Chapter II · (continued 2)

Interest of Duke Robert in the rebellion. It is well to be reminded by words like these what the professed object of the insurgents was. It would be easy to forget that all the plundering that had been done from Rochester to Ilchester had been done in the name of the lawful rights of Duke Robert. The men who harried Berkeley and who were overthrown at Worcester were but the forerunners of the Duke of His coming looked for. the Normans, who was to come, as spring went on, with the full force of his duchy.[199] It was not for nothing that King William had gathered his English army, when a new Norman Conquest was looked for. He fails to help the rebels. But as yet the blow was put off; Duke Robert came not; he seemed to think that the crown of England could be won with ease at any moment. When the first news of William’s accession came, when those around him urged him to active measures to support his rights, he had spoken of the matter with childish scorn. His childish boasting. Were he at the ends of the earth—​the city of Alexandria is taken as the standard of distance—​the English would not dare to make William king, William would not dare to accept the crown at their hands, without waiting for the coming of his elder brother.[200] Both the impossible 72 things had happened, and Robert and his partisans had now before them the harder task of driving William from a throne which was already his, instead of merely hindering him from mounting it. Up to this time Robert had done nothing; His promises. but now, in answer to the urgent prayers of his uncles, he did get together a force for their help, and promised that he would himself follow it before long.[201]

William marches on Pevensey. The news of Odo’s presence at Pevensey at once changed the course of William’s march. Wherever the Bishop of Bayeux was, there was the point to be aimed at.[202] Instead of going on to Rochester, the King turned and marched straight upon Pevensey. The exact line of his march is not told us, but it could not fail to cross, perhaps it might for a while even coincide with, the line of march by which Harold had pressed to the South-Saxon coast on the eve of the great battle. The English besiege Odo in Pevensey. Things might seem to have strangely turned about, when an English army, led by a son of the Conqueror, marched to lay siege to the two brothers and chief fellow-workers of the Conqueror within the stronghold which was the very firstfruits of the Conquest. The Roman walls of Anderida were still there; but their whole circuit was no longer desolate, as it had been when the Conqueror landed, and as we see it now again. The castle of Pevensey. One part of the ancient city had again become a dwelling-place of man. As Pevensey now stands, the south-eastern corner of the Roman enclosure, 73 now again as forsaken as the rest, is fenced in by the moat, the walls, the towers, of a castle of the later type, the type of the Edwards, but whose towers are built in evident imitation of the solid Roman bastions. Then, or at some earlier time, the Roman wall itself received a new line of parapet, and one at least of its bastions was raised to form a tower in the restored line of defence. When the house of Mortain passed away in the second generation, the honour of Pevensey became the possession of the house of Laigle, and from them, perhaps in popular speech, certainly in the dialect of local antiquaries, Anderida became the Honour of the Eagle.[203] Within the circuit of the later castle, close on the ancient wall, rises, covered with shapeless ruins, a small mound which doubtless marks the site of the elder keep of Count Robert. Within that keep the two sons of Herleva, Bishop and Count, looked down on the shore close at their feet where they had landed with their mightier brother two-and-twenty years before. Within that stern memorial of their victory, they had now to defend themselves against the sons and brothers of men who had fallen by their hands, and whose lands they had parted out among them for a prey.

The siege of Pevensey. The siege of Pevensey proved a far harder work than the siege of Tunbridge. The Roman wall with its new Norman defences was less easy to storm than the ancient English mound. William the Red had to wait longer before Pevensey than William the Great had had to wait before Exeter. The fortress was strong; the spirit of its defenders was high; for Odo was among them. The King beset the castle with a great host; 74 he brought the artillery of the time to bear upon its defences; but for six weeks his rebellious uncles bore up against the attacks of William and his Englishmen.[204] Duke Robert at last sends help. And, while the siege went on, another of the chances of war seemed yet more thoroughly to reverse what had happened on the same spot not a generation back. Again a Norman host landed, or strove to land, within the haven of Pevensey. But they came under other guidance than that which had led the men who came before them on the like errand. When William crossed the sea, his own Mora sailed foremost and swiftest in the whole fleet, and William himself was the first man in his army to set foot on English ground. William in short led his fleet; his son only sent his. Robert stays behind. Robert still tarried in Normandy; he was coming, but not yet; his men were to make their way into England how they could without him. They came, and they found the South-Saxon coast better guarded than it had been when Harold had to strive against two invaders at once. The English hinder the Normans from landing. When Robert’s ships drew nigh, they found the ships of King William watching the coast; they found the soldiers of King William lining the shore.[205] On such a spot, in such a cause, no Englishman’s heart or hand was likely to fail him. The attempt at a new Norman landing at Pevensey was driven back. Those who escaped the English sailors drew near to the shore, but only to fall into the hands of the English land-force. It must not be forgotten that, as the coast-line then stood, when the sea covered what is now the low ground between the 75 castle and the beach, the struggle for the landing must have gone on close under the walls of the ancient city and of the new-built castle. The English who beat back the Normans of Duke Robert’s fleet as they strove to land must have been themselves exposed to the arrows of the Normans who guarded Count Robert’s donjon. But the work was done. Some of the invaders lived to be taken prisoners; but the more part, a greater number than any man could tell, were smitten down by the English axes or thrust back to meet their doom in the waves of the Channel. Some who deemed that they had still the means of escape tried to hoist the sails of their ships and get them back to their own land. But the elements fought against them. The winds which had so long refused to bring the fleet of William from Normandy to England now refused no less to take back the fleet of Robert from England to Normandy. And there were no means now, as there had been by the Dive and at Saint Valery, for waiting patiently by a friendly coast, or for winning the good will of the South-Saxon saints by prayers or offerings.[206] Even Saint Martin of the Place of Battle had no call to help the eldest son of his founder against his founder’s namesake and chosen heir. The ships could not be moved; the English were upon them; the Normans, a laughing-stock to their enemies, rather than fall into their enemies’ hands, leaped from their benches into the less hostile waters. Utter failure of the invasion. The attempt of the Conqueror’s eldest son to do by deputy what his father had done in person had utterly come to nought. The new invaders of England had been overthrown by English hands on the spot where the work of the former invaders had begun.

After the defeat of this attempt to bring help to the 76 besieged at Pevensey, nothing more was heard of Duke Robert’s coming in person. Alleged death of William of Warren. If we may believe a single confused and doubtful narrative, the defenders of the castle had at least the satisfaction of slaying one of the chief men in the royal army. We are told that Earl William of Warren was mortally wounded in the leg by an arrow from the walls of Pevensey, and was carried to Lewes only to die there.[207] However this may be, the failure of the Norman expedition carried with it the failure of the hopes of the besieged. The castle surrenders. Food now began to fail them, and Odo and Robert found that there was nothing left for them but to surrender to their nephew on the best terms that they could get. Of the terms which were granted to the Count of Mortain and lord of Cornwall we hear nothing. The Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent was a more important person, and we have full details of everything that concerned him. Terms granted to Odo. The terms granted to the chief stirrer up of the whole rebellion were certainly favourable. He was called on to swear that he would leave England, and would never come back, unless the King sent for him, and that, before he Rochester to be surrendered. went, he would cause the castle of Rochester to be surrendered.[208] For the better carrying out of the last of his engagements, the Bishop was sent on towards Rochester 77 in the keeping of a small body of the King’s troops, while the King himself slowly followed.[209] No further treachery was feared; it was taken for granted that those who held the castle for Odo would give it up at once when Odo came in person to bid them do so. These hopes were vain; the young nobles who were left in the castle, Count Eustace, Robert of Bellême, and the rest, were not scrupulous as to the faith of treaties, and they had no mind to give up their stronghold till they were made to do so by force of arms. Odo was brought before the walls of Rochester. The leaders of the party that brought him called on the defenders of the castle to surrender; such was the bidding alike of the King who was absent and of the Bishop who was there in person. But Odo’s friends could see from the wall that the voices of the King’s messengers told one story, while the looks of the Bishop told another. The garrison refuse to surrender; Odo taken prisoner by his own friends. They threw open the gates; they rushed forth on the King’s men, who were in no case to resist them, and carried both them and the Bishop prisoners into the castle.[210] Odo was doubtless a willing captive; once within the walls of Rochester, he again became the life and soul of the defence.

