Chapter XII · THE LATER REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY.[159] 1051–1066. (continued 3)

Whether Herbert ever obtained actual possession of his new fief does not certainly appear. If he did, his enjoyment |Herbert dies childless. 1063.| of it was very short. Within two years he died, and died childless. By the terms of the treaty, Maine now passed to William. According to Norman accounts, Herbert’s last breath was spent in asserting the rights of the Norman Duke, and in exhorting his friends and subjects to seek for no other as their lord. Almost forestalling the words of the English Chronicler, he warned them that the yoke of William would be light to those who accepted |Unwillingness of Maine to submit to William.| it willingly, but heavy indeed to those who dared to withstand him.^[600] But the mass of the people of city and county were of another mind. They doubted the lightness of the Norman yoke in any case.^[601] And the treaty between 200Herbert and William had sacrificed the rights of several members of Herbert’s family. Herbert had, as he hoped, secured the succession to the descendants of one of his sisters. But no such descendants were in being; Robert and Margaret were not married, nor seemingly even betrothed, at the time of his death. There was therefore no sort of security that, if William were once admitted, the County would ever return to the descendants of its ancient lords. Then again, though Herbert had left no male heir, he had kinsfolk in the female line whose rights were as good as those of the unborn posterity of Margaret. We read of no movements at this time on behalf either of the Marquess of Liguria or of the Lord of La Flèche, the claims of both |The patriotic party assert the rights of Walter and Biota.| of whom were pressed in after times. But a strong party, the patriotic party, as it would seem, throughout the province, asserted the rights of Herbert’s aunt Biota and of her husband Walter of Mantes, the nephew of Eadward of England. The city was held for them by several of the chief lords of the country, among whom we hear specially of Hubert of Saint-Susanna, and of Geoffrey of Mayenne, of whom we have already heard in the wars between Anjou and Normandy.^[602] The citizens seem to have been on the same side. Of the Bishop, for once in Cenomannian history, we hear nothing. The line of Bishops of the fierce house of Belesme had come to an end, and the line of eminent Prelates appointed under |Bishop Vulgrin. 1058–1059.| Norman rule had not yet begun. The reigning Bishop Vulgrin was a good, prudent, and peaceful monk, whose monastic virtues had been proved by his reform of the 201Abbey of Saint Sergius without the walls of Angers,^[603] and whose chief object at Le Mans was to rebuild the church of Saint Julian on a greater scale.^[604] In this revolution then the ecclesiastical power seems to have been neutral, while nobles and citizens were united for Count Walter and against the Norman.

William’s preparations for war.

A struggle therefore could not be avoided. William was the least likely of all men tamely to give up either a real or a fancied right, or even to pass by a decent pretext for extending his power. Maine was to be conquered. But William was no more disposed to hurry in |His measures at home.| the business of conquest than in any other business. He began by healing a few wounds at home. It was now that he called back from banishment Hugh of Grantmesnil and Ralph of Toesny,^[605] men whose offences were very doubtful, and whose services in the war were likely to be useful. It was now also that he made that agreement with Arnold of Escalfoy, by which that turbulent spirit |His plans for the campaign.| was sent off to the wars in Apulia.^[606] The plan of the campaign was thoroughly characteristic. William saw 202that the prize must be his in the long run. Maine alone could not resist Normandy, and Walter’s chance of finding allies was just now not great. William’s panegyrist tells us—and we have no reason to doubt the fact—that he was anxious to win his conquest with the least possible amount of bloodshed.^[607] It was a policy still more obvious to forbear to destroy or damage a noble city which he designed to be one of the chief jewels of his coronet. And it was only reasonable military foresight to avoid the risk of a rash attack on a strong fortress which might be won in |He determines to harry the country and to keep the attack on the city for the last.| another way.^[608] The city was the main object; we see throughout that the capital was in a special manner the head of the province, that Le Mans was Maine in a sense in which Rouen certainly was not Normandy.^[609] The city then was reserved by William to be the last object of attack. But the city was strongly defended by Geoffrey of Mayenne, whom Walter had made his chief adviser, and who seems to have been equally in the confidence of the citizens.^[610] A hasty attack might have seriously jeoparded the success of William’s plans. His course therefore was to impoverish, and at the same time to frighten, the besiegers by a systematic harrying of the whole country. 203Vineyards, fields, detached houses, were everywhere |The country gradually subdued.| ravaged; the smaller fortified posts of the province were taken one by one; garrisons were left wherever they were called for by the scheme of the campaign;^[611] the capital was left to be devoured the last. This mode of warfare gradually wore out the patience, as it weakened the resources, of the defenders of the city. At last, when well nigh every other fortress of Maine had come into |The city reduced to surrender.| William’s hands,^[612] the citizens were reduced to submit to a surrender, and William found himself in a position to enter the city at whose possession he had been so long aiming, as a conquest won without a battle or a siege.

Position and history of Le Mans.

The city into which William had now to make his triumphal entry was one which might have added fresh lustre even to an Imperial diadem. In his day it was a possession which could hardly be overvalued as a strong military post, as the centre of a rich and flourishing province, as a city itself rich and flourishing, according to the standard of those times. To us it is mainly attractive as a spot on which the history of a long series of ages, before and after the days of William, is still legibly written. Le Mans is one of a type of cities which is spread over a great part of Gaul, but to which England, and even Normandy, can present but feeble approaches. A steep hill rises abruptly above the river Sarthe to the west, and somewhat less abruptly above the lower ground to the east. The ground also falls away in the like sort to the south, while the hill is continued in the higher ground to the north, of which it forms the natural termination. The height, therefore, though washed by the river on one side only, does in effect assume a sort of peninsular shape. Like most elevated sites of towns, the rise of the ground 204is such as would not be remarkable in a hill whose sides were covered with verdure or forest, but it is quite enough to make the post strongly defensible, and to make the streets of the still existing city steep and hard of ascent. |Growth of the Gaulish hill-fort into the Roman, the mediæval, and the modern city.| This point, like so many points of the same kind, had, in unrecorded days, become the site of a Gaulish hill-fort, and the Gaulish hill-fort had, as usual, grown into a Roman city. The name of the universal conquerors still dwells there, and the most ancient quarter of the city is still traditionally known as La vieille Rome. The original Gaulish rampart was, in the later days of the Empire, exchanged, at the bidding of the great Constantine, for a wall of Roman masonry, large portions of which still remain. They show how small a part of the existing town was covered by the famous city of old. The Roman wall still fences in only the higher ground; the fortifications were not brought down to the river till Cenomannia had, in the thirteenth century, been constrained to bow to Paris. Two great monasteries lay, as usual, without the walls. They were placed at the foot of the hill on either side, one of them even lay beyond the river. The growth of the modern city has embraced both, leaving the ancient fortified circuit as a venerable acropolis, retaining its place even now as the ecclesiastical and municipal hearth of the city. To the west the city still presents a stately front to the river. Walls and houses, the dwellings of priests and citizens, still showing, in their rich and early work, the importance of both classes in the Cenomannian state, still rise, stage above stage, up to the highest ridge crowned |The Palace of the Counts.| by the two dominant buildings of the city. To the south-east, on the Roman wall itself, incorporating within itself the very fortifications of the elder Empire, stood, and still stands, the palace of the ancient rulers, the Hughs |The Cathedral.| and the Herberts of Cenomannia. In the north-east corner of the original city, rose the Minster of Saint 205Julian, the cathedral church of that famous Bishoprick. That soaring apse, which the glories even of Beauvais and Amiens can hardly surpass, had not as yet demanded the sacrifice of that portion of the ancient rampart which hindered the full developement of the mighty temple. Even the stately nave, so strangely attached to the later and loftier choir, itself one of the works in which the builders of the twelfth century aimed most successfully at reproducing the gorgeous foliage of Rome and Corinth, had not as yet assumed its present shape. But the earlier temple out of which it was as it were hewn, whose masonry bespeaks, not the deliberate imitation, but the immemorial retention of Roman forms, was a work of William’s age, and its earliest portions were probably slowly rising at the |William’s “Joyeuse Entrée” at Le Mans.| time of William’s conquest.^[613] The stern and massive portal which still forms its principal approach, may well have been the one through which the procession swept, which went forth singing hymns and swinging censers, to welcome the prince who had won the city without shedding the blood of friend or foe.^[614] With equal joy, real or pretended, 206men of all ranks in the city went forth to greet the conqueror; shouts of applause met the ear of William as he entered; men knelt as he drew near, and hailed the Duke of the Normans as the lawful lord of Le Mans. |Walter consents to the surrender.| Walter, putting the best face upon the matter, agreed to the surrender with apparent willingness. William had neither motive nor temptation to further harshness. He took peaceful possession of his conquest, but he took care to guard it after the ordinary fashion of a Norman conqueror. |William builds a castle near the cathedral.| In the north-western angle of the city, near the point where William, advancing from his own Duchy, had doubtless made his triumphal entry, a Norman donjon now rose in dangerous neighbourhood to the minster and to the dwelling of its Prelate. So near were the two buildings that, in later days, the towers which, as at Exeter and Geneva, formed the finish of the transepts were deemed to be a standing menace to the royal fortress. Of these towers the reign of William’s immediate successor has a strange tale to tell.^[615] They have however left more speaking traces behind them than the fortress which was now the outward trophy of William’s victory. While Le Mans can still boast such splendid remains of the works both of earlier and of later days, the politic devastation of the seventeenth century has left only a few shapeless fragments of wall to bear witness to the former being of the castle with which the Conqueror sought to curb the lofty spirit of the city which was as yet his noblest conquest.^[616]

Submission of Walter.

