and good fortune of William.| a fight between Normans and Frenchmen.^[788] But the Duke of the Normans himself was not idle. If his royal ally 261was personally unlucky, it was on this day that William began that career of personal success, of good fortune in the mere tug of battle, which, till the clouded evening of his life, was as conspicuous as the higher triumphs of his military genius and his political craft. Men loved to tell how the young Duke slew with his own hand the beloved vassal of Randolf, Hardrez, the choicest warrior of Bayeux;^[789] how the veteran champion, in the pride of his might, rode defiant in the front rank; how the Duke rode straight at him, not justing with his lance as in a mimic tourney, but smiting hand to hand with the sword. The poet rises to an almost Homeric flight, when he tells us how William smote the rebel below the chin, how he drove the sharp steel between the throat and the chest, how the body fell beneath his stroke and the soul passed away.^[790]

Randolf loses heart and flees.

The fortune of the day was now distinctly turning against the rebels; but, had all of them displayed equal courage, the issue of the struggle might still have been unfavourable to King and Duke. Neal of Saint Saviour still fought among the foremost of the men of his peninsula, but the heart of his accomplice from Bayeux began to fail him. Randolf had seen his most cherished vassal fall by the hand of his young sovereign; his heart quailed lest the like fate should be his own; he feared lest Neal 262had fled; he feared that he was betrayed to the enemy; he repented that he had ever put on his helmet; it was sad to be taken captive, it was a still worse doom to be slain. The battle ceased to give him any pleasure;^[791] he gave way before every charge; he wandered in front and in rear; at last he lost heart altogether; he dropped his lance and his shield, he stretched forth his neck,^[792] and rode |Neal continues the fight to the last.| for his life. The cowards, we are told, followed him; but Neal still continued the fight, giving and taking blows till his strength failed him. The French pressed upon him; their numbers increased, the numbers of the Normans lessened; some of his followers had fled, others lay dead and dying around him. At last the mighty lord of the Côtentin saw that all hope was lost. On the rising ground of Saint Lawrence the last blow seems to have been struck. The spot was afterwards marked by a commemorative chapel, which was destroyed by the Huguenots in the religious wars. On its site it doubtless was that the valiant Neal at last turned and left the field, seemingly the last man of the whole rebel army.

Rout of the Rebels.

The rout now became general. The example of Randolf drew after it far more followers than the example of Neal. The rebels rode for their lives in small parties, the troops of the King and the Duke following hard upon them, and smiting them from the rear. From the ridge of Saint Lawrence they rode westward, to reach the friendly land of Bayeux;^[793] they rode by the Abbey of Fontenay and the 263quarries of Allemagne; but the flood of the Orne checked their course; men and horses were swept away by the stream, or were slaughtered by the pursuers in the attempt to cross; the mills of Borbillon, we are told, were stopped by the dead bodies.^[794]

Completeness of the victory.