78 It perhaps did not tend to the moral improvement of William Rufus to find himself thus shamefully deceived by one so near of kin to himself, so high in ecclesiastical rank. At the moment the treachery of Odo stirred him up to greater efforts. Rochester should be won, though it might need the whole strength of the kingdom to win it. William’s Niðing Proclamation. But the King saw that it was only by English hands that it could be won. He gathered around him his English followers, and by their advice put out a proclamation in ancient form bidding all men, French and English, from port and from upland, to come with all speed to the royal muster, if they would not be branded with the shameful name of Nithing. That name, the name which had been fixed, as the lowest badge of infamy, on the murderer Swegen,[211] was a name under which no Englishman could live; and it seems to have been held that strangers settled on English ground would have put on enough of English feeling to be stirred in the like sort by the fear of having such a mark set upon them. What the Frenchmen did we are not told; The second English muster. but the fyrd of England answered loyally to the call of a King who thus knew how to appeal to the most deep-set feelings and traditions of Englishmen.[212] Men came in crowds to King 79 William’s muster, and, in the course of May, a vast host beset the fortress of Rochester. The siege of Rochester. According to a practice of which we have often heard already, two temporary forts, no doubt of wood, were raised, so as to hem in the besieged and to cut off their communications from without.[213] The site of one at least of these may be looked for on the high ground to the south of the castle, said to be itself partly artificial, and known as Boley Hill.[214] The besieged soon found that all resistance was useless. They were absolutely alone. Pevensey and Tunbridge were now in the King’s hands; since the overthrow of Duke Robert’s fleet, they could look for no help from Normandy; they could look for none from yet more distant Bristol or Durham. Straits of the besieged. Till the siege began, they had lived at the cost of the loyal inhabitants of Kent and London. For not only the Archbishop, but most of the chief land-owners of Kent were on the King’s side.[215] This is a point to be noticed amid the general falling away of the Normans. For the land-owners of Kent, a land where no Englishman was a tenant-in-chief, were a class preeminently Norman. But we can well believe that the rule of Odo, who spared neither French nor English who stood in his way,[216] may have been little more to the liking of his own countrymen than it was to that of 80 the men of the land. But all chance of plunder was now cut off; a crowd of men and horses were packed closely together within the circuit of the fortress, with little heed to health or cleanliness. Plague of flies. Sickness was rife among them, and a plague of flies, a plague which is likened to the ancient plague of Egypt, added to their distress.[217] There was no hope within their own defences, and beyond them a host lay spread which there was no chance of overcoming. At last the heart of Odo himself failed him. They agree to surrender. He and his fiercest comrades, Eustace of Boulogne, even Robert of Bellême, at last brought themselves to crave for peace at the hands of the offended and victorious King.

Lesson of the war: the King stronger than any one noble. It was a great and a hard lesson which Odo and his accomplices learned at Pevensey and Rochester. It was the great lesson of English history, the great result of the teaching of William the Great on the day of Salisbury, that no one noble, however great his power, however strong the force which he could gather round him, could strive with any hope of success against the King of the whole land. In the royal army itself Odo might see one who had risen as high as himself among the conquerors of England, the father of the fiercest of the warriors who stood beside him, following indeed the King’s bidding, but following it against his will. Odo and Roger of Montgomery. Roger of Montgomery was in the host before Rochester, an unwilling partner in a siege which was waged against his own sons. Both he and other Normans in the King’s army are charged with giving more of real help to the besieged than they gave to the King whom 81 they no longer dared to withstand openly.[218] But it was in vain that even so great a lord as Earl Roger sought to strive or to plot against England and her King. The unity of England. The policy of the Conqueror, crowning the work of earlier kings, had made England a land in which no Earl of Kent or of Shrewsbury could gather a host able to withstand the King of the English at the head of the English people.[219] When the days came that kings were to be brought low, it was not by the might of this or that overgrown noble, but by the people of the land, with the barons of the land acting only as the first rank of the people. Those days were yet far away; but an earlier stage in the chain of progress had been reached. The Norman nobles had taken one step towards becoming the first rank of the English people, when they learned that King and people together were stronger than they.

Rufus refuses terms to the besieged. The defenders of Rochester had brought themselves to ask for peace; but they still thought that they could make terms with their sovereign. Let the King secure to them the lands and honours which they held in his kingdom, and they would give up the castle of Rochester to his will; they would hold all that they had as of his grant, and would serve him faithfully as their natural lord.[220] The wrath of the Red King burst forth, as well it might. Odo at least was asking at Rochester for more favourable terms than those to which he had already sworn 82 at Pevensey. William answered that he would grant no terms; he had strength enough to take the castle, whether they chose to surrender it or not. The King’s threats.And the story runs that he added—​not altogether in the spirit of his father—​that all the traitors within the walls should be hanged on gibbets, or put to such other forms of death as might please him.[221] But those of his followers who had friends or kinsfolk within the castle came to the King to crave mercy for them. Pleadings for the besieged. A dialogue follows in our most detailed account, in which the scriptural reference to the history of Saul and David may be set down as the garnish of the monk of Saint Evroul, but which contains arguments that are likely enough to have been used on the two sides of the question. An appeal is made to William’s own greatness and victory, to his position as the successor of his father. God, who helps those who trust in him, gives to good fathers a worthy offspring to come after them. The men in the castle, the proud youths and the old men blinded by greediness, had learned that the power of kings had not died out in the island realm. Those who had come from Normandy—​here we seem to hear an argument from English mouths—​sweeping down upon the land like kites, they who had deemed that the kingly stock had died out in England, had learned that the younger William was in no way weaker than the elder.[222] Mercy 83 was the noblest attribute of a conqueror; something too was due to the men who had helped him to his victory, and who now pleaded for those who had undergone enough of punishment for their error. Answer of the King. Rufus is made to answer that he is thankful both to God and to his faithful followers. But he fears that he should be lacking in that justice which is a king’s first duty, if he were to spare the men who had risen up against him without cause, and who had sought the life of a king who, as he truly said, had done them no harm.[223] The Red King is made to employ the argument which we have so often come across on behalf of that severe discharge of princely duty which made the names of his father and his younger brother live in men’s grateful remembrance. He fears lest their prayers should lead him away from the strait path of justice. He who spares robbers and traitors and perjured persons takes away the peace and safety of the innocent, and only sows loss and slaughter for the good and for the unarmed people.[224] This course is one which the Red King was very far from following in after years; but it is quite possible that he may have made such professions at any stage of his life, and he may have even made them honestly at this stage. Pleadings for Odo. But on behalf of the chiefest of all culprits, the counsellors of mercy had special arguments. Odo is the King’s uncle, the companion of his father in the Conquest of England. He is moreover a bishop, a priest of the Lord, a sharer in the privileges to which, in one side of his twofold character, he had 84 once appealed in vain. The King is implored not to lay hands on one of Odo’s holy calling, not to shed blood which was at once kindred and sacred. Let the Bishop of Bayeux at least be spared, and allowed to go back to his proper place in his Norman diocese.[225] Pleadings for Eustace and Robert of Bellême. Count Eustace too was the son of his father’s old ally and follower—​the invasion which Eustace’s father had once wrought in that very shire seems to be conveniently forgotten.[226] Robert of Bellême had been loved and promoted by his father; he held no small part of Normandy; lord of many strong castles, he stood out foremost among the nobles of the duchy.[227] It was no more than the bidding of prudence to win over such men by favours, and to have their friendship instead of their enmity.[228] As for the rest, they were valiant knights, whose proffered services the King would do well not to despise.[229] The King had shown how far he surpassed his enemies in power, riches, and valour; let him now show how far he surpassed them in mercy and greatness of soul.[230]

85 To this appeal Rufus yielded. The King yields. It was not indeed an appeal to his knightly faith, which was in no way pledged to the defenders of Rochester. But it was an appeal to any gentler feelings that might be in him, and still more so to that vein of self-esteem and self-exaltation which was the leading feature in his character. If Rufus had an opportunity of showing himself greater than other men, as neither justice nor mercy stood in the way of his making the most of it, so neither did any mere feeling of wrath or revenge. As his advisers told him, he was so successful that he could afford to be merciful, and merciful he accordingly was. To have hanged or blinded his enemies would not have so distinctly exalted himself, as he must have felt himself exalted, when those who had defied him, those who had tried to make terms with him, were driven to accept such terms as he chose to give them. He grants terms. The Red King then plighted his faith—​and his faith when once so plighted was never broken—​that the lives and limbs of the garrison should be safe, that they should come forth from the castle with their arms and horses. But they must leave the realm; they must give up all hope of keeping their lands and honours in England, as long at least as King William lived.[231] To these terms they had to yield; but Odo, even in his extremity, craved for one favour. Odo asks for the honours of war. He had to bear utter discomfiture, the failure of his hopes, the loss of his lands and honours; but he prayed to be at least spared the public scorn of the victors. His proud soul was not ready to bear the looks, the gestures, the triumphant shouts and songs, of the people whom he had trodden to the earth, and who 86 had now risen up to be his conquerors. He asked, it would seem, to be allowed to march out with what in modern phrase are called the honours of war. His particular prayer was that the trumpets might not sound when he and his followers came forth from the castle. This, we are told, was the usual ceremony after the overthrow of an enemy and the taking of a fortress.[232] The King was again wrathful at the request, and said that not for a thousand marks of gold would he grant it.[233] Humiliation of Odo. Odo had therefore to submit, and to drink the cup of his humiliation to the dregs. With sad and downcast looks he and his companions came forth from the stronghold which could shelter them no longer. The trumpets sounded merrily to greet them.[234] But other sounds more fearful than the voice of the trumpet sounded in the ears of Odo as he came forth. Men saw passing before them, a second time hurled down from his high estate—​and this time not by the bidding of a Norman king but by the arms of the English people—​the man who stood forth in English eyes as the imbodiment of all that was blackest and basest in the foreign dominion. Odo might keep his eyes fixed on the ground, but the eyes of the nation which he had wronged were full upon him. Wrath of the English against him. The English followers of Rufus pressed close upon him, crying out with shouts which all could hear, “Halters, bring halters; hang up the traitor Bishop and his accomplices on the gibbet.” They turned to the King whose throne they had made fast for him, and hailed him as a national ruler. “Mighty King of the English, let 87 not the stirrer up of all evil go away unharmed. The perjured murderer, whose craft and cruelty have taken away the lives of thousands of men, ought not to live any longer.”[235] Cries like these, mingled with every form of cursing and reviling, with every threat which could rise to the lips of an oppressed people in their day of vengeance, sounded in the ears of Odo and his comrades.[236] But the King’s word had been passed, and the thirst for vengeance of the wrathful English had to be baulked. He leaves England for ever. Odo and those who had shared with him in the defence of Rochester went away unhurt; but they had to leave England, and to lose all their English lands and honours, at least for a season. But Odo left England and all that he had in England for ever.[237] The career of the Earl of Kent was over; of the later career of the Bishop of Bayeux we shall hear again.

