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

CHAPTER VIII. THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.^[497] A.D. 1028–1051.

§ 1. Birth, Character, and Accession of William. A.D. 1028–1035.

Character and greatness of WILLIAM.

William, King of the English and Duke of the Normans, bears a name which must for ever stand forth among the foremost of mankind. No man that ever 164trod this earth was ever endowed with greater natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater things. If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts, without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world’s |Lasting results of his career.| greatest men. No man ever did his work more effectually at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as |A good side to his character.| more truly an abiding possession for all time. And, when we consider all the circumstances of his life, when we judge him by the standard of his own age, above all, when we compare him with those who came after him in his own house, we shall perhaps be inclined to dwell on his great qualities, on his many undoubted virtues, rather than to put his no less undoubted crimes in their darkest light. As we cannot refuse to place him among the greatest of men, neither will a candid judgement incline us to place him among the worst of men. If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure glory of Timoleôn, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, 165and Cnut; but he has even less in common with the mere enemies of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swends, and the Buonapartes, whom God has from time to time sent as simple scourges of a guilty world. Happily there are few men in history of whom we have |English and Norman portraits of him.| better materials for drawing the portrait. We see him as he appeared to admiring followers of his own race; we see him also as he appeared to men of the conquered nation who had looked on him and had lived in his household.^[498] We have to make allowance for flattery on the one side; we have not to make allowance for calumny on the other. The feeling with which the Normans looked on their conquering leader was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of love; and the feeling with which the vanquished English looked on their Conqueror was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of simple hatred. Assuredly William’s English subjects did not love him; but they felt a sort of sullen reverence for the King who was richer and mightier than all the Kings that were before him. In speaking of him, the Chronicler writes as it were with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself, but was rather drawing the portrait |Justice done to him by the English Chronicler.| of a being of another nature. Yet he holds the balance fairly between the dark and the bright qualities of one so far raised above the common lot of man. He does not conceal his crimes and his oppressions; but he sets before us the merits of his government and the good peace that he made in this land; he judicially sums up what was good and what was evil in him; he warns men to follow the good and to avoid the evil, and he sends him out of the world with a charitable prayer for the repose of his soul. And, at the moment when he wrote, it was no marvel if 166the Chronicler was inclined to dwell on the good rather than on the evil. The Crown of William passed to one who shared largely in his mere intellectual gifts, but who had no fellowship with the greater and nobler elements of his character. To appreciate William the Conqueror we have but to cast our glance onwards to William the Red. We shall then well understand how men writhing under the scorpions of the son might look back with regret to the whips of the father. We can understand how, under his godless rule, men might feel kindly towards the memory of one who never wholly cast away the thoughts of justice and mercy, and who, in his darkest hours, had still somewhat of the fear of God before his eyes.

Strength of will in William.

In estimating the character of William, one feature stands out preeminently above all others. Throughout his career, we admire in him the embodiment, in the highest degree that human nature will allow, of the fixed purpose and the unbending will. From time to time there have been men who seem to have come into the world to sway the course of events at their good pleasure, men who have made destiny itself their vassal, and whose decrees it seems in vain for lesser men to seek to withstand. Such was the man who, with the blood of thousands reeking on his hands, could lay down despotic power, could walk unattended to his house, and calmly offer to give an account for any of his actions;^[499] and such in might, though assuredly not such in crime, was our first Norman King. Whatever the will of William decreed, he found a means to bring it about. Whatever his hand found to do, he did |His military genius.| it with all his might. As a warrior, as a general, it is needless to sound his praises. His warlike exploits set him among the foremost captains of history, but his warlike exploits are but the smallest part of his fame. 167Others beside him could have led the charge at Val-ès-dunes; others beside him could have chosen the happy moment for the ambush at Varaville; others beside him could have endured the weariness of the long blockade beneath the donjon of Brionne. Others, it may even be, beside him could have cut their way through palisade and shield-wall and battle-axe to the royal Standard of England. |His statesmanship.| But none in his own age, and few in any age, have shown themselves like him masters of every branch of the consummate craft of the statesman. Calm and clear-sighted, he saw his object before him; he knew when to tarry and when to hasten; he knew when to strike and how to strike, and how to use alike the noblest and the vilest of |His unscrupulousness as to means.| men as his instruments. Utterly unscrupulous, though far from unprincipled, taking no pleasure in wrong or oppression for its own sake, always keeping back his hands from needless bloodshed, he yet never shrank from force or fraud, from wrong or bloodshed or oppression, when they seemed to him the straightest paths to accomplish his purpose. His crimes admit of no denial; but, with one single exception, they never were wanton crimes. And when we come to see the school in which he was brought up, when we see the men whom he had to deal with from his childhood, our wonder really ought to |His personal virtues.| be that his crimes were not infinitely blacker. His personal virtues were throughout life many and great. We hear much of his piety, and we see reason to believe that his piety was something more than the mere conventional |His religious zeal.| piety of lavish gifts to monasteries. Punctual in every exercise of devotion, paying respect and honour of every kind to religion and its ministers, William showed, in two ways most unusual among the princes of that age, that his zeal for holy things was neither hypocrisy, nor fanaticism, nor superstition. Like his illustrious contemporary on the Imperial throne, he appeared as a real ecclesiastical 168reformer, and he allowed the precepts of his religion to have a distinct influence on his private life. He was one of the few princes of that age whose hands |General excellence of his ecclesiastical appointments.| were perfectly clean from the guilt of simony. His ecclesiastical appointments for the most part do him honour; the patron of Lanfranc and Anselm can never be spoken of without respect. In his personal conduct he practised at least one most unusual virtue; in a profligate age he was a model of conjugal fidelity. He was a good and faithful friend, an affectionate brother—we must perhaps add, too indulgent a father. And strong as was his sense of religion, deep as was his reverence for the Church, open-handed as was his bounty to her ministers, no prince that ever reigned was less disposed to yield to ecclesiastical usurpations. No prince ever knew better how to control the priesthood within his own dominions; none knew better both how to win the voice of Rome to abet his purposes, and how to bid defiance to her demands when they infringed on the rights of his Crown and the laws of his Kingdom. While all Europe rang with the great strife of Pope and Cæsar, England and Normandy remained at peace under the rule of one who knew how, firmly and calmly, to hold his own against Hildebrand himself.

Effects of his reign in Normandy, France, and England.

But to know what William was, no way is so clear as to see what William did in both the countries over which he was so strangely called to rule. We are too apt to look on him simply as the Conqueror of England. But so to do is to look at him only in his most splendid, but at the same time his least honourable, aspect. William learned to become the Conqueror of England only by first becoming the Conqueror of Normandy and the Conqueror of France. He found means to conquer Normandy by the help of France and to conquer France by the help of Normandy. He turned a jealous overlord into an effective ally against his rebellious subjects, and he turned 169those rebellious subjects into faithful supporters against |His early struggles.| that jealous overlord. He came to his Duchy under every disadvantage. At once bastard and minor, with competitors for his coronet arising at every moment, with turbulent barons to hold in check and envious neighbours to guard against, he was, throughout the whole of his early life, beset by troubles, none of which were of his own making, and he came honourably out of all. The |Excellence of his rule in Normandy.| change which William wrought in Normandy was nothing less than a change from anarchy to good order. Instead of a state, torn by internal feuds and open to the attacks of every enemy, his Duchy became, under his youthful rule, a loyal and well-governed land, respected by all its neighbours, and putting most of them to shame by its prosperity. In the face of every obstacle, the mighty genius of the once despised Bastard raised himself and his principality to a place in the eyes of Europe such as Normandy and its prince had never held before. And these great successes were gained with far less of cruelty or harshness than might have been looked for in so |His general forbearance and occasional cruelty.| ruthless an age. He shared indeed in the fierce passions of his race, and in one or two cases his wrath hurried him, or his policy beguiled him, into acts at which humanity shudders. At all stages of his life, if he was debonair to those who would do his will, he was beyond measure stern to all who withstood it.^[500] Yet, when we think of all that he went through, of the treachery and ingratitude which he met with on every side, how his most faithful friends were murdered beside him, how he himself had to flee for his life or to lurk in mean disguises, 170we shall see that it is not without reason that his panegyrist praises his general forbearance and clemency. In short, the reign of William as Duke of the Normans was alike prosperous and honourable in the highest degree. Had he never stretched forth his hand to grasp the diadem which was another’s, his fame would not have filled the world as now it does, but he would have gone down to his grave as one of the best, as well as one of the greatest, rulers of his time.

His reign in England.