The victory was a decisive one, and it was one which proved no less decisive in its lasting results than it had been |The French auxiliaries return.| as a mere success on the field of battle. King Henry, who had done his work well and faithfully, now went back to his own land, and left William to complete the reduction of his revolted subjects. One of them, the original author of the plot, still offered him a long and vigorous resistance. Of the conduct of Guy of Burgundy in the field we hear nothing, except an incidental mention of a wound which he received there.^[795] Indeed, since the appearance of his three great Norman adherents, the |Escape of Guy.| Burgundian prince has nearly dropped out of sight.^[796] He now reappears, to receive from the Norman writers a vast out-pouring of scorn on account of his flight from the field,^[797] though it does not appear to have been in any way more ignominious than the flight of the mass of his Norman allies. At any rate he was not borne away in the indiscriminate rush of his comrades towards the Orne. He 264escaped, with a large body of companions,^[798] in quite the opposite direction, to his own castle of Brionne on the |He defends himself at Brionne.| Risle. There he took up a position of defence, and was speedily followed and besieged by Duke William. The castle of Brionne of those days was not the hill fortress, the shell of a donjon of that or of the next age, which now looks down upon the town and valley beneath. The stronghold of Count Guy had natural defences, but they were defences of another kind. The town itself seems to have been strongly fortified; but the point of defence which was most relied on at Brionne was the fortified hall of stone which stood on an island in the river.^[799] William had, before now, by one vigorous assault, brought his own native Falaise to surrender;^[800] but, though we are expressly told that the stream was everywhere fordable, the island fortress seems to have been deemed proof against any attacks |Siege of Brionne 1047–1050?| of this kind. A regular siege alone could reduce it, and William was driven to practise all the devices of the military art of his day against his rebellious cousin. He built a castle, this time very possibly of wood, on each side of the river, and thus cut off the besieged from their supplies of provisions.^[801] Constant assaults on the beleaguered castle 265are spoken of, but their aim seems to have been mainly to frighten the besieged rather than to produce any more practical effect;^[802] hunger was the sure and slow means on which William relied to bring Guy to reason. The siege was clearly a long one, though it is hardly possible to believe, on the incidental statement of a single authority, that it was spread over a space of three years.^[803] |Surrender of Brionne.| At last the endurance of Guy and his companions gave way, and he sent messengers praying for mercy. The Duke required the surrender of the castle; but touched, we are told, by the tie of kindred blood, he bade Guy |William’s clemency to the vanquished.| remain in his court.^[804] Nor was the Duke’s hand, on the whole, heavy on the other offenders. No man was put to death, though William’s panegyrist holds that death |Rarity of political executions.| was the fitting punishment for their offences.^[805] But in those days, both in Normandy and elsewhere, the legal execution of a state criminal was an event which seldom happened. Men’s lives were recklessly wasted in the endless 266warfare of the times, and there were men, as we have seen, who did not shrink from private murder, even in its basest form.^[806] But the formal hanging or beheading of a noble prisoner, so common in later times, was, in the eleventh century, distinctly an unusual sight.^[807] And, strange as it may sound, there was a sense in which |William’s ordinary treatment of enemies.| William the Conqueror was not a man of blood. He would sacrifice any number of lives to his boundless ambition; he did not scruple to condemn his enemies to cruel personal mutilations; he would keep men for years, as a mere measure of security, in the horrible prison-houses of those days; but the extinction of human life in cold blood was something from which he shrank. His biographer exultingly points out this feature in his character, and his recorded acts do not belie his praise.^[808] Once only did he swerve from this rule, when he sent the noble Waltheof to the scaffold. And, as that act stands out conspicuously from its contrast to his ordinary conduct, so it is the act from which it is impossible not to date the decline of his high fortune. And, at the time of his first great victory, William was of an age which is commonly disposed to be generous, and none of the worse features of his character had hitherto come to the surface. With one exception only, 267no very hard punishments were inflicted on the conquered |Destruction of the castles.| rebels. The mass of the rebellious Barons paid fines, gave hostages, and had to submit to the destruction of the castles which they had raised without the ducal licence.^[809] To this, and to other measures of the same kind, it is owing that such small traces of the Norman castles of the eleventh century now remain. Neal of Saint Saviour had to retire for a time to Britanny, but his exile must have been short, as we find him, seemingly in the very next year, again in office and in the ducal favour. He survived his restoration forty-four years;^[810] he lived to repay at Senlac the old wrong done by Englishmen to his father’s province; but, almost alone among the great Norman chiefs, he received |Guy returns to Burgundy.| no share in the spoils of England. As for Guy, he presently left the country of his own free will. His sojourn at William’s court must have been little else than an honourable imprisonment, and it would seem that he now found little respect or sympathy in Normandy.^[811] He 268returned to his native land, the Burgundian Palatinate, and there, we are told, spent the rest of his days in plotting against his brother, the reigning Count William.^[812] |Fate of Grimbald.| One criminal only was reserved for a harsher fate. Grimbald was taken to Rouen, and there kept in prison—such as prisons were in those days—and in fetters. He was looked on as the foulest traitor of all; he it was whom the Duke charged with the personal attempt on his life at Valognes.^[813] Grimbald confessed the crime, and named as his accomplice a knight named Salle the son of Hugh. The accused denied the charge, and challenged Grimbald to the judicial combat. Before the appointed day of battle came, Grimbald was found dead in his prison. He was buried with his fetters on his legs, his lands were confiscated, and part of them was given to the church of Bayeux. Plessis became a domain of the see, and other portions of the estates of Grimbald became the corpses of various prebends in the cathedral church.^[814]

Establishment of William’s power in Normandy.