End of the rebellion. The rebellion was now at an end in southern England. Revolt had been crushed at Worcester, at Pevensey, and at Rochester, and we hear nothing more of those movements of which Bishop Geoffrey had made Bristol the centre, and which had met with such a reverse at the hands of the gallant defenders of Ilchester. 88 The chronology of the whole time is very puzzling. Order of events. We have no exact date for the surrender of Rochester; we are told only that it happened in the beginning of summer.[238] But, as the siege of Pevensey lasted six weeks,[239] it is impossible The Whitsun Assembly. June 4, 1088.to crowd all the events which had happened since Easter into the time between Easter and Whitsuntide. Otherwise the pentecostal Gemót would have been the most natural season for some acts of authority which took place at some time during the year. The King was now in a position to reward and to punish; and some confiscations, some grants, Confiscations and grants.were made by him soon after the rebellion came to an end. “Many Frenchmen forlet their land and went over sea, and the King gave their land to the men that were faithful to him.”[240] Of these confiscations and grants we should be glad to have some details. Did any dispossessed Englishmen win back their ancient heritage? And, if so, did they keep their recovered heritage, notwithstanding the amnesty which at a somewhat later time restored many of the rebels? One thing is clear, that the Frenchmen who are now spoken of were not the men of highest rank and greatest estates among the rebellious Normans. For them there was an amnesty at once. Amnesty of the chief rebels. Them, we are told, the King spared, for the love of his father to whom they had been faithful followers, and out of reverence for their age which opened a speedy prospect of their deaths. He was rewarded, it is added, by their repentant loyalty and thankfulness, 89 which made them eager to please him by gifts and service of all kinds.[241]

The speed with which some of the greatest among the rebel leaders were restored to their old rank and their old places in the King’s favour is shown by the way in which, within a very few months, we find them acting on the King’s side against one who at the worst was their own accomplice, and who himself professed to have had no part or lot in their doings. Versions of the story of the Bishop of Durham. We must now take up again the puzzling story of Bishop William of Durham. We left him, according to his own version, hindered from coming to the King by the violence of the Sheriff of Yorkshire, and suffering a seven weeks’ harrying of his lands which carries us into the month of May.[242] This is exactly the time when the national Chronicler sets the Bishop himself before us as carrying on a general harrying of the North country.[243] It is likely enough that both stories are true; in a civil war above all it is easy, without the assertion of any direct falsehood, to draw two exactly opposite pictures by simply leaving out the doings of each side in turn. Anyhow the King had summoned the Bishop to his presence, and the Bishop had not come. The King again summons the Bishop. The King now sends a more special and urgent summons, demanding the Bishop’s presence in his court, that is, in all likelihood, at the Whitsun Gemót, or at whatever assembly took its place 90 for that year.[244] The message was sent by a prelate of high rank, that Abbot Guy who had just before been forced by Lanfranc upon the unwilling monks of Saint Augustine’s.[245] The Bishop was to accompany the Abbot to the King’s presence. The Bishop’s complaints. But, instead of going with Guy, Bishop William, fearing the King’s wrath and the snares of his enemies, sent another letter, the bearer of which went under the Abbot’s protection.[246] The letter curiously illustrates some of the features of the case. We learn more details of the Sheriff’s doings. Doings of Counts Alan and Odo. He had divided certain of the Bishop’s lands between two very great personages, Count Alan of the Breton and of the Yorkshire Richmond, and Count Odo, husband of the King’s aunt, and seemingly already lord of Holderness.[247] The Sheriff had not only refused the King’s peace to the Bishop; he had formally defied him on the part of the King.[248] Some of the Bishop’s men he had allowed to redeem themselves; but others he had actually sold. Were they the Bishop’s slaves, dealt with as forfeited chattels, or did the Sheriff take on himself to degrade freemen into slavery?[249] The Bishop protests that he is 91 ready to come with a safe-conduct, and to prove before all the barons of the realm that he is wholly innocent of any crime against the King. He adds that he would willingly come at once with the Abbot. He had full faith in the King and his barons; but he feared his personal enemies and the unlearned multitude.[250] Who were these last? Are we again driven to think of the old popular character of the Assembly, and did the Bishop fear that the solemn proceedings of the King’s court would be disturbed by a loyal crowd, ready to deal out summary justice against any one who should be even suspected of treason? The Bishop comes with a safe-conduct. The King sent the safe-conduct that was asked for, and the Bishop came to the King’s court.[251]

The two Williams, King and Bishop, now met face to face. William of Saint-Calais pleaded his rights as a bishop as zealously, and far more fully, than they had been pleaded by the bishop who was also an earl. The Bishop’s ecclesiastical claims. The Bishop of Durham, as Bishop of Durham, held great temporal rights; but William of Saint-Calais was not, like his predecessor Walcher, personally earl of any earldom. Bishop William’s assertion of the new ecclesiastical claims reminds us of two more famous assemblies, in the earlier of which William of Saint-Calais will appear on the other side. In forming our estimate of the whole story, we must never forget that the man who surprised the Red King with claims greater than those of Anselm is the same man who a few years later became the counsellor of the Red King against Anselm. In 92 this first Assembly the Bishop refuses to plead otherwise than according to the privileges of his order. The demand is refused. He craves for the counsel of his Metropolitan Thomas of York and of the other bishops. This also is refused. He offers to make his personal purgation on any charge of treason or perjury. This is refused. The King insists that he shall be tried before the Court after the manner of a layman. He goes back to Durham. This the Bishop refuses;[252] but the King keeps his personal faith, and the Bishop is allowed to go back safely to Durham. We hear much of the ravages done on the Bishop’s lands, both while he was away from Durham and after he had gone back thither.[253] Of ravages done by the Bishop we hear nothing in this version. In this version William of Saint-Calais, blackest of traitors in the Peterborough Chronicle, is still the meekest of confessors.

June-September, 1088. We get no further details of the Bishop of Durham’s story till the beginning of September. But in the meanwhile the Bishop wrote another letter to the King, again asking leave to make his purgation. The only answer, we are told, on the King’s part was to imprison the Bishop’s messenger and to lay waste his lands more thoroughly than ever. But, from the beginning of September, the story is told with great detail. By that time southern England at least was at peace, and by that time too men who had taken a leading part in the rebellion were acting as loyal subjects to the King. Agreement between the Bishop On the day of the Nativity of our Lady an agreement was come to between the Bishop and three of the barons of 93 the North. Two of these were the Counts Alan and Odo, who had received grants of the Bishop’s lands. and the Counts. September 8. They, it seems clear, had had no share in the rebellion; but with them was joined a leading rebel, Roger of Poitou, son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, whom we last heard of as one of Odo’s accomplices at Pevensey. These three, acting in the King’s name, pledged their faith for the Bishop’s personal safety to and from the King’s court. The three barons seem to make themselves in some sort arbiters between the King and the Bishop. His personal safety is guaranteed in any case. But the place to which he is to be safely taken is to differ according to the result of the trial. The terms seem to imply that, if the three barons deem justice to be on the side of the Bishop, he is to be taken back safely to Durham, while, if they deem justice to be on the side of the King, he is to be allowed freely to cross the sea at any haven that he may choose, from Sandwich to Exeter.[254] In case of the Bishop’s return to Durham, if he should find that during his absence any new fortifications have been added to the castle, those fortifications are to be destroyed.[255] If, on the other hand, the Bishop crosses the sea, the castle is to be surrendered to the King. No agreement contrary to this present one was to be extorted from the Bishop on any pretext. 94 The terms were agreed to by the Bishop, and were sworn to, as far as the surrender of the castle was concerned, by seven of the Bishop’s men, seemingly the same seven of whom we have heard before and of whom we shall hear again. All matters were to be settled in the King’s court one way or the other by the coming feast of Saint Michael; but, as this term was plainly too short, the time of meeting was put off by the consent of both sides to an early day in November.