If we turn from William Duke of the Normans to William King of the English, we may indeed mourn that, in a moral sense, the fine gold has become dim, but our admiration for mere greatness, for the highest craft of the statesman and the soldier, will rise higher than ever. No doubt he was highly favoured by fortune; nothing but an extraordinary combination of events could have made the Conquest of England possible. But then |Difficulties of his undertaking.| it is the true art of statesmanship, the art by which men like William carry the world before them, to know how to grasp every fortunate moment and to take advantage of every auspicious turn of events. Doubtless William could never have conquered England except under peculiarly favourable circumstances; but then none but such a man as William could have conquered England under any circumstances at all. He conquered and retained a land far greater than his paternal Duchy, and a land in |Skill displayed in his claim on the English Crown;| which he had not a single native partisan. Yet he contrived to put himself forward in the eyes of the world as a legal claimant, and not as an unprovoked invader. We must condemn the fraud, but we cannot help admiring the skill, by which he made men believe that he was the true heir of England, shut out from his inheritance by a perjured usurper. Never was a more subtle web of fallacy woven by the craft of man; never did diplomatic ingenuity more triumphantly obtain its end. He contrived 171to make an utterly unjust aggression bear the aspect, not only of righteous, but almost of holy, warfare. The wholesale spoiler of a Christian people contrived to win for himself something very like the position of a Crusader. And, landed on English ground, with no rights but those of his own sword, with no supporters but his own foreign |in his acquisition of it;| army, he yet contrived to win the English Crown with every circumstance of formal legality. He was elected, crowned, and anointed like his native predecessors, and he swore at the hands of an English Primate to observe the ancient laws of England. By force and by craft, but with the outward pretext of law always put prominently forward, he gradually obtained full possession of the whole land; he deprived the nation one by one of its native |and in his subsequent government.| leaders, and put in their places men of foreign birth and wholly dependent on himself. No prince ever more richly rewarded those to whom he owed his Crown, but no prince ever took more jealous care that they should never be able to bring his Crown into jeopardy. None but a man like him could have held down both conquerors and conquered, and have made his will the only law for Norman and Englishman alike. His consummate policy guarded against the dangers which he saw rife in every other country; he put the finishing stroke to the work of Ecgberht, and made England the most united Kingdom in Western Christendom. Normans and Englishmen conspired against him, and called the fleets and hosts of Denmark to their help. But William held his own alike against revolters at home and against invaders from abroad. Norman and English rebels were alike crushed; sometimes the Dane was bought off, sometimes he shrank from the firm array with which the land was guarded. All opposition was |Severity of his police.| quelled by fire and sword; but when it was quelled, whenever and wherever William’s rule was quietly accepted, his hand was heavy upon all smaller disturbers of the 172peace of the world. Life, property, female honour, stood indeed but a small chance while the process of Conquest was going on, but, when William’s work was fully accomplished, they were safer under him than they had ever been under England’s native Kings. As the stern avenger of crime, even the conquered learned to bless him, and to crown his good deeds with a tribute of praise hardly inferior to that which waits on the name of his illustrious rival.^[501]

The worst features of his character brought out in England.

Here then was a career through which none but one of the greatest of mankind could have passed successfully. But it was a career which brought out into full play all those darker features of his character which found but little room for their developement during his earlier reign in his native Duchy. There is no reason to believe that William came into England with any fixed determination to rule otherwise in England than he had already ruled in Normandy. Cnut can hardly fail to have been his model, and William’s earliest days in England were far more promising than the earliest days of Cnut. At no time of his life does William appear as one of those tyrants who actually delight in oppression, to whom the infliction of human suffering is really a source of morbid pleasure. |His false position gradually developed itself, and led him to oppression.| But, if he took no pleasure in the infliction of suffering, it was at least a matter about which he was utterly reckless; he stuck at no injustice which was needed to carry out his purpose. His will was fixed, to win and to keep the Crown of England at all hazards. We may well believe that he would have been well pleased could he have 173won that Crown without bloodshed. But, rather than not win it, he did not shrink from the guilt of carrying on a desolating war against a people who had never wronged him. We may well believe that, when he swore to govern his new subjects as well as they had been governed by their own Kings, it was his full purpose to keep his oath. That he acted on any settled scheme of uprooting the nationality, the laws, or the language of England is an exploded fable.^[502] But he could not govern England as he had governed Normandy; he could not govern England as Cnut had governed England; he could not himself be as Cnut, neither could his Normans be as Cnut’s Danes. He gradually found that there was no way for him to govern England save by oppressions, exactions, and confiscations, by the bondage or the death of the noblest of the land. He made the discovery, and he shrank not from its practical consequences. A reign which had begun with as good hopes as the reign of a foreign conqueror could begin with gradually changed into one of the most tremendous tyrannies on record. Northumberland was hard to be kept in order, and Northumberland was made a desert. |General change for the worse in his character.| This was the dictate of a relentless policy; but when William had once set forth on the downward course of evil, he soon showed that he could do wrong when no policy commanded it, merely to supply means for his |Formation of the New Forest.| personal gratification. To lay waste Hampshire merely to make a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to lay waste Northumberland to rid himself of a political danger. He could still be merciful when mercy was not dangerous, but he had now learned to shed innocent blood without remorse, if its shedding seemed to add safety to his throne. The repeated revolts of Eadgar were forgiven 174as often as they occurred; but Waltheof, caressed, |Death of Waltheof.| flattered, promoted, was sent to the scaffold on the first convenient pretext. It is hardly superstitious to point out, alike with ancient and with modern authorities,^[503] that the New Forest became a spot fatal to William’s house, and that, after the death of Waltheof, his old prosperity |Crimes and misfortunes of his last years.| forsook him. Nothing indeed occurred to loosen his hold on England; but his last years were spent in bickerings with his unworthy son, and in a petty border warfare, in which the Conqueror had, for the first time, to undergo defeat. At last he found his death-wound in an inglorious quarrel, in the personal commission of cruelties which aroused the indignation of his own age; and the mighty King and Conqueror, forsaken by his servants and children, had to owe his funeral rites to the voluntary charity of a loyal vassal, and within the walls of his own minster he could not find an undisputed grave.

William’s surnames: the Great, the Conqueror, the Bastard.

Such was William the Great, a title which, in the mouths of his contemporaries, he shared with Alexander and with Charles, but which in later times has been displaced by the misunderstood description of Conqueror.^[504] But, before he had won any right to either of those lofty titles, William was already known by another surname |Laxity of the Norman Dukes as to marriage and legitimacy.| drawn from the circumstances of his birth. Of all princely lines the ducal house of Normandy was that which paid least regard to the canonical laws of marriage or to the special claims of legitimate birth.^[505] The Duchy had been 175ruled by a whole succession of princes who either were sprung from that irregular kind of union which was known as the Danish marriage,^[506] or else were the sons of concubines raised to the rank of wives after the birth of their children. But, among all this brood of spurious or irregular heirs, the greatest of the whole line was the one to whom the reproach, if reproach it was deemed, |Special illegitimacy of William.| of illegitimate birth clave the most abidingly. William the son of Robert was emphatically William the Bastard, and the name clave to him through life, on the Imperial throne of Britain no less than on the ducal chair of Normandy. For, of all the whole line, William was the one whose bastardy was the most undoubted, the least capable of being veiled under ambiguous and euphemistic phrases. The position of Popa and Sprota was a doubtful one;^[507] it may, according to Danish ideas, have been perfectly honourable. The children of Richard and Gunnor were, according to the law recognized everywhere but in our own country, legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their parents. But we may doubt whether the notion of the Danish marriage survived as late as the days of Robert, and it is certain that no ecclesiastical sacrament ever gave William a right, according to the law of the Church, to rank as the lawful son of his father. The mother of William is never spoken of in the respectful terms which we find applied to the mother of Richard the Fearless. Throughout the whole of Duke Robert’s life, she remained in the position of an acknowledged mistress, and her illustrious son came forth before the world with no other description than the Bastard.

Story of William’s birth.

The irregular birth of one so renowned naturally became the subject of romance and legend. And the spot on which William first saw the light is one which seems to 176call for the tribute of the legend-maker as its natural due. |Position of Falaise.| The town of Falaise, in the Diocese of Seez, is one of the most famous spots both in the earlier and in the later history of Normandy, and none assuredly surpasses it in the striking character of its natural position. Lying on the edge of the great forest of Gouffer, the spot had its natural attractions for a line of princes renowned, even above others of their time, for their devotion to the sports of the field. The town itself lies in a sort of valley between two eminences. The great Abbey, a foundation of a later date than the times which we are concerned with, has utterly vanished; but two stately parish churches, one of them dating from the days of Norman independence, bear witness to the ecclesiastical splendour of the place. Passing |Historical associations of the Castle.| by them, the traveller gradually ascends to the gate of the Castle, renowned alike in the wars of the twelfth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth centuries. A tall round tower still bears the name of the great Talbot, the guardian of |1417–1450.| the castle in the great English war, and who afterwards won a still higher fame as the last champion of the ancient |1453.| freedom of Aquitaine against the encroachments of the Kings of Paris.^[508] But this witness of comparatively recent strife is but an excrescence on the original structure. It is the addition made by an English King to one of the noblest works of his Norman forefathers. The Castle where legend fixes the birth of William of Normandy, and where |1175.| history fixes the famous homage of William of Scotland, is a vast donjon of the eleventh or twelfth century.^[509] One of 177the grandest of those massive square keeps which I have already spoken of as distinguishing the earliest military architecture of Normandy, crowns the summit of a precipitous rock, fronted by another mass of rock wilder still, on which the cannon of England were planted during |The rocks give its name to the town.| Henry’s siege. To these rocks, these felsen, the spot owes its name of Falaise,^[510] one of the many spots in Normandy where the good old Teutonic speech still lingers in local nomenclature, though in this case the Teutonic name has also preserved its permanent being in the general vocabulary of the Romance speech. Between these two rugged heights lies a narrow dell, through which runs a small beck, a tributary of the neighbouring river Ante. The dell is crowded with mills and tanneries, but the mills and tanneries of Falaise have their share in the historic interest of the place. The mills play no inconsiderable part in the |The Tanneries of Falaise.| records of the Norman Exchequer,^[511] and the tanneries at once suggest the name of the greatest son of Normandy. In every form which the story has taken in history or legend, the mother of the Conqueror appears as the |William the son of a Tanner’s daughter.| daughter of a tanner of Falaise, plying his unsavoury craft on the spot where it has continued to be plied through so many ages. The conquered English indeed strove to claim the Norman Duke as their own, by representing his mother as a descendant of their own royal house.^[512] But, even in this version, the traditional trade of her father 178|English legend of the birth of William.| is not forgotten. The daughter of the hero Eadmund disgraced herself by a marriage or an intrigue with her father’s tanner, to whom in process of time she bore three daughters. The pair were banished from England, and took refuge on the opposite coast. In the course of their wanderings they came to beg alms at the gate of Duke Richard the Good. The Prince discovered the lofty birth of the mother, and took the whole family into his favour. The youngest daughter became the mistress of his son Robert, and of them sprang the mighty William, great-grandson of Eadmund Ironside no less than of Richard the Fearless.