269The power of William was now on the whole firmly established. He had still to repel many attacks from hostile neighbours, and we shall have yet to record one more considerable revolt within the Norman territory. But the Norman Barons now knew that they had a master.^[815] For some years to come, internal discord, strictly so called, underwent a sort of lull to a degree most remarkable in such an age. Under the firm and equal government of her great Duke, Normandy began to recover from her years of anarchy, and to rise to a higher degree of prosperity than she had ever yet attained to.^[816] |Effect of the struggle.| The Duchy became, more completely than it had ever been before, a member of the European and of the Capetian |The supremacy of the French element confirmed.| commonwealth. The Capetian King indeed soon learned again to look with a grudging eye on his northern neighbour; but the general result of the struggle must have been to make Normandy still more French than before. The French and the Scandinavian elements had met face to face, and the French element had had the upper hand. Frenchmen and French Normans had overthrown the stout Saxons of the Bessin and the fierce Danes of the Côtentin. The distinction between the two parts of Normandy is still one which even the passing traveller may remark; but, from the day of Val-ès-dunes, it ceased to manifest itself in the great outward expressions of language and political feeling. The struggle which began during the minority of Richard the Fearless was now finally decided at the close of the minority of William 270the Bastard. The Count of Rouen had overcome Saxons and Danes within his own dominions, and he was about to weld them into his most trustworthy weapons wherewith to overcome Saxons and Danes beyond the sea. The omen of the fight against Neal and Hamon might well have recurred to the mind of William, when Neal himself and the son of Hamon marched forth at his side from the camp at Hastings, and went on to complete the conquest of England at Exeter and York.

§ 3. From the Battle of Val-ès-dunes to William’s Visit to England. 1047–1051.