207Le Mans then was won, and with Le Mans the whole Cenomannian land formally passed into the hand of the conqueror.^[617] The rival pretender to the County had given up his claims, for fear, we are told, lest in seeking what was another’s he should lose his own. While the harrying of Maine had been going on, other Norman bands had crossed another part of the frontier, and had carried havoc through Walter’s original possessions of Mantes and Chaumont.^[618] |Death of Walter and Biota.| He and his wife soon disappear from the scene. We have no trustworthy details of their death, but rumour affirmed |William charged with poisoning them.| that both of them died by poison. In the mouths of William’s enemies, rumour further added that the poison was administered to them by William’s order, when they were his guests in his own castle at Falaise. This is one of those occasions on which the remark must be again repeated that the charge of secret poisoning is one which it is easy to bring and hard to disprove. In this case the charge is certainly not brought home to William by any direct evidence. It seems indeed to rest on nothing better than the wild assertions of William’s enemies at a drunken revel.^[619] 208To stoop to a crime of this kind, which admitted of no defence, and which could be cloked by no self-delusion, seems to me to be quite inconsistent with a character like William’s, in which, among all its darker features, a certain regard to the first principles of morality, a distinct element of the fear of God, was never wholly wanting. I venture therefore to dismiss the tale as simply part of that stock of uncertified scandal of which William’s age was so fruitful.

Geoffrey of Mayenne still holds out.

One enemy had however still to be brought into subjection before William could boast that he was undisputed master of the whole Cenomannian land. Geoffrey of Mayenne, the brave defender of Le Mans, seems to have refused to have any share in the surrender of the city; he had withdrawn so as not to be a witness of William’s triumphal entry; he had been often summoned, but he had neglected every summons, to appear and do a vassal’s duty to his new sovereign.^[620] Such an enemy was one of whom it was manifestly fitting to make an example. Call him rebel or patriot as we will, Geoffrey of Mayenne was the sort of man with whom it did not suit William’s purposes to put up with for a moment. If the Duke knew when to 209delay, he also knew when to hasten. He had won Le Mans without a blow; he had gained his point more easily by bringing a gradual process of terror and distress to bear on the minds of its defenders. No such process would answer with a single determined enemy. It was for the new Lord of Maine to show, once for all, that no man in his |William besieges Mayenne. 1063.| new dominion could resist him with impunity. The Duke therefore led his forces at once against Geoffrey’s town and fortress of Mayenne.^[621] The castle was strong, and men deemed an assault to be an hazardous undertaking.^[622] But the prince to whom Domfront and Alençon and Arques had yielded, who had himself carried the bulwarks of his own Falaise by sheer strength of onslaught,^[623] was not to be baffled by works which were at least not stronger than |Description of the place.| those of so many famous fortresses. The position of the castle of Mayenne is one which bears more likeness to that of Alençon^[624] than to that of Falaise or Domfront. It is no Gaulish hill-fortress which has grown by degrees into a Roman and into a modern city. The town of Mayenne stands on both sides of the river from which it takes its name, a river of far greater width than the maternal beck at Falaise or even than the Varenne at Domfront. It may well be that the light craft of the Northmen, who so long harassed the shores and islands of the Loire and its tributaries, may have made their way even to this inland post. At all events, the main point in the fortification of Mayenne was to secure the river. The town covers the steep slopes on either side, and the right^[625] bank of the 210stream still washes the walls of the castle. No buildings now remain which can have witnessed the wars of William and Geoffrey, but the later castle evidently occupies the ancient site. A noble range of bastions rising above the stream, a miniature as it were of the mighty pile of dark and frowning Angers, contrasts well with the steep and narrow streets of the town itself, with the varied and eccentric outline of the great church of Our Lady, and with the thick woods which still overshadow the river close up to the buildings of the town. The greater part of the modern town lies on the right bank, and in William’s time, when Mayenne was less a town than a military post, it was doubtless this part alone, as in the elder Angers, that was encompassed by a wall.^[626] But the date of the church of Saint Martin beyond the river shows that, as at Angers, the opposite shore must, at this time, or soon after, have become the site of a populous suburb. To a modern and non-military eye, the site of Mayenne, which could easily be commanded from the higher ground above, does not seem so formidable as that of other places which had yielded to William’s arms; but it must be remembered that, before the invention of cannon, a fortress did not suffer as it now does by being open to the missiles of the enemy. No more striking instance of this difference can be found than in the long resistance which William himself met with before the river fortress of Brionne.^[627] At all events, Mayenne is spoken of as a post well defended by the river on one side and by both nature and art on the other, and which was looked on as almost hopeless to carry by 211|Difficulties of the siege.| assault. Horse and foot, lances, swords, and arrows, the ram and the catapult themselves, were all, we are told, deemed useless.^[628] Famine alone could be looked to for the reduction of the impregnable fortress.^[629] One only hope of |The Normans fire the town.| immediate success presented itself. Fire at least was at hand, and fire was a weapon with which the Normans were always ready. By the Duke’s order, flaming materials of some sort were hurled over the walls of the town.^[630] As ever happened among the wooden houses of those times, the flames spread fast, and did their work fully as well as the sword.^[631] The defenders of the town walls and town gates left their posts to rescue, as far as might be, their own houses and goods. The Normans rushed in with a loud and joyful shout. The spoils were abundant; horses, arms, household stuff of every kind, were found in plenty. And all was, by |The castle surrenders. Probable absence of Geoffrey.| the liberality of the Duke, given up to his soldiers.^[632] The town was thus taken, and the next day the castle surrendered.^[633] This speedy surrender, as well as some other expressions of our historian, might lead us to think that 212Geoffrey himself was not present in person.^[634] Of his |His later history. 1073–1098.| immediate fate we hear nothing; but, thirty years later, either himself, or perhaps a son of the same name, again played an important part in Cenomannian history.^[635] The town was restored by William;^[636] a garrison was left in the castle; the Duke and his army went home rejoicing,^[637] and the few who still ventured to hold up their heads against him within his new dominions soon submitted.^[638]

Succession of deaths in the House of Maine.

The fate of one person has still to be spoken of. The house of the Counts of Maine might seem to have lain under a ban of fate. Herbert, Walter, Biota, had all been swept away.^[639] It may strengthen the belief that William had no hand in their removal when we find that they were soon followed to the grave by a member of the same house whom William had no possible motive to destroy, but rather every possible motive to keep alive. Herbert 213had died before the marriage of his sister with the Duke’s |Margaret brought from Germany.| son could be carried out. William now sent for her from her German shelter, meaning to bring her up in his own land as the bride of its future sovereign. On account of her youth, the actual marriage was put off for a while, and the fair and pious Margaret was entrusted to the care of discreet persons of both sexes.^[640] Before the time for the |Her death.| marriage came, the bride was no more.^[641] The tale is told of her, as it is told of one of William’s own daughters, that she shrank from the prospect of an earthly bridegroom, and prayed to be released from so hard a necessity.^[642] After her death, as in the case of so many saints, a hair-shirt was found on her, with which, young as she was, she had already learned to bring the flesh into subjection.^[643] The body thus early inured to austerity found its last home in the minster of Fécamp, which, along with other churches of her adopted country, she had already learned to love and honour.^[644]

Importance of the conquest of Maine; its connexion with the conquest of England.

