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

CHAPTER XII. THE LATER REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY.^[159] 1051–1066.

Recapitulation of the history of Normandy.

We left the Duchy of Normandy in the enjoyment of a short season of unusual peace, after the energy of its great Duke had for a moment quelled all enemies at home and |1051.| abroad. We saw the Duke himself received as a cherished guest at the Court of England, during those gloomy months when England, in the absence of her defenders, seemed to have already become a Norman land. We saw him return to his home, clothed, there can be little doubt, in his own eyes, with the character of the lawful heir of the English Crown. We have now to trace out his history and that of his Duchy from the time of his return from his first English sojourn till he again steps upon the field of English history as an avowed claimant of the Kingdom of England. The intervening time fills a space of fifteen 76|Character of the period in Norman history.| years, years crowded with stirring and memorable events in the history of Normandy. But they are events which, till quite the end of the period, have no direct connexion with the history of England. It is only in the last stage of the present Chapter that the two streams of our narrative must again converge, at the moment when the two great figures of our drama meet face to face in the memorable and fatal visit of Earl Harold to the Norman court. The earlier years of the period are wholly occupied with the affairs of William and his Duchy, his marriage, his ecclesiastical reforms and foundations, his wars against rebellious kinsmen within his Duchy and with French and Angevin enemies beyond its bounds. But these things all form part of our story. No part of the life of the great Conqueror is foreign to the history of the Conquest of England. Every blow dealt by William against his restless neighbours or against his jealous overlord formed part of his military schooling for the greatest day of his military life. Every exercise of that political craft in which he surpassed all men made his hand more skilful for the weaving of that masterpiece of subtlety by which, even more than by his lance and bow, he knew how to make England his own.

Divisions of the period.

The period will fall naturally into four divisions. First |William’s marriage.| comes William’s marriage with Matilda of Flanders, a step which was, in itself, of no small moment in William’s career, and which, as I have already hinted,^[160] supplies some |His French wars. 1050–1058.| most characteristic illustrations of William’s temper. Next come the wars of William with the King of the French and his allies, those allies being not only the ceaseless enemy of Normandy, the Count of Anjou, but also enemies of William’s within his own Duchy and within his own |His war for Maine. 1061–1063.| ducal house. Thirdly comes the later stage of the Angevin war, when it became almost wholly resolved into a struggle for the possession of Maine. Lastly, we come to William’s 77|The Breton War and the oath of Harold.| Breton campaigns, which, in our point of view, necessarily become a mere adjunct to the great question of the visit and the oath of Harold. I have purposely reserved that question for this stage of my history. As the date is uncertain, and as the event is recorded by no contemporary English writer, I could find no fitting place for it in the |The oath a Norman rather than an English question.| course of my purely English narrative. Recorded only by Norman writers, it seems essentially a piece of Norman history, and the question of right or wrong is essentially a Norman question.^[161] It has no bearing on the events narrated and discussed in my last Chapter; it has the closest bearing on the events which will be narrated in later Chapters. |Its bearing on the history.| Any personal obligations towards William, which Harold had contracted or which Harold had broken, formed altogether a personal question between William and Harold. It was a question with which the English nation had in strictness nothing to do.^[162] They might take it into consideration as a matter of prudence; they had nothing to do with it as a matter of right. If any wrong was done to William, it was done, not by England, but by Harold personally. It might be a crime in Harold to accept the Crown to which he was chosen, but that in no way affected the right of the English people to choose him. The question then, up to this point, is a Norman question; it became an English question only when William claimed the English Crown, and put forth the alleged perjury of Harold as one of the grounds of his claim. I have therefore reserved the consideration of the whole story for the present Chapter. It comes in here as a part of the Norman history, which has no direct bearing on the purely English 78events which have gone before, but which has the most direct and important bearing on the combined Norman and English events which are to follow.

§ 1. The Marriage of William and Matilda. 1049–1060.

Position of William.

William, at the time of his visit to Eadward, had reached the age of about twenty-four years. The negotiations for |1049.| his marriage had already begun at least two years before.^[163] A marriage into some princely house was an object of no small moment for one in William’s position. The Bastard, the Tanner’s grandson, had now abundantly made good his position within his own Duchy, and he had shown to his neighbours that he was one whose borders could not be insulted with impunity. The victor of Val-ès-dunes, the avenger of Alençon, the man to whom the impregnable steep of Domfront had yielded in sheer dread of his wrath,^[164] already held no small place among the princes of Gaul and of Europe. The rulers of the lands nearest to his own had had abundant means of judging of his prowess. His royal overlord at Paris had witnessed what William could do as an ally, and his restless rival at Angers had felt yet more keenly what he could do as an enemy. Alike in warfare and in internal government, he had shown himself in every way the peer of Kings and of long-descended Dukes and Counts. It remained now to be seen whether |A princely marriage desirable for him.| the rulers of other European states were ready to receive him as their social peer, and to allow their blood to mingle with the blood of the son of Herleva. His own panegyrist has indeed no doubt on the point. The Duke of the Normans had only to choose his wife at his will from the 79houses of whichever of the neighbouring princes he thought good. Nay, distant Kings would have vied with one another in offering their daughters to such a bridegroom.^[165] Notwithstanding this rhetoric, we may be allowed to suspect that, when the chief men of Normandy urged on their sovereign the prudence of an early marriage, they thought somewhat of the advantage of fixing the position of William in the eyes of the world as well as of the necessity of securing the Norman succession.^[166] This last object |Importance of direct heirs to William.| indeed was a matter of paramount importance. Nothing but the life of the reigning Duke stood between his Duchy and the repetition of such anarchy as his own early years had witnessed. A bastard could, in strict law, have no heirs but heirs of his own body; and, even setting aside William’s bastardy, it was as hard now as it had been at the death of Robert to say who was the lawful presumptive heir to the Norman Duchy. It was before all things necessary that William should, with all speed, raise up sons of his own to |Domestic purity of William’s life.| sit on his ducal chair. And it is to the eternal honour of the young Duke that there was no fear of the rights of William’s lawful sons being interfered with by the claims of any elder but unlawful issue. There was no fear of William’s bride, whoever she might be, having to share her place in his house or in his heart with any unlawful or irregular consort. Alone of all his race, William set an example to all the princes of his time of a domestic life of unsullied purity. He had marked, it may well be, the shame, the sorrow, the anarchy, which had been brought upon 80himself and his country by the youthful error of his own parents, or rather—it might be fairer to say—by the neglect of his father to redeem that youthful error by a later marriage. He was determined that no such evils should ever arise from any such error on his own part. No mistress, no Danish wife, appeared in William’s days in the palace of Rouen; and this virtue, so unusual in one surrounded by all the temptations of youth and power, seems to have become the subject of foolish and brutal jests among the profligate scoffers of his Court.^[167] The private life of William is a bright feature among the varied traits of his strangely mingled character. In this respect the noblest of women would have been no more than an help meet for him. And such an one he found in the wife whom he sought with such characteristic pertinacity, and who, in the end, shared his cares and his glories for more than thirty years.

His counsellors recommend a marriage with Matilda of Flanders.

The counsels of the wise men of Normandy both pressed William to marry, and further suggested the expediency of selecting for his bride the daughter of some neighbouring prince.^[168] The weighty matter was long and anxiously discussed, but at last either the counsels of his advisers or his own inclination disposed William in favour of the daughter of the reigning Count of Flanders. It may be that, if the English Court had been adorned with a princess, he would have sought, by a marriage with a 81daughter of Eadward, to strengthen the hopes which he may have already begun to cherish in the direction of Eadward’s Crown. But no such help was to be looked for in the house of his childless cousin; still, as I have already hinted, it is possible that one of the merits in his eyes of the wife whom he did choose was that she sprang by direct, if only by female descent, from the blood of Ælfred.^[169] It is possible that other princesses might have been found who had the same amount of connexion with English royalty,^[170] but it would have been hard to find one who united a descent of this kind with the great European position which attached to a daughter of Baldwin. The laureate of William taxes his powers to the uttermost to set forth the greatness of the prince who was thought worthy to become the father-in-law |Descent of the Counts of Flanders.| of his hero. No line was so exalted as that of the Count of Flanders, or as, in contempt of the geography of his own time, he wishes rather to call him, the Satrap of the Morini.^[171] The lowly origin of Lyderic the Forester^[172] was forgotten among the splendours of a house which, by successive intermarriages, could boast of a descent from the Kings of Wessex, Italy, and Burgundy, and from the Imperial stock of the Great Charles.^[173] The Flemish Count 82was in name a vassal of the Roman Emperor; in truth he was the stay and glory of his counsels. Rarely did he condescend to visit the Imperial Court; when he stooped so far, Counts, Marquesses, Dukes, the mighty Primates of the German Church, even Kings themselves, looked on him |Their power and dignity.| with wonder and admiration.^[174] Without accepting all this rhetoric, it is certain that, next to a marriage into the house of an anointed King, no connexion could have been found more exalted than that which William sought to form with the prince whom his contemporaries spoke of as the mighty |Importance of their border position.| Marquess.^[175] No description could be more apt. It was to their position as Marquesses in the strict sense of the word, as princes holding a border land between France and Germany,^[176] as vassals of both Crowns, but no very humble subjects of either, that the Counts of Flanders owed their special greatness among European princes. Their land, with its sea-board and its rivers, was marked out by nature as the land where commerce and civic greatness were to take a firmer hold than in any other land north of the Alps.^[177] 83And its hardy, sharp-witted, and industrious inhabitants, |Character of the people.| near kinsmen of our own Nether-Dutch stock, were no less renowned in warfare than they were in the peaceful arts of commerce and manufacture. And we must not forget that, in those days, the Flemish dominion, and, with it, the Low-Dutch speech, reached far to the south of the narrow frontier which is all that successive French aggressions have left to the modern Kingdom of Belgium. The Marquess of Flanders was a near neighbour of the Duke of the Normans. Between them lay only the small Counties of Ponthieu and Boulogne, the representatives of the old disputed land of Herlwin of Montreuil.^[178] On every political ground, no alliance could be more desirable for the young Duke than one which brought him into close and friendly connexion with this mighty house.