William was thus at peace at home; his next war was indeed one of his own seeking, but it was one from which he could not have shrunk without breaking through every |The Counts of Anjou; their connexion with Norman and English history.| tie alike of gratitude and of feudal duty. This is the first time that I have had directly to mention a power, which had been, for more than a hundred years, steadily growing up to the south of Normandy, and which was to exercise a most important influence on the future history of Normandy and, through Normandy, on that of England. I mean the dynasty of the Counts of Anjou. That |1154.| house, the house which mounted the throne of England in the person of a great-grandson of William, produced a succession of princes to whose personal qualities it must mainly have been owing that their dominions fill the place which they do fill in French and in European history. |Characteristics of Angevin history.| Anjou holds a peculiar position among the great fiefs of France. It was a singular destiny which gave so marked a character, and so conspicuous a history, to a country which seems in no way marked out for separate existence by any geographical or national distinction. Normandy, Britanny, Flanders, Aquitaine, Ducal Burgundy, all had a being of 271their own; they were fiefs of the Crown of France, but they were in no sense French provinces. But Anjou was at most an outpost on the Loire, a border district of France and Aquitaine; beyond this position it had nothing specially to distinguish it from any other part of the great |Saxon occupation. 464.| Parisian Duchy.^[817] A momentary Saxon occupation in the fifth century^[818] cannot be supposed to have left behind it any such abiding traces as were certainly left by the settlement of the same people at Bayeux, perhaps even by their less famous settlement at Seez.^[819] It was wholly to the energy and the marked character of its individual rulers that Anjou owes its distinct and prominent place among the principalities of Gaul. The restless spirit of the race showed itself sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, but there was no Count of Anjou who could be called a fool, a coward, or a fainéant. The history or legends of the family which was to rise to such greatness laid claim |Ingelgar, first Count. 870?| to no very remote or illustrious pedigree.^[820] The first Count of Anjou, who held a part only of the later County,^[821] was 272invested with that dignity either by Charles the Bald or by his son Lewis the Stammerer.^[822] He bore the name of Ingelgar, and he seems to be the first member of the family who can be unhesitatingly set down as historical. His grandfather, |Peasant origin of the family.| Torquatius or Tortulfus, was, according to the legend, a peasant, and seems to have sprung from that Breton race of which his descendants became the most persevering enemies. It must have been a later version of the tale which invented for him a Roman name and a Roman descent.^[823] |Torquatius and Tertullus.| The son of Torquatius, Tertullus, rose, we are told, to importance at the court of Charles, and founded the |Historical value of these tales.| greatness of his house.^[824] Whatever may be the amount of strictly historical truth preserved in these stories, they are, in one point of view, of no small historical value. Like the similar story of the origin of Godwine, they point to a belief, which can hardly have been ill-founded, that, in Gaul in the ninth century and in England in the eleventh, ignoble birth did not disqualify a man from 273rising to the highest dignities, or from founding a dynasty of Princes or even of Kings.^[825] But, when we reach Ingelgar, we seem to stand on more distinctly historical ground. He held Amboise in Touraine as an allodial possession,^[826] and he was, as we have seen, invested with the Countship of Anjou on the hither side of the Mayenne. But it is plain that no detailed account of his actions, or of those of his immediate successors, was preserved.^[827] |Fulk the Red. 888.| His son Fulk the Red received from Charles the Simple the remaining portion of the County of Anjou, that beyond the Mayenne, and he vigorously defended his enlarged dominions against the attacks of Northmen and Bretons.^[828] |Fulk the Good. 938.| This Romulus was appropriately succeeded by a Numa, Fulk the Good, renowned for his piety, his almsdeeds, 274his just and peaceful government, and for being the traditional author of the proverb that an unlettered King is but |Geoffrey Grisegonelle. 958.| a crowned ass.^[829] His son, Geoffrey Grisegonelle,^[830] renewed the warlike fame of his house; he fought with his neighbours of Britanny and Aquitaine; and he is said to |978.| have borne an important share in the wars between King Lothar and the Emperor Otto the Second.^[831] After |Fulk Nerra. 987.| him came his son Fulk,^[832] surnamed Nerra or the Black, renowned as a warrior and still more renowned as a pilgrim, and who is the first prince of his house whose name has found its way into the general history of France. He overthrew his brother-in-law Conan of Britanny in one or |992.| more pitched battles, which French, as well as Breton and |His war with Odo of Chartres.| Angevin, writers thought worthy of record. He was also engaged in a war with his neighbour Odo the Second, Count of Blois and Chartres, the grandson of the famous Theobald, a war which passed on as an inheritance to the next generation, and which proved the origin of the first entanglements between Normandy and Anjou.^[833] It sounds like an incursion from another hemisphere, when we read how Aldebert, Count of Perigueux, Perigueux with its cupolas and its Roman tower, far away in the heart of Aquitaine, appeared as an ally of the Angevin |Fulk gains and loses Tours. 990.| Count. He took Tours and gave it to Fulk, but the citizens were ill disposed to their new master, and Odo |Battle of Pontlevois. 1016.| recovered it after a short time. Later in his reign, Fulk defeated Odo in a great battle at Pontlevois in the territory 275|1031.| of Touraine, and afterwards gained or recovered Saumur. We have already met with him in the character of a mediator between contending candidates for the Crown of France,^[834] and he appears also in the less honourable light of an assassin, who removed a courtier of King Robert who stood in the way of the plans of his own termagant niece Queen Constance.^[835] We hear also heavy complaints of him as a violator of ecclesiastical rule, by setting up the usurped authority of the See of Rome against the rights |His pilgrimages. 1028, 1035.| of the independent metropolitans of Gaul.^[836] But he is perhaps best known for his two pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre, for the ready ingenuity which he displayed on his first journey, and for the extreme of penitential humiliation by which he edified all men on the second.^[837] Less happy in his private than in his public career, he was troubled in his last years by a rebellion of his son;^[838] he was charged, truly or falsely, with the murder of one wife, and 276with driving another from him by ill-treatment.^[839] A reign of unusual length made him, during a few years, a contemporary of the Great William, and at last he left his dominions to a son under whom Normans and Angevins met for the first time in open warfare.