The Meeting at Salisbury. November 2, 1088. On the appointed day Bishop William of Durham appeared in the King’s court at Salisbury. We have not now, as we had two years before, to deal with a gathering of all the land-owners of England in the great plain. The castle which had been reared within the ditches that fence in the waterless hill became the scene of a meeting of the King and the great men of the realm which may take its place alongside of later meetings of the same kind in the castle by the wood at Rockingham and in the castle by the busy streets of Northampton. We have—​from the Bishop’s side only, it must be remembered—​a minute and lifelike account of a two days’ debate in the Assembly, a debate in which not a few men with whose names we have been long familiar in our story, in which others whose names and possessions are written in the Great Survey, meet us face to face as living men and utter characteristic speeches in our ears. Urse of Abetot. We are met at the threshold by a well-known form, that of the terrible Sheriff of Worcestershire, Urse of Abetot. Notwithstanding the curse of Ealdred, he flourished and enjoyed court favour, and we now find him the first among the courtiers to meet Bishop William, and to bid him enter the royal presence.[256] That presence the Bishop entered four times 95 in the course of the day, having had three times to withdraw while the Court came to a judgement on points of law touching his case. Conduct of the Bishop. At every stage the Bishop raises some point, renews some protest, interposes some delay or other. And during the whole earlier part of the debate, it is Lanfranc who takes the chief part in answering him; the King says little till a late stage of the controversy. Before Bishop William comes in to the King’s presence, he prays again, but prays in vain, to have the counsel of his brother bishops. None of them, not even his own Metropolitan Thomas, would give him the kiss of peace or even a word of greeting. When he does come in, he first raises the question whether he ought not to be judged, and the other bishops to judge him, in full episcopal dress. Lanfranc’s view of vestments. To the practical mind of Lanfranc questions about vestments did not seem of first-rate importance. “We can judge very well,” he said, “clothed as we are; for garments do not hinder truth.”[257] Case of Thomas at Northampton. 1164. This point, it will be remembered, again came up at Northampton, seventy-six years later. The entrance of Thomas into the King’s hall clad in the full garb of the Primate of all England was one of the most striking features of that memorable day.[258]

A long legal discussion followed, in which Bishop William and Lanfranc were the chief speakers. Some points were merely verbal. Much turned on the construction of the word bishopric. The Bishop of Durham 96 asked to be restored to his bishopric. Lanfranc answered that he had not been disseized of it.[259] In the course of this dispute one or two facts of interest come out. Hostile dealings of the Bishop’s own men. It appears from the Bishop’s complaint that some of the chief men of the patrimony of Saint Cuthberht had made their way to the meeting at Salisbury, and that not as their bishop’s friends. They, his own liegemen, had abjured him; they held the lands of the bishopric in fief of the King; they had made war upon him by the King’s orders, and were now sitting as his judges.[260] The Bishop called on to “do right.” But the main point was that the Bishop should, before matters went any further, do right to the King, that is, acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Court.[261] This demand the Bishop tried to evade by every means; but it was firmly pressed both by Lanfranc and by the lay members of the Court. These last seem to act in close concert with the Primate, and the ecclesiastical writer brings out in a lively way the energy of their way of speaking.[262] In answer to them the Bishop spake words which amounted to a casting aside of all the earlier jurisprudence of England, but which were only a natural 97 inference from that act of the Conqueror which had severed the jurisdictions which ancient English custom had joined together. He denies the authority of the Court. He told the barons of the realm and the other laymen who were present that with them he had nothing to do, that he altogether refused their jurisdiction; he demanded, that, if the King and the Bishops allowed them to be present, they should at least not speak against him.[263] Growth of the new doctrines. The doctrine of ecclesiastical privilege had indeed grown, since, six and thirty years before, the people of England, gathered beneath the walls of London, had declared a traitorous archbishop to be deprived and outlawed, and had by their own act set another in his place. Position of Lanfranc and Bishop William. Yet the position of William of Saint-Calais was more consistent than the position of Lanfranc. William of Saint-Calais wholly denied the right of laymen to judge a bishop; Lanfranc, the assertor of that right, had been placed in his see on the very ground that the deposition of Robert and the election of Stigand were both invalid, as being merely acts of the secular power. Still, however logical might be the Bishop’s argument, his claims were practically new, either in English or in Norman ears. If they had ever been heard of before, it had been only for a moment from the lips of Odo. And we may mark again that, though the words of William of Saint-Calais would have won him favour with Hildebrand, they won him no favour with Lanfranc. Lanfranc represented the traditions of the Conqueror, and in the days of the Conqueror, all things, divine and human, had depended on the Conqueror’s nod.[264]

98 The King speaks. At this stage the King speaks for the first time, and, in this first speech the words of William the Red are mild enough. He had hoped, he said, that the Bishop would have first made answer to the charges which had been brought against him, and he wondered that he had taken any other course. But the charge had not yet been formally made. Roger Bigod demands that the charge be read. Amid the Bishop’s protests about the rights of his order, this somewhat important point was pressed by one of his fellow-rebels. This was Roger the Bigod, he who from the castle of Norwich had done such harm in the eastern lands, but who now appears as an adviser of the king against whom he had been fighting a few months before. Let the charge, he said, be brought in due form, and let the Bishop be tried according to it.[265] After more protests from the Bishop, the charge was made by Hugh of Beaumont.[266] The charge formally brought. It contained a full statement of the Bishop’s treason and desertion, as already described,[267] and the time is said to have been when the King’s enemies came against him, and when his own men, Bishop Odo, Earl Roger, and many others, strove to take away his crown and kingdom.[268] It is demanded that, on this charge and on any other charges that the King may afterwards bring, the Bishop shall abide by the sentence of the King’s court. We have 99 this statement only in the version of Bishop William himself or of a local partisan. Its probable truth. Yet there is no reason to doubt that it is a fair representation of the formal charge which was brought in the King’s court. That charge brings out quite enough of overt acts of treason to justify even the strong words of the Peterborough Chronicler.[269] With the secret counsels of the rebels during Lent it does not deal; what share Bishop William had had in them might be hard to make out by legal proof, and the charge is quite enough for the King’s purpose without them. But it brings out this special aggravation of the Bishop’s guilt, that, after the rebellion had broken out, after military operations had begun, the Bishop was still at the King’s side, counselling action while he was himself plotting desertion. The flight of Bishop William, as we have already told it, really reads not unlike the flight of Cornbury and Churchill just six centuries later; and it would be pressing the judgement of charity a long way to plead in his behalf the doctrine that in revolutions men live fast.[270] Points not dwelled on. We may notice also that nothing is said about the Bishop’s harryings in Northern England. They might, according to the custom of the time, be almost taken as implied in the fact of his rebellion; or they might be among the other charges which the King had ready to bring forward if he thought good.

The Bishop’s answer. The formal charge was thus laid before the Court, and it was for the Bishop to make his answer. It was the same as before. Hugh of Beaumont might say what he chose;[271] only according to his own ideas of canonical rule would he answer. By this time the wrath of the lay 100 members of the Assembly was waxing hot; Wrath of the lay members. they assailed the Bishop, some, we are told, with arguments, some with revilings.[272] At this stage Bishop William found a friend where we should hardly have looked for one. Speech of Bishop Geoffrey on behalf of William. The brigand Bishop of Coutances, already changed from a rebel into a loyal subject, was there among the great men of the realm. England knew him, not as a prelate of the Church, but as one of the greatest of her land-owners; but now, like Odo, he speaks as a bishop. He appeals to the Archbishops at least to give a hearing to Bishop William’s objection. They, the bishops and abbots, ought no longer to sit there; they ought to withdraw, taking with them some lay assessors, to discuss the point raised by the Bishop of Durham, whether he ought not to be restored to his bishopric before he is called on to plead.[273] Answer of Lanfranc. Again the great ecclesiastical statesman is inclined to scorn, almost to mock, the scruples of lesser men. Canonical subtleties might disturb the conscience of a bishop who had a few months before headed a band of robbers; but the lawyer of Pavia, the teacher of Avranches, the monk of Bec, the Abbot of Saint Stephen’s, the Patriarch of all the nations beyond the sea, had learned, in his long experience, that, as changes of vestments did not greatly matter, so changes of place and procedure did not greatly matter either. As Lanfranc had told Bishop William that they could judge perfectly well in the clothes which they then had on, so now he tells Bishop Geoffrey that they can judge 101 perfectly well in the place and company in which they were now sitting. The Bishop goes out. There was no need to rise; let the Bishop of Durham and his men go out, and the rest of the Court, clergy and laity alike, would judge what was right to be done.[274] The Bishop warned the Court to act according to the canons, and to let no one judge who might not canonically judge a bishop. Lanfranc calmly, but vaguely, assured him that justice would be done.[275] Defiance of Hugh of Beaumont. Hugh of Beaumont told him more plainly, “If I may not to-day judge you and your order, you and your order shall never afterwards judge me.”[276] With one more protest, one more declaration that he would disown any judgement which was not strictly canonical,[277] Bishop William and his followers left the hall of meeting.