Baldwin the Fifth. 1036–1067.

Of the reigning Count, Baldwin the Fifth, Baldwin of Lisle or Yssel,^[179] Baldwin the Debonnaire, we have often heard in other parts of our history. We first heard of him as a rebel against his own father, and as being brought to reason by the potent influence of Duke Robert.^[180] We next heard of his constant reception of English and other exiles, and of his wars with the Empire, in which England bore a part against him.^[181] In those wars his Norman panegyrist represents him as invariably successful.^[182] We have seen how far this description departs from the truth of history; |Baldwin’s second rebellion and reconciliation. 1054–1056.| but in after times, when the might of Rome and Germany was represented by a woman and a child, it is said that Baldwin gained concessions which he was not likely to gain at the hands of Henry the Third.^[183] With his other 84overlord, the Parisian King, he had formed the closest tie of affinity; his wife was Adela, the daughter of King |His Regency in France. 1061.| Robert and sister of the reigning King Henry.^[184] In after times, on the death of Henry, Count Baldwin was called on to act as Regent or Protector over the realm of his wife’s young nephew Philip.^[185] His marriage with Adela gave him two sons, Baldwin and Robert, both of whom afterwards reigned over Flanders.^[186] Judith, who a few |1051.| years later became the wife of Tostig the son of Godwine, is often spoken of as his daughter, but she was in truth his sister, the child of his father’s old age,^[187] and probably in years the contemporary of his own children. But, if the sister of Baldwin shared the viceregal seat of Northumberland, his daughter was fated to yet higher honour within |His daughter Matilda.| our island. Matilda, the child of Baldwin and Adela, in after days to be crowned at Westminster as Lady of the English, was the princess whom the advice of William’s wisest counsellors selected as the fittest bride for their young Duke.

William seeks her in marriage.

One might be curious to know how far this choice was at all prompted in the beginning by personal inclination on William’s part. It is certain that Matilda won and retained William’s deepest affection, that he had to struggle hard to obtain her hand, and that he made her a faithful and loving husband throughout their joint lives. But modern researches have shown that there was a mystery about the marriage which no one would have guessed from the fluent narratives of the Norman writers. They enlarge on 85Matilda’s beauty, on her accomplishments and her virtues.^[188] But, just as the Encomiast of Emma keeps out of sight the fact that his heroine was a widow and a mother at the time of her marriage with Cnut,^[189] so the panegyrists of William keep out of sight the fact, revealed to us by a comparison of several documents and incidental statements, that |Matilda’s former marriage and children.| Matilda was the mother of a son and a daughter of whom William was not the father.^[190] Some of them further conceal, what others have the honesty to allow, that the marriage of the Duke was objected to on canonical grounds, and that an interval of some years took place between the first proposal of marriage and the actual celebration of the rite. The language of William’s laureate would lead us to believe that Count Baldwin brought his daughter across the Norman frontier almost as soon as William’s ambassadors had reached his court with William’s proposal.^[191] A more minute examination reveals the fact that the marriage was first |1049–1053.| thought of before the murder of Beorn, but that the lovers were not joined together by the Church till the year of the death of Godwine.

Legend of Brihtric.

The scandal of a later age told the tale how one Brihtric, a Thegn of Gloucestershire, was sent as an ambassador from 86the King of the English to the court of Bruges, how the daughter of the Count cast an eye of love on the tall stalwart Englishman, how she offered herself to him in marriage, how he refused her advances, and how in later times Matilda, the Lady of the English, found means of ample revenge for the slight which he had offered to Matilda, the Flemish princess. William, we are told, not considering, it would seem, that such hatred might be deemed to savour of love, easily granted his wife’s prayer for the imprisonment of Brihtric and for the transfer of his lands to herself.^[192] The tale is evidently mythical, but it preserves the kernel of truth that William was not the |Gerbod, first husband of Matilda.| first love, or indeed the first husband, of Matilda. She had been already married to Gerbod, a man of distinction in Flanders, whose title was taken from his hereditary office as Advocate of the great Abbey of Saint Bertin at |Her children, Gerbod and Gundrada.| Saint Omer. To him she had borne two children, a son who bore his father’s name, and who, in after times, when his step-father filled the English throne, held and resigned the great Earldom of Chester, the special home of the house of Leofric.^[193] The other child of Gerbod and Matilda was a daughter, Gundrada by name, who became the wife of William of Warren, and whose tomb and its inscription have long been among the favourite objects of antiquarian research.^[194] That tomb was placed in a minster of her own rearing, which has now vanished from the earth, in that great Priory of Saint Pancras at Lewes, whose walls |1264.| sheltered the King and the enemies of England in the next great struggle for her freedom. For a long while 87Gundrada was looked on as a daughter of William himself,^[195] but there is no doubt that both she and her brother Gerbod were the children of Matilda by her first husband. The question now arises, which I shall discuss elsewhere,^[196] whether the elder Gerbod was dead at the time of William’s first courtship, or whether the delays and difficulties which beset the marriage of William and Matilda were not, partly at least, caused by the necessity of procuring a divorce between the Flemish princess and her first husband. The |Matilda probably a widow.| balance of evidence and of probability seems to me to be decidedly in favour of the belief that Matilda was now a widow. But at any rate it is certain, though no one would have guessed it from any of the writers who record the marriage, that the bride of William was already the mother of two children by another man. The whole story forcibly reminds us of the marriage of Cnut and Emma, except that, while Emma was clearly many years older than Cnut, Matilda, married no doubt to Gerbod when very young, must have been about William’s own age.^[197] Another point is plain that, even if the marriage was first thought of as a matter of policy, William’s affections were soon firmly fixed upon the woman whose hand he was seeking. No otherwise can we explain the desperate pertinacity with which he pursued his object in defiance of difficulties to which a merely political suitor would soon have yielded.

Beginning of William’s courtship. 1048–1049.

The scheme of the marriage must have been first broached soon after the war of Domfront and Alençon. For in the year following that war the marriage met with the most formidable of all obstacles. It was forbidden by an express 88command of the common Father of Christendom, speaking at the head of an Assembly which had a real claim to command no small share of the reverence of Western |The Council of Rheims. 1049.| Europe. The good Pope Leo had gathered together at Rheims that famous Council of some of whose acts I have had occasion to speak earlier in my history.^[198] For one of those moments which come few and far between in the annals of nations and Churches, the two lights of the Christian firmament shone in friendship side by side; the two swords no longer clashed against each other, but were drawn at the same bidding to chastise the same offenders. At the summons of a Pope and an Emperor each alike worthy of his throne, clerks and laymen had assembled from distant lands, among which England had not been slow to send her representatives.^[199] The abbatial minster of Saint Remigius had been hallowed by the Pope himself; and a number of Princes and Prelates were next called to account by the assembled Fathers for various breaches of the law, canonical and moral. There, as we have seen, a Norman Bishop, a member of the mightiest house in Normandy, had to defend himself on a charge of sacrilegious destruction of his own cathedral.^[200] There a Prelate of the Ducal Burgundy, Hugh of Langres, was deposed from his episcopal office for various acts of cruelty and adultery.^[201] But Pope Leo did not shrink from smiting offenders yet more exalted, and among them he struck the most grievous of personal blows at the Duke of the Normans |Enforcement of the ecclesiastical laws of marriage.| himself. One special object of the Council was the stricter enforcement of the Church’s law of marriage, a point on which the princes and great nobles of Gaul would seem just then to have been specially lax. Among the canons of the Council, two are aimed specially at 89offences of this kind, and the Pope and the assembled Fathers at once proceeded to launch the censures of the Church against offenders of every degree. A whole train of princes were summoned before the Synod, and some of them were actually excommunicated. Among them |Censures pronounced on various French Princes.| were the two princes who held the border lands between Flanders and Normandy, two princes of one of whom we have already heard but too much in our history, and of both of whom we shall hear again. Eustace of Boulogne, the brother-in-law of King Eadward, and Ingelram, seemingly the son of the reigning Count of Ponthieu, were both smitten with excommunication on charges of incest the evidence for which seems to be no longer forthcoming. Theobald of Chartres, the son of Odo the old enemy of Normandy, was also called to account on a charge of putting away his lawful wife without cause.^[202] And it was now that an order went forth which touched the |Baldwin forbidden to give his daughter to William.| two mightier neighbours of all these princes. Count Baldwin of Flanders was forbidden to give his daughter in marriage to William the Norman, and he, William, was forbidden to receive her. Such is the only description vouchsafed to the great Duke. The other princes receive their usual titles of honour, but it would almost seem that any such respectful mention was still looked on as not due of right to the grandson of the Tanner.