Geoffrey Martel. 1040.

This son, Geoffrey by name, rejoiced in the surname of Martel, which he bestowed upon himself to express the heavy blows which, like the victor of Tours, he dealt around upon all his enemies.^[840] He began his career in his father’s lifetime. A dispute for the possession of the County of Saintonge led to a war between him and William the Sixth or the Fat, Duke of Aquitaine and |He imprisons William of Aquitaine. April 22, 1033.| Count of Poitou.^[841] Geoffrey was successful; he took the Aquitanian prince prisoner, and kept him in close bondage, till his wife Eustacia ransomed him at a heavy price. According to one version, the ransom consisted only of gold and silver, the spoil or contribution of the monasteries of his Duchy. Others however assert that it was nothing short of the cession of Bourdeaux and other cities, and an engagement to pay tribute for the rest of his dominions. Three days after this hard bought deliverance, William died. Immediately afterwards, or, according to some accounts, in the course of the year before, Geoffrey married Agnes, the step-mother of his victim, the widow of William’s father, William the Fifth or the Great. The marriage was, on some ground or other, branded as incestuous, and it was this imprisonment of William and 277|Geoffrey rebels against his father. 1033.| this marriage with Agnes which, we are told, gave rise in some way to Geoffrey’s rebellion against his father and to the discord between Fulk and his second wife Hildegardis the mother of Geoffrey.

The imprisonment of William of Aquitaine evidently made a deep impression upon men’s minds at the time; but it was the standing war with the house of Chartres which brought Anjou into direct collision with Normandy, and thereby, at a somewhat later time, into connexion |Last days of Odo of Chartres.| with England. The last energies of Odo were mainly directed to objects remote from Anjou, and even from Chartres and Blois. He was one of the party which opposed the succession of King Henry, and in so doing he must have crossed the policy of Henry’s great champion |His war with King Henry. 1034.| Duke Robert. In a war which followed with the King Odo was unsuccessful,^[842] but his mind was now set upon greater things. Already Count of Champagne, he aimed |His attempt on the Kingdom of Burgundy. 1033.| at restoring the great frontier state between the Eastern and the Western Franks, at reigning as King of Burgundy, of Lotharingia, perhaps of Italy. After meeting |His defeat and death at Bar. 1037.| for a while with some measure of success, he was at last defeated and slain by Duke Gozelo, the father of Godfrey of whom we have already heard,^[843] in a battle near Bar in the Upper Lotharingia.^[844] His great schemes died with him. His sons were only Counts and not Kings, and their father’s dominions were divided between them. The |His sons Stephen and Theobald.| sons of both of them obtained settlements in England, and a grandson of one figures largely in English history. Stephen reigned in Champagne; his son Odo married a sister of the Conqueror, and was one of the objects of his brother-in-law’s bounty in England.^[845] Theobald inherited Blois and Chartres. His son Stephen married 278|Their wars with King Henry and with Geoffrey.| William’s daughter Adela, and thereby became father of a King of the English. But at present we have to deal with Count Theobald as a vassal of France at variance with his overlord, as a neighbour of Anjou inheriting the hereditary enmity of his forefathers. Touraine, part of which was already possessed by Geoffrey,^[846] and, above all, the metropolitan city of Tours, were ever the great objects of Angevin ambition. It was a stroke of policy on the part of Henry, when he formally deprived the rebel Theobald of |Geoffrey receives Tours as a grant from Henry, and imprisons Theobald. 1044.| that famous city, and bestowed it by a royal grant on the Count of Anjou.^[847] Geoffrey was not slow to press a claim at once fresh and most plausible. He advanced on the city to assert his rights by force. Saint Martin, we are specially told, favoured the enterprise.^[848] The brothers resisted in vain. Stephen was put to flight; Theobald was taken prisoner, and was compelled, like William of Aquitaine, to obtain his freedom by the surrender of the city.^[849]