Such a tale is of course valuable only as illustrating the universal tendency of conquered nations to try to alleviate the shame and grief of conquest by striving to believe that their tyrants are at least their countrymen. The story of William’s English origin clearly comes from the same mint as the story in which Egyptian vanity gave out that Kambysês was Egyptian by his maternal origin,^[513] as the story which saw in Alexander himself a scion of the royal house of Persia.^[514] It seems however to preserve one grain of truth in the midst of so much that is mythical. It represents the connexion between Robert and his mistress as having begun before he ascended the ducal throne. There can be little doubt that this was the case, though the story is generally told as if Robert had been already Duke |Story of Herleva.| of the Normans. But it is more likely that Robert was as yet only Count of the Hiesmois, and, as such, Lord of Falaise, when his eye was first caught by the beauty of Arlette, or rather Herleva, the daughter of Fulbert the Tanner. Some say he first saw her engaged in the dance,^[515] others when she was busied in the more homely work 179of washing linen in the beck which flows by her father’s tannery at the foot of the castle.^[516] The prince himself, a mere stripling, saw and loved her. He sought her of her father, who, after some reluctance, gave up his child to his lord, by the advice, according to one account, of a holy hermit his brother.^[517] She was led the same evening to the castle; the poetical chroniclers are rich in details of her behaviour.^[518] She became the cherished mistress of Robert, and her empire over his heart was, we are told, not disturbed by another connexion, lawful or unlawful.^[519] |Advancement of her family.| After the example of former princes, Robert in after times raised the kinsfolk of his mistress to high honours. Half the nobility of Normandy had sprung from the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, so now Fulbert the Tanner, the father of Herleva, was raised to the post of ducal chamberlain,^[520] and her brother Walter was placed in some office which, in after times, gave him close access to the person of his princely nephew.^[521] After Robert’s death, |Her marriage with Herlwin of Conteville.| Herleva obtained an honourable marriage, and became, by her husband Herlwin of Conteville,^[522] the mother of two sons who will fill no small space in our history. But her union with the Duke produced but one son, perhaps but |Legends of omens.| one child.^[523] That child however was one whose future greatness was, so we are told, prefigured by omens and prodigies from the moment of his birth, and even from the moment of his conception. On the night of her first visit to the castle, Herleva dreamed that a tree arose from her 180body which overshadowed all Normandy and all England.^[524] At the moment of his birth, the babe seized the straw on the chamber floor with so vigorous a grasp that all who saw the sight knew that he would become a mighty conqueror, who would never let go anything that he had once laid |Birth of William. 1027–1028.| his hand upon.^[525] Leaving tales like these apart, it is certain that William, the bastard son of Robert and Herleva, was born at Falaise, perhaps in the year in which the great Cnut made his famous pilgrimage to the threshold of the Apostles.^[526]

Question of the succession: state of the Ducal family.

Before Robert undertook so perilous an enterprise, it was clearly needful for him to regulate the succession to the Duchy. The reigning prince had neither brother nor legitimate child. The heir, according to modern notions of heirship, was a churchman, Robert, Archbishop of |Robert Archbishop of Rouen. 989–1037.| Rouen. This Prelate we have already seen in rebellion against his namesake the Duke,^[527] probably on account of this very claim to the succession. He was one of the children of Richard the Fearless, legitimated and made capable of ecclesiastical honours by the late marriage of his parents. Indeed, according to one account, the marriage of Richard and Gunnor was contracted expressly to take away the canonical objections which were raised against the appointment of a bastard to the metropolitan see.^[528] Archbishop Robert was thus an uncle of Duke Robert and a great-uncle of the child William. Besides his Archbishoprick, he held the County of Evreux as a lay fee. Like the more famous Odo of Bayeux, he drew a marked distinction between his ecclesiastical and his temporal character. As Count of Evreux, he had a wife, Herleva 181by name,^[529] and was the father of children of whom we shall hear again in our history. In his latter days, his spiritual character became more prominent; he repented of his misdeeds, gave great alms to the poor, and began the rebuilding of the metropolitan church.^[530] There were also two princes whose connexion with the ducal house was by legitimate, though only female, descent. One was |Guy of Burgundy;| Guy of Burgundy, a nephew of Duke Robert, being grandson of Richard the Good through his daughter |Alan of Britanny;| Adeliza.^[531] The other was Robert’s cousin, Count Alan of Britanny, the son of Hadwisa daughter of Richard the Fearless.^[532] Nearer in blood, but of more doubtful legitimacy, were Robert’s own half-brothers, the sons of Richard |Malger;| the Good by Papia. These were the churchman Malger, who afterwards succeeded Archbishop Robert in the |William of Arques;| see of Rouen,^[533] and William, who held the County and |Nicholas.| castle of Arques near Dieppe.^[534] There was also the monk Nicholas, the young, and no doubt illegitimate, son of |No candidate free from objection.| Richard the Third.^[535] None of these were promising candidates for the ducal crown. Robert, the lineal heir, might 182be looked on as disqualified by his profession; Alan and Guy were strangers, and could claim only through females; the nearer kinsmen were of spurious or doubtful birth, and some of them were liable also to the same objection as Robert. Had any strong opposition existed, William of Arques would probably have been found the best card to play; but there was no candidate whose claims were absolutely without cavil; there was none round whom national feeling could instinctively centre; there was none who was clearly marked out, either by birth or by merit, as the natural leader of the Norman people. This state of things must be borne in mind, in order to understand the fact, otherwise so extraordinary, that Robert was able to secure the succession to a son who was at once bastard and minor. There were strong objections against young William; but there were objections equally strong against |Unpopularity of William’s succession.| every other possible candidate. Under these circumstances it was possible for William to succeed; but it followed, almost as a matter of course, that the early years of his reign were disturbed by constant rebellions. William’s succession was deeply offensive to many of his subjects, especially to that large portion of the Norman nobility who had any kind of connexion with the ducal house. From the time of the child’s birth, there can be little doubt that his father’s intentions in his favour were at least suspected, and the suspicion may well have given rise to some of the rebellions by which Robert’s reign was disturbed.^[536]

The great Norman houses; their connexion with English history.

At this stage of our narrative it becomes necessary to form some clear conception of the personality and the ancestry of some of the great Norman nobles. Most of them belonged to houses whose fame has not been confined to Normandy. We are now dealing with the fathers of the men, in some cases with the men themselves, who fought round William at Senlac, and among whom he 183divided the honours and the lands of England. These men became the ancestors of the new nobility of England, and, as their forefathers had changed in Gaul from Northmen into Normans, so now, by a happier application of the same law, they gradually changed from Normans into Englishmen. Many a name famous in English history, many a name whose sound is as familiar to us as any word of our own Teutonic speech, many a name which has long ceased to suggest any thought of foreign origin, is but the name of some Norman village, whose lord, or perhaps some lowlier inhabitant, followed his Duke to the Conquest of England and shared in the plunder of the conquered. But the names which are most familiar to us as names of English lords and gentlemen of Norman descent belong, for the most part, to a sort of second crop, which first grew up to importance on English soil. The great Norman houses whose acts—for the most part whose crimes—become of paramount importance at the time with which we are now dealing, were mostly worn out in a few generations, and they have left but few direct representatives on either side of the sea.

Greatness of the House of Belesme.