Debate in the Bishop’s absence. Our only narrative of these debates, the narrative of Bishop William himself or of some one writing under his inspiration, complains of the long delay before the Bishop was allowed to come back, and gives a description, one which reads like satire, of the assembly which stayed to debate the preliminary point of law. Constitution of the Court. There was the King, with the bishops and earls, the sheriffs and the lesser reeves, with the King’s huntsmen and other officials.[278] The great officers of state, Justiciar, Chancellor, 102 Treasurer, had not yet risen to their full importance; still it is odd to find them, as they would seem to be, thrust in, after the manner of an et cetera, after, it may be, Osgeat the reeve and Croc the huntsman.[279] But anyhow, in this purely official assembly, we may surely see the Theningmannagemót gradually changing into the Curia Regis.[280] The Court, however constituted, debated in the Bishop’s absence on the point of the law which he had raised. The Bishop comes back. On his return, his own Metropolitan, Thomas of York, announced to him the decision of the Assembly. Till he acknowledged the jurisdiction of the Court, the King was not bound to restore anything that had been taken from him. Debate on the word fief. We seem to hear the voice of Flambard, when, in announcing this decision, Thomas makes use of the word fief, which had not hitherto been heard in the discussion.[281] Bishop William catches in vain at the novelty; Archbishop Thomas declines all verbal discussion; whether it is called bishopric or fief, nothing is to be restored till the jurisdiction of the court is acknowledged.[282] Thus baffled, Bishop William has only to fall back on his old protests, his old demand for the counsel of his brother bishops. Lanfranc meets him as a lawyer; the bishops 103 are his judges, and therefore cannot be his counsel.[283] The King now steps in; the Bishop may take counsel with his own men, but he shall have no counsel from any man of his.[284] The Bishop’s seven men. The Bishop answers that, in the seven men whom he has with him—​clearly the same seven of whom we have twice heard already—​he will find but little help against the power and learning of the whole realm which he sees arrayed against him.[285] He goes out the second time. But he gets no further help; he withdraws the second time for consultation, but it is only with the seven men of his own following.

The result of their secret debate suggests that Bishop William in truth took counsel with no one but himself. Surely no seven men of English or Norman birth could have been found to suggest the course which William of Saint-Calais now took. For he came back to utter words which must have sounded strange indeed either in English or in Norman ears. He comes back and appeals to Rome. “The judgement which has here been given I reject, because it is made against the canons and against our law; nor was I canonically summoned; but I stand here compelled by the force of the King’s army, and despoiled of my bishopric, beyond the bounds of my province, in the absence of all my comprovincial bishops. I am compelled to plead my cause in a lay assembly; and my enemies, who refuse me their counsel and speech and the kiss of peace, laying aside the things which I have said, judge me of things which I have not said; and they are at once accusers and judges; and I find it forbidden in our law to admit such a judgement as I in my folly was 104 willing to admit.[286] The Archbishop of Canterbury and my own Primate ought, out of regard for God and our order, to save me of their good will from this encroachment. Because then, through the King’s enmity, I see you all against me, I appeal to the Apostolic See of Rome, to the Holy Church, and to the Blessed Peter and his Vicar, that he may take order for a just sentence in my affair; for to his disposition the ancient authority of the Apostles and their successors and of the canons reserves the greater ecclesiastical causes and the judgement of bishops.”[287]

Character of the appeal. Such an appeal as this was indeed going to the root of the matter. It was laying down the rule against which Englishmen had yet to strive for more than four hundred years. William of Saint-Calais not only declared that there were causes with which no English tribunal was competent to deal, but he laid down that among such causes were to be reckoned all judgements where any bishop—​if not every priest—​was an accused party. Bishop William could not even claim that, as one charged with an ecclesiastical offence, he had a right to appeal to the highest ecclesiastical judge. Even such a claim as this was a novelty either in Normandy or in England; but William of Saint-Calais was not charged with any ecclesiastical offence. Except so far as the indictment involved the charge of perjury, that debateable ground of the two jurisdictions, the offence 105 laid to the Bishop’s charge was a purely temporal one, that of treason against his lord the King. So arraigned, he refuses the judgement of the King of the English and his Witan, and appeals from them to the Bishop of Rome. He justifies his appeal by referring to some law other than the law of England, some special law of his own order, by which, he alleges, he is forbidden to submit to any such judgements as that of the national assembly of the realm of which he is a subject. We again instinctively ask, how would William the Great have dealt with such an appeal, if any man had been so hardy as to make it in his hearing? But we again see how the ecclesiastical system which William the Great had brought in was one which needed his own mighty hand to guide.[288] He was indeed, in all causes and over all persons, ecclesiastical and temporal, within his dominions supreme. But the moment he himself was gone, that great supremacy seems to have fallen in pieces. Arguments of Lanfranc. Lanfranc himself, steadily as he maintains the royal authority throughout the dispute, seems to shrink from boldly grappling with the Bishop’s claim. Some lesser fallacies we are not surprised to find passed over. The daring statement that the sole right of the Bishop of Rome to judge other bishops was established by the Apostles may perhaps have seemed less strange even to Lanfranc than it does to us. William’s comprovincials. But Lanfranc must have smiled, and Thomas of York must have smiled yet more, at the Bishop of Durham’s grotesque complaint that he was deprived of the help of his comprovincial bishops.[289] It was a vain hope indeed, if he thought that King Malcolm would allow him the comfort of any brotherly counsel from Glasgow or Saint Andrews. But the real 106 point is that Lanfranc seems to avoid giving any direct answer to Bishop William’s claim to appeal to a court beyond the sea. Instead of stoutly denying the right of any English subject to appeal to any foreign power from the judgement of the highest court in England, he falls back into Bishop William’s own subtleties about “fief” and “bishopric;” and he appeals to the case of Odo, where it was only the Earl and not the Bishop who was dealt with.[290] The verbal question goes on, till the Bishop declares that he has no skill to dispute against the wisdom of Lanfranc; he has been driven to appeal to the apostolic see, and he wishes to have the leave of the King and the Archbishop to go to the see to which he has appealed.[291] The Bishop goes out the third time. A third time does he, at Lanfranc’s bidding, leave the hall while this question is debated by the King and his council. On his return the final sentence is pronounced by the mouth of Hugh of Beaumont. He comes back, and sentence is pronounced.As the Bishop has refused to answer the charges brought against him by the King, as he invites the King to a tribunal at Rome, the Bishop’s fief is declared forfeited by the judgement of the King’s court and the barons. It really says a good deal for the long-suffering of the prelates and barons, and of the Red King himself, He renews his appeal. that Bishop William again ventured to make his appeal in more offensive terms than before. He is ready, in any place where justice reigns and not violence, to purge himself of all charges of crime and perjury. He will prove in the Roman Church that the 107 judgement which has just been pronounced is false and unjust.[292] Hugh of Beaumont is driven to a retort; “I and my companions are ready to confirm our judgement in this court.” The Bishop again declares that he will enter into no pleadings in that court. Let him speak never so well, his words are perverted by the King’s partisans. They have no respect for the apostolic authority, and, even after he has made his appeal, they load him with an unjust judgement. He will go to Rome to seek the help of God and of Saint Peter.[293]