90At the date then of the Council of Rheims, the marriage had not yet been celebrated, though William’s first proposals must have been already made to Baldwin, and must have been favourably listened to by him. The Papal prohibition seemingly stopped the marriage for four years. |Alleged consanguinity of William and Matilda.| The ground of objection was, according to all the evidence which we have on the subject, the usual ground of nearness of kin. Yet it is by no means easy, either to trace up the pedigree of William and Matilda to a common ancestor, or to see any reasonable ground for the prohibition on any of the usual ecclesiastical theories of affinity. But it certainly seems more reasonable to suppose the existence of some unrecorded hindrance of this kind than to believe that William sought the hand of Matilda, and that her father favoured his suit, at a time when she was actually the |The marriage delayed.| wife of another man.^[203] At all events, the marriage was delayed, and the moment when it was actually celebrated |Coincidence of its celebration with the captivity of Pope Leo.| coincides so remarkably with one of the most memorable exploits of William’s countrymen in another part of Europe that it is hard to believe that the one event had not some influence on the other. The Normans were now pressing their conquests in the South of Italy, and Pope Leo did |1053–1054.| not deem it inconsistent with his duty to endeavour to check their progress even by force of arms.^[204] His own prowess, tried in earlier warfare, the lofty stature and heavy swords of his German auxiliaries, availed him not.^[205] 91|Leo’s wars with the Normans of Apulia. His defeat and imprisonment.| The Pontiff became a captive in the hands of enemies who knew as well how to make the most of an advantage as if William himself had been their leader. And in truth there was one in their ranks with a head well nigh as cunning to devise, and an arm well nigh as strong to execute, as the head and the arm of William himself. For the Norman host was commanded by the sons of Tancred |Policy of Robert Wiscard.| of Hauteville, and among them, as yet the least renowned among his brethren, stood the man before whom Cæsars as well as Pontiffs were to quail.^[206] There stood the founder of the Apulian Duchy, the remote founder of the Sicilian Kingdom, the man who did less only than William himself to make the Norman name famous and terrible throughout the world. The true spirit of Robert Wiscard appears in the demeanour of conquerors who bowed in the lowliest reverence to their holy captive, and who at the same time knew how to win from him what might pass as a lawful investiture |Origin of the Sicilian Kingdom.| of all their conquests. Such were the beginnings of that Norman Kingdom of the South whose fate forms so striking a contrast to that of their northern conquest. Thus arose that Sicilian realm, whose Crown shone the brightest among the Pleiads which decked the brow of 92the Wonder of the World,^[207] and which, in its lowest depth of degradation, we have seen merged in a realm of happier |1860.| omen at the mere approach of the wonder-worker of our own day.

The marriage at last celebrated; Baldwin brings his daughter to Eu. 1053.

It was while Leo was thus kept in the power of the Normans of the South that William seems to have thought that the hour was at last come when he might venture to trample under foot the prohibition of the Council of Rheims. It may be that the reverential gaolers of the Pope had contrived to wring from him some concession to the prince whom, if they did not look on as their sovereign, they must at least have honoured as the most renowned of all who bore the Norman name. Or it may be that William and Baldwin deemed that, during such a collapse of the Papal authority, any breach of ecclesiastical discipline might safely be dared, in the hope that an absolution after the fact might be won from some successor less austere than the saintly Leo. At all events the marriage was celebrated while Leo was still in durance. Count Baldwin himself led his daughter through Ponthieu to the Norman frontier. She was there met by the bridegroom who had so long and so patiently waited for her. The marriage ceremony was performed, by what daring priest or Prelate we know not, in the church of the ducal town which stood nearest to the Flemish border. At Eu, under the shadow of the old fortress of Rolf, in the minster which had been lately reared by the bounty of Count William and his half-canonized wife,^[208] Duke William received the hand of the bride whose possession had been forbidden to him by the judgement of Pope and Council. From the border castle the new Duchess was led in all fitting state |Matilda’s reception at Rouen.| to her husband’s capital. The metropolitan city received the Lady of Normandy with every expression of joy. Any doubts as to the canonical validity of the marriage 93were likely to give way before the charm of Matilda’s presence, before the mere novelty of seeing the Court of Rouen, after an interval of perhaps thirty years,^[209] once more adorned by the grace and dignity of a reigning Duchess.

Opposition to the marriage within the Duchy.

But, in an age and country where the religious spirit was so actively at work as it was in Normandy in the days of William, it was not likely that any breach of canonical law, even on the part of the sovereign, should pass unchallenged. Men were found who feared not, perhaps in the spirit of the Baptist, to rebuke the prince who had dared so direct a breach of the orders of so revered an assembly as the Council of Rheims. And the opposition was led by one from whom, according to all the accounts of his character which have been handed down to us, we should not have looked for any special zeal either for ecclesiastical discipline |Censure pronounced by Archbishop Malger.| or for Christian morality. At the head of the Norman Church now stood William’s uncle Malger, a man who, as I have already said,^[210] is described to us only in the darkest colours. Yet almost the only act recorded of him is one which, in the life of a saint, would undoubtedly have been set down as one of the most striking proofs of his sanctity. The Primate of Normandy did not shrink from reproving his prince, and that prince the Great William, for the breach of canonical law which he had committed in marrying his kinswoman. He at least threatened, if he did not actually publish, a sentence of excommunication against the princely |His probable motives.| offender.^[211] Was his motive in so doing simply disloyalty? 94Was he, as one account seems to imply, in league with his brother the Count of Arques, to overthrow William’s throne?^[212] Or are we to suppose that Malger was really stirred up by a holy zeal to denounce a breach of ecclesiastical law, however exalted the offenders? Such is the equally distinct statement of another of our authorities, less open than those who are hardest upon Malger to the influences |Nature of the charges against Malger.| of flattery or prejudice.^[213] After all, if we come to distinguish the crimes alleged against Malger from the declamation which is used about them, they are not crimes of any enormous dye. They are the follies and vices which could hardly fail to be expected from a young prince thrust into a great ecclesiastical office to which he clearly had no real call. He is allowed not to have been deficient in the learning of the time.^[214] But he was fonder of hunting than became an Archbishop, a charge which seems a little hard in an age when an extravagant devotion to brutal sports was not deemed inconsistent with the highest saintliness.^[215] He kept too splendid a table,^[216] and wasted the wealth, and even the ornaments, of his church in reckless largesses.^[217] All this is likely enough, and the existence of 95his son Michael shows that he was no strict observer of ecclesiastical rule on other points.^[218] And we can well believe that Duke William, most of whose own faults were of a kind exactly opposite to those of his uncle, was diligent in rebuking one who certainly departed widely from his ideal of a Prelate.^[219] But when these intelligible and probable charges are mixed up with vague stories of robbery and other unnamed crimes,^[220] we begin to have our doubts. |His lack of the Pallium.| We are told also that successive Pontiffs had refused him the pallium, as being unworthy of his office,^[221] so that Rouen was now in much the same case as Canterbury. He also neglected to attend more than one Council at Rome to which he was summoned.^[222] All Rouen and all Normandy, we are told, were utterly weary of their Primate and his doings.^[223]

Malger’s opposition probably honest.

All this may well have been so; yet the excommunication, or threatened excommunication, of the Duke, more especially when we remember that the fact is left out by those who draw the worst picture of Malger, suggests that there may have been another side to the story. 96The excommunication does not read like the act of one who was utterly dead to the duties and decencies of his office. It reads more like the act of one who, conscious that he had greatly neglected those duties and decencies, was anxious to make amends for past offences by an act of saintly zeal and boldness. It is the sort of act which may well have been meant as the first step |William’s indignation at him.| in an amended career. And there is strong ground for believing that it was this over zealous discharge of ecclesiastical duty, quite as much as any of his ecclesiastical or moral offences, which finally brought down on Malger the wrath of his nephew and sovereign. It would be altogether of a piece with William’s conduct in greater matters still, if his personal indignation, and the complaints and entreaties of Matilda, were mixed up with a real |Malger deposed at Council of Lisieux. 1055.| feeling of the unfitness of Malger for his office.^[224] At all events, two years after William’s marriage, long before that marriage was recognized at Rome, Malger was formally deposed from his see by a joint exercise of the ducal and the pontifical authority. Ermenfrid, Bishop of Sitten, a Prelate who seems to have been specially employed to represent the Roman See beyond the Alps, was |1062, 1070.| now sent into Normandy, as he was in after years twice sent into England. William gathered a Council at Lisieux, in which all the Bishops of Normandy, under the presidency of the Papal Legate, sat in judgement on their erring metropolitan. Malger was unanimously condemned, and the Duke decreed his deposition from his see.^[225] He was banished to the Isles of the Côtentin, so 97|His banishment and death.| familiar to us as the Channel Islands.^[226] His life there is said to have still given scandal;^[227] if Malger’s ebullition of zeal against William was really the beginning of his own reformation, nothing was more likely to throw him back in the work of amendment than the consequences which his over diligence had brought upon him. One of the charges against him was that of dealing with a familiar spirit,^[228] a charge which has been ingeniously explained by the supposition that the learning of Malger took in mathematics and astronomy, and that, as in the ease of Gerbert and many others, the reputation of practising magic was the penalty of knowledge beyond his age.^[229] It was his custom to sail about among the islands, and sometimes to visit the mainland of the Côtentin. One day, on 98entering the vessel, his supernatural power enabled him to prophesy that one of the company would die that day. He knew not however who was the doomed person, nor by what means he would perish. His prediction was fulfilled in himself: he fell overboard and was drowned. His body was afterwards found among the rocks, and he was buried at Cherbourg.^[230]

Malger succeeded by Maurilius.