High among these great houses, the third in rank among the original Norman nobility,^[537] stood the house of Belesme, whose present head was William, surnamed Talvas.^[538] The domains held by his family, partly of the Crown of France, partly of the Duchy of Normandy, might almost put him on a level with princes rather than with ordinary nobles. The possession from which the family took its name lay within the French territory, and was a fief of the French Crown. But, within the Norman Duchy, the Lords of Belesme were masters of the valley bounded by the hills from which the Orne flows in one 184direction and the Sarthe in another. Close on the French frontier, they held the strong fortress of Alençon, the key of Normandy on that side. They are called Lords of the city of Seez,^[539] and, at the time of which we are speaking, a member of their house filled its episcopal throne.^[540] Their domains stretched to Vinoz, a few miles south-east of Falaise, and separated from the town by the forest of Gouffer. Ivo, the first founder of this mighty house, had been one of the faithful guardians of the childhood of Richard the Fearless, and had been enriched by him as the reward of his true service in evil days.^[541] But with Ivo the virtue of his race seems to have died out, and his descendants appear in Norman and English history as |Their supposed hereditary wickedness.| monsters of cruelty and perfidy, whose deeds aroused the horror even of that not over scrupulous age. Open robbery and treacherous assassination seem to have been their daily occupations. The second of the line, William of Belesme, had rebelled against Duke Robert, and had defended his fortress of Alençon against him.^[542] His eldest son Warren murdered a harmless and unsuspecting friend, and was for this crime, so the men of his age said, openly seized and strangled by the fiend. Of his other sons, Fulk, presuming to ravage the ducal territory, was killed in battle, Robert was taken prisoner by the men of Le 185Mans and beheaded by way of reprisals for a murder committed by his followers. The surviving heir of the possessions and of the wickedness of his race was his one remaining son William Talvas.^[543] This man, we are told, |William Talvas; his crimes.| being displeased by the piety and good manners of his first wife Hildeburgis, hired ruffians to murder her on her way to church.^[544] At his second wedding-feast he put out the eyes, and cut off the nose and ears, of an unsuspecting guest.^[545] This was William the son of Geroy, one of a house whose name we shall often meet again in connexion with the famous Abbeys of Bec and Saint Evroul. A local war ensued, in which William Talvas suffered an inadequate punishment for his crimes in the constant devastation of his lands. At last a more appropriate avenger arose from his own house. The hereditary wickedness of his line passed on to his daughter Mabel and his son Arnulf. Mabel, the wife of Roger of Montgomery, will be a prominent character in our story for many years. Arnulf rebelled against his father, and left him to die wretchedly in exile. An act of wanton rapacity was presently punished by a supernatural avenger; Arnulf, like his uncle Warren, was strangled by a dæmon in his bed.^[546] 186Such was the character of the family whose chief, first in power and in crime among the nobility of Normandy, stood forth, as the story goes, as the mouthpiece of that nobility, to express the feelings with which the descendants of the comrades of Rolf, the descendants of Richard the Fearless, even the descendants of the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, looked on the possible promotion of the Tanner’s grandson to be their lord.

William Talvas curses young William.

William Talvas, says the tale, in the days of his prosperity, was one day in the streets of Falaise, a town where the close neighbourhood of his possessions doubtless made him well known. The babe William, the son of the Duke and Herleva, was being nursed in the house of his maternal grandfather. A burgher, meeting the baron, bade him step in and see the son of his lord. William Talvas entered the house and looked on the babe. He then cursed him, saying that, by that child and his descendants, himself and his descendants would be brought to shame.^[547] A curse from the mouth of William Talvas might almost be looked on as a blessing, and the form of the prediction was such as to come very near to the nature of a panegyric. It is indeed the highest praise of the babe who then lay in his cradle, that he did something to bring to shame, something to bring under the restraints of law and justice, men like the hoary sinner who instinctively saw in him 187the destined enemy of his kind. But the words, when uttered, would be meant and understood simply as a protest against the insult which was preparing for the aristocratic pride of the great Norman houses. Possibly indeed the tale, like other tales of the kind, may have been devised after the event; still it would mark none the less truly the feelings with which a man like William Talvas, boasting of a descent from the original conquerors of the land, looked on the unworthy sovereign whom destiny seemed to be providing for them.

Robert announces his intention of pilgrimage. 1034–5.

Duke Robert however was bent on his purpose. He gathered an assembly of the great men of his Duchy, among whom the presence of Archbishop Robert, perhaps as being a possible competitor for the succession, is specially mentioned.^[548] The Duke set forth his intention of visiting the Holy Sepulchre, and told his hearers, that, aware of the dangers of such a journey, he wished to settle the succession to the Duchy before he set out. The voice of the Assembly bade him stay at home and continue to discharge the duties of government in person, especially at a time when there was no one successor or representative to whom they could be entrusted with any chance of the general good will. It was of course desirable to stave off the question. Robert might yet have legitimate heirs; or, in the failure of that hope, the Norman chiefs might gradually come to an agreement in favour of some other candidate. Let the Duke stay at home and guard his Duchy against the pretensions of the Breton and the Burgundian.^[549] But Robert would brook no delay in the accomplishment of his pious purpose; he would go at 188|He proposes William as his successor.| once to the Holy Land; he would settle the succession before he went. He brought forward the young William, and acknowledged him as his son. He was little, he told them, but he would grow; he was one of their own stock, brought up among them.^[550] His overlord the King of the French had engaged to acknowledge and protect him.^[551] He called on them to accept, to choose—the never-ceasing mixture of elective and hereditary claims appears here as everywhere—the child as their future Lord, as his successor in the Duchy, should he never return from the distant land to which he was bound.^[552] The Normans were in a manner entrapped. There can be no doubt that nothing could be further from the wishes of the majority of the Assembly than to agree to the Duke’s proposal; but there was nothing else to be done. If Robert could not be prevailed on to stay at home, some settlement must be made; and, little as any of them liked the prospect of the rule of the young Bastard, there was no other candidate in whose favour all parties could come to an agreement |William’s succession accepted.| on the spot. Unwillingly then the Norman nobility consented; they accepted the only proposal which was before them; they swore the usual oaths, and did homage to the son of Herleva as their future sovereign.^[553] The 189kinsmen of Gunnor, the descendants of the comrades of Rolf, became the men of the Tanner’s grandson, and he himself was received as the man of King Henry at Paris.^[554] As far as forms went, no form was wanting which could make William’s succession indisputably lawful. Duke Robert then set forth on the pilgrimage from which he never returned. Within a few months, his short life and |William succeeds his father in the Duchy. 1035.| reign came to an end at Nikaia.^[555] Thus, in the same year which beheld the great Empire of Cnut parted among his sons, did William, the seven years old grandson of the Tanner Fulbert, find himself on the seat of Rolf and Richard the Fearless, charged with the mission to keep down, as his infant hands best might, the turbulent spirits who had been unwillingly beguiled into acknowledging him as their sovereign.

Necessary evils of a minority.

Anarchy at once broke forth; all the evils which attend a minority in a rude age were at once poured forth upon the unhappy Duchy. We see the wisdom with which the custom of our own and of most contemporary lands provided that the government of men should be entrusted to those 190only who had themselves at least reached man’s estate. In England the exceptional minorities of the sons of Eadmund and of Eadgar had been calamitous, but they were nothing to compare to the minority of William of Normandy. In England the custom of regular national assemblies, the habit of submitting all matters to a fair vote, the recognition of the Law as supreme over every man, hindered the state from falling into utter dissolution, even in those perilous times. The personal reign of Æthelred proved far weaker than the administration which Dunstan carried on in his name in his early years. But in Normandy, where constitutional ideas had found so imperfect a developement as compared with England, there was nothing of this kind to fall back upon. Nothing but the personal genius of a determined and vigorous Prince could keep that fierce nobility in any measure of order. With the accession of an infant there at once ceased to be any power to protect or to punish. “Woe |Childhood of William.| to the land whose King is a child” is the apt quotation of an historian of the next age.^[556] The developement of the young Duke both in mind and body was undoubtedly precocious; but his early maturity was mainly owing to the stern discipline of that terrible childhood. It was in those years that he learned the arts which made Normandy, France, and England bow before him; but, at the age of seven years, William himself was no more capable than Æthelred of personally wielding the rod of rule. The child had good and faithful guardians, guardians perhaps no less well disposed to fulfil their trust towards him than Dunstan had been towards the children of Eadgar. But there was no one man in Normandy to whom every Norman could look up as every Englishman 191had looked up to the mighty Primate, and the bowl and the dagger soon deprived the young Prince of the support of his wisest and truest counsellors. The minority of William was truly a time when every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And what seemed right in the eyes of the nobles of Normandy was commonly |Utter anarchy of the time.| rebellion against their sovereign, ruthless oppression of those beneath them, and endless deadly feuds with one another. We have already seen some specimens of their crimes in the doings of the house of Belesme. That house is indeed always spoken of as exceptionally wicked; but a state of things in which such deeds could be done, and could go unpunished, must have come very nearly to a complete break-up of society. The general pictures which we find given us of the time are fearful beyond expression. Through the withdrawal of all controlling power, every landowner became a petty sovereign, and began to exercise all the sovereign rights of slaughter and devastation. |Building of castles.| The land soon bristled with castles. The mound crowned with the square donjon rose as the defence or the terror of every lordship.^[557] This castle-building 192|Building of castles.| is now spoken of in Normandy with a condemnation nearly as strong as that with which it was spoken of in England, when, a few years after this time, the practice was introduced into England by the Norman favourites of Eadward.^[558] But there is a characteristic difference in the tone of the two complaints. The English complaint always is that the Frenchmen built castles and oppressed the poor folk,^[559] or that they did all possible evil and shame to their English neighbours.^[560] The Norman complaint, though not wholly silent as to the oppression of the humbler ranks,^[561] yet dwells mainly on the castle-building as a sign of rebellion against the authority of the Prince, and as an occasion of warfare between baron and baron. And it would have been well for the reputation of the Norman nobles of that age if they had confined themselves to open warfare with one another and open rebellion against their sovereign. |Frequency of assassinations.| But they sank below the common morality of their own age; private murder was as familiar to them as open war. The house of Belesme had a bad preeminence in this as in other crimes; but, if they had a preeminence, they were far from having a monopoly. Probably no period of the same length in the history of Christendom contains the record of so many foul deeds of slaughter and mutilation as the early years of the reign of William. And they were constantly practised, not only against avowed and armed enemies, but against unarmed and unsuspecting guests. Some of the tales may be inventions or exaggerations; but the days in which such tales could even be invented must 193have been full of deeds of horror. Isolated cases of similar crimes may doubtless be found in any age; but this period is remarkable alike for the abundance of crimes, for the rank of the criminals, and for the impunity which they enjoyed. To control these men was the duty laid upon the almost infant years of William, a duty with which nothing short of his own full and matured powers might seem fit to grapple. Yet over all these difficulties the genius of the |Effects of William’s government in Normandy.| great Duke was at last triumphant. His hand brought order out of the chaos, and changed a land wasted by rebellion and intestine warfare into one of the most prosperous regions of Europe, a land flourishing as no Norman ruler had seen it flourish before. When we think of the days in which William spent his youth, of the men against whom his early years were destined to be one continued struggle, we shall be less inclined to lift up our hands in horror at his later crimes than to dwell with admiration on the large share of higher and better qualities which, among all his evil deeds, clave to him to his dying day.