The conquest of Maine is one of the most important events in the life of William. It stands second only to the Conquest of England. It was in truth William’s first great appearance in the character of the Conqueror, it was a sort of prelude to the still greater work which he had to do beyond the sea. The two events indeed have a direct connexion. William’s rival for the possession of Maine 214was, if not an English Ætheling, yet the grandson of an English King, a possible, though not a likely, competitor for the English Crown.^[645] But the conquest of Maine connects itself with the conquest of England in a more instructive way than through the fact that Walter of Mantes was the son of a daughter of Æthelred. The |Analogies between the two.| circumstances of the two conquests are strangely alike, and the earlier and lesser success may well have served both as a happy omen and as an actual school for the later and greater enterprise. In each case, William took possession of a land, at once against the will of its inhabitants, and to the prejudice of members of the reigning family. In each case, William trampled alike on hereditary right and on popular election. But in neither ease was it the mere brute force of the sword which he opposed to them. Those wonderful arts by which he deceived others, by which he most likely deceived even himself, in the matter of England, were practised with almost equal skill, though in a narrower field, in the matter of Maine. In the case of Maine, as in the case of England, William contrived to give his claims an aspect of strict legality. In both cases he could allege a bequest of a reigning sovereign; in both cases he could allege an act of homage done by a rival: in both cases a marriage, which in neither case ever took effect, was designed to connect William’s house with the house of the rival who thus became his vassal. The circumstances indeed differed in the two stories; the parts in the two dramas were differently arranged. In the Cenomannian version, the bequest of Eadward and the homage of Harold are both united in the person of Herbert. The part of Harold is therefore divided between Herbert and Walter, or rather between Herbert and the valiant Geoffrey of Mayenne. Such differences will always occur, for no events in history exactly reproduce one another. But in 215each story we see the bequest, the commendation, the intended marriage. In each the conquest is made to take the shape of a legal claim, which is unavoidably backed by force. In each the conqueror contrives to be received with at least the outward consent of the conquered. The two stories are so like one another that we may be sure that the likeness was present to the keen and busy mind of the hero of both. While winning Maine, William was, beyond all doubt, planning how he might win England. He was feeling his way; he was learning his trade; he was practising his prentice hand in the great arts of diplomacy and invasion. It is therefore not only the mere probable chronological sequence, but a close connexion in the subjects themselves, which leads us directly from William’s Cenomannian conquest to the subject of the last section of the Chapter, to the visit of Earl Harold to the Norman Court, and to the memorable oath, whatever was its exact nature, which he is alleged to have plighted to the Norman Duke.

§ 4. The Visit of Harold and the Breton War. 1064?

Position of William and Harold.

The time was now come for the two born leaders of men around whose career our whole history gathers to meet face to face. As yet, for a little while, their meeting was to be friendly; but in that friendly meeting the seeds were sown of their last meeting on the battle-field. The Duke of the Normans and the Earl of the West-Saxons were now each of them at the height of his glory. The most famous exploits of each had happened within a single year. About the time that William had been receiving the submission of Le Mans and Mayenne, Harold had been waging his great campaign against the 216Welsh, and, if he had not been winning crowns for himself, he had been disposing of crowns to others and |William and Harold at the moment the two first men in Western Europe.| receiving the homage of their wearers.^[646] It is not too much to say that, at that moment, William and Harold were the two foremost men of Western Europe. The great Emperor was gone; the great Pope had not yet risen on the world, though Hildebrand the Archdeacon had already begun to guide the policy of the Court of which he was before long to be the avowed as well as the virtual ruler. Among Western crowns, those of France and Germany were worn by children; on what brow the Crown of England rested I need not again set forth. Kings of greater renown than Eadward or Philip reigned in Northern Europe; but the persevering prudence of Swend, the knight-errantry of Harold Hardrada, can hardly be put on a level with the union of every kingly gift alike in the great Englishman and in the great Norman. Few words are needed to show how far, in Gaul and in Britain respectively, the great Duke and the great Earl outshone the sovereigns to whom the accident of birth had given the right to claim the vassal’s homage from the one and the subject’s duty from the other. Among princes not bearing the royal title, Baldwin, Count of Flanders and Regent of France, could alone be compared with them in power. But no one would bring his personal character and personal exploits into rivalry with those of the renowned rulers of Normandy and Wessex. Harold and William then were the first men in Western Christendom, the one the first in continental lands, the other the first within the Island Empire. |The rivalry between them as yet not avowed.| Nothing had as yet happened to make either the avowed enemy of the other, and two such men must have looked admiringly on each other’s great deeds. Yet each must 217have looked on the other as a lion in his path; both were already aiming at the same prize, and each must have known that that prize was not likely to be won without |Their meeting. Question whether it was their first meeting.| a struggle with a worthy rival. It is a striking episode in our story when these two mighty men, so soon to be the deadliest of enemies, could meet yet once, as host and guest, in peace and friendship. Whether they had before seen each other is uncertain. They had not met on English ground, for at the time of William’s visit to Eadward, Harold, I need not say, was a banished man in Ireland. Whether they met on Norman ground in the course of Harold’s earlier continental journey we have no certain evidence. If they had met at any earlier moment, their earlier meeting no doubt taught each of them what manner of man he had to deal with in the other. But in no case had that earlier meeting any such direct results on the events of our history as those which sprang out of the strange accident which now for a while made Earl Harold the guest, the friend, the companion in arms, of the Norman Duke.

Contradictory nature of the different stories.

I have said a strange accident, because, among all the various statements which are handed down to us as to the occasion of Harold’s visit to Normandy and his alleged oath to William, I am inclined to prefer that version which represents his presence in Normandy as being wholly the result of chance. I need hardly say that there is no portion of our history, perhaps no portion of any history, which is more entangled in the mazes of contradictory, and often impossible, statements than that on which we are now entering. I have already touched incidentally on the |Probable groundwork of truth.| subject in an earlier Chapter.^[647] I there said that, with regard both to the alleged bequest of Eadward to William and to the alleged oath of Harold to William, I could not 218but hold that there is some groundwork of truth in both stories. I held that the absolute silence of the contemporary English writers told, under the circumstances, in favour of a bequest of some kind and an oath of some kind. But the details, as I there said, are told with such an amount of contradiction, many of the statements are so manifestly impossible, it is so hard to fix the date of the event or to piece it on in any way to the undoubted facts of the history, that we can hardly admit anything as certain beyond these bare facts of a bequest of some kind and an oath of some kind. As for the bequest, I trust that I have shown^[648] that the groundwork of William’s claim as testamentary successor to Eadward was, in all probability, a promise of the succession, or at least a promise of a royal recommendation to the Witan, |1051.| made by Eadward to William at the time of the Duke’s visit to England. I trust that I have also shown that that promise was set aside by later arrangements in favour, first of the Ætheling Eadward, and then of Earl Harold.^[649] |Connexion between the bequest of Eadward and the oath of Harold.| With regard to the oath, it is, in the Norman accounts, inextricably mixed up with the bequest. In one version Harold is actually represented as being sent into Normandy to announce the devise of the Crown in favour of William. In all the received versions the intentions of Eadward in favour of his Norman kinsman are taken for granted as the ground on which the oath is demanded. The two questions then must be discussed together. As usual, I shall discuss them at large in another part of this volume.^[650] I shall here do little more than tell the tale itself, in that shape in which it seems to me to have least of improbability about it. But, as I before said, I can look upon nothing in the whole story as absolutely certain, except that Harold made some engagement or other, which 219was capable of being construed as an admission of William’s claim to the Crown, and which made his own later acceptance of the Crown capable of being represented as an act of perjury.

Three different versions; 1. Harold sent by Eadward to announce the devise of the Crown in favour of William.

There are three chief statements as to the causes which took Harold into Normandy. According to a version which I have already mentioned, Eadward, perhaps after the death of the Ætheling, determined to make William his heir. He therefore sent Harold over to announce his intention to the Norman Duke, and to confirm the appointment by an oath in his own person. This account I believe to be absolutely fabulous. According to another |2. Harold goes to reclaim the hostages given by Godwine in 1052.| account, Godwine, on his reconciliation with Eadward, gave hostages to the King for his good behaviour, in the persons of his youngest son Wulfnoth and his grandson Hakon the son of Swegen. These hostages were given by the King to the safe keeping of the Duke of the Normans. Now that years had rolled by, now that Godwine was dead, now that Eadward was, as this version of the story implies, on perfectly good and confidential terms with Godwine’s successor Harold, there no longer seemed any reason why a brother and a nephew of the first man in England should linger any longer in foreign banishment. Harold therefore asks the King’s leave to go to the Court of William and ask for their release. The King warns his brother-in-law against so perilous an adventure; he knew William well, and some harm was sure to happen to Harold, if he trusted himself in his power. The impetuous spirit of the Earl refuses to hearken to the warnings of the Saint. He wrings an unwilling permission from the King, and goes on his errand. He is entrapped into an oath binding him in the fullest way to support William’s claims. He returns to England to receive much more of sorrowful reproof and warning from the King who had 220foreseen the future so much more clearly than himself.^[651]

The first story a mere invention; the second contains a certain groundwork of fact. Both stories assume Harold’s loyalty to Eadward.