Up to this time the King has taken only a secondary part in the lively dispute which has been going on in his presence. We have listened chiefly to the pithy sayings of Lanfranc and to the official utterances of Hugh of Beaumont. Speeches of the King. But now Rufus himself steps in as a chief speaker, and that certainly in a characteristic strain. His patience had borne a good deal, but it was now beginning to give way. The King’s short and pointed sentences, uttered, we must remember, with a fierce look and a stammering tongue, are a marked contrast to the long-turned periods and legal subtleties of the Bishop. He now steps into the dispute from a very practical side; “My will is that you give me up your castle, as you will not abide by the sentence of my court.”[294] More distinctions, more protests, more appeals to Rome, only stir up the Red King to the use of his familiar oath; 108 “By the face of Lucca, you shall never go out of my hands till I have your castle.”[295] The Bishop was now fairly in the mouth of the lion; yet he again goes through the whole story of his wrongs and his innocence, with some particulars which we have not hitherto heard. When his possessions were seized by the King’s officers, though a hundred of his own knights looked on, no resistance had been offered to the King’s will.[296] He had now nothing left but his episcopal city; if the King wished to take that, he would offer no resistance, save by the power of God. He would only warn him, on behalf of God and Saint Peter and his Vicar the Pope, not to take it. He would give hostages and sureties that, while he went to Rome, his own men should keep the castle, and that, if the King wished, they should keep it for his service.[297] The King again spoke; “Be sure, Bishop, that you shall never go to Durham, nor shall your men hold Durham, nor shall you escape my hands, unless you freely give up the castle to me.”[298] The Bishop appeals to Counts Odo and Alan. The Bishop now for once says not a word about canonical rights; he appeals, more shortly and more prudently, to the plighted faith of the two Counts who had promised that he should go back to Durham. But Lanfranc argues that the Bishop has forfeited his safe-conduct, and that, if he refuses to give up the castle, the 109 King may rightly arrest him.[299] Cries of the lay members. At this hint the lay members of the Assembly joined in with one voice, the foremost among them being that Randolf Peverel of whose possessions and supposed kindred we have had elsewhere to speak.[300] “Take him,” was the cry, “take him; for that old gaoler speaks well.”[301] But at this stage the Bishop finds friends in the Counts whose faith had been pledged to his safe-conduct. Intervention of Count Alan. Count Alan formally states the terms of the agreement, and prays the King—​Odo and Roger joining with him in the prayer—​that he may not be forced to belie his faith, as otherwise the King should have no further service from him.[302] But in Lanfranc’s view the second of the two cases which were contemplated in the agreement had taken place. The King was not bound to let the Bishop go back to Durham; all that he was now bound to do was to give him ships and a safe-conduct out of the realm.[303] The dispute goes on in the usual style. The Bishop appeals yet again. The Bishop continues his appeal to Rome; he again invokes what he calls specially the Christian law, pointing, it would seem, to a volume in his own hand;[304] while 110 Lanfranc asserts the authority of the King’s court.[305] The King then steps in with one of his short speeches; “You may say what you will, but you shall not escape my hands, unless you first give up the castle to me.”[306] The Bishop then makes a shorter protest than usual, the drift of which seems to be that he is ready to suffer any loss rather than be personally arrested.[307] The final sentence. The sentence of the Court is now finally passed. A day is fixed by which the Bishop’s men should leave the city of Durham and the King’s men take possession of it instead.[308]

The judgement of the Assembly had thus formally gone against the claims of the Bishop of Durham; but his The Bishop asks for an allowance.resources were not at an end. Defeated on all points of law, he makes an appeal to the King’s generosity. Will his lord the King, he now prays, leave him something from his bishopric on which he may at least be able to live? Lanfranc again answers; “Shall you go to Rome, Answer of Lanfranc.to the King’s hurt and to the dishonour of all of us, and shall the King leave lands to you? Stay in his land, and he will give back to you all your bishopric, except the city, on the one condition that you do right to him in his court by the judgement of his barons.”[309] 111 Bishop William, almost parodying the words of a much earlier appeal to Rome, says that he has appealed to the Apostolic See, and to the Apostolic See he will go.[310] Lanfranc retorts; “If you go to Rome without the King’s leave, we will tell him what he ought to do with your bishopric.” Bishop William answers in a long speech, renewing his protests of innocence and his offers of purgation, and setting forth the services which he claimed to have done for the King at Dover, Hastings, and London. The Bishop many times makes his prayer, and the King as often refuses. Then Lanfranc counsels him to throw himself wholly on the King’s mercy; if he will do so, he himself will plead for him at the King’s feet. But the Bishop still goes on about the authority of the canons and the honour of the Church; he will earnestly pray for the King’s mercy, but he will accept no uncanonical judgement. The King’s offers. The King then makes a new proposal; “Let the Bishop give me sureties that he will do nought to my hurt on this side the sea, and that neither my brother nor any of my brother’s men shall keep the ships which I shall provide to my damage or against the will of their crews.”[311] It certainly was demanding a good deal to expect Bishop William to go surety for either the will or the power of Duke Robert to do or to hinder anything. The Bishop pleads that the Counts pledged their faith that he should not be obliged to enter into any agreement except the one which had been made at Durham. The King and Ralph Paganel. And the Sheriff of Yorkshire, Ralph Paganel, the same who had been the 112 spoiler of the Bishop’s goods, bears witness that his claim was a just one.[312] By this time the wrath of the Red King was gradually kindling; he turns on the Sheriff with some sharpness; “Hold your peace; for no surety will I endure to lose my ships; but if the Bishop will give this surety which I ask, I will ask for no other.”[313] The Bishop falls back on his old plea; he will enter into no agreement save that into which he entered with the Counts. The King again swears by the face of Lucca that the Bishop shall not cross the sea that year, unless he gives the required surety for the ships.[314] The Bishop then protests that, rather than be arrested, he will give the surety and more than the surety which is demanded; but he calls all men to witness that he does this unwillingly and through fear of arrest.[315] He gives the surety, and another stage in the long debate ends.

Question of the safe-conduct. A new point, happily the last, was raised when the Bishop, having given the required surety, asked for ships and a safe-conduct. The King says that he shall have them as soon as the castle of Durham is in the King’s power; till then, he shall have no safe-conduct, but shall stay at Wilton.[316] He again meekly protests; he will endure the wrong against which he has no means of 113 striving.[317] Then a man of Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances steps in with a new count. Charges against the Bishop’s men. The men who held the Bishop of Durham’s castle had—​before the Bishop came to the King’s court; therefore, it might be inferred, with his knowledge—​taken two hundred beasts belonging to the Bishop of Coutances which were under the King’s safe-conduct. Bishop Geoffrey had surely seen more than two hundred beasts brought into Bristol as the spoil of loyal men in Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Wiltshire; but he is careful to exact the redress of his own loss from his brother bishop and rebel. The men of the Bishop of Durham had refused to pay the price of the beasts; they refused even when Walter of Eyncourt—​we have met him in Lincolnshire[318]—​bade them do so in the King’s name; he William, the man of Bishop Geoffrey, demands that the price be paid to his lord.[319] The King puts it to the barons whether he can implead the Bishop on this charge also.[320] Interposition of Lanfranc on behalf of the Bishop. Lanfranc, for the first time helping his brother prelate, rules that this cannot be done. Bishop William cannot be impleaded any further, because he now holds nothing of the King—​the surrender of the castle of Durham is thus held to be already made—​and is entitled to the King’s safe-conduct.[321] The Bishop to leave England. The Assembly now breaks up for the day; the Bishop is to choose the haven from which he will sail, and to make known his choice on the morrow.

The next day the Court again comes together. The 114 Bishop of Durham asks Count Alan to find him a haven and ships at Southampton. Conditions of the Bishop’s sailing. The King steps in; “Know well, Bishop, that you shall never cross the channel till I have your castle”—​adding, with a remembrance of the doings of another prelate at Rochester—​“for the Bishop of Bayeux made me smart with that kind of thing.”[322] If the castle of Durham was in the King’s hands by the fixed day, the fourteenth day of November, the Bishop should have the ships and the safe-conduct without further delay. November 21,1088. The King then bids Count Alan and the Sheriff Gilbert[323] to give the Bishop at Southampton such ships as might be needful for his voyage seven days after the day fixed for the surrender of the castle. November 14. Meanwhile, on the appointed day, the castle of Durham was received into the King’s hands by Ivo Taillebois and Erneis of Burun—​names with which we have long been familiar.[324] They disseized the Bishop of his church and castle and all his land; but they gave to the Bishop’s men a writ under the King’s seal, promising the most perfect safety to the Bishop and his men through all England and in their voyage.[325] And, according to the most obvious meaning of the narrative, Heppo, the King’s balistarius—​a man of whom, like Ivo Taillebois, we have heard in Lincolnshire—​was put into their hands as surety for the observance of the safe-conduct.