§ 2. From the Accession of William to the Battle of Val-ès-dunes. 1035–1047.

Guardians of William.

We have seen among what kind of men the young Duke of the Normans had to pass the first years of his life and sovereignty. But his father, in leaving his one lamb among so many wolves, had at least provided him with trustworthy |Alan of Britanny.| guardians. Alan of Britanny, a possible competitor for the Duchy, a neighbouring prince with whom Duke Robert had so lately been at war,^[562] was disarmed when his overlord committed his son to his faith as kinsman and vassal, and even invested him with some measure of 194authority in Normandy itself.^[563] The immediate care of the young Duke’s person was given to one Thurcytel or Thorold, names which point to a genuine Scandinavian descent in their bearer, and which would make us look to the Bessin as the probable place of his birth.^[564] Other |Osbern.| guardians of high rank were the Seneschal Osbern, and Count Gilbert, both of them connected in the usual way with the ducal family. Osbern was the son of Herfast, a brother of the Duchess Gunnor; he was also married to a daughter of Rudolf of Ivry, the son of Asperleng and Sprota, the savage suppressor of the great |Gilbert.| peasant revolt.^[565] Gilbert’s connexion was still closer. He was illustrious alike in his forefathers and in his descendants. He sprang of the ducal blood of Normandy, and of his blood sprang the great houses of Clare and Pembroke in England. His father Godfrey was one of those natural children of Richard the Fearless who did not share the promotion of the offspring of Gunnor.^[566] He was lord of the border fortress of Eu, renowned in Norman history as early as the days of Rolf;^[567] he was lord too of the pleasant valley of the Risle, separated only by one wooded hill from the more memorable valley which is hallowed by the names of Herlwin, Lanfranc, and Anselm. 195|Alan poisoned. 1039–1040.| All these worthy men paid the penalty of their fidelity. Count Alan died of poison, while he was besieging the castle of Montgomery, the stronghold of a house which we shall often have again to mention. He died at Vinmoutier, and was buried in the abbey of Fécamp. Breton slander afterwards threw the guilt of this crime upon the Duke himself,^[568] the person who had least to gain by it. Norman slander threw it on Alan’s own subjects;^[569] but one can hardly doubt that, if the poisoned bowl was administered at all, it was administered by some one or |Murder of Gilbert.| other of the rebellious Norman nobles.^[570] Count Gilbert was murdered by assassins employed by Ralph of Wacey, son of Archbishop Robert.^[571] The sons of the murdered man fled to Flanders, and took refuge with the common protector of banished men, Count Baldwin. The lands of Gilbert were divided among various claimants; the County of Eu seems to have passed into the hands of his uncle William;^[572] but his famous castle of Brionne fell to the lot of Guy of Burgundy, of whom, and of whose possession of the fortress, we shall hear much as we go on.^[573]

Castle and house of Montgomery.

Another still more criminal attempt directly introduces us for the first time to another of the great Norman houses, and one whose name has been more abiding than 196any other. I have just before mentioned Count Alan’s siege of the castle of Montgomery. The name of that castle, a hill fortress in the diocese of Lisieux, enjoys a peculiar privilege above all others in Norman geography. Other spots in Normandy have given their names to Norman houses, and those Norman houses have transferred those names to English castles and English towns and villages. But there is only one shire in Great Britain which has had the name of a Norman house impressed |Roger of Montgomery and his five sons.| upon it for ever. Roger, the present Lord of Montgomery, was, at the time of Duke Robert’s death, in banishment at Paris.^[574] His five sons remained in Normandy, and were among the foremost disturbers of the peace of the country.^[575] But one of the five, Hugh, had a son, named, like his |The younger Roger.| grandfather, Roger, who bore a better character and was destined to a higher fate. He had, through his mother, a connexion of the usual kind with the ducal house. Weva, a sister of Gunnor, was the wife of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, the son of Torf,^[576] and her daughter Joscelina was the wife of Hugh of Montgomery, and the mother of the younger Roger.^[577] On this Roger, William Talvas, in his old age, |His wife Mabel, daughter of William Talvas.| bestowed the hand of his daughter Mabel, who transferred the name, the honours, and the hereditary wickedness of the house of Belesme to her sons of the house of Montgomery.^[578] Mabel, small in stature, talkative, and cruel, guilty of fearful crimes and destined to a fearful doom,^[579] fills a place 197in history fully equal to that filled by her husband. Of him we shall hear again as literally the foremost among the conquerors of England; we shall see him enriched with English estates and honours, bearing the lofty titles of Earl of Arundel and Shrewsbury, and, once at least, adorned with the loftier title which had been borne by Æthelred and |1087.| Leofric. Once, and that while engaged in rebellion against his prince, he flits before us for a moment as Roger Earl of the Mercians.^[580] A munificent friend of monks both in England and in Normandy, he has left behind him a different reputation from that of either his father, his wife, or his sons. In one of those sons we shall see the name of his maternal ancestors revive, and, with their name, a double portion of their wickedness.

But we have as yet to deal with the house of Montgomery |Attempt of William of Montgomery on Duke William at Vaudreuil.| only in its least honourable aspect. William, son of the elder, and uncle of the younger, Roger, stands charged with an attempt, aimed no longer at guardians or tutors, but at the person of the young Duke himself. William was staying with his guardian Osbern at Vaudreuil, a castle on an island in the Eure, said to have been the place of captivity of the famous Fredegunda in Merowingian times.^[581] Thorold, it would seem, had been already murdered, but his assassins are spoken of only in general terms.^[582] But Osbern still watched over his young lord day |Murder of Osbern; escape of the Duke.| and night. While at Vaudreuil he was butchered by William of Montgomery in the very bedchamber of the Duke, and the young prince owed his own safety on this, and on many other occasions, to the zealous care of his maternal uncle Walter. Many a time did this faithful 198kinsman carry him from palace and castle to find a lurking-place from those who sought his life in the cottages of the poor.^[583] The blood of Osbern was soon avenged; a faithful servant of the murdered Seneschal presently did to William of Montgomery as William of Montgomery had done to Osbern.^[584] In the state of things in Normandy at that moment crime could be punished only by crime. The remembrance of the faithful Osbern lived also in the memory of the Prince whose childhood he had so well |Friendship of the Duke with William Fitz-Osbern.| guarded. His son William grew up from his youth as the familiar friend and counsellor of his namesake the Duke. This is that famous William Fitz-Osbern who lived to be, next to the Duke himself, the prime agent in the Conquest of England, who won, far more than the Duke himself, the hatred of the conquered people, and who at last perished in a mad enterprise after a crown and a wife in Flanders.

The next enemy was Roger of Toesny, whom we have 199already heard of as a premature Crusader, the savage foe |Rebellion and death of Roger of Toesny.| of the Infidels of Spain.^[585] Disappointed in his dream of a Kingdom in the Iberian peninsula, he returned to his native land to find it under the sway of the son of the Tanner’s daughter. The proud soul of the descendant of Malahulc scorned submission to such a lord; “A bastard is not fit to rule over me and the other Normans.”^[586] He refused all allegiance, and began to ravage the lands of his neighbours. The one who suffered most was Humfrey de Vetulis, a son of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, and of Weva the sister of Gunnor. He sent his son Roger of Beaumont against the aggressor. A battle followed, in which Roger of Toesny and his two sons were killed, and Robert of Grantmesnil received a mortal wound.^[587] This fight was fought rather in defence of private property than in the assertion of any public principle. But the country gained by the destruction of so inveterate an enemy of peace as Roger of Toesny. And here, as at every step of this stage of our narrative, we become acquainted with men whose names are to figure in the later portion of |Houses of Grantmesnil and Beaumont.| our history. Robert of Grantmesnil was the father of Hugh of Grantmesnil, who had no small share in the conquest of England and the division of its spoil. Roger of Beaumont became the patriarch of the first house of the Earls of Leicester. One of his descendants played an honourable part in the great struggle between King and Primate in the latter half of the twelfth century;^[588] and his 200honours passed by female succession to that great deliverer who made the title of Earl of Leicester the most glorious in the whole peerage of England.^[589]

Ralph of Wacey chosen as the Duke’s guardian.