This tale I do not believe any more than the other, but it apparently differs from it as not being pure invention, but as being grounded on a certain basis of fact. Both stories, it will be observed, assume the loyalty of Harold and the confidence placed in him by Eadward, and they thereby at once contradict those other Norman statements which describe Harold as acting with insolence to Eadward, and Eadward as being afraid of Harold’s power.^[652] The former story indeed, by representing Harold as sent to announce and confirm Eadward’s choice, implies that Harold had himself no designs on the Crown, or, at all events, that Eadward had no suspicion that he had any. But the second story distinctly implies that, at the time of the journey, Eadward had no intentions in favour of William, perhaps that he had intentions in favour of Harold. This version therefore comes nearer to the true state of the case than the other. With regard to the hostages, I do not believe the tale, but I still suspect that some small amount of truth lurks under it. No English account of the restoration of Godwine mentions that he gave hostages to the King, still less that any such hostages were entrusted to the keeping of Duke William. Such |Improbability of the story of the hostages; its origin.| a story is most improbable in itself, and it distinctly contradicts the real facts of the case. Hostages were given and exchanged many times in the course of the banishment and return of Godwine, once indeed so late as the day of his return, the day before the famous Mickle Gemót.^[653] But this was because matters were still under debate, and, when hostages were given, they were given on both sides. When the controversy was over, when Godwine was fully restored to his old honours, there was no longer any need 221or any room for hostages. At such a moment as that, when Godwine’s family and the whole patriotic party were in the full swing of triumph, when decrees were being passed for their restoration to all their honours, when other decrees were pronouncing banishment against the leaders of the Norman faction, when every road was thronged with Norman knights and priests fleeing for their lives,—at such a moment as this, it is utterly inconceivable that two members of the House of Godwine, a son and a grandson of the great Earl, should have been sent off into what would be in truth captivity, however honourable captivity, at the Norman Court. Nothing short of the express authority of the English Chronicles could make us accept a statement so utterly incredible. And instead of being supported by their authority, it is implicitly contradicted by it. The banishment of Wulfnoth and Hakon is manifestly inconsistent with the statement that all the members of Godwine’s family were restored to what they had before held.^[654] I therefore altogether disbelieve in the story of the hostages. But I think that it may not be difficult to trace its origin, which I shall accordingly attempt to do elsewhere.^[655] |Third story; Harold’s presence in Normandy accidental, through stress of weather.| I accept then the third version, according to which Harold’s presence in Normandy was purely accidental. According to this account, he was not going to William’s court, either on the King’s errand or on his own. He was sailing elsewhere, to Wales or to Flanders, or simply taking his pleasure in the Channel. I am inclined to think that this last was really the case, and I further suspect that he was accompanied on his pleasure-trip by |Possible presence of other members of his family.| some of the younger members of his family, by his brother Wulfnoth, his nephew Hakon, and possibly his sister Ælfgifu.^[656] At all events, the Earl set forth at the head of a considerable company, enough to fill three of the 222vessels of the time,^[657] and he went accompanied by dogs and hawks, ready to enjoy the sports of the field at any points |They set sail at Bosham.| at which they might land.^[658] The place of embarcation was close by the favourite South-Saxon abode of Godwine and Harold, the land-locked haven of Bosham.^[659] The contemporary record sets them before our eyes as first paying their devotions in that venerable church which still remains as one of the living witnesses of their age,^[660] and then as feasting in the Earl’s hall, before their temporary farewell to their native land.^[661] As for their voyage, nearly all accounts agree that, whatever was their original destination, |They are driven by a storm to the coast of Ponthieu.| Harold’s ships were driven by stress of weather to the coast of Ponthieu. They were there in the dominions of Count Guy, who, since the slaughter of Mortemer, had become, first the prisoner, and then the vassal, of William.^[662] Guy, like the |The right of Wreck. Barbarous treatment of shipwrecked persons.| princes and inhabitants of various parts of Gaul, exercised the right of wreck in all its fulness. Their barbarous and unchristian practice on this head is strongly and justly denounced by the panegyrist of William.^[663] The shipwrecked man, instead of being looked on as an object of humanity and Christian charity, was looked on as a wretch forsaken of God and man, who became the lawful 223spoil of the lord into whose hands he was thrown. Indeed the words used might almost be taken as meaning that they were not even satisfied with those unfortunates whom accident threw in their way. Fraud of some kind, false lights or the like, would seem to have been used to entrap the unwary.^[664] And woeful indeed was the doom of the unlucky wretch who fell into their hands. Imprisonment was his usual fate, and to imprisonment torture was often added. The higher and more illustrious the victim, the harder was his doom, as from such captives more might be wrung in the way of ransom than could be gained from meaner men. Such was now the fate which threatened the foremost man |Harold betrayed to Guy of Ponthieu and seized by him.| of England, the brother-in-law of its King. A fisherman, we are told, who frequented the English coast, knew the person of the Earl of the West-Saxons. He hastened to Count Guy; for twenty pounds he would show him a captive who would gladly pay a hundred pounds for his ransom.^[665] The Count rode in person to the coast, and the |He is imprisoned at Beaurain.| English Earl was seized in his presence.^[666] Harold was now kept in prison, perhaps actually in fetters,^[667] not, as has been sometimes thought, on the sea-shore at Saint Valery, but in the inland fortress of Beaurain near Hesdin.^[668] Some 224|He sends a message to William.| however of the party contrived to escape; an Englishman, charged with a message from Earl Harold, made his way to the palace of Rouen and to the presence of William. The messenger knelt before the Duke, and told him the tale of wrong, how the great English Earl, without any offence on his part, had been seized by a vassal of Normandy, and was at that moment held in bonds at Beaurain.^[669] We can well understand the mingled feelings of William on hearing such a piece of news. The nobler elements of his nature would sincerely abhor the base act of Guy; but his crafty policy would at once discern how great and manifold were the advantages which he |William’s interest in the matter.| might draw out of the crime of his vassal.^[670] His rival, not yet his open enemy, was thrown into his hands by an accident which made generosity at once the surest policy. No greater good fortune could befall William 225than that which made him the benefactor, the liberator, of Harold. He might disarm him by benefits; he might win him over by cajolery; he might entrap him into some engagement, which might be craftily represented as binding the English Earl to something which he had himself perhaps never dreamed of. He could, in any case, establish a claim upon his gratitude; he might perhaps establish a claim upon his honour. Whatever course events might take, some gain, greater or smaller, could hardly fail to accrue to William. His course therefore was clear; Harold was to be set free at any cost. |He sends to Guy and demands Harold’s enlargement.| Messengers were sent, bidden to hasten to Beaurain with the full speed of Norman horsemanship.^[671] They were to ask in the Duke’s name for the enlargement of the illustrious captive; they were, if it proved needful, to demand it with threats.^[672] Guy, himself for two years the captive of William, had no mind to bring on himself the wrath |Guy brings Harold to William at Eu.| of his new overlord a second time. He put the best face on the matter;^[673] the Earl was at once released from prison, and Guy and Harold rode together, hawk on hand, to meet Duke William. The Duke had by this time reached the border fortress of Eu, the castle of the brave and loyal 226Count Robert.^[674] Instead of being the prisoner of Guy, |William’s rewards to Guy.| Harold was now the guest of William. The prompt obedience of the Count of Ponthieu to the bidding of the Duke was rewarded with fitting thanks, with money—no doubt to the amount of Harold’s ransom—and moreover with a large and goodly grant of lands by the banks of the Eaulne.^[675] The price was a heavy one, but it was a price which William could well afford to pay for the great advantage which a freak of fortune had thus unexpectedly thrown into his hands.

Harold’s splendid reception at Rouen.