A Prelate of a very different stamp from Malger succeeded him on the metropolitan throne of Rouen. William |His life and character.| had now fully learned that the high places of the Church could not be rightly turned into mere provisions for the younger members of sovereign houses. He determined to give the Norman Church a thoroughly worthy chief pastor, and in his choice he overlooked all prejudices of family and even of nation. This willingness to recognize the claims of merit in strangers from every land has been already spoken of as one of the marked features of the Norman national character.^[231] The new Primate, Maurilius, was a man of foreign birth, one who had seen much of various parts of the world, and who seems to have made choice of Normandy as his adopted country. His |His birth near Rheims, and studies at Lüttich.| career in many respects reminds us of that of Lanfranc, with this difference, that the earlier years of Lanfranc were spent in a character wholly lay, while Maurilius had first entered the ecclesiastical calling as a secular priest. He was a Frenchman by birth, born of a noble house in the neighbourhood of Rheims.^[232] But his higher 99education was Teutonic. He first studied at home at Rheims, then at Lüttich, and lastly, as the reward of his proficiency in learning, he was raised to the dignity of |He becomes “Scholasticus” at Halberstadt.| “Scholasticus,” Chancellor or Lecturer, in the cathedral church of Halberstadt, one of the richest secular foundations in the Saxon Church.^[233] But the zeal of Maurilius soon aspired to a straiter life than that of a secular canon. He |He becomes a monk at Fécamp. 1001–1031.| left his stall at Halberstadt, he betook himself into Normandy, and there became a monk in the Abbey of Fécamp.^[234] That great house, the favourite foundation of Richard the Fearless, and one of the objects of the misapplied bounty of our own Eadward, was now flourishing in all the odour of |Secular Canons at Fécamp. 990.| youthful sanctity.^[235] The secular canons, who had been its first inmates, had, under the rule of Richard the Good, the patron and father of monks, made way for regulars of |Benedictine Monks. 1001.| the Benedictine order, under the rule of their first Abbot, the renowned and holy William, a native of Italy, and of illustrious birth. He it was who received the Chancellor of |Maurilius leaves Fécamp, and| Halberstadt as one of his spiritual household,^[236] till, like Lanfranc,^[237] the neophyte sought for a still more complete 100|becomes a hermit in Italy.| isolation from the world, and, with the leave of his Abbot, Maurilius left Fécamp for some undescribed part of Italy, where he led a hermit’s life, supporting himself by the work of his own hands.^[238] His sanctity at last drew on him |He is made Abbot of Saint Mary’s at Florence by the Marquess Boniface. [1027–1052.]| the attention of the famous Boniface, Marquess of Tuscany, the father of the more famous Countess Matilda. This prince constrained him, much against his will, to undertake the government and the reform of the great monastery of Saint Mary in the city of Florence. He laboured there for some years, and brought his monks into some degree of order and good living. But the elder members of the brotherhood, accustomed to the lax government of former Abbots, proved too much for his powers |He returns to Fécamp.| of reformation.^[239] He resigned his dignity and returned to Fécamp, where he lived for some years as a private monk, |Abbot John. 1031–1080.| under the new Abbot John. This Prelate was another Italian, high in favour alike with the Duke of the Normans and with the King of the English, who, like so many others of his order, found it to his advantage to cross the |Maurilius Archbishop of Rouen. 1055–1069.| sea and visit the saintly Eadward face to face.^[240] Under his rule the ex-Abbot of Florence lived in peace, till he was called by Duke William to the highest place in the Norman Church. He held more than one Council of his Province.^[241] He also finished the rebuilding of the metropolitan 101Church, which had been begun by his predecessor Robert, and had been possibly interrupted during the unthrifty reign of Malger. The church of Maurilius, which has |He completes and consecrates Rouen Cathedral. 1063.| wholly made way for the works of later architects, was consecrated three years before the invasion of England, in the presence of all the Bishops of his Province, and of Duke William himself.^[242] He survived this great ceremony six years, and died in the full odour of sanctity, having seen his sovereign and benefactor for three years on the throne of England.

The marriage of William and Matilda censured by Lanfranc.

The deposition of Malger, the succession of Maurilius, and the men to whom the career of the new Primate introduces us, serve well to illustrate that great religious movement which was now going on in Normandy,^[243] and which was beyond doubt greatly fostered by the wise appointments which William had now learned to make to the great ecclesiastical offices in his gift. But the unlucky Archbishop was not the only churchman who felt that it was dangerous to administer rebuke to one of William’s temper. A greater than Malger or Maurilius also took upon him the function of Micaiah, and, strangely enough, he found, through a temporary disgrace, a path to a higher place in the favour of his |His present favour with William.| prince. Lanfranc, now Prior of Bec, already high in the Duke’s favour and a sharer in his inmost counsels,^[244] perhaps took upon him personally to rebuke his sovereign 102for his uncanonical marriage; at all events he was known to have spoken his mind freely and openly on the subject.^[245] |Papal Interdict on Normandy?| The writer whom we have to follow for the share taken by Lanfranc in the affair adds that all Normandy was laid under an interdict by Papal authority as a punishment for the sin of its prince.^[246] The contemporary writers so evidently avoid the whole subject that their silence counts for less than it otherwise would; but it would certainly be strange if so memorable an exercise of Papal authority as the interdiction of divine offices throughout the Duchy found no one to record it except the local chronicler of Bec. But, however this may be, we need not doubt that Lanfranc spoke out on the subject in a way which was far from agreeable to the Duke and probably still less agreeable to the Duchess. The darker side of William’s character now stands forth. He was already stark beyond |William’s incapacity to bear personal insult.| measure to the men who withstood his will.^[247] With all his great qualities, he could not endure anything which savoured of personal insult, least of all when that insult touched his wife as well as himself. The stern executor of justice, the reformer of the Norman Church, is forgotten for a while in the man who mutilated his prisoners at Alençon,^[248] and who, years after, burned Mantes to punish a silly jest of its sovereign. Lanfranc had also enemies at hand, who did not fail to stir up the mind of the Duke against him.^[249] The vengeance taken by William 103was cruel, one might almost add, cowardly. For the fault or virtue of one member he punished the whole society, and, as commonly happened in such cases, the punishment fell more heavily on the dependants of the society than |He orders the banishment of Lanfranc, and burns the “Park” of the Abbey.| on the society itself.^[250] William ordered that Lanfranc should at once be dismissed from the monastery and banished from Normandy. But he also ordered the ravaging and burning of part of the possessions of the Abbey.^[251] He was obeyed in both orders. Lanfranc set forth from Bec, to seek his fortune once more, and he set forth in a guise almost as lowly as that in which he first appeared in the presence of Herlwin. But his journey |Reconciliation of Lanfranc and the Duke.| was not a long one. By chance or by design, he met William on the way;^[252] the visible change in his fortunes, aided by his own ready wit, procured him an audience of the Duke, and in that audience terms of reconciliation were readily agreed on. Lanfranc was again admitted to William’s full favour, confirmed by the kiss of peace.^[253] 104The damage done to the estates of the House of Bec was more than made good.^[254] But Lanfranc was required in return to withdraw his opposition to the Duke’s marriage, |Lanfranc becomes the champion of the marriage.| and even to make himself the champion of his cause. A man of scrupulous honour, according to modern ideas of honour, would not have accepted such an office. But modern ideas of honour differ widely from monastic ideas of conscience. There was nothing in the terms agreed to by Lanfranc at which the most tender and the most formal conscience could be offended.^[255] Lanfranc had denounced the marriage as sinful, and he was not called on to withdraw that denunciation. He might still look upon the act as sinful, but he pledged himself to do his best to procure that the sin should be forgiven. The marriage was at most a breach of a canonical restriction, and it was not beyond the power of the Apostolic See to heal such a breach even after the fact. Lanfranc then was to go to 105Rome, and to use all the power of his learning and eloquence to obtain from the Pontiff a dispensation which would make good the marriage which had been irregularly contracted.^[256]

Negotiations with the Roman Court. 1054?-1059.

If these transactions between William and Lanfranc took place soon after the celebration of the marriage, the negotiations with the Roman Court must have been prolonged indeed. William’s anxiety to keep his wife would seem to have proved as fertile a source for canonical disputations as the anxiety of Henry the Eighth to get rid of his. It is at least certain that the matter was not finally settled till the Pontificate of Nicolas the Second, the Pontiff who yielded so readily to the threats of the English Earl Tostig,^[257] and who found it equally expedient to yield to the milder persuasions of the orator of Pavia. |Succession of Popes. [Victor the Second. 1055–1057. Stephen the Ninth. 1057–1058. Benedict the Tenth. 1058–1059. Nicolas the Second. 1059–1061.]| But Nicolas did not ascend the Papal throne till six years after the marriage ceremony at Eu. It is quite possible that stern and resolute Popes like Victor the Second and Stephen the Ninth refused to grant any concession, and it is probable that the scruples of Lanfranc, perhaps those of William himself, would forbid any application to the usurper Benedict.^[258] But, in any case, Nicolas granted the required dispensation. Lanfranc visited Rome, both on the Duke’s errand and on his own. The theological dispute with Berengar of Tours^[259] was still |Second Lateran Council. April 13, 1059.| going on, and in the second Lateran Council, held under the presidency of Nicolas, the heretic publicly retracted his errors.^[260] Lanfranc was again present as the champion |Lanfranc again opposes Berengar;| of orthodoxy,^[261] and his performances in this way may well have inclined Pope and Council to listen favourably to his petitions on other subjects. He pleaded the cause of his 106|and pleads for William and Matilda.| sovereign firmly and effectually, and he seems to have used language nearly as plain-spoken as Tostig did two years later. William, he argued, was determined not to give up his wife;^[262] the Pope would therefore do well to yield, for ecclesiastical censures—the interdict is clearly intended—would fall quite as heavily on the innocent as on the guilty.^[263] Another argument is also put into Lanfranc’s mouth, that the pride of Count Baldwin would not endure to have his daughter returned on his hands—he might have added with a second brood of children, and those too of doubtful legitimacy. War would certainly break out between Normandy and Flanders, and it was the duty of the common Father of Christendom to hinder, as far |Nicholas grants the dispensation. Lanfranc returns to Normandy. 1059–1060.| as in him lay, the shedding of Christian blood. To these various arguments the mind of Pope Nicolas yielded. Lanfranc at last returned with the wished-for dispensation which at last ratified by the highest ecclesiastical authority the marriage which had been, in ecclesiastical eyes, rashly and irregularly entered into six years before.^[264]

Condition of the dispensation. Foundation of the two Abbeys at Caen.