By this time William was getting beyond the years of childhood, and he was beginning to display those extraordinary powers of mind and body with which nature had endowed him. He could now in some measure exercise a will of his own. He still needed a guardian, but, according to the principles of Roman Law, he had a right to a voice in determining who that guardian should be. He summoned the chief men of his Duchy, and, by their advice, he chose as his own tutor and as Captain-General of the armies of Normandy,^[590] Ralph the son of Archbishop Robert. The choice seems a strange one, as Ralph was no other than the murderer of William’s former guardian Count Gilbert.^[591] But it may have been thought politic for the young Duke to strengthen his hands by an alliance with a former enemy, and to make, as in the case of Count Alan of Britanny, a practical appeal to the honour of a possible rival. The appointment of Ralph seems in fact to have had that effect. A time of comparative internal quiet now followed. But there still were traitors in the land. Many, we are told, of the Norman nobles, even of those who professed the firmest fidelity to the Duke, and were loaded by him with the highest honours, still continued to plot against him in secret.^[592] For a while they no longer 201revolted openly on their own account; but there was a potentate hard by whose ear was ever open to their suggestions, and who was ever ready to help them in any plots against their sovereign and their country.

Relations between Normandy and France hitherto friendly.

From this point a new chapter opens in the relations between Normandy and France. We have seen that, ever since the Commendation made by Richard the Fearless to Hugh the Great,^[593] the relations between the Norman Princes and the Dukes and Kings of Paris had been invariably |945.| |987.| friendly.^[594] It was to Norman help that the Parisian dynasty in a great measure owed its rise to royalty;^[595] it |1031.| was to Norman help that the reigning King of the French owed his restoration to his throne.^[596] Henry of Paris, made King by the help of Robert, had received Robert’s son as his vassal,^[597] and had promised to afford him the protection due from a righteous overlord to a faithful vassal. But we |Return to ill-feeling from the accession of William.| now, from the accession of William, begin to see signs of something like a return on the French side to the old state of feeling in the days when the Normans were still looked on as heathen intruders, and their Duke was held to be Duke only of the Pirates.^[598] We find the French applying contemptuous epithets to the Norman people,^[599] and we find the King of the French ready to seize every opportunity 202for enriching himself at the expense of the Norman Duke.

Causes of this change of feeling.

It is not easy at first sight to explain this return to a state of things which seemed to have passed away for more than a generation. Still we must not forget that any prince reigning at Paris could hardly fail to look with a grudging eye on the practically independent power which cut him off from the mouth of his own river. The great feudatory at Rouen seemed, in a way in which no other feudatory seemed, to shut up his overlord in a kind of prison. The wealth and greatness and prosperity of Normandy might seem, both historically and geographically, to be something actually taken away from the possessions of France. This feeling would apply to Normandy in a way in which it did not apply to the other great fiefs of Flanders and Aquitaine. And the feeling would on every ground be stronger in the mind of a King reigning at Paris than in that of a King reigning at Laôn. To a French King at Paris the Normans were the nearest and the most powerful of all neighbours, those whose presence must have made itself far more constantly felt than that of any other power in Gaul. Hitherto this inherent feeling of jealousy had been kept in check by the close hereditary connexion between the two states. The league established between Richard and Hugh had hitherto been kept unbroken by their descendants. But the main original object of that league, mutual support against the Carolingian King at Laôn, had ceased to exist when the Parisian Duke assumed the royal dignity. Since that time, the league could have rested on little more than an hereditary sentiment between the Norman and French princes, which probably was never very deeply shared by their subjects on either side. And now that sentiment was giving way to the earlier and more instinctive feeling which pointed out the Rouen Duchy as the natural enemy 203of the Parisian Kingdom. It had once been convenient to forget, it was now equally convenient to remember, that the original grant to Rolf had been made at the immediate expense, not of the King of Laôn but of the Duke of Paris.^[600] Under these changed circumstances, the old feeling, dormant for a time, seems to have again awakened in all its strength. And now that Normandy held out temptations to every aggressor, now that Norman nobles did not scruple to invite aid from any quarter against a prince |Ingratitude of King Henry.| whose years were the best witness of his innocence, every feeling of justice and generosity seems to have vanished from the mind of King Henry. The King who owed his Crown to the unbought fidelity of Duke Robert did not scruple to despoil the helpless boy whom his benefactor had |Dispute about Tillières.| entrusted to his protection. The border fortress of Tillières formed the first pretext. That famous creation of Richard the Good had been raised as a bulwark, not against the King, but against the troublesome Count of Chartres.^[601] But Odo had found it convenient to surrender the disputed territory of Dreux to the Crown;^[602] the Arve therefore now became the boundary between Normandy and the royal domain. Tillières was accordingly declared to be a standing menace to Paris, whose retention was inconsistent with any friendly relations between King and Duke.^[603] The loyal party in Normandy thought it better to yield 204than to expose their young Duke to fresh jeopardy.^[604] But the actual commander of the fortress was of another mind. |Gilbert Crispin besieged in Tillières.| Tillières had been entrusted by Duke Robert to Gilbert Crispin, the ancestor of a race by whom, after its restoration to Normandy, the border fortress was held for several generations.^[605] He scorned to agree to a surrender which he looked on as dangerous and disgraceful;^[606] he shut himself up in the castle with a strong force, and there endured a siege at the hands of the King. Besides his own subjects, Henry had a large body of Normans in the besieging host.^[607] It is not clear whether these were Normans of the disaffected party, or whether the Duke’s own adherents, when they had once pledged themselves to surrender the castle, deemed it expedient to display this excess of zeal against a comrade who had carried his loyalty to the extreme of |Tillières surrendered and burned.| disobedience. It is certain that it was only in deference to orders given in the Duke’s name, and which seem to imply the Duke’s personal presence,^[608] that the gallant Gilbert at last surrendered his trust. The fortress of which Normandy had been so proud was handed over to the French King, and was at once given to the flames, to the sorrow of every true Norman heart.^[609] The King pledged 205himself, as one of the conditions of the surrender, not to restore the fortress for four years.^[610] But, if the Norman writers may be trusted, he grossly belied his faith. His somewhat unreasonable demand had been granted, and no further provocation seems to have been given on the Norman side. But, now that the protecting fortress |Henry invades Normandy and restores Tillières.| was dismantled, Henry ventured on an actual invasion. He retired for a while; but he soon returned and crossed the border. He passed through the County of Hiesmes, the old appanage of Duke Robert; from the valley of the Dive he passed into the valley of the Orne, and burned the Duke’s own town of Argentan. He then returned laden with booty, and, on his way back, in defiance of his engagements, he restored and garrisoned the dismantled fortress of Tillières.^[611] The border fortress, so long the cherished defence of Normandy, now became the sharpest thorn in her side.

It is impossible to doubt that this devastation of the County of Hiesmes was made by special agreement with the man who was most bound to defend it. The commander of the district was Thurstan surnamed Goz, the son of Ansfrid the Dane.^[612] In this description, so long after the first occupation of the country, we must recognize a son of a follower of Harold Blaatand,^[613] not a son of an original companion of Rolf. And a son of a follower of Harold Blaatand must have been by this time a man advanced in life. But neither his age and office, nor his Scandinavian 206|Treason of Thurstan Goz.| descent and name, hindered Thurstan from playing into the hands of the French invaders. Seeing that the Duke had been thus compelled to yield to the King, Thurstan |He garrisons Falaise Castle against the Duke.| looked upon the moment as one propitious for revolt. He took some of the King’s soldiers into his pay, and with their help he garrisoned the castle of Falaise against the Duke.^[614] Young William’s indignation was naturally great. To select that particular spot as a centre of rebellion was not only a flagrant act of disloyalty, but the grossest of personal insults. Acting under the guidance of his guardian Ralph of Wacey, he summoned all loyal Normans to his standard, and advanced to the siege of his |The castle besieged and taken by the Duke and Ralph of Wacey.| birthplace. The castle was attacked by storm, a fact which shows that the town was loyal, proud as it well might be of numbering among its sons not only a sovereign, but a sovereign who was beginning to be renowned even in his boyhood. It was only on the side of the town that the castle could be assaulted in this way. William himself could hardly have swarmed up the steep cliffs which looked down upon the dwelling of his grandfather, nor could he, like the English invader four centuries later, command the fortress by artillery planted on the opposite heights. By dint of sheer personal strength and courage, the gallant Normans assaulted the massive walls of the Norman fortress, in the heart of the Norman land, which French hirelings, in the pay of a Norman traitor, were defending against the prince to whom that fortress owes a renown which can never pass away. Their attacks 207made a breach, perhaps not in the donjon itself, but at any rate in its external defences; night alone, we are told, put an end to the combat, and saved Thurstan and his party from all the horrors of a storm. But the rebel chief now saw that his hopes were vain; he sought a parley with the Duke, and was allowed to go away unhurt on condition of perpetual banishment from Normandy. |Thurstan’s descendants, the Earls of Chester.| Thurstan’s son, Richard, Viscount of Avranches, proved a loyal servant to William, and in the end procured the pardon of his father.^[615] The son of the loyal Richard, the grandson of the rebel Thurstan, finds a place in English history by the name of Hugh the Wolf, the first of the mighty but short-lived line of the Counts Palatine of Chester.^[616]

Developement of Williams’s character.