Harold was now the honoured guest of William. The Duke of the English, as he appeared in Norman eyes,^[676] accompanied his Norman brother to his palace at Rouen.^[677] There he was entertained with martial exercises;^[678] he received every mark of respect which was due to so illustrious a visitor; he was admitted to the closest intimacy with the Duke and his family. One writer, whose minute knowledge 227of the subject is a little startling, tells us that William used always to go to bed early, and to leave |Blandishments of Matilda.| Harold conversing with Matilda to a later hour.^[679] The winning graces of the Duchess are said to have had no small share in gaining the consent of the English Earl to one part of the engagement which was to be presently |Doubtful date of the events, but before Harold’s marriage with Ealdgyth.| required of him. The date of these events, I need not say, is one of the most puzzling features of the whole story, and it is impossible to do more than approach it by conjecture.^[680] But, if there be any truth at all in the tale, it must have taken place before Harold’s marriage with Ealdgyth, itself |Harold engages to marry a daughter of William.| an event whose date is not a little doubtful.^[681] One feature in Harold’s engagement, one which is insisted on in every account save one,^[682] and one which in many accounts is made the most prominent of all, is his promise to marry a daughter of William. The daughters of William and Matilda were still quite children, while Harold was older than their father;^[683] yet we are told that the renown and lofty bearing of the English Earl made so deep an impression on the heart of one of them, that, when she found herself forsaken by Harold, she shrank from the thought of another, even a royal, bridegroom.^[684] Whatever we may 228think of this tale, it can hardly be doubted that Harold allowed himself to be entangled into some engagement of the kind. Such engagements were often lightly entered into, without much serious thought of their accomplishment. And, in the case of an engagement between Harold and a daughter of William, mere difference of age would |Harold’s sister [Ælfgifu?] to be married to a Norman.| make the chances rather against its fulfilment. At the same time, we are told, it was arranged that Harold’s sister—that is, doubtless, Ælfgifu, who was perhaps then present at Rouen—should be given in marriage to a Norman noble.^[685] Harold, in short, seems to have been for a while altogether fascinated by the splendid reception which he had met |Harold receives knighthood from William, and joins in an expedition against Britanny.| with at the Norman court. He even agreed, like Jehoshaphat on his visit to Ahab, to accompany William in an expedition which he was preparing against the Bretons, and, either before setting forth or after his return, he allowed himself to receive knighthood after the Norman fashion from the Duke’s hand.^[686] It is not hard to understand how Harold may have been beguiled into these certainly unwise compliances. He may well have been dazzled by finding himself an object of the highest honour at the court of the most renowned sovereign in Europe. And he undoubtedly owed William a debt of solid gratitude |Influences brought to bear on Harold’s mind.| for his deliverance from Guy’s dungeon at Beaurain. We can understand too the arts by which William might entrap the conqueror of Gruffydd into taking a share in warfare against an enemy of the same race. An expedition against 229the continental Briton might be pressed in the most flattering and attractive shapes upon the man who had been the first to show how the insular Briton might be effectually subdued. Gratitude, curiosity, love of adventure, personal and national ambition, a half laudable desire to display the might of Harold and of England in the eyes of Norman comrades,^[687] would all work upon his mind. All these motives would unite to lead him to waste time among the fascinations, peaceful and warlike, offered him by his Norman sojourn, time which would undoubtedly have been more wisely spent within his own island and his own Earldom. A speedy return to England was Harold’s wisest policy. But a speedy return would have been uncourteous, |Harold practically a prisoner.| perhaps impossible. Harold was, after all, in William’s power. The palace of Rouen differed in every external aspect from the dungeon of Beaurain. But Harold was perhaps hardly more of a free agent in the hands of William than he had been in the hands of Guy. His fetters were gilded, but he was still in fetters. The guest of William was practically his prisoner; nay, unless Harold walked warily on such dangerous ground, he might, like the guests of Geoffrey of Anjou, exchange the hall of the ducal palace for its prison-house.

The Breton war; uncertainty of our accounts.

Of the Breton war in which Harold was thus induced to take a share, it is very hard to make out anything at all clearly. I can find nothing to throw any light upon it in the Breton or Angevin chronicles, and the Norman accounts are anything but satisfactory or coherent.^[688] The 230|Conan Count of the Bretons. 1040–1066.| reigning Count Conan, son of that Alan who had acted so faithfully as William’s guardian,^[689] was a kinsman of the Duke’s, each of them owning a common ancestor in Richard the Fearless.^[690] It will be remembered that, in the days of William’s childhood, Alan had been looked upon as a possible competitor for the succession of Duke Robert;^[691] but we have hardly heard of him during the later years of |His relations to his uncle Odo.| William. We have seen his uncle and guardian Odo acting against William in the campaign which followed the rout of Mortemer.^[692] But Odo had been, since that |1056.| time, seized and imprisoned by his nephew Conan,^[693] and a war had since gone on between the Count and Odo’s son, Hoel Count of Nantes. That war however seems to have come to an end before the time which seems the least |1062.| improbable date for the joint expedition of William and Harold.^[694] The Norman account represents Conan as rising in rebellion against William, whose somewhat antiquated suzerain rights are set forth in the strongest language.^[695] 231|A Breton party said to be favourable to Normandy.| But it also implies that some at least of the Breton chieftains took the Norman side against Conan. Conan is further described as being aided by Geoffrey of Anjou, no longer of course the famous Martel, but his less terrible nephew, |Alleged alliance between Britanny and Anjou.| Geoffrey the Bearded.^[696] Here again I am unable to confirm the Norman account by any statement to the same effect elsewhere. In fact, the narrative of this campaign, which one would have thought there was no temptation to falsify, is every whit as puzzling as those parts of the story which one may conceive as being misrepresented to the prejudice of Harold.

Norman accounts of Breton manners.

The panegyrist of William takes this opportunity of setting forth in strong terms the formidable nature of a Breton war, as well as the barbarism and wickedness of the Breton people. Of this subject we have heard something already from other sources.^[697] The land was populous, a fact which is oddly attributed to the polygamous habits of the people. One man had, like the ancient Moors, ten wives or more, and became the father of fifty children.^[698] That such an arrangement must have doomed nine men or more to celibacy, and could therefore be hardly looked on as on 232the whole conducive to population, does not seem to have occurred to the Norman Archdeacon. The land, we are told, was fertile in pasture; it produced vast herds of cattle of all kinds; but tillage was hardly known. Milk—and, one may presume, flesh also—was the chief diet of the people; bread was a rarity.^[699] Delighting in warfare, the Bretons were no mean adversaries, even for Normans; terrible in the attack, they were used to conquer, and with difficulty brought themselves to retreat.^[700] Their intervals of peace were spent in plunder and slaughter of one another.^[701] The whole picture is one deeply coloured by national hatred. But the Breton prince must at least have had the spirit—not to say the follies—of chivalry in him in full measure. |Conan’s challenge to William.| Like William himself, in his warfare with Anjou,^[702] Conan, we are told, sent word to William on what day he purposed to cross the Norman frontier.^[703] To meet this threatened invasion, the Duke of the Normans set forth at the head of his host, with the Duke of the English as his comrade.

The Castle of Saint James founded by William.

The object of Conan’s attack was most likely the castle of Saint James, a border fortress which had been lately raised by William himself some way south of Avranches, in the south-western corner of his dominions.^[704] William however forestalled his assailant, and met him within the 233Breton territory on the day appointed for the invasion of |Dol held for William by Rhiwallon.| Normandy.^[705] William’s immediate object was to relieve one of those Breton chiefs who held for him against their immediate lord. The famous but most unfortunate city of Dol was now held in William’s interest by a leader bearing, it seems, the genuine Celtic name of Rhiwallon.^[706] This, it will be remembered, was the name of one of the brothers to whom Harold had committed the under-kingship of the insular Britons.^[707] |Former history of Dol; ravages of the Northmen. 944. 1013.| No town of Gaul or Britain had suffered more in the days of Scandinavian invasion than the once metropolitan city of Armorica. Once in the days of Richard the Fearless,^[708] once in the days of Richard the Good,^[709] had Dol been seized, plundered, or burned by Northern pirates. It was now, |Dol besieged by Conan; William comes to raise the siege.| by another turn of fortune, besieged by its own sovereign;^[710] and the Norman Duke, accompanied by his English ally, drew near with the purpose of raising the siege.

Character of eastern Britanny; the language now no longer Celtic.