So great a favour however was not to be granted, except on condition that the sinners should atone for their fault by worthy works of penance. The Duke and the Duchess were each to rear and endow a monastery for religious persons of their respective sexes.^[265] Another 107account adds that four foundations of still more direct usefulness, hospitals namely for the sick, blind, and aged, were also to be established in four of the chief towns of Normandy, at Rouen, Bayeux, Caen, and Cherbourg.^[266] The discharge of the former part of the Papal command caused the creation of two of the noblest architectural monuments of the Duchy. The two stately Abbeys of Caen arose as at once the monument and the atonement of the irregular marriage of William and Matilda. Each |Character of the buildings.| of those noble piles retains to this day large portions of the original work of its founder, and each exhibits a character of its own, a sort of personality received from |Matilda’s church of the Holy Trinity.| its founder’s hand. The church of Matilda, the Abbey of the Holy Trinity, the first to be begun, the last to be brought to perfection, bears witness, we may say, to the feminine impatience of the Duchess, to her anxiety not 108to delay the work of atonement for her fault. Her church |Its consecration. June 18, 1066.| was so far completed as to be ready for consecration in the year of the great crisis of her husband’s life, and its solemn hallowing forms an incident which will again claim our attention even in the midst of William’s preparations for the invasion of our island.^[267] But the church then hallowed seems to have been a mere fragment, simply so much as was necessary for the devotions of the sisterhood; the greater portion of the present fabric belongs to a somewhat later age. But enough remains of Matilda’s own work to show that the building was carried on in the full spirit of her original design. No contrast between two buildings so nearly alike in plan and style can be more striking than the contrast between the minster of William and the |William’s church of Saint Stephen, begun 1064?| minster of Matilda. William was no more inclined to hurry in this undertaking than in any other undertaking of his life. His wife hastened to consecrate a fragment; but William knew how to bide his time as much in a work |consecrated 1077.| of architecture as in a work of war or politics. Eleven years later,^[268] William and Lanfranc, now promoted to be the 109Cæsar and the Pontiff of another world,^[269] were present at the consecration of the great Abbey of Saint Stephen, perfect from east to west, save only that the addition of |1086.| the western towers was a later work, and was probably |Character of the Conqueror impressed on his building.| celebrated with a second feast of dedication. And that mighty pile, perhaps the noblest and most perfect work of its own date, shows us the spirit of the Conqueror impressed on every stone. The choir has given way to a later creation; but the nave of William and Lanfranc is still there,^[270] precisely such a nave as we should expect to arise at the bidding of William the Great. Erected at the moment when the Romanesque of Normandy had cast aside the earlier leaven of Bernay and Jumièges, and had not yet begun to develope into the more florid style of Bayeux and Saint Gabriel, the church of William, vast in scale, bold and simple in its design, disdaining ornament, but never sinking into rudeness, is indeed a church worthy of its founder. The minster of Matilda, far richer, even in its earliest parts, smaller in size, more delicate in workmanship, has nothing of that simplicity and grandeur of proportion which marks the work of her husband. The one is the expression in stone of the imperial will of the conquering Duke; the other breathes the true spirit of his loving and faithful Duchess.

Beginning of the foundation of Saint Stephen’s. 1064?

But, though the completion of William’s minster was delayed till a much later date, yet, according to the custom of the founders of monasteries,^[271] the society itself, furnished no doubt with a temporary church and other temporary buildings, was established as soon as possible after the 110receipt of the Papal rescript. The monks of Saint Stephen already dwelt in their suburb beyond the walls of Caen, and the care of their founder had already given them the most famous man in his dominions for their ruler. In the same year in which the sister church was dedicated, in the same year in which England was invaded, the house was fit for at least the temporary accommodation of its new ruler. |Lanfranc first Abbot. June 15, 1066.| Lanfranc, the Prior of Bec, was called to the office of Abbot of the rising house. It was fitting that the man who had wrought the reconciliation between the Duke and the Holy See should receive the dignity which came into being as the fruit and seal of that reconciliation. Lanfranc long resisted;^[272] he had no wish to encumber himself with the cares and responsibilities of a post which was designed to hold a high place among the Norman Prelacy. His learned retirement at Bec was far more to his taste. But the will of Duke William was not to be withstood, either by those to whom he would give or by those from whom he would take away. Lanfranc became the first Abbot of the great |Anselm, born 1033; Monk of Bec 1060; Prior 1066? Abbot of Bec 1078; Archbishop of Canterbury 1093–1109.| house of Saint Stephen. In the office which he vacated at Bec he was succeeded by one no less renowned than himself. A few years before the foundation of Saint Stephen’s, another wanderer from the South had found his way to the holy shelter of Bec, and had become one of the spiritual household of Abbot Herlwin. Anselm of Aosta, the profoundest of metaphysicians and divines, the father of all Christian theology since his time, had heard of the fame of Lanfranc, and he had left his home and his heritage to sit at his feet as his scholar. He soon, by the counsel of Lanfranc himself and of Archbishop Maurilius, became not only his scholar, but his brother in the monastic profession. He now succeeded him in his office of Prior;^[273] he 111lived to succeed their common father Herlwin in the abbatial chair of Bec, and at last to succeed Lanfranc himself on the |Excellence of William’s ecclesiastical appointments.| throne of Augustine. We have now reached quite another æra in the history of the Norman Church from that when Robert and Malger and Odo were thrust into the highest ranks of the priesthood. Lanfranc, Anselm, Maurilius, the worthiest men of every land—such were now the chief pastors to whom William, in this at least a true nursing father, entrusted the care of the spiritual welfare of his people.

Happiness of William’s marriage.

William had thus, after so many troubles and difficulties, won, or rather wrested, the highest ecclesiastical sanction for the marriage which he had so dearly at heart. That marriage proved happy and fruitful. The abiding affection of William and Matilda endured no shock till, in their later days, a subject of difference between them was stirred up by the misconduct of their eldest son.^[274] That son was the first-born of a house as numerous, as flourishing, and well |His sons.| nigh as ill-fated as the House of Godwine himself. Four sons were born to William and Matilda. Two of them seem to have been born before the Papal confirmation of their parents’ marriage,^[275] but we do not read that any objection |Robert, b. 1056? d. 1135.| to their legitimacy was raised on that ground. Of these two, Robert, the eldest, twice failed of the Crown of England, and ruled Normandy to his shame and sorrow. Still the bold Crusader, the generous brother, the chosen friend of the last male of the House of Cerdic, the only one of his own house who had not the opportunity, perhaps had not the will, to be a tyrant over England, may perhaps claim some small sympathy at English hands. The second brother, 112|Richard, b. 1058? d. after 1066. William, b. 1060? d. 1100. Henry, b. 1068, d. 1135.| Richard, was cut off in his youth by that mysterious doom which made the woods of Hampshire fatal to William’s house. The third, William the Red, a man of natural powers perhaps hardly inferior to those of his father, lived to leave behind him a name more detested than any other name in the dark catalogue of royal oppressors. The fourth was the mighty Henry, the Lion of Justice, an Englishman so far as birth on English soil could make him one, the one son of their Conqueror whom Englishmen recognized as a true Ætheling, the child of a crowned King and a crowned Lady. In him we see once more, if not the personal virtues, yet at least the vigorous government, the far-seeing policy, which became a son of William the Great. Deeply as he was stained with crimes and vices, it is not without a certain reverence that we look back to the King in whom the green tree began at last to return to its place, to him of whom our own Chronicler could say that “a good man was he and mickle awe was there of him,” and who won for himself a praise like that of Godwine, of Harold, and of William, the praise that “no man durst hurt other in his days.”^[276]

William’s daughters.

Such were the sons of the Conqueror. The names and number of his daughters are given with such strange variation that I must examine the different statements more |Adela, wife of Stephen of Blois.| minutely elsewhere.^[277] But among them we see clearly the noble Adela, through whom the once hostile land of Chartres and Blois became a land friendly to Normandy, a land |Cecily, Abbess of Caen.| which gave a King to England. Clearly too we see Cecily, a virgin consecrated to God from her childhood, dedicated at the altar which her mother had reared, and where she was herself so long to bear rule over her holy sisterhood. More |Other daughters, Adeliza, &c.| dimly pass before our eyes the forms of daughters wedded or betrothed to a Duke in neighbouring Britanny and to a King in distant Spain. And one there was to whom 113a higher honour than all was for a moment offered, the betrothed for a day of the one man who could bear himself as the born peer of her mighty father, the bride whose sad betrothal directly led to all the woes which the warfare of those two master spirits was to bring upon the land for which they strove.

§ 2. William’s Wars with France. 1053–1060.