It might have seemed that the Bishop’s troubles were now ended, so far as they could be ended by leaving the land which he professed to look on as a land of persecution. 115 But a crowd of hindrances were put in the way of his voyage. Action of Ivo Taillebois. Notwithstanding the safe-conduct given to the Bishop’s men, a number of wrongs were done to them by Ivo Taillebois, whose conduct may be thought to bear out his character as drawn in the legendary history of Crowland. The great grievance was that in defiance—​so men thought at Durham—​of Lanfranc’s judgement that Bishop William was not bound to plead in the matter of the beasts taken from the Bishop of Coutances, two of his knights were forced to plead on that charge.[326] November 21. Meanwhile the day came which had been appointed for the Bishop’s voyage. He had been waiting at Wilton, under the care of a certain Robert of Conteville, who had been assigned, at his own request, to keep him from all harm.[327] The Bishop’s voyage delayed. The castle had been duly given up; all seemed ready for his crossing. Bishop William asked the Sheriff Gilbert and his guardian Robert for ships, to cross in the company of Robert of Mowbray.[328] Under orders from the King,[329] November 26. they kept him for five days longer, when Robert of Conteville took him to Southampton. The wind was favourable, and the Bishop craved for leave to set sail at once. The King’s officers forbade him to sail that day; the next day, when the wind had become contrary, they, seemingly in mockery, gave him 116 leave to sail. Charge against the monk Geoffrey. While he waited for a favourable wind, a new charge was brought against him, founded on the alleged doings of one of his monks, Geoffrey by name, of whom we shall afterwards hear as being in his special confidence. By the sentence of forfeiture pronounced by the Court, all the Bishop’s goods had become the property of the Crown. It was therefore deemed an invasion of the King’s rights when, after the Bishop had gone to the King’s court, Geoffrey took a large number of beasts from the Bishop’s demesne. He had also taken away part of the garrison of the castle, who had killed a man of the King’s. New summons against the Bishop. On this charge Bishop William was summoned to appear in the King’s court at the Christmas Gemót to be held in London. One of the bearers of the summons was no less famous a man than Bishop Osmund of Salisbury, a man of a local reputation almost saintly.[330] His argument with Osmund. Bishop William again appeals to the old agreement; he protests his innocence of any share in the acts of Geoffrey, though he adds that he might lawfully have done what he would with his own up to the moment when he was formally disseized.[331] These words might seem to imply that the act of Geoffrey, though done after the Bishop had left Durham, was done before the sentence was finally pronounced. But he cannot go to the King’s court; he has nothing left; he has eaten his horses; that is seemingly their price.[332] He is 117 still repeatedly forbidden to cross, even alone.[333] In answer to an earnest message that he might be allowed to go to Rome, The Bishop again summoned by Walkelin. the King sent Walkelin Bishop of Winchester with two companions, one of them Hugh of Port, a well-known Domesday name, to summon him to send Geoffrey for trial to Durham and to appear himself in London at the Christmas Gemót to answer for the deeds of his men.[334] In defiance of all prayers and protests, the King’s officers kept the Bishop in ward night and day; in his sadness he sent a message to the Counts who had given him the safe-conduct, praying them by the faith of their baptism to have him released from his imprisonment and allowed to cross the sea.[335] Interposition of the Counts. They answered his appeal. At their urgent prayer, the King at last let him cross. He at last crosses to Normandy. He sailed to Normandy, where he was honourably received by Duke Robert, and—​so the Durham writer believed—​entrusted with the care of his whole duchy.[336] Perhaps it was owing to these new worldly cares that, though we often hear of him again, we do not hear of him as a suppliant at the court of Rome.

Importance of the story of William of Saint-Calais. The tale of Bishop William of Durham is long, perhaps in some of its stages it is wearisome; but it is too important a contribution to our story to be left out or cut short. It sets before us the earliest of those debates in the King’s court of which we shall come 118 across other memorable examples before the reign of Rufus is over. Illustrations of jurisprudence. We see the forms and the spirit of the jurisprudence of England in the days immediately following the Norman Conquest, a jurisprudence which, both in its forms and its spirit, has become strongly technical, but which still has not yet become the exclusive possession of a professional class. Bishops, earls, sheriffs, are still, as of old, learned in the law, and are fully able to carry on a legal discussion in their own persons. And we see that a legal discussion in those days could be carried out with a good deal of freedom of speech on all sides. Legal trickery of the Bishop. As to the matter of the debate, all that we know of Bishop William, both afterwards and at this time from other sources, can leave hardly any doubt that he was simply availing himself of every legal subtlety, of every pretended ecclesiastical privilege, in order to escape a real trial in which he knew that he would have no safe ground on the merits of the case. Reasons for proceeding against him. And, if it be asked why the Bishop of Durham should have been picked out for legal prosecution, while his accomplices were forgiven and were actually sitting as his judges, the answer is to be found in the circumstances of the case. As we read the tale in all other accounts, as we read of it in the formal charge brought by Hugh of Beaumont, we see that there was a special treachery in Bishop William’s rebellion which distinguished his case from that of all other rebels. Why he should have joined the revolt at all, how he could expect that any change could make him greater than he already was, is certainly a difficulty; but the fact seems certain, and, if it be true, it quite accounts for the special enmity with which he was now pursued. The idea of the Bishop which the story conveys to us is that of a subtle man, full of resources, well able to counterfeit innocence, and to employ the highest ecclesiastical claims as a 119 means to escape punishment for a civil crime. The first appeal to Rome made by William of Saint-Calais. It was from the mouth of William of Saint-Calais that, for the first time as far as we can see, men who were English by birth or settlement heard the doctrine that the King of the English had a superior on earth, that the decrees of the Witan of England could be rightly appealed from to a foreign power. The later career of the Bishop makes him a strange champion of any such teaching. The largest charity will not allow us to give him credit for the pure single-mindedness of Anselm, or even for the conscious self-devotion of Thomas. We feel throughout that he is simply using every verbal technicality in order to avoid any discussion of the real facts. A trial and conviction would hardly have brought with them any harsher punishment than the forfeiture and banishment which he actually underwent. But it made a fairer show in men’s eyes to undergo forfeiture and banishment in the character of a persecuted confessor than to undergo the same amount of loss in the character of a convicted traitor.

Behaviour of Lanfranc; The part played by Lanfranc is eminently characteristic. Practically he maintains the royal supremacy on every point; but he makes no formal declaration which could commit him to anti-papal theories. of the King. As for William Rufus, one is really inclined for a long while to admire his patience through a discussion which must have been both wearisome and provoking, rather than to feel any wonder that, towards the end of the day, he begins to break out into somewhat stronger language. But in the latter part of the story, like Henry the Second but unlike Henry the First, he stoops from his own thoroughly good position. He shows a purpose to take every advantage however mean, and to crush the Bishop in any way, fair or foul. So at least it seems in our story; but one would like to hear the other side, as one is unwilling 120 to fancy either Bishop Walkelin or Bishop Osmund directly lending himself to sheer palpable wrong. The lesser actors. But, after all, not the least attractive part of the story is the glimpse which it gives us of the lesser actors, some of them men of whom we know from other sources the mere names and nothing more. We feel brought nearer to the real life of the eleventh century every time that we are admitted to see a Domesday name becoming something more than a name, to see Ralph Paganel, Hugh of Port, and Heppo the Balistarius playing their parts in an actual story. The short sharp speeches put into the mouths of some of the smaller actors, as well as those which are put into the mouth of the King, both add to the liveliness of the story and increase our faith in its trustworthiness. Conduct of the laity, As in some other pictures of the kind, the laity, both the great men and the general body, stand out on the whole in favourable colours. not favourable to the Bishop. It is perfectly plain, from Bishop William’s own words,[337] that he had not, like Anselm and Thomas, the mass of the people on his side. It is equally plain that the majority of the assembly, though they certainly gave him a fair hearing, were neither inclined to his cause nor convinced by his arguments. And the conduct of the Counts Alan and Odo and their companion Roger of Poitou is throughout that of strictly honourable men, anxious to carry out to the letter every point to which they have pledged their faith. The Red King, having merely pledged his faith as a king, and not in that more fantastic character in which he always held his plighted word as sacred, is less scrupulous on this head.

The affair of Bishop William brings us almost to the last days of the year of the rebellion. But, much 121 earlier in the year, events of some importance had been happening in other parts of the island. No recorded movement in Scotland. We are almost tempted to take for granted that so great a stir in northern England as that which accompanied the banishment of the Bishop of Durham must have been accompanied or followed by some action on the part of King Malcolm of Scotland. None such however is spoken of. Movements in Wales. But the stirs on the Western border had been taken advantage of by the enemies of England on that side. We have seen that British allies played a part on the side of the rebels in the attack on Worcester. Further north, independent Britons deemed that the time was come for a renewal of the old border strife. When Earl Hugh of Chester and the Marquess Robert of Rhuddlan took opposite sides in a civil war, it was indeed an inviting moment for any of the neighbouring Welsh princes. The time seems to have been one of even more confusion than usual among the Britons. State of Wales. The year after the death of the Conqueror is marked in their annals as a special time of civil warfare, in which allies were brought by sea from Scotland and Ireland. Rhys restored by a fleet from Ireland. Rhys the son of Tewdwr, of whom we have already heard,[338] was driven from his kingdom by the sons of Bleddyn, and won it again by the help of a fleet from Ireland.[339] Men were struck by the vast rewards in money and captives with which he repaid his naval allies, who are spoken of as if some of them were still heathens.[340] These movements 122 are not recorded by any English or Norman writer, nor do the Welsh annals record the event with which Norman and English feeling was more deeply concerned. But there was clearly a connexion between the two. Gruffydd the son of Cynan appears in the British annals as an ally of the restored Rhys,[341] Gruffydd’s Irish allies. and we now find a King Gruffydd, not only carrying slaughter by land into the English territory, but appearing in the more unusual character of the head of a seafaring expedition. We may feel pretty sure that it was the presence of the allies from Ireland—​both native Irish, it would seem, and Scandinavian settlers—​which combined with the disturbed state of England to lead Gruffydd to a frightful inroad on the lands of the most cruel enemy of the Britons, the Marquess Robert. He attacks Rhuddlan. The Welsh King and his allies marched as far as the new stronghold of Rhuddlan; they burned much and slew many men, and carried off many prisoners, doubtless for the Irish slave-market.[342] It was clearly through this doubtless far more profitable raid on the English territory that Rhys and Gruffydd found the means of rewarding their Irish and Scandinavian allies.