Both French and Angevin writers agree in describing Geoffrey as taking possession of Tours with the full consent of King Henry. Yet, in the first glimpse of Angevin affairs given us by our Norman authorities, the relations between the King of the French and the Count of Anjou 279are set forth in an exactly opposite light. Geoffrey is |William helps King Henry against Geoffrey. 1048.| engaged in a rebellious war against Henry, and the Duke of the Normans appears simply to discharge his feudal duty to his lord, and to return the obligation incurred by the King’s prompt and effectual help at Val-ès-dunes.^[850] These two accounts are in no way inconsistent; in the space of four years the relations between the King and so dangerous a vassal as Geoffrey may very well have changed. Henry may well have found that it was not sound policy to foster the growth of one whose blows might easily be extended from Counts to Kings. The campaign which followed is dwelt on at great length by our Norman authorities and is cut significantly short by the Angevins. |Personal exploits of William.| In its course, we are told, William gained the highest reputation. The troops of Normandy surpassed in number the united contingents of the King and of all his other vassals.^[851] The Duke’s courage and conduct were preeminent, and they won him the first place in the King’s counsels.^[852] But on one point Henry had to remonstrate with his valiant ally. He was forced, says the panegyrist, to warn both William himself and the chief Norman leaders against the needless exposure of so precious a life.^[853] 280William at no time of his life ever shrank from danger, and we may be sure that, at this time of his life especially, he thoroughly enjoyed the practice of war in all its forms. But William’s impulses were already under the control of his reason. He knew, no doubt, as well as any man, that to plunge himself into needless dangers, and to run the risk of hairbreadth scapes, was no part of the real duty of a prince or a general. But he also knew that it was mainly by exploits of this kind that he must dazzle the minds of his own generation, and so obtain that influence over men which was needful for the great schemes of his life.^[854] In any other point of view, one would say that it was unworthy of William’s policy to win the reputation of a knight-errant at the expense of making for himself a lasting and dangerous enemy in the Count of Anjou.

Position of Maine under Geoffrey.

The undisputed dominions of the two princes nowhere touched each other. But between them lay a country closely connected both with Normandy and with Anjou, and over which both William and Geoffrey asserted rights. This was the County of Maine, a district which was always said to have formed part of the later acquisitions of Rolf,^[855] but of which the Norman Dukes had never taken practical possession. The history of the Cenomannian city and province will be more fittingly sketched at another stage of William’s |Count Herbert. 1015.| career; it is enough to say here that Geoffrey was now practical sovereign of Maine, in the character of protector, |Hugh. 1036.| guardian, or conqueror of the young Count Hugh, the son of the famous Herbert, surnamed Wake-the-dog.^[856] William 281and Geoffrey thus became immediate neighbours, and Geoffrey, with the craft of his house, knew how to strike a blow |The fortresses of Domfront and Alençon.| where William was weakest. Two chief fortresses guarded the frontier between Maine and Normandy. Each commanded its own valley, its own approach into the heart of the Norman territory; each watched over a stream flowing from Norman into Cenomannian ground. These were Domfront towards the western, and Alençon towards the eastern, portion of the frontier. Domfront commanded the region watered by the Mayenne and its tributaries, while Alençon was the key of the valley of the Sarthe, the keeper of the path which led straight to the minster of Seez and to the donjon of Falaise. Of these two strongholds, Alençon stood on Norman, Domfront on Cenomannian soil.^[857] But Norman writers maintained that Domfront, no less than Alençon, was of right a Norman possession, both fortresses alike having been reared by the licence of Richard the |Disloyalty of Alençon.| Good.^[858] But even Alençon, whatever may have been its origin, was at this time far from being a sound member of the Norman body-politic. As a lordship of William Talvas, it shared in the ambiguous character, half Norman, half French, which attached to all the border possessions of the house of Belesme. And, as events presently showed, its inhabitants shared most fully in the spirit in which the 282Lord of Alençon had cursed the Bastard in his cradle.^[859] We are told also that the citizens both of Alençon and of Domfront disliked the rule of William, on account of the strict justice which he administered and the checks which he put on their marauding practices.^[860] This complaint sounds rather as if it came from turbulent barons than from burghers; yet it is quite possible that the burghers of a frontier town, especially on a frontier which was very doubtful and ill defined, may have indulged in those breaches of the peace which it was William’s greatest praise, both in Normandy and in England, to chastise without mercy. |Alençon garrisoned by Geoffrey.| At any rate, the people of Alençon were thoroughly disloyal to Normandy, and they willingly received the Angevin Count and his garrison.^[861] William returned the blow of |William marches ta Domfront;| Geoffrey’s hammer in kind. Leaving Alençon for a while to itself, he crossed the frontier, Angevin or Cenomannian as we may choose to call it, and laid siege to Domfront. |his exploits on the way.| On his march he found that treason was not wholly extinguished, even among his own troops. He had gone on a foraging or plundering party with fifty horse;^[862] a traitor, a Norman noble, sent word of his whereabout to the defenders of the town, who sent forth, we are told, three hundred horse and seven hundred foot to attack the Duke unexpectedly. It sounds like romance when we read 283that William at once charged and overthrew the horseman nearest to him, that the rest were seized with a sudden panic and took to flight, that the Duke and his little band chased them to the gates of Domfront, and that William carried off one prisoner with his own hands.^[863] Such stories are no doubt greatly exaggerated; the details may often be pure invention; but, as contemporary exaggerations and inventions, they show the kind of merit which Normans then looked for in their rulers, and they show the kind of exploit of which William himself was thought capable. |Traitors in the Norman camp.| And the perfectly casual mention of the traitor in the Norman camp is instructive in another way. We have here no doubt merely an example of what often happened, and the way in which treason is spoken of as an everyday matter sets vividly before us the difficulties with which William, even now after the victory of Val-ès-dunes, had still to contend at every step.^[864]