The many points which are suggested by William’s marriage have led us some years away from our strict |Character of the period.| chronological order. But the years which were occupied by these discussions and delays were important and busy years in many ways. William, still young, was now in the full maturity of mind and body, and the renown of his exploits was spreading far beyond the bounds of his own Duchy. But he had still to struggle for its possession |Rebellions within Normandy supported by Anjou and France.| against foes both within and without its borders. Faithless vassals and jealous kinsmen were still constantly rising up against him, nor did they ever fail to find neighbouring potentates ready to abet them against their sovereign. The restless enmity of the Angevin never slept, and now King Henry himself relapsed into that same position of constantly recurring hostility which had marked the earlier days of William’s reign. Henry had acted as a good and faithful overlord at Val-ès-dunes; but William had paid the debt in full by no less good and faithful service against the King’s enemies. It was indeed in the King’s cause that he had drawn upon himself the abiding enmity of the Count of Anjou. But now we see France and Anjou leagued together against Normandy. Every Norman rebel is aided in his revolt and sheltered in his exile. Once at least, King and 114Count pass the Norman frontier together, but only to feel both the strength of the Norman arm and the subtlety of the Norman brain. Henry in short plays the part which he played in the days before Val-ès-dunes, and |France and Normandy naturally hostile.| he now has the power of Anjou to help him. The relapse on the King’s part is not wonderful; the real wonder is that he ever left his course of obvious, though crooked, policy, in order to act for once as a generous and honourable neighbour and suzerain. It was only natural that every advance which was made by the lord of Rouen, whether in the way of external greatness or of internal prosperity, should be felt by the lord of Paris as |Greatness of Normandy even in later times.| a blow dealt against himself and his kingdom. We may perhaps better understand the greatness of Normandy in the days of its independence, if we look at some of the signs of the greatness which it retained after two centuries and a half of subjection, after having long served as the chief battle-ground between England and France. In the days of Lewis the Eleventh, Normandy, far from being a third part in extent, was in wealth and importance a third part of the kingdom into which it had been merged, and it furnished a third part of the revenue of the Parisian Crown. The great object of every enemy of the Parisian Kingdom was to wrest Normandy from its grasp. No blow could be so great as to give even a qualified independence to the great province which cut off the city which was the cradle and kernel of the Kingdom from |Its importance in the English and Burgundian Wars.| all communication with the English seas. There was no object on which the enemies of France, English and Burgundian, were more strongly bent, than on the separation of Normandy from the French Crown. There was no sacrifice which a French King would not make rather than surrender the noblest province of his Kingdom. The last |1421.| dying injunction of the great English conqueror of France was, at all risks, at all sacrifices, to keep Normandy in full 115|1465.| possession.^[278] One main object of the great Burgundian rival of France was to give Normandy a Duke of her own,^[279] even though that Duke was himself a member of |Spirit of Norman independence still remaining in the fifteenth century.| the royal house of France. And, whatever we say of the wish of the Englishman, the wish of the Burgundian was certainly met by a strong vein of local feeling in Normandy itself. Even in those times, Norman patriotism still held that Normandy was too great for simple incorporation with France, and that so great a Duchy ought not to be without its Duke.^[280] On the other hand, there was no sacrifice from which French policy so instinctively shrank. Lewis the Eleventh, who at least knew his own interests, was willing to surrender anything rather than make that one great sacrifice. He would give up Champagne, even Aquitaine, far greater in extent than Normandy, anything rather than the |Independent Normandy threatening to France.| precious dominion itself.^[281] And, if the extended France of the fifteenth century could so little afford to see Normandy separated from its body, even though it was to form an appanage of one of its own princes, how far more threatening must a practically independent, and often hostile, Normandy have been to the infant France of the eleventh century, when Champagne and Anjou were the fiefs 116of princes well nigh as powerful as their overlord, when Aquitaine was, in all save a nominal homage, a foreign land? Independent Normandy, flourishing under its illustrious Duke, was as sharp an eye-sore to Paris as ever Aigina was to Peiraieus.^[282] As he who held Dêmêtrias, Chalkis, and Akrokorinthos was said to hold the fetters of Greece,^[283] so he who held Eu, Cherbourg, Honfleur, and Rouen, might truly be said to hold the fetters of royal France.

Norman rebels constantly supported by France and Anjou.

The King of the French then, throughout this period, is the arch-disturber, powerfully helped on occasion by his now loyal vassal the Count of Anjou. We shall see both of them advance, step by step, from giving shelter and comfort to Norman rebels to giving them active help in their warfare, and from giving them active help in their warfare to formal invasions of the Norman land at the head of their own armies.

Revolt of William Busac. 1048–1053?

The first revolt against William after the war of Domfront and Alençon is wrapped up in great obscurity. One ancient writer alone records it; among modern writers, some pass it by unnoticed, while others recount it with a singular amount of confusion.^[284] But there seems reason to believe that, at the beginning of this period, at some time after the affair of William of Mortain,^[285] the Duke was disturbed by a revolt of another kinsman of his |The Counts of Eu.| own name at the other end of his Duchy. Duke Richard the Good had granted to his half-brother William the castle and county of Eu, the old border-fortress of Rolf.^[286] |Castle of Eu.| That famous spot, known in modern times as the last home of lawful royalty in France, was marked by a castle, 117every trace of which has given way to a palace of the sixteenth century, but which was long the chief guard of Normandy towards the frontier of Ponthieu. It was no hill-fort, like Domfront or, in another way, like Falaise. |The earlier Norman sites on the coast.| It was a fortress of the older Norman type, a stronghold of the days when the Normans had not yet cast off the feelings of the old Wikings, when to command the sea was their main object, and when princes placed their dwelling-places on points close to the sea or to some navigable river. Placed on comparatively low ground, with hills overlooking town and castle on every side, the fortress of Eu no doubt had its value in the days of Hasting and Rolf. It immediately commands the flats, in those days no doubt not fully reclaimed from the sea, which lie skirted by the hills which end in the cliffs of Tréport. Count William and his wife Lescelina were among the most lavish benefactors of the Church |Church of Eu founded for secular Canons, 1002; changed to regulars, 1177.| among the princes and nobles of Normandy. The church of Eu was built and endowed by Count William as a foundation of secular canons, which, like so many other foundations of the same kind, like Waltham in the very same year, was afterwards changed into an establishment of regulars.^[287] Small, if any, are the traces which remain of the church where the Great William received his bride;^[288] it is to the monastic occupants of Eu that we owe that stately and soaring pile which needs only fitting towers to rank among the noblest |Other ecclesiastical foundations of the family.| minsters of Normandy. Lescelina, the Count’s wife, who herself in her widowhood took the monastic habit, lives in Norman ecclesiastical history as the foundress of the Abbey of Saint Peter on the Dive,^[289] whose noble tower forms the most striking object on the way from the birthplace of the Great William to the place of his 118|Sons of William and Lescelina; Robert Count of Eu;| burial. Two of their sons, the eldest and the youngest, walked in the steps of their parents. Robert succeeded his father in the County of Eu; he lived a loyal and honoured subject of Duke William, one of his chosen counsellors and valiant soldiers, whose name will often occur in this history alike among the defenders of Normandy and the invaders of England. He too was bountiful to ecclesiastical foundations, and at his bidding the Abbey of Tréport^[290] arose on the rocks which bound the view from the now forsaken walks which surround his |Hugh, Bishop of Lisieux. 1050–1077.| dwelling-place. His younger brother, Hugh, mounted the episcopal throne of Lisieux. In that office he is described as showing himself a model of ecclesiastical |His virtues.| perfection of every kind.^[291] Among his other good deeds, his panegyrist records that, when the synod was held in his own church for the trial of his kinsman and metropolitan Malger, he preferred the cause of God to the ties of blood, and was foremost to give his voice against the son of his uncle.^[292] There is no need to doubt the purity of Hugh’s motives; yet an historian who judged Norman Bishops by a rule as uncharitable as that by which his panegyrist judges English Earls might doubt whether it was necessarily a disinterested act when the Bishop of Lisieux pleaded for the condemnation of the Archbishop of Rouen. The eldest and the third son of William and Lescelina were thus memorable and honoured |William Busac.| in their several walks. Their second son, William, called Busac, has left behind him a less worthy name. He is 119|His rebellion.| known in Norman history only for his rebellion, a rebellion of which the exact cause and the exact date are alike uncertain. But it is plain that he asserted a right to the Duchy.^[293] This claim must have been made on much more frivolous grounds than those which had been put forth by some other pretenders; for, to say nothing of his having an elder brother living, the birth of his father was as distinctly illegitimate as the birth of the reigning Duke. William Busac seems to have been at this time, by what means does not appear, in possession of his brother’s fortress of Eu, which he made the centre of his revolt. |Duke William takes Eu.| But he had provoked a foe stronger than himself. Duke William gathered a force, and besieged and took the fortress of his great ancestor.^[294] He acted with the same politic lenity which, at this time of his life, he always showed, except when his passions were specially aroused |William Busac banished. He takes refuge in France, and receives the County of Soissons. 1058.| in the way that they had been at Alençon. He merely required his rebellious kinsman to go into banishment. The castle of Eu was restored to its lawful owner Count Robert. As for William Busac, he distinctly gained by his exile. A younger son in Normandy, he became the founder of a great house in a foreign land. He took shelter in France, where King Henry received him with all honour, and after a while promoted him to a splendid marriage and a great fief. He bestowed on the exile the hand of Adelaide, heiress of Reginald Count of Soissons, sprung from a younger branch of that house of Vermandois which traced its descent from the direct and legitimate male line of Charles the Great.^[295] But the direct line 120of the banished rebel did not flourish. Two sons succeeded Count William in the possession of Soissons, and the heritage then passed away into the hands of descendants in the female line.^[296]

Revolt of William Count of Arques. 1053.