It would be an interesting question to determine how far the Celtic language has gone back, and how far the Romance language has advanced, along the frontier which now became the seat of war. The country through which William and Harold passed is now wholly French in speech, and in outward appearance it offers hardly any strictly Breton peculiarities.^[711] Into what is still the true Britanny further to the west the line of their campaign |March of William and Harold.| did not reach. Their march led them only through those border-lands of Normandy and Britanny, where the 234trees, the hedges, the rich pastures, the orchards loaded with their autumnal wealth,^[712] might have made the English Earl still deem himself within the fairest regions |Avranches.| of his own Wessex. Their course must have passed by Avranches, the city so lately enlightened by the learning, and made illustrious by the fame, of Lanfranc. From the height where the now vanished minster once crowned the city, the eye of Harold would rest for the first time on that other and far more wondrous minster which crowns the island rock in the distance, the minster which Æthelred in his wrath and pride had feared to injure,^[713] the guardian |Saint Michael’s Mount.| Mount of the Archangel, Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea. That princely Abbey is marked as one of the halting-places of the host, and the rude art of the times still preserves the pictured representation of the Duke and his host passing below the sea-girt sanctuary.^[714] Beneath its walls the army crossed over that vast expanse of sand, where the frontier stream of the Norman and the Breton, |Passage of the Coesnon;| the deep and rushing Coesnon, then no doubt unfettered by dykes and fences, pours its flood into the bay at the foot of the consecrated Mount. In that dangerous passage the |Harold saves the drowning soldiers.| careless traveller might easily be engulfed. Even soldiers of the Norman army were sinking in the sands or were being carried away by the stream, when the strong arm of the English Earl was stretched forth to save them. This feat of Harold’s bodily prowess, the ease with which his single strength raised up the sinking men, made an impression on the minds of his companions which still lives in the truest record of the one campaign in which Harold and 235William fought side by side.^[715] The stream was crossed, and the Norman Duke and his English guest were now landed on Breton ground, where Harold was ready, perhaps eager, to display the same prowess which he had already shown in his own island in warfare against a kindred enemy. |They reach Dol; description of the city.| A short march from the frontier stream brought them to the first important post of eastern Britanny, the city which they came to rescue. The ancient ill luck of Dol has pursued it in all ages, and warfare later than the days of Harold has swept away nearly every trace of the city on which he could have gazed. Its cathedral church, small as compared with the gigantic piles of Amiens and Ely, yields to none in true stateliness and vigour of design, and it draws only greater solemnity from its rugged material, the granite of the neighbouring rock. But that church, even now unfinished, is a work of the thirteenth century, and it owes its origin to a calamity which fell upon the city in the wars of John Lackland. And now Dol has wholly sunk from its old ecclesiastical rank; the church which once aspired to metropolitan honours has lost even its diocesan Bishop; the cathedral has sunk to a parish church; the parish church, the only building which can date from the days of William and Harold, is put to profane uses. The city itself hardly ranks above a village, though, in the varied and curious architecture of its long street, its houses ranging from the twelfth century onwards, we see abundant traces of the greatness which has passed away. Still Dol has features wrought by the hand of nature, and by the hand of man in earlier days, which remain now as they were when Harold and William rode forth to the war |Primæval remains in the neighbourhood.| against Conan. At no great distance to the south of the city stands one of the hugest of those huge stones, which were as mysterious in the days of Harold as they are in 236our own. There it still abides, reared, it may well be, by the hands of men by whose side the Briton himself might stand abashed as a modern intruder. On that rude pillar the zeal of later days has reared the triumphant cross, to crown the vast work of heathen times, the monument, it may well be, of heathen worship. And to the north of the city lies the great natural feature of the district, the Mount |Mount Dol.| of Dol. The elevation of the city itself is small; its walls indeed crown what passes for a height in that vast plain, a height great enough to give the minster yet further stateliness in the view from the lower ground. But Dol is no hill-fortress, like Le Mans, Angers, and Domfront. The spot where one would have almost looked to find the city is the mount itself, which still rises, a huge stern mass of granite, well nigh as wild and untilled as in the days of its first inhabitants. But the presence of man and the dominion of the Christian faith are witnessed by the village, with its rude and ancient church, nestling at the base, by the small chapel and the vast statue of Our Lady which crown the height itself. From that height the eye ranges far and wide over that noble bay, over the shores of Britanny and of the Constantine peninsula, over islands dotted here and there, the proud Mount of the Archangel rising in the foreground as if alike to guard and to sanctify the landscape. From that height the trembling watchers of Dol had gazed in fear, when in earlier days the sails of the heathen pirates were seen in the far horizon. They had gazed, perhaps in hope, when the fleet of Æthelred drew near to ravage the Norman shore. They had gazed again in fear, when Duke Robert, when his hopes of English conquest were dashed to the ground, turned his wrath on neighbours who were at least guiltless of the death of Ælfred or of the banishment of Eadward.^[716] And now from that height, not indeed the men of Dol, but the spies of 237the besieging host of Conan, doubtless looked forth as the Duke of the Normans and his renowned English guest |Union of Normans and English against the Celts on both sides of the Channel.| drew nigh. The men of Britanny might well quake with greater fear than ever as the two mightiest warriors of their age marched against them side by side. The presence of William and Harold in the same host might seem to show that the old strifes of Angle and Saxon and Dane and Frank and Roman were lulled to rest, that the powers of North and South were joined together in one great effort to crush the persecuted Briton in each of his two last homes on either side of his own sea.

Flight of Conan.

The besieging host, we are told, did not dare to meet in the field the enemy whose presence their prince had so unwisely challenged. At the approach of William the Breton Count fled, laying himself open to the jeers and mockeries of his rebellious subject within the besieged city.^[717] Nothing could check his flight, which seems not to have stopped till he found himself safe in his own |Rhiwallon complains of the damage done by the Normans.| capital at Rennes.^[718] Dol was saved; but its commander found his deliverers almost as destructive as his enemies. The Norman host, encamped round the city, was fast eating up the fruits of the ground. Rhiwallon represented to his Norman ally that it mattered little to him and to his neighbours whether it was by Norman or by Breton destroyers that their goods were lost to them.^[719] The flight of Conan, however glorious to William, had as yet done no good to the men of Dol.^[720] In the narrative of the expedition, a 238|William’s return.| narrative by no means easy to follow, we are told that these considerations of prudence or humanity were enough to induce William to withdraw his troops at the end of a month’s campaign.^[721] This retreat however has a strange sound, when we go on to hear that an Angevin host was said to have suddenly appeared in support of Conan.^[722]

Probability that Harold accompanied William in more than one expedition.

On the whole it seems most probable that Harold accompanied William in more than one expedition against Britanny.^[723] It was most likely in another raid, though in one, we may be sure, which followed pretty soon after the earlier one, that William and his English guest made their way somewhat further into the Breton territory, though still without reaching the districts most strongly marked with Breton characteristics. In a campaign of which we have no further account, Conan was driven to take shelter in what was doubtless one of the most important |Siege of Dinan.| strongholds of his dominions. His last stand was made at Dinan, the fortress by the Rance, than which no town in all Gaul better preserves the character, expressed perhaps in its Celtic name, of the old Gaulish |Description of the town.| hill-fort. No remains of castle or minster are there which can have witnessed the approach of the Norman Conqueror and the English hero. The chief church, a building which seems more like the work of Aquitanian than of Breton hands, dates only from the next age, and the noble mass of the castle, the almost perfect circuit of the town-walls, are the work of still later times. The heroic associations of Dinan gather round the name of Bertrand Du Guesclin rather than round those of Conan, William, or Harold. 239Yet, save the heights crowned by the donjons of Domfront and Falaise, few of the spots which figure in our history more thoroughly preserve the general aspect which they must have borne in the eleventh century. The peninsular height looking down on the Rance, the hills, the rocks, the woods, remain doubtless unchanged. The neighbouring group of buildings at Lehon, the monastery in the vale, the castle on the height, though their existing buildings all belong to later times, speak to us of the tastes alike of the monks and of the warriors of William’s day. They tell of times when the armed chief reared his eagle’s nest on the height, and when the peaceful brotherhood below sought for a spot where wood and water would never fail them.^[724] And the town itself, still almost wholly contained within its ancient walls, crowns the main hill exactly as it must have done in the days of William. Unmarked as it is by the soaring spires of Angers, by the spreading apse of Le Mans, or by the twin towers of Exeter and Geneva, no town better sets before us that distinctive feature of early times, the city set on an hill which cannot be hid. The ancient bridge remains, now guarded only by a mere village suburb; it is only the modern viaduct, a work worthy of old Roman days, which speaks at all forcibly of the changes which have passed over the world since William and Harold encamped beneath the height. They crossed the stream, they compassed the town, and doubtless made their attack on the western side, where the fall is gentler, where the later fortifications are stronger, and where the comparatively modern castle no doubt occupies the site of the donjon of Conan.

William attacks the town—employment of fire.

We have no details of the siege. It must be in a great degree a fancy picture which represents the Norman horsemen as charging with lifted lances against the defenders of the fortress.^[725] But the same representation implies a 240vigorous defence on the part of the besieged, and it shows that the post was at last won by the familiar Norman means, the application of fire.^[726] This seems, as at Mayenne, to have broken the spirits of the defenders, and, |Conan surrenders the town.| in our one representation of the siege, Conan is shown, according to the custom of the time, surrendering the keys of his fortress by offering them on the point of a spear to his conqueror. It is in the like fashion that the conqueror receives his submission.^[727] This is all that we hear of the expedition in which Harold took a part. Whatever may have been its real nature and results, it at least did not lead to any permanent Norman occupation of the country which had been the seat of war. Dol and Dinan both remained Breton. And, at a later period of William’s life, when he could command the whole force of England and not only an occasional English volunteer, we shall |1076.| find him again in arms before Dol, but this time as the besieger of the doomed city, not as its deliverer.^[728]

According to one account, according to that account on which I look with less of distrust than on the others,^[729] |Knighthood of Harold.| Harold’s knighthood and Harold’s oath did not go before, but followed, the Breton campaign, and the knighthood seems to be set forth as taking place within or under the walls of Dinan, immediately after the capture of the town. Such a ceremony, possibly amounting to a tie of sworn brotherhood^[730] between the two companions-in-arms, may very well have followed the capture of a town won by the joint prowess of the Norman Duke and the English |Question of Harold’s oath.| Earl. But the more famous oath, the oath on which so much of the history turns, wherever and whenever it was 241|Contradiction as to time and place. Probably at Bayeux after the Breton War.| taken, was, at any rate, taken on Norman ground. One version, as we have seen, places it before the Breton expedition; the account which I am inclined to follow places it immediately after. From Dinan William returned to Bayeux, and at Bayeux it was that Harold took the fatal engagement upon his soul.^[731] Other accounts place it at Bonneville; others at Rouen, either in the palace, or under |Contradiction as to the nature of the Oath.| an oak near the city. The nature of the oath, is as little certain as its time or place. As I have already said,^[732] nearly every account represents it as containing an engagement to marry one of William’s daughters; some accounts seem to make that engagement and its breach the whole ground of quarrel between the two Princes. Others add that Harold further engaged to give his |Statements as to its terms.| sister in marriage to an unnamed Norman noble. Most accounts add also far more important political stipulations. Harold is to become the man of William; he is to receive him, on Eadward’s death, as his successor on the throne of England; meanwhile he is to be the guardian of William’s interests in England, and to act in some sort as his lieutenant. He is at once to give up the castle of Dover, with its well, to the Duke, and to receive a Norman garrison in it; he is to build other castles at other points of English ground, where the Duke may think good, and there also he is to receive and maintain Norman garrisons. The highest place in William’s favour, when he shall have attained the English Crown, honours, grants, even to the half of the Kingdom, are of course promised to Harold as the reward of faithfully carrying out all these promises.