Siege of Domfront.

William now laid siege to Domfront. The town was strong both by its fortifications and by its natural position. The spirit of the citizens was high, and they were further strengthened by the presence of a chosen body of Angevin troops sent by Count Geoffrey. An assault was hopeless where two steep and narrow paths were the only ways by which the fortress could be approached even on foot.^[865] William surrounded it with four towers,^[866] and the Norman army sat down before it. The Duke was foremost in every attack, in every ambush, in every night march to cut off 284the approach of those who sought to bring either messages or provisions to the besieged town.^[867] Yet we are told that he found himself so safe in the enemy’s country that he often enjoyed the sports of hunting and hawking, for which the neighbouring woods afforded special opportunities.^[868] |1048–1049.| The siege had continued for some time in this way, and it was now seemingly winter,^[869] when news was brought that Count Geoffrey was advancing with a large |Geoffrey comes to relieve Domfront.| force to the relief of the town. A tale of knight-errantry follows, the main substance of which, coming as it does from a contemporary writer, we have no ground for disbelieving, even though some details may have been heightened to enhance the glory of William. The story is worthy of attention as showing that, amid all the apparent rudeness of the times, some germs of the later follies of chivalry had already begun to show themselves. As the Angevin army |Messages between William and Geoffrey. Early example of knight-errantry.| approached, William sent a message to Geoffrey by the hands of two of his chosen friends, two youths who had grown up along with him, and who were destined to share with him in all his greatest dangers and greatest successes. Both were men who lived to be famous in English history, Roger of Montgomery, the son-in-law of the terrible Talvas,^[870] and William, the son of that Osbern who had lost his life through his faithfulness to his master.^[871] These two trusty companions were sent to see Count Geoffrey, and to get from him an explanation of his purpose. Geoffrey told them that, at daybreak the next morning, 285he would come and beat up William’s quarters before Domfront. There should be no mistake about his person; he would be known by such a dress, such a shield,^[872] such a coloured horse. The Norman messengers answered that he need not trouble himself to come so far as the Norman quarters; he whom he sought would come and visit him nearer home. Duke William would be ready for battle, with such a horse, such a dress, such manner of weapons.^[873] The Normans appeared the next morning, eager for fight, |Geoffrey decamps.| and their Duke the most eager among them.^[874] But no enemy was there to await them; before the Normans came in sight, the Count of Anjou and his host had decamped. Geoffrey doubtless, like some later generals, retired only for strategical reasons; but the Norman writers can see no nobler motive for his conduct than his being seized with a sudden panic.^[875] Here, and throughout the war, the lions 286stand in need of a painter, or rather their painters suddenly refuse to do their duty. We have no Angevin account of the siege of Domfront to set against our evidently highly coloured Norman picture.