The next revolt against which the Duke had to struggle was of a much more formidable kind. Of no man could it be more truly said than of William that his foes were they of his own household. The rebel was again a kinsman, and the scene of the rebellion was again laid in those lands beyond Seine which had remained loyal during the revolt which ended at Val-ès-dunes.^[297] William, in short, was destined to fight for his crown with every branch of his family, and with the men of every part of his dominions. The kinsman who now revolted was an uncle, another William, a son of Richard the Good by Papia, a brother therefore of Archbishop Malger. The legitimacy of his own birth was perhaps not absolutely beyond doubt,^[298] yet we are told that he, like Guy of Burgundy and others,^[299] as the son of a lawful wife,^[300] despised the Bastard of Herleva, |Wide-spread movement| and asserted his own better right to the Duchy. In this movement against Duke William many conspirators, both 121|against the Duke;| in and out of Normandy, had a share. And at their head stood one, the highest of all in rank, and now again the |share taken by King Henry;| foremost in hatred against the prince by whose side he once had fought, Henry, King of the French. It is also |perhaps by Archbishop Malger.| quite possible that the Primate of Normandy himself had a share in his brother’s intrigues. Acts of distinct treason may thus have been among the causes which led to his deposition, as well as either neglect of ecclesiastical rule in his own person or an intemperate zeal for its observance in |The Duke suspects William of Arques.| the persons of others.^[301] At all events, the Primate’s brother was now strongly, most likely deservedly, suspected by the |His earlier conduct;| Duke. We are told that he had been engaged in secret plots ever since William’s childhood;^[302] but it is certain that |his desertion at Domfront. 1048–1049.| his name has not openly appeared in any of the conspiracies and revolts which we have thus far had to record. We are told also that, at the siege of Domfront, he acted something like the part of a deserter, leaving his post without any |Duke William occupies the castle of Arques.| leave from his sovereign and general.^[303] On these and on other grounds it was that Duke William, as a matter of precaution, without as yet interfering with any other of the rights and possessions of his uncle, took possession of and garrisoned his castle of Arques.^[304]

Description of Arques: its earlier and later history.

122Arques, the small capital of the district of Talou,^[305] plays a part in warfare both earlier and later than the days with which we are concerned. Its name is now best known through the victory which was won in its neighbourhood by Henry of Navarre over the forces of the League. |1589.| But Arques had become famous in far earlier times. In the troubled minority of Richard the Fearless, when King |944.| Lewis of Laôn and Count Arnulf of Flanders invaded the Duchy, the Flemish Count, in marching along the Norman coast, had been checked by the resistance of the Norman garrison which defended Arques.^[306] The position then contended for was probably the town of Arques, now sunk to a village, but which was in those days a place of some importance. As an important position according to earlier Norman ideas,^[307] it became an occasional dwelling-place of the Dukes, and it was in its neighbourhood that Duke Richard first made the acquaintance of the famous Gunnor.^[308] Arques had also given its name to a line of Viscounts, themselves descended from another daughter of the lucky forester, and whose names will be found enrolled |Duke William grants the County to his Uncle.| among the conquerors of England.^[309] But the County of Arques or Talou had been granted, seemingly by William himself in the early part of his reign,^[310] to his uncle the son of Papia. Count William now proceeded, after the 123|Count William builds the Castle of Arques.| manner of that time, to secure himself by the erection of a fortress on a new site, a fortress which is undoubtedly one of the earliest and most important in the history of Norman military architecture. The castle of Arques, the work of William’s rebellious uncle and namesake,^[311] is one of the few examples still remaining of the castles which were raised by the turbulent Norman barons in |The later Norman castles on heights.| the stormy days of William’s minority.^[312] In the stage of the military art which now opens, the lower ground is forsaken, and the square donjon is almost always found placed on a height. Such a position at once added to the strength of the castle in case of attack, and enabled it to command the surrounding country like an eagle’s nest perched on a rock. Still, in days before the introduction of artillery, it was no objection to a site, otherwise convenient, that it was commanded by ground higher still. It was not till the days of the English wars that William’s own Falaise had been commanded by the rock on the opposite side of his maternal beck.^[313] An insular or peninsular site was specially preferred; and this is very |Position of Arques.| conspicuously seen in the site of the Castle of Arques. At a distance of about three miles from the haven whose name of Dieppe is but a slight corruption of the old Teutonic deeps, near the point of junction of the river of the same name with the Eaulne and with the northern Varenne, a 124narrow tongue of land immediately commands the low, and in old times marshy, flats which lie between the high ground and the sea. The range of hills which ends in the cliffs of Dieppe rises close to the left; to the right, at a greater distance, lie the heights covered by the Forest of Arques. These heights are separated from the peninsular hill by the town of Arques, with its rich and picturesque church of the latest mediæval work, and by the battle-ground which made Arques famous in later days. In fact both Williams, the founder and the Conqueror alike, seem to be eclipsed even in local memory by the fame of the more modern hero.^[314] It was on the end of this tongue of land that Count William fixed his castle, the outer wall fencing in the greater part of the peninsula, while the donjon itself |Strength of the castle.| was placed on the neck of the isthmus. At Arques no artificial mound was needed; the sides of the hill are naturally of no slight steepness; but, even on such a site as this, a Norman castle-builder was not satisfied with trusting to natural defences only. Between the wall and the slope of the hill Count William dug a fosse of enormous depth, such a fosse as may be seen in our own land at Old Sarum. An enemy who scaled the sides of the hill thus found himself, not under the castle wall, but on a narrow ledge of ground, a mere pathway in short, with a deep and wide ditch between himself and the fortress. This gigantic work still remains; so does the donjon itself, but, stripped as it is of all its smooth stone and of every fragment of architectural detail, it appears to the ordinary eye little more than a shapeless mass. The inner gate and part of the outer wall are perhaps also of the original work; but the castle received large additions and alterations in very late times, some of 125which did not even spare the donjon itself.^[315] Still the site remains untouched, and the huge stern mass of the donjon is still there, at least more fortunate in its decay than Falaise in its “restoration.” There is no spot in Normandy on which the true Norman spirit is more thoroughly impressed.

Such a fortress as this Duke William could not afford to |Duke William puts a garrison in the castle.| leave in the hands of a suspected enemy. He therefore, as I have just said, placed a garrison in the castle of Arques, seemingly thinking that, in so doing, he had done enough to provide for the safety of that quarter of the Duchy. At all events he did not think that his personal presence was |Duke William at Valognes.| needed; for we find him once more in the distant Côtentin, once more, as before the day of Val-ès-dunes, to be summoned from his quarters at Valognes^[316] by the news of a rebellion in the land. This time it was not his personal safety that was threatened, but everything was in jeopardy for which William could deem it worth while to reign or to |The Duke’s garrison at Arques betrays the castle to Count William.| live. The garrison which he had placed on the steep of Arques had proved faithless. Count William had appeared before the gate of the fortress which he had himself raised; threats, gifts, promises, solicitations of every kind, had won over the minds of its unsteady defenders.^[317] The Lord of |Count William openly revolts.| Arques once more stood as master within his own castle, and now, in reliance on the support of their common overlord, he openly defied his nephew and immediate sovereign.^[318]

126The anarchy which had overspread all Normandy in the days of Duke William’s childhood, now broke forth again, |Ravages of the rebels.| no less terrible in kind if greatly narrowed in extent. But it was at least spread over as wide a range as could be commanded from the Castle of Arques. The hill-fortress became a mere nest of robbers, by whom every sort of damage was ceaselessly inflicted on the country around. As ever happened in these wretched conflicts, the blow fell heaviest on those who were least able to bear it. The goods of the churches, the crops and cattle of the peasant, the wares of the travelling merchant, became the prey of Count William and his soldiers. This kind of excess it was ever the great Duke’s boast, as it was his highest glory, to put down with all the weight of his hand. We may well believe his panegyrist when he tells us that it was in answer to the cry of his suffering people, no less than to avenge the insult done to his own authority,^[319] that William set forth in all haste |Duke William’s march from Valognes.| from Valognes. He set forth on a march only less speedy than the headlong ride which had once borne him across the estuary of the Vire and by the minster and the mount of the faithful Hubert.^[320] No longer alone, he again made his way across the ford which he had passed on that memorable night, but now he had no need to slink in by-paths or to fear to present himself before the gates of any city in his dominions. He pressed on by now loyal Bayeux, safe under the episcopal care of his brother, or rather of those who ruled under the name of the youthful Prelate.^[321] He 127passed by Caen, where the anathema had been spoken against evil-doors such as those whom he was hastening to chastise.^[322] There he made a feint of going on towards his capital; but he turned his steps to Pontaudemer, he crossed the Seine at Caudebec, one of the spots where the ancient speech of the Northman still lives in the local name;^[323] he hastened on by Baons-le-Comte, till he found himself, at the head of |He reaches Arques with a small company,| six followers only, at the foot of the hill of Arques.^[324] All the rest of the company at whose head he had set forth from Valognes had broken down on the way beneath the |and meets a reinforcement from Rouen.| haste and weariness of that terrible ride. But a reinforcement was already waiting for him. Some of the Duke’s chiefest and most trusty vassals had deemed that, in such a moment of peril, there was no need to wait for formal orders to do the duty of every loyal subject. They had set forth from Rouen at the head of a troop numbering three hundred knights, meaning to keep the revolters in check and to hinder the carrying of any kind of provisions into the rebellious fortress.^[325] But they found the forces gathered in the castle to be so numerous, and they found the loyalty of some of their own men to be so doubtful, that, on the second day of their adventure, they made up their minds to turn home again before the dawn of the next day. Hard by the castle |William exhorted to delay.| they found the Duke with his small company. They told him the state of affairs; the disaffection was greater than he thought; nearly the whole neighbourhood—that is, we may suppose, the noble portion of its inhabitants—was hostile; it was dangerous to go on further with so small a force. But the victor of Val-ès-dunes and Domfront had learned something like confidence in his star. “The rebels,” 128said the Duke, “if once they see me face to face, will |He hastens on; his successful skirmish before the gates.| never dare to withstand me.”^[326] At once, we are told, he spurred on his horse at full speed. His rebel uncle and his followers, a greater company than his own, were to be seen on the steep, returning, it would seem, from a plundering excursion. They were therefore no doubt disordered and encumbered with booty. The Duke determined on an instant attack. He followed them up to the only accessible point of the hill, by the path leading straight to the gate of the castle. A skirmish followed before the gateway, on the ground now covered by the later defences of the castle. The defenders of the fortress gave way before the impetuous charge of the Duke, and it was only, we are told, through their suddenly shutting the gates that the quarrel failed to be decided on the very day in which William had come in sight of the rebel stronghold.