The young Duke’s great qualities were now fast displaying themselves. At the earliest age which the rules of chivalry allowed, he received the ensigns of knighthood from King Henry, and his subjects now began, not without reason, to look forward to a season of peace and order under his rule.^[617] We hardly need the exaggerated talk of his extravagant panegyrist to feel sure that William, at an unusually early age, taught men to see in him the born ruler. We hear, not only of his grace and skill in every warlike exercise, not only of his wisdom in the choice of his counsellors, but of his personally practising every virtue that becomes a man and a prince. William, we are told, was fervent in his devotions, righteous in his judgements, and he dealt out a justice as strict as that of Godwine or 208Harold upon all disturbers of the public peace.^[618] All this we can well believe. Of all these virtues he retained many traces to the last. A long career of ambition, craft, and despotic rule, never utterly seared his conscience, never brought him down to the level of those tyrants who neither fear God nor regard man. And in the fresh and generous days of youth, we can well believe that one so highly gifted, and who as yet had so little temptation to abuse his gifts, must have shone forth before all men as the very model of every princely virtue. In one important point however, the public acts of William, or of those who acted in his name, hardly bear out the language of his |Ecclesiastical appointments abused by the Norman Dukes.| panegyrists. His first ecclesiastical appointments were quite unworthy of the prince who was, somewhat later in life, to learn to appreciate and to reward the virtues of Lanfranc and Anselm. The two greatest preferments of the Norman Church fell vacant during this period, and the way in which they were filled illustrates a not uncommon practice of the Norman princes which had few or no parallels in England. There have been few instances in England in any age of great spiritual preferments being perverted into means of maintenance for cadets or bastards of the royal house. In Normandy, at least since the days of Richard the Fearless, the practice had been shamefully common, and in the early days of William the scandal still continued.

It must be remembered that the Prelates of Normandy, 209|Position of the Norman Prelates.| like the Prelates of the other great fiefs of the French Crown, were, in every sense, the subjects of the Princes within whose immediate dominions they found themselves. Here was one great point of difference between the condition of France and the condition of Germany. In Germany all the great churchmen, in every part of the country, held immediately of the Emperor. Every Bishop was therefore reckoned as a Prince. The episcopal city also commonly became a Free City of the Empire, and, as such, a commonwealth enjoying practical independence. |Their subjection to the Ducal authority.| No such oases of ecclesiastical or municipal privilege interrupted the continuous dominion of a Norman or Aquitanian Duke. The Metropolitan of Rouen or of Bourdeaux might be either the loyal subject or the refractory vassal of his immediate Prince; but in no case was he a coordinate sovereign, owning no superior except in the common overlord. It is only among the Bishops within the Crown lands, those who, in the extemporized jurisprudence of a later age, sat as Peers of France, alongside of the great Dukes and Counts, that the slightest signs of any such hierarchical independence can be discerned. At an earlier age we have indeed seen the metropolitan see of Rheims holding a position which faintly approached that of Mainz or Köln;^[619] but even Rheims had now considerably fallen from its ancient greatness, and no such claims to princely authority were at any time put forward by the proudest Prelate of Rouen or Bayeux. It was as Count of Evreux, rather than as Primate of Normandy, that Archbishop Robert had been able to make himself so troublesome to |Death of Archbishop Robert. 1037.| his nephew and sovereign. That turbulent Prelate, after an episcopate of forty-eight years, had amended his ways, and had at last vacated both County and Archbishoprick by death.^[620] In his temporal capacity he was succeeded by 210a son and a grandson, after whom the County of Evreux passed by an heiress to the house of Montfort, giving the Count-Primate the honour of being, through female descendants, a forefather of the great Simon.^[621] The vacancy of the Archbishoprick placed the greatest spiritual preferment in the Duchy at the disposal of the young Duke. The choice of the new Primate was as little directed by considerations of ecclesiastical merit as that of his predecessor, and it proved in every way unfortunate. At the |Malger, Archbishop of Rouen. 1037–1055.| head of the Norman Church William’s counsellors placed his uncle Malger, one of the sons of Richard the Good by Papia.^[622] We shall presently find him displaying no very priestly qualities, and the only act of his life which could be attributed to Christian or ecclesiastical zeal was one which wounded the Duke himself in the tenderest point. |Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. 1048–1098.| So too, when, some years later, the great see of Bayeux fell vacant, William bestowed it on his half-brother Odo, the son of Herleva by her husband Herlwin of Conteville.^[623] Odo, like Hugh of Rheims in earlier times,^[624] must have been a mere boy at the time of his appointment;^[625] but he 211held the see of Bayeux for fifty years,^[626] and, during most part of that time, his name was famous and terrible on both sides of the Channel. The character which he left |His character in England,| behind him was a singularly contradictory one.^[627] In England he was remembered only as the foremost among the conquerors and oppressors of the land, the man who gained for himself a larger share of English hatred than William |1086|. himself, the man whose career of wrong was at last cut short by his royal brother, who, stern and unscrupulous as he was, at least took no pleasure in deeds of wanton oppression. Of Odo’s boundless ambition and love of enterprise there is no doubt. The one quality led him to aspire to the Papal throne;^[628] the other led him first to forsake his diocese to rule as an Earl in England, and then to forsake it again to follow his nephew Duke Robert to the first Crusade. That he was no strict observer of ecclesiastical rules in his own person is shown by the fact that he left behind him a son, on whom however he at least bestowed the ecclesiastical name of John.^[629] Still Norman |and in Normandy.| ecclesiastical history sets Odo before us in a somewhat fairer light than that in which we see him in English secular history. He at least possessed the episcopal virtue of munificence, and, whatever were the defects of his own conduct, he seems to have been an encourager of learning and good conversation in others. He was bountiful to all, 212specially to those of his own spiritual household. He |His works at Bayeux. Cathedral consecrated, 1077.| rebuilt his own church at Bayeux, where parts of his work still remain. The lower part of the lofty towers of the western front, the dim and solemn crypt beneath the choir, of that stately and varied cathedral, are relics of the church reared by its most famous Bishop. These precious fragments, severe but far from rude in style, form a striking contrast to the gorgeous arcades which in the next century supplanted Odo’s nave, and to the soaring choir and apse raised by a still later age. Besides renewing the fabric, he increased the number of the clergy of his church, and founded or enriched a monastery in the outskirts of the city, in honour of Saint Vigor, a canonized predecessor in the see of Bayeux.^[630] The name of Odo is one which will be constantly recurring in this history, from the day when his Bishop’s staff and warrior’s mace were so successfully wielded against the defenders of England, till the day when he went forth to wield the same weapons against the misbelievers of the East, and found on his road a tomb, far from the heavy pillars and massive arches of his own Bayeux, among the light and gorgeous enrichments with which the art of the conquered Saracen knew how to adorn the palaces and churches of the Norman lords of Palermo.^[631]