William marches suddenly to Alençon, and besieges the town.

The whole country now lay open for William to harry; but he knew better than to waste time and energy on mere useless ravages.^[876] He determined rather to strike another sudden blow. Leaving a force before Domfront, he marched all night, through the enemy’s country, along the course of the Mayenne, passing by Mehendin, Pointel, and Saint-Samson.^[877] He thus suddenly appeared before Alençon with the morning light.^[878] A bridge over the Sarthe, strongly fortified with a ditch and a palisade, divided the Norman from the Cenomannian territory.^[879] This bridge now served as a barrier against a Duke of the Normans attacking his own town from the Cenomannian |Insults offered to William at Alençon.| side. The defenders of the bridge, whether Angevins or disaffected Normans, received the Duke with the grossest personal insult. They spread out skins and leather jerkins, and beat them, shouting, “Hides, 287hides for the Tanner.”^[880] The Duke of the Normans had acted a merciful and generous part towards the rebels of Val-ès-dunes and Brionne; but the grandson of Fulbert of Falaise could not endure the jeers thus thrown on his descent by the spindle side. Anything like a personal insult is commonly far more unpardonable in princely eyes than a real injury. The one act of cruelty which |1296.| stains the reign of our great Edward is the slaughter of the inhabitants of Berwick in revenge for a jesting and not very intelligible ballad sung against him from the walls.^[881] So now William swore, according to his fashion, by the Splendour of God,^[882] that the men who thus mocked him should be dealt with like a tree whose branches are cut off by the pollarding-knife.^[883] He kept his word. 288A vigorous assault was made upon the bridge. Houses were unroofed, and the timbers were thrown into the fosse.^[884] Fire was set to the mass; the wood was dry, the flame spread, the palisades and gates were burned down, and |He takes the town, and mutilates his prisoners.| William was master of the bridge, and with it of the town of Alençon. The castle still held out. The Conqueror, faithful to his fearful oath, now gave the first of that long list of instances of indifference to human suffering which have won for him a worse name than many parts of his character really deserve. Thirty-two of the offenders were brought before him; their hands and feet were cut off,^[885] and the dismembered limbs were thrown over the walls of the castle, as a speaking menace to its defenders.^[886] The threat did its work; the garrison surrendered, bargaining only for safety for life and limb.^[887] Alençon, tower and town, was thus taken so speedily that William’s panegyrist says that he might renew the boast of Cæsar, “I came; I saw; I conquered.”^[888] Leaving 289|Domfront surrenders.| a garrison in Alençon, the Duke hastened back to Domfront, the fame of his conquest and of his cruelty going before him. The man before whom Alençon had fallen, before whom the Hammer of Anjou had fled without striking a blow, had become an enemy too fearful for the men of Domfront to face.^[889] They surrendered on terms somewhat more favourable than those which had been granted to the defenders of the castle of Alençon; they were allowed to retain their arms as well as their lives and limbs.^[890] William entered Domfront, and displayed the banner of Normandy over the donjon.^[891] The town henceforth became a standing menace on the side of Normandy against Maine, and it formed, together with Alençon, the main defence of the southern frontier of the Duchy. If William undertook the war to discharge his feudal duty towards King Henry, he certainly did not lose the opportunity for permanently strengthening his own dominions. In fact, in our Norman accounts, the King of the French has long ago slipped away from the scene, and the Count of Chartres has vanished along with him. William and Geoffrey remain the only figures |William fortifies Ambières.| in the foreground. The Duke, having secured his frontier, marched, seemingly without resistance, into the undoubted territory of Maine; he there fortified a castle at Ambières, and returned in triumph to Rouen.^[892]