Form of the oath, said to be on the relics of the saints.

To all this, or to some part of all this, we are told that Harold swore. He swore, it is said, after some form of more than usual solemnity, something beyond the ordinary oath of homage. He swore upon the relics of the 242|Trick played by William about the relics.| saints.^[733] And one famous version of the tale represents this more solemn form of oath as something into which Harold was unwittingly entrapped by a base trick on the part of William. It is not an English apologist of Harold, but a Norman admirer of William,^[734] who tells us how the Duke filled a chest with all the holiest relics of the saints of Normandy; how Harold swore on the chest, not knowing on what he swore; how William then drew away the covering with which the holy things had been hidden, and bade Harold see how fearful was the oath which he had taken, and how awful was the vengeance which would light on him who failed to keep it. His hand trembled and his flesh quivered^[735] when he laid his hand on the chest, while still unknowing of all that was in it; how much more frightened was he when he knew by how awful a sanction he had unwittingly bound his soul.^[736] This may be history or it may be legend; at any rate it is the honour of the Norman rather than that of the Englishman which is staked on its truth or falsehood.

Harold returns to England, perhaps leaving Wulfnoth as a hostage.

The oath then, whatever was its nature, being sworn, Harold left, or was allowed to leave, the Norman Court. He returned to England in full outward friendship with the Norman Duke, as his sworn man, his future son-in-law. With Hakon, and with his sister, if she had accompanied him, he sailed back to England. Wulfnoth, it would seem, was left with the Duke as a hostage for his brother’s fidelity.^[737]

Impossibility of fixing the details, but some groundwork of truth in the story.

243I have told this famous tale in that one of the many shapes which it has taken which seems least widely removed from the probabilities of the case. It is at least not impossible, which is more than can be said of some of the other shapes. But I would not be understood as pledging myself to the accuracy of a single detail. The charge of perjury against Harold is a charge in which there is no statement for the defence, while the witnesses |Negative evidence of the English writers.| for the prosecution contradict one another. To my own mind, as I have before said,^[738] the strongest argument against Harold is that there is no statement for the defence. Had there been a single distinct English contradiction of the story, direct or implied, I should have cast away the whole tale as pure invention. But, while we have such contradictions on almost every other point, on this point we have none. It was clearly a weak point in Harold’s case; it was a subject on which his friends shrank from entering. This to my mind proves a great deal; but we must beware of dealing with it as if it proved more than it really does. It proves that there was something wrong, something about which Harold’s friends could not speak freely. It proves that there was some groundwork for the Norman story; it proves that Harold took some engagement the breach of which could easily be represented as perjury. But it proves no more. The different forms of the Norman story remain as contradictory to one another, as lacking in all corroborative evidence, as they were before. Harold swore. |No certainty as to the time,| But when? All kinds of dates are given; our only means of choosing one date rather than another is by choosing the most vacant year in the English annals. We know that it must have been before Harold’s marriage with Ealdgyth; but the date of that marriage is itself matter of conjecture.^[739] Again, we could fix the date, if we had any 244independent accounts of the campaigns of Dol and Dinan. But no Breton writer mentions those campaigns at all; no Norman writer mentions them except in connexion with the visit and oath of Harold. I have myself placed the event at the point of time which on the whole seemed least unlikely; but I confess to have had all along a lurking feeling that the whole story may have arisen out of something which happened in that earlier French journey of Harold’s, of which we have no details.^[740] Harold then, I admit, swore, but when he swore must remain matter of conjecture.

the place,

And, if we are thus left to conjecture as to the time when Harold swore, we are equally left to conjecture as to the place. The scene of such an event might have been expected to be well known. We are told that the oath was taken in the presence of a full assembly of the Norman nobles;^[741] but even contemporary authorities do not agree as to the spot where this great council was gathered together. We have to choose at our pleasure between Bonneville, Bayeux, and Rouen. These glaring contradictions do not indeed affect the belief that there is some groundwork of fact for the story, but they are quite enough to hinder us from putting implicit faith in a single uncorroborated detail.

or the nature, of the oath.

Still more important than the questions when and where Harold swore, is the question what he swore. Even here the witness of his accusers does not agree together. The engagement to marry William’s daughter, so prominent in most of the accounts, is passed by in one which ought to be the most trustworthy of any. There is an utter uncertainty as to which of William’s many daughters it was that Harold engaged to marry. According to one version, this part at least of the oath, if not kept, was 245at least not broken; one statement, and that put into Harold’s own mouth,^[742] affirms, with whatever truth, that the daughter of William to whom he had plighted himself died before his accession to the Crown. Even the most important engagement of all, the promise to secure William’s succession, or at least to do all that one man could do to secure it, appears in different shapes in the different |Impossibility of some of its alleged terms.| accounts. In most of them it is accompanied by lesser engagements which carry their own confutation with them. Harold is made to promise to do various things on William’s behalf forthwith. The engagements to receive a Norman garrison in Dover Castle, to build other castles elsewhere, and to receive and maintain Norman garrisons in them—these were engagements the fulfilment of which was not to wait till the death of Eadward. They were engagements to be fulfilled at once, as pledges of Harold’s faith, and as means of paving the way for William’s succession when the day should come. But it is certain that these lesser engagements never were fulfilled; it is nowhere stated that any complaint was made during Eadward’s life as to their non-fulfilment. We hear nothing of any complaint, of any message, on the part of William, until after Harold’s election and coronation. They were in truth stipulations the fulfilment of which was simply impossible, and a prince so clear-sighted as William must have seen that it was impossible. Harold might indeed do all that was in one man’s power to secure the election of William whenever the throne should become vacant; but it would have been beyond the power of any man, even of an Earl of the West-Saxons, to surrender English fortresses to William while Eadward still lived. When Eadward was dead, the Witan might of course, if they would, choose William as his successor. But, while 246William was not yet King, it would have been simple treason in an English Earl to surrender to him a fortress which the King and people of England had entrusted to his keeping. It is highly probable that William himself knew the English Constitution much better than the historians who write as his advocates and flatterers. But it called for no special knowledge of the English Constitution, it was little more than a matter of common sense, to see that no subject, however exalted, either could, or ought to, hand over English fortresses to a foreign prince, even though that foreign prince was the destined successor to the English Crown.

The oath, if the terms were as is alleged, must have been taken under compulsion.

Harold then, as I hold, swore, but what he swore is as uncertain as it is when and where he swore it. We are left as completely to conjecture as to the matter of his oath as we are left as to its time and its place. We know only that it was something which gave William a great advantage, something which enabled him, without much difficulty, to represent his rival as guilty of a signal perjury. But we can say no more. If Harold really promised to accept William as King after the death of Eadward, and to use every means in his power to bring about his acceptance by the rest of the nation, such an oath could have been taken only under compulsion. If Harold took such an oath, it could only have been because he felt that his position in the Norman Court, however honourable in appearance, was practically the position of a prisoner. For such an oath was one which he certainly had no intention of keeping. And, however reckless Harold may have been with regard to oaths,^[743] this was an oath which neither Harold nor any other man in his senses would have willingly taken, unless he had meant to keep it. To take such an oath, and then to break it, was to give the enemy the greatest possible advantage. We may therefore feel sure that, if Harold 247did swear to all which the Norman accounts represent him as swearing to, he must have sworn simply because he felt himself in bonds, because he saw no other way of escaping from Normandy and returning to England.^[744]

William’s apparent motives—to entrap Harold into breach of his oath.

On the other hand, if William required such an oath, he could have required it only because he knew that it would not be kept. It is quite impossible to believe that, at the time when Harold’s visit is commonly placed, William did not know perfectly well that Harold had designs on the English Crown, even if Harold were not in some sort already recognized as Eadward’s destined successor. William could not be so blind as to think that an extorted oath on the part of Harold would really hinder the English people from electing Harold King, or would even hinder Harold from accepting the election of the English people. A formal oath to receive William as King could have been required with no other object than that of gaining, on some future day, the advantage of representing Harold as a perjured man. Harold, in short, was called on to take an oath, simply in the hope that he might break it. Great as William’s character was in many ways, I fear that this sort of trick to entrap a rival would have seemed to him simply a praiseworthy stratagem. We may be sure that William’s religious feelings, to speak of no other motive, would have kept him back from a wilfully false oath in his own person. But the formal religion of those times would perhaps not have kept him back from throwing an occasion of sin in the way of another, provided his own hands were kept formally clean from all share in it. A more enlightened morality will pronounce that, if William really did thus purposely entrap Harold into the crime of 248perjury, the guilt of William was far blacker than the guilt of Harold.