But, though the appointments of Malger and Odo might bode but little good for the cause of ecclesiastical reformation, 213it is certain that a great movement was at this time |Ecclesiastical movement in Normandy; foundation of monasteries.| going on in the interior of the Norman Church. The middle of the eleventh century was, in Normandy, the most fruitful æra of the foundation of monasteries. The movement in that direction, which had begun under Richard the Fearless, had continued under Richard the Good, and it seems to have reached its height under Robert and William. A Norman noble of that age thought that his estate lacked its chief ornament, if he failed to plant a colony of monks in some corner of his possessions.^[632] No doubt the fashion of founding monasteries became, in this case, as in other cases earlier and later, little more than a mere fashion. Many a man must have founded a religious house, not from any special devotion or any special liberality, but simply because it was the regular thing for a man in his position to do.^[633] And, as an age of founding monasteries must also be an age in which men are unusually eager to enter the monastic profession, we may infer that many men took that profession on them out of mere imitation or prevalent impulse, without any real |Character of the monastic reformations in various ages.| personal call to the monastic life. Still, though movements of this sort may end in becoming a mere fashion, they never are a mere fashion at their beginning. The Norman Benedictine movement in the eleventh century, the English Cistercian movement in the twelfth century, 214the still greater movement of the Friars in the thirteenth century—we may add the revulsion in favour of the Seculars in the fourteenth century, and the great Jesuit movement in the sixteenth—all alike point to times when all classes of men were dissatisfied with the existing state of the Church, and were filled with a general desire for its reformation. The evil in every case was that the monastic reformations were never more than temporary. Some new foundations were created, perhaps even some old ones were reformed; the newly kindled fire burned with great fervour for a generation or two; a crop of saints arose, with their due supply of legends and miracles. But presently love again waxed cold; the new foundations fell away like the elder ones, and the next age saw its new order arise, to run the same course of primitive poverty and primitive holiness, degenerating into wealth, indolence, and corruption. Still there is a peculiar charm in contemplating the early years, the infant struggles, the simple and fervent devotion, of one of these religious brotherhoods |Two monasteries claiming special notice, Bec and Saint Evroul.| in the days of its first purity. And, among the countless monasteries which arose in Normandy at this time, there are two which claim some special notice at the hands of an historian whose chief aim is to connect the history of Normandy with that of England. The famous Abbey |Three Archbishops of Canterbury from Bec;| of Bec became the most renowned school of the learning of the time, and, among the other famous men whom it sent forth, it gave three Primates to the throne of Augustine. Thence came Lanfranc, the right hand man of the |Lanfranc, 1070–1089.| Conqueror—the scholar whose learning drew hearers from all Christendom, and before whose logic the heretic stood abashed—the courtier who could win the favour of Kings without stooping to any base compliance with their will—the ruler whose crozier completed the conquest which the ducal sword only began, and who knew how to win the love of the conquered, even while rivetting their fetters. 215|Anselm, 1093–1109.| Thence too came also the man of simple faith and holiness, the man who, a stranger in a strange land, could feel his heart beat for the poor and the oppressed, the man who braved the wrath of the most terrible of Kings in the cause at once of ecclesiastical discipline and of moral righteousness. Such are the truest claims of Anselm to the reverence of later ages, but it must not be forgotten that, if Bec sent forth in Lanfranc the great reformer of ecclesiastical discipline, it sent forth also in his successor the father of the whole dogmatic theology of later times. |Theobald, 1139–1161.| The third Metropolitan who found his way from Bec to Canterbury cannot compete with the fame of either of his great predecessors; yet Theobald lives in history as the first to discern the native powers of one whose renown presently came to outshine the renown of Lanfranc and Anselm. The early patron of Thomas the burgher’s son of London may fairly claim some reflected share of the glory which surrounds the name of Thomas the Chancellor of England, the Primate and the Martyr of Canterbury. |Ouche or Saint Evroul.| By the side of the house which sent forth men like these the name of the other Norman monastery of which I speak may seem comparatively obscure. Yet the Abbey of Ouche or Saint Evroul has its own claim on our respect. It was the spot which beheld the composition of the record from which we draw our main knowledge of the times following |The home of Orderic Vital.| those with which we have immediately to deal; it was the home of the man in whom, perhaps more than in any other, the characters of Norman and Englishman were inseparably mingled. There the historian wrote, who, though the son of a French father, the denizen of a Norman monastery, still clave to England as his country and gloried in his English birth^[634]—the historian who could at 216once admire the greatness of the Conqueror and sympathize with the wrongs of his victims, who, amid all the conventional reviling which Norman loyalty prescribed, could still see and acknowledge with genuine admiration the virtues and the greatness even of the perjured Harold.^[635] To have merely produced a chronicler may seem faint praise beside the fame of producing men whose career has had a lasting influence on the human mind; yet, even beside the long bead-roll of the worthies of Bec, some thought may well be extended to the house where Orderic recorded the minutest details of the lives alike of the saints and of the warriors of his time.

Early history of Bec.

The tale of the early days of Bec is one of the most captivating in the whole range of monastic history or monastic legend. It has a character of its own. The origin of Bec differs from that of those earlier monasteries which gradually grew up around the dwelling-place or the burial-place of some revered Bishop or saintly hermit. It differs again from the origin of those monasteries of its own age which were the creation of some one external founder. Or rather it united the two characters in one. It gradually rose to greatness from very small beginnings; but, gradual as the process was, it took place within the lifetime of one man. And that man was at once its founder and its first ruler. The part of Cuthberht at Lindisfarne, the parts of William and of Lanfranc at Caen, |Herlwin, founder of Bec, born 994.| were all united in Herlwin, Knight, Founder, and Abbot. This famous man passed thirty-seven years of his life as a man of the world, a Norman gentleman and soldier. His father Ansgod boasted of a descent from the first 217|His descent| Danes who occupied Neustria,^[636] that is to say, from the original companions of Rolf as distinguished from the later settlers under Harold Blaatand.^[637] And this descent agrees with the geographical position of his estates, which lay, though on the left bank of the Seine, yet on the right bank of the Dive, within the limits of the original grant of Charles the Simple.^[638] On the spindle side he boasted of a still higher ancestry; his mother Heloise is said, on what authority it is not very clear, to have been a near |and early life.| kinswoman of the reigning house of Flanders.^[639] He was a vassal of Count Gilbert of Brionne, the faithful guardian of William, in the neighbourhood of whose castle his own estates lay. He had proved his faithfulness to his immediate lord by many services of various kinds, and he had won the favour, not only of Count Gilbert but of their common sovereign Duke Robert. On one occasion, an injury received from the Count had caused him to forsake |His virtues.| his service. But presently the Count was engaged in a more dangerous warfare with Ingelram, Count of Ponthieu. Herlwin with his followers came at a critical moment to Gilbert’s help, and the Count restored all, and more than all, that he had taken away from one who so well knew how to return good for evil.^[640] At another time 218Gilbert sent Herlwin to the ducal court on an errand of which his conscience disapproved;^[641] he failed to execute the unjust commission; in revenge the Count ravaged the lands of Herlwin and did great damage to their poor occupiers.^[642] Herlwin went to the Count, and made light of his own injury, but prayed that in any case the losses of the poor might be made good to them. Such a man was already a saint in practice, if not in profession; and we have no right to assume that, in this carrying out of Christian principles into daily life, Herlwin stood alone among the gallant gentlemen of Normandy. But the misfortune always was that men like Herlwin, who were designed to leaven the world by their virtues, were in that age open to so many temptations to forsake the world |He contemplates monastic retirement.| altogether. Herlwin began to feel himself out of place in the secular world of Normandy, full, as it was in those days, of strife and bloodshed, where every man sought to win justice for himself by his own sword. But he was hardly more out of place in the Norman ecclesiastical world, where priests not only married freely, but bore arms and lived the life of heathen Danes,^[643] and where even monks used their fists in a way which would hardly have been becoming in laymen.^[644] The faith of Herlwin nearly 219failed him when he saw the disorder of one famous monastery; but he was comforted by accidentally beholding the devotions of one godly brother, who spent the whole night in secret prayer. He was thus convinced that the salt of the earth had not as yet wholly lost its savour.^[645]

Herlwin begins his foundation at Burneville. 1034.

Herlwin now, at the age of forty, retired from the world, and received the habit of religion from Herbert, Bishop of Lisieux.^[646] Count Gilbert released him from his service, and seemingly released his lands from all feudal dependence on himself.^[647] Herlwin then began the foundation of a monastery on his own estate of Burneville near Brionne.^[648] A few devotees soon gathered round him. They lived a hard life, Herlwin himself joining them in tilling the ground, and in raising with his own hands the church and the other buildings needed by the infant brotherhood.^[649] The |He becomes Priest and Abbot. 1037.| church, when finished, was consecrated by Bishop Herbert, who at the same time ordained Herlwin a priest, and gave him the usual benediction as Abbot of the new society.^[650] 220About the same time he for the first time learned to read, and that to such good purpose that he gradually became mighty in the Scriptures, and that without ever neglecting the daily toil which his austere discipline imposed upon himself.^[651] His mother Heloise also, struck by the example of her son, gave up her dower-lands, and became a sort of serving sister to the brotherhood, washing their clothes, and doing for them other menial services.^[652] But after a while it was found that the site of Burneville was unsuited for a religious establishment; it seems not to have been well supplied with the two great monastic necessities of wood |He removes the monastery to Bec.| and water.^[653] Herlwin therefore determined to remove his infant colony to a spot better suited to his purpose, a spot to which his own name has ever since been inseparably attached. A wooded hill divides the valley of the Risle, with the town and castle of Brionne, from another valley watered by a small stream, or, in the old Teutonic speech of the Normans, a beck.^[654] That stream gave its name to the most famous of Norman religious houses, and to this day the name of Bec is never uttered to denote that spot without the distinguishing addition of the name of Herlwin. |Present condition of the spot.| The hills are still thickly wooded; the beck still flows, through rich meadows and under trees planted by 221the water-side, by the walls of what once was the renowned monastery to which it gave its name. But of the days of Herlwin no trace remains besides these imperishable works of nature. A tall tower, of rich and fanciful design, one of the latest works of mediæval skill, still attracts the traveller from a distance; but of the mighty minster itself all traces, save a few small fragments, have perished.^[655] The monastic buildings, like those of so many other monasteries in Normandy and elsewhere in Gaul, had been rebuilt in the worst days of art, and they are now applied to the degrading purposes of a receptacle of French cavalry. The gateway also remains, but it is, like the rest of the buildings, of a date far later than the days of Herlwin. The truest memorial of that illustrious Abbey is now to be found in the parish church of the neighbouring village. In that lowly shelter is still preserved the effigy with which after times had marked the resting-place of the Founder. Such are all the traces which now remain of the house which once owned Lanfranc and Anselm as its inmates.