The castle of Arques might possibly have been taken by such a sudden blow as the Duke had done his best to deal; but he knew well that to attempt to carry his uncle’s fortress by storm while its defenders were on their guard was an undertaking which surpassed even his prowess. Horse and foot could only have pressed up the sides of the peninsula, probably to fall headlong into the deep chasm which yawned between them and the outer walls of the castle.^[327] Duke William was too wary a warrior to waste his strength on such attempts as this; moreover, at this time of his life at least, he had no mind for wanton slaughter, and he wished for the honour of recovering the castle and subduing the rebellion without the shedding of Norman blood.^[328] A blockade was therefore 129|William blockades the castle.| the only course open to him; Arques was to be another Brionne.^[329] The Duke had now been joined by a large following, counting among them some of the best knights of Normandy.^[330] He could therefore afford to divide his forces. One party was left to continue the blockade of the castle. |Walter Giffard commands the blockading party.| Its command was entrusted to Walter Giffard, a loyal knight of the neighbourhood. He was a kinsman of William of Arques, that is, not of the rebel Count, but of the faithful Viscount, and a more distant kinsman of the Duke himself, both owning a common ancestor in the forester of Equiqueville, the father of Gunnor and her sisters.^[331] The chief who now commanded below the steep of Arques lived to refuse to bear the banner of Normandy below the steep of Senlac. He lived to make up for a forced inaction against rebels in his own land, by dealing blows with all the remaining strength of his aged arm against men who were fighting for their homes against an unprovoked invasion. He lived to have his name written in the great record of the Conquest, and to found, like so many others among the baronage of Normandy, a short-lived Earldom in the land which he helped to conquer. The force under Walter now remained to guard the works which the 130Duke raised for the blockade of the castle. A ditch and palisade at the foot of the hill protected a wooden tower,^[332] which was raised, as usual, in order to cut off the besieged from all communication with the neighbourhood. With the other party William himself departed, to keep in check some of the more powerful allies by whom it was likely that supplies or reinforcements would be furnished to the besieged.^[333]

King Henry abets the rebels.

At the head of these was King Henry. It would seem that a scruple of feudal honour made William shrink from meeting his lord face to face in battle, even though his lord was in the act of committing a breach of every feudal tie towards a vassal who had fully discharged every feudal |William’s feudal scruple against meeting the King in arms.| duty. One reason, we are told, for the Duke’s entrusting the blockade to others was that the King was known to be marching to the relief of the castle. Rather than do aught against his oath of homage, William would run all the risk involved in carrying his own arms elsewhere, while he left others to head the resistance against the most dangerous 131of his foes.^[334] And so it happened. The King came and went unhurt in person, but he was far from |Ambush of the Normans at Saint Aubin.| being successful in his enterprise. The besiegers laid an ambush in the way of the French army, near the dwelling of one of the few men in the County of Talou who remained loyal. The scene of this stratagem was the castle of Saint Aubin, a point on the Dieppe at a short |Loyalty of Richard of Hugleville.| distance above Arques. There dwelt a valiant knight of princely descent, Richard of Hugleville, a son of Papia, a daughter of Richard the Good. She had married beyond the limits of Normandy. Her husband was Gulbert, Advocate of Saint Valery in Ponthieu, a name soon to become so famous in Norman history. The Ponthevin dignity continued in the elder branch of the family; but Richard, the second son of Gulbert and Papia, had received an establishment in the land of Talou, and he now stood firmly by his cousin the Duke, while nearly the whole of the surrounding country was hostile.^[335] With him no doubt stood his son, the younger 132|His son Gulbert.| Gulbert, a man whose name we shall again greet with honour, one whom Englishmen at least may look on as the noblest among the chivalry of Normandy.^[336] With Richard too stood his son-in-law Geoffrey, the husband of his daughter Ada, and Geoffrey’s brother Hugh, the sons of Thurcytel who held the lordship of Neufmarché by the famous forest of Lions. Of these, Hugh had already fallen in an earlier |Richard’s son-in-law Geoffrey and his son Bernard of Newmarch.| skirmish with the rebels of Arques.^[337] Geoffrey lived to be father of one who made himself a name in a remote corner of our own island. Bernard of Newmarch, the son of Ada the daughter of Richard of Hugleville, became as terrible an enemy to the central land of the Cymry, as the son of Hamon Dentatus showed himself to the Cymry of the southern coasts.^[338] His fame still |His priory and castle at Brecknock.| lives, far away from the forest of Lions and the hill of Arques, where the minster and the castle of Brecknock look forth on the vale of the Welsh Axe, and on the mountain rampart which, when Arques was beleaguered and defended, still guarded the realm of Gruffydd the son of Rhydderch.^[339]

The French halt at Saint Aubin.

The King of the French and his comrades must have been strangely ignorant of the state of the country, when they chose a spot for their halting-place so near to the home of such tried and loyal warriors as these. They had brought with them a good stock of provisions of corn and of wine, for the relief of the besieged of Arques. At Saint Aubin they began to make ready a train of sumpter-horses with a military convoy, to carry these good things to their suffering friends, just as if they had been in a country where 133no danger was to be looked for.^[340] But, no doubt by the help of the loyal lord of Saint Aubin,^[341] the besiegers of Arques, in their wooden castle,^[342] soon learned the careless |Success of the Norman ambush.| approach of the French. A plan was speedily devised; an ambush was laid; a smaller party was sent forth to practise that stratagem of pretended flight which Norman craft was to display thirteen years later on a greater scale.^[343] The Normans turned; the French pursued; presently the liers-in-wait were upon them, and the noblest and bravest of the invading host were slaughtered or taken prisoners before |Capture of Hugh Bardulf.| the eyes of their King.^[344] One Norman traitor at least was taken. “Hugh Bardulf himself, that great man,”^[345] was among the captives. The exact nature and measure of Hugh’s greatness does not appear; but his capture is 134spoken of as one of the most important events of the fight. I know of no record of his earlier exploits or of his later fate; but the name of Bardulf occurs repeatedly in the later records both of the Norman and of the English Exchequer, and one at least of his descendants seems to have been as |Death of Count Ingelram of Ponthieu.| little amenable to lawful authority as his ancestor.^[346] By the side of the captive Bardulf died a sovereign prince, a neighbour of Normandy, bound by ties of the closest affinity |The Counts of Ponthieu.| alike to William the Duke and to William the rebel. The house of the Counts of Ponthieu is one whose name will meet us more than once again in the course of the present volume. Sprung of the blood of Herlwin of Montreuil, a name so familiar to us in Norman history a hundred years before,^[347] they held, as he had done, the border land between Normandy and Flanders. But they had held it by various |Hugh the First, Advocate of Saint Riquier.| tenures and under various titles. Hugh, the great-grandfather of the present ruler, a prince, if we may so call him, high in the favour of his namesake the Parisian King, had borne no title but that of Advocate of Saint Riquier.^[348] He was, as the chronicles of the Abbey take care to tell us, enriched at the expense of the great monastery of which he was bound to be the defender.^[349] The house of Saint Riquier was the work of the bounty of the great Charles; it was 135the house where a saintly Abbot and an Emperor’s daughter so strangely became the parents of that famous Nithard, who figures alike as Count and as Abbot, and who is yet more renowned as a lay historian in whose steps neither Æthelweard |Ingelram the First, Count of Ponthieu or Abbeville.| nor Fulk knew how to walk.^[350] The son of Hugh, Ingelram or Enguerrand^[351] the First, was the first to bear the title of Count of Ponthieu, a title sometimes exchanged for that of Count of Abbeville.^[352] The grange stolen away from the house of Saint Riquier grew into the capital of a principality, and the town was in after days adorned with that unfinished minster, which, as it is looked at from the west or from the east, may be called the noblest or the meanest in France. This elder Ingelram has already appeared in our history as a foe of Count Gilbert of Brionne, his antagonist on the field where Herlwin, not yet of Bec, taught the contending chiefs how a Christian soldier had learned to |Hugh the Second. 1046–1052.| return good for evil.^[353] From him the County passed to a second Hugh, and from him, only a year before, it had |Ingelram the Second. 1052–1053.| passed to a second Ingelram. This prince now, whether led by border enmity, by loyalty to his suzerain, or by preference to one domestic tie over another, had joined the call of King |His affinity with both Williams.| Henry to an invasion of the Norman Duchy. The Count of Ponthieu went forth to help the husband of his sister against the brother of his wife. Count Hugh had given 136his daughter in marriage to William of Arques,^[354] but his son was also the husband of a full sister of Duke William.^[355] As such, he was himself the son-in-law of the Tanner’s daughter, and he had therefore no right to join the Lord of Arques in his sneers at the Bastard of Falaise. He now felt the strength of the Norman steel, even in the absence of the Prince against whom he came. He fell in the ambush |Guy, 1053–1100.| of Saint Aubin;^[356] his County passed to his brother Guy, soon again to appear in our story;^[357] but his daughters, |Daughters of Ingelram.| the nieces of Duke William, were treated as members of the ducal family, and one of them, Judith the wife of Waltheof, lived to leave behind her an evil renown in the history of our own land.^[358]