Probable real nature of the oath.

But perhaps it is not necessary to suppose that Harold really did swear to William’s succession in the full and formal way which the Norman writers assert. It is remarkable how prominent a place is filled in nearly every account by Harold’s promise to marry William’s daughter. And it is further remarkable that this promise is the only part of the story which seems to have reached some writers |An engagement to marry William’s daughter,| in other lands.^[745] I am inclined to suspect that we have here before us the germ of the whole matter. Harold may have promised, promised, as we are told his manner was, too hastily, to marry one of William’s daughters. He may easily have been thus far cajoled by the blandishments of Matilda, and even, as some accounts suggest, by the expressed preference of the princess herself. When once out of the snare, he may have forgotten or laughed at his promise to so youthful a bride, and love, or policy, or both, may have attracted him to the widow of Gruffydd. We must remember how very lightly matrimonial engagements of this sort were both entered into and cancelled. The whole history of the middle ages is full of stories of princesses whose marriage engagements were lightly made and lightly broken, sometimes through the inconstancy of suitors, sometimes through that of fathers. The diplomacy of days a little later than those of Harold and William shows us many a treaty of marriage which became a dead letter almost as soon as it was signed. In the morality of those times, Harold’s breach of his promise to marry Adeliza or Agatha, or whatever the maiden’s name was, would certainly not be set down as a very deadly sin. But, deadly or not deadly, it was manifestly a sin out of which William could reap no small advantage, one which could easily be employed to discredit the cause of his adversary. 249|combined with an act of formal homage.| The case would be still stronger if we could suppose, what is really not unlikely, that either Harold’s knighthood or his engagement to marry William’s daughter was accompanied by some formal act of homage done by Harold to William.^[746] We must remember that Harold owed William a real and deep debt of gratitude for his deliverance from Guy’s dungeon. He consented to serve in William’s army in a quarrel which concerned neither himself nor his country; and, though older than William, he did not scruple to enter into what was in some sort a filial relation |Probability of such homage on Harold’s part.| towards him. It would really not be wonderful if, under this combination of circumstances, Harold consented to become William’s man. We must again bear in mind how lightly engagements of this kind were entered into, |Complications of the feudal relation.| and how perplexing and clashing were the endless complications of feudalism. Men did homage on all kinds of grounds, on the receipt of almost any kind of benefit, and they were often bound by the tie of homage to several lords at the same time. William himself was the man of King Henry; but he seems also to have looked on himself as the man of King Eadward;^[747] it is within the compass of possibility that he did homage to Eadward as his chosen successor at the time of his visit to England. Herbert of Maine might have been claimed as the man of the King of the French, of the Duke of the Normans, and of the Count of Anjou, all at once. Roger of Mortemer was undoubtedly the man of Duke William; but he was also the man of so small a lord as Ralph of Montdidier; and we have seen the difficulties into which he was brought through this divided allegiance.^[748] King Malcolm was the man of Eadward and the sworn brother of Tostig; yet neither of these obligations kept him back from ravaging Northumberland.^[749] In 250short the instances are endless. Most public men of the eleventh century must have been like the English statesman of the seventeenth, who had taken a great many oaths, |Effect of homage done by Harold to William.| and was afraid that he had not kept them all.^[750] In such a state of things it would be nothing amazing if Harold became the man of his benefactor, his future father-in-law, his military commander in the Breton war. Such an act of homage would undoubtedly not bind him, either in its terms or in its spirit, to receive William as Eadward’s |The advantage given by it to William.| successor on the throne of England. But it would give William a great advantage nevertheless. Nothing would be more easy than for William to construe the oath of homage in one way and for Harold to construe it in another. When the man assumed a crown to which the lord laid claim, such conduct might easily be represented as a breach of the man’s duty to his lord. The man had promised to do his lord faithful service, and he had failed to do that faithful service in the matter which, of all others, was nearest the lord’s heart. Here was quite material enough for the craft of William to take advantage of, and to turn to the discredit of his rival. The relations of lord and vassal in those days were in a state somewhat like that in which other relations of life have been at other |Fluctuating public opinion as to the obligations of homage.| times. There must have been few princes or nobles in western Europe who had not, at some time or other, been guilty of some breach of the strict duty of a man to his lord. The fault thus lightly committed was often as lightly pardoned. Yet, as special acts of fidelity called for special admiration, so it was not hard, whenever it was convenient, to insist on and to aggravate the offence of the faithless vassal.^[751] The offence was one which could, almost 251at pleasure, be either passed by as altogether trivial or held up to execration as a sin of the most heinous dye. The latter course, I need not say, was that which would be followed with unrelenting eagerness, when the breach of duty to be held up for scorn and vengeance was one committed by Harold and against William.

Case of an oath on relics.

And, in the ideas of those days, it would be held as further strengthening the case of William, as further aggravating the crime of Harold, if the oath taken and broken was not merely the common oath of a man to his lord, but an oath of unusual sanctity, an oath taken upon the relics of the saints. We must look at the matter with |General case with regard to oaths.| the feelings of those times. In any enlightened view of morality, one promise is as binding as another; the word of an honest man is as sacred as a thousand oaths. But the fact that oaths are required among all nations and under all religions shows that this is a morality so high that the mass of mankind do not practically act upon it. Every oath is in truth a curse, a religious threat, a calling down of the vengeance of an unseen power on the man who shall break it. A man, under different forms of religion, swears by such a god or by such a saint. If he breaks his oath, he offers a personal insult to the god or the saint by |Personal enmity of the saints incurred by a false oath on their relics.| whom he swears. The power whom he thus offends becomes his personal enemy, and may be expected to mark him out as an object for personal vengeance. If therefore the story of the relics be true, William’s object was to work on Harold’s mind by dint of the extreme of superstitious dread, by pointing to all the saints of Normandy as about to become his personal enemies in case he should break his oath. The strange thing to our minds is that it does not 252seem to have struck any one that the real sinner against |True moral aspect of the case. William more guilty than Harold.| the saints was not Harold but William. If the saints in glory are conceived as being still capable of personal human passions, one would have expected that they would look on no insult as so great, so direct, so unpardonable, as that of profaning their holy relics to a purpose of deliberate fraud. Harold is made to swear; then, after he has sworn, he is told that he has sworn on these awful and wonder-working relics, whose vengeance, in case of breach of faith, will track him like that of the Erinnyes. Strange to say, the author of so base a deception is looked on as a pious worshipper, deserving the highest favour of every holy person of whom a bone or a fragment of clothing lay within the chest. It is the unwitting victim of fraud whom the saints mark out for what, in the intercourse of mortals upon earth, would be looked on as a somewhat unjust vengeance. The reader must judge for himself as to the probability of the tale. The strongest argument in its favour is that Harold’s alleged perjury seems to have aroused greater general indignation than could have been aroused by a mere breach of the common oath of homage. At any rate, the question whether such a tale be true or false is certainly one which comes much more nearly home to the apologist of William than to the apologist of Harold.

Harold’s sin lay not in breaking the oath, but in taking it.

As to the bearing of the transaction on Harold’s character, the morality of the question is easily summed up. Whatever was the engagement which Harold broke, whether it was a promise to betray England to the stranger or simply to contract a marriage of absurd disparity in point of years, his sin lay wholly in taking the oath, not in breaking it. He yielded to threats or to blandishments, to a vague sense of danger, to a vague impulse of gratitude or to a momentary inclination, when in strict morality he ought to have stood firm against every temptation and every threat. Through one or other of these 253motives he allowed himself to be cajoled into making a promise which he had no serious intention of fulfilling. He incurred whatever amount of guilt is incurred by thus trifling with what ought to be solemn engagements. No one, I suppose, will argue that he would at all have mended matters, had he fulfilled his promise by any act of treason towards his country. This of course goes on the supposition that his promise really involved any such acts of treason. But it is just as likely that Harold really broke no promise of greater moment than that of marrying, at some unfixed time, a child whose father was younger than himself.

Utter obscurity of the whole matter.

I found the question involved in darkness, and I must leave it in the darkness in which I found it. I have offered some conjectures, but it is simply as conjectures that I have offered them. The tale is so beset with contradictions that it is impossible to attain to anything like certainty on |The oath in no case affected the English people.| any single point of detail. One thing at least is certain. However deeply Harold may have sinned against William, England sinned not at all. No promise or oath of Harold could bind the people of England, or could give William any right over them which he did not possess before. If Harold sinned, his guilt was on his own head. The people of England were guiltless, and William’s invasion of England was none the less an unprovoked attack on a people who had never wronged him. And, if we accept the most famous and most striking part of the story, it is clear that the guilt of the deceiver was far heavier than the guilt of the deceived. The question is therefore a Norman rather than an English question, and as a Norman question I have dealt with it in one of the Norman chapters of my history.