Robert of Rhuddlan. This inroad took place while the civil war in England was going on,[343] a war in which it must be remembered that other British warriors had borne their part.[344] While 123 the lands of Rhuddlan were wasted, the Marquess Robert was busy far away at the siege of Rochester. His probable change of party. This would make us think that, like Earl Roger, he changed sides early,[345] and that he was now in the royal camp, helping to besiege Odo and his accomplices. He returns to North Wales. After the surrender of Rochester, the news of the grievous blow which had been dealt to himself and his lands brought Robert back to North Wales, wrathful and full of threats.[346] The enemy must by this time have withdrawn from the neighbourhood of Rhuddlan; for we now hear of the Marquess in the north-western corner of the land which he had brought under his rule. The peninsula of Dwyganwy. He was now in the peninsula which ends to the north in that vast headland which, like the other headland which ends the peninsula of Gower to the west, bears the name of the Orm’s Head.[347] The mountain itself, thick set with remains which were most likely ancient when Suetonius passed by to Mona, forms a strong contrast to the flat ground at its foot which stretches southward towards the tidal mouth of the Conwy. But that flat ground is broken by several isolated hills, once doubtless, like the Head itself, islands. Of these the two most conspicuous, two peaks of no great height but of marked steepness and ruggedness, rise close together, one almost immediately above the Conwy shore, the other landwards behind it. They are in fact two peaks of a single hill, with a dip between the two, as on the Capitoline hill of Rome. 124 Here was the old British stronghold of Dwyganwy, The castle of Dwyganwy. famous in early times as the royal seat of Maelgwyn, him who is apostrophized in the lament of Gildas by the name of the dragon—​the worm—​of the island.[348] That stronghold had now passed into the hands of the Marquess Robert, and had been by him strengthened with all the newly imported skill of Normandy. The castle of Dwyganwy plays a part in every Welsh war during the next two centuries, and we can hardly fancy that much of Robert’s work survives in the remains of buildings which are to be traced on both peaks and in the dip between them. But it is likely that at all times the habitable part of the castle lay between the two peaks, while the peaks themselves formed merely military defences. Robert at Dwyganwy. Here then Robert was keeping his head-quarters in the opening days of July. At noon on one of the summer days the Marquess was sleeping—​between the peaks, we may fancy, whether in any building or in the open air. He was roused from his slumber by stirring tidings. Approach of Gruffydd. July 3, 1088. King Gruffydd, at the head of three ships, had entered the mouth of the Conwy; he had brought his ships to anchor; his pirate crews had landed and were laying waste the country. The tide ebbed; the ships stood on the dry land; the followers of Gruffydd spread themselves far and wide over the flat country, and carried prisoners and cattle to their ships.[349] The Marquess rose; he climbed the height immediately 125 above him, a height which looks on the flat land, the open sea, the estuary now crowned on the other side by Conwy with its diadem of towers, over the inland hills, and on the Orm’s Head itself rising in the full view to the northward. He saw beneath him a sight which might have stirred a more sluggish soul. As King Henry had looked down on the slaughter of his troops at Varaville,[350] so Robert, from his fortified post of Dwyganwy, saw his men carried off in bonds and thrown into the ships along with the sheep.[351] Eagerness of Robert. He sent forth orders for a general gathering, and made ready for an attack on the plunderers at the head of such men as were with him at the moment. They were few; they were unarmed; but he called on them to make their way down the steep hillside and to fall on the plunderers on the shore before the returning tide enabled them to carry off their booty.[352] The appeal met with no hearty answer; the followers of the valiant Marquess pleaded their small numbers and the hard task 126 of making their way down the steep and rocky height.[353] But Robert was not to be kept back; he still saw what was doing through the whole of the peninsular lowlands. He could not bear to let the favourable moment pass by. Without his cuirass, attended only by a single knight, Osbern of Orgères, he went down to attack the enemy on the shores of the estuary.[354] Death of Robert. When the Britons saw him alone, with only a single companion and no defence but his shield, they gathered round him to overwhelm him with darts and arrows, none daring to attack him with the sword.[355] He still stood, wounded, with his shield bristling with missiles, but still defying his enemies. At last his wounds bore him down. The weight of the encumbered shield was too much for him; he sank on his knees[356] , and commended his soul to God and His Mother. Then the enemy rushed on him with one accord; they smote off his head in sight of his followers, and fixed it as a trophy on the mast of one of the ships.[357] Men saw all this from the hilltop with grief and rage; but they could give no help. 127 A crowd came together on the shore; but it was too late; the lord of Rhuddlan was already slain. By this time the invaders were able to put to sea, and the followers of Robert were also able to get their ships together and follow them. They followed in wrath and sorrow, as they saw the head of their chief on the mast.[358] Gruffydd must have felt himself the weaker. He ordered the head to be taken down and cast into the sea. On this the pursuers gave up the chase; His burial at Chester. they took up the body of the slain Marquess, and, amidst much grief of Normans and English,[359] buried him in Saint Werburh’s minster at Chester.[360]

We are well pleased to have preserved to us this living piece of personal anecdote, which reminds us for a moment of the deaths of Harold and of Hereward. Connexion of Robert with Saint Evroul. Its preservation we doubtless owe to the connexion of Robert of Rhuddlan with the house of Saint Evroul. Otherwise we might have known no more of the conqueror of North Wales than we can learn from the entries in Domesday which record his possessions.[361] But Robert, nephew of Hugh of Grantmesnil, had enriched his uncle’s foundation with estates in England, and in the city of Chester itself.[362] He was therefore 128 not allowed to sleep for ever in the foreign soil of Chester. He had a brother Arnold, a monk of Saint Evroul, zealous in all things for his house, who had begged endless gifts for it from his kinsfolk in England, Sicily, and elsewhere. His translation to Saint Evroul. Some years after Robert’s death, Arnold came to England, and, by the leave of Bishop Robert of Chester or Coventry—​Bishop of the Mercians in the phrase of the monk who was born in his diocese—​translated the body of Robert to the minster of Saint Evroul. There a skilful painter, Reginald surnamed Bartholomew—​most likely a monk who had taken the apostolic name on entering religion—​was employed to adorn the tomb of Robert and the arch which sheltered it with all the devices of his art.[363] Orderic writes his epitaph. And the English monk Vital—​we know him better by his English and worldly name—​was set to compose the epitaph of one who had in some sort, like himself, passed from Mercia to Saint Evroul.[364] In his history Orderic deemed it his duty to brand Robert’s dealings with the Welsh as breaches of the natural law which binds man to man.[365] Its character. And it may be that something of the same feeling peeps out in the words of the epitaph itself, which prays with unusual fervour for the forgiveness of Robert’s sins.[366] Yet in the verses which record his acts, his campaigns against the Briton appear as worthy exploits alongside of his zeal for holy things and his special love for the house of Ouche. It is not 129 easy to track out all these exploits, even in the narrative of Orderic himself, much less in the annals of Robert’s British enemies. But all the mightiest names of the Cymry are set forth in order, as having felt the might of the daring Marquess. He had built Rhuddlan and had guarded it against the fierce people of the land. He had ofttimes crossed beyond Conwy and Snowdon in arms. He had put King Bleddyn to flight and had won great spoil from him. He had carried off King Howel as a prisoner in bonds. He had taken King Gruffydd and had overthrown Trahaern. That Howel, his former captive, should rejoice at his fall is in no way wonderful; but the epitaph speaks further of the treachery of a certain Owen, of which there is no mention in the prose narrative.[367] In any case Robert of Rhuddlan stands out as one of the mightiest enemies of the Northern Cymry, and the tale of his end is one of the most picturesque in this reign of picturesque incidents.

End of the Norman Conquest. The rebellion was now over, and the new King was firm upon his throne. And with the rebellion, the last scene, as we have already said, of the Norman Conquest 130 was over also. Englishmen and Normans had, for the last time under those names, met in open fight on English soil. Whether of the two had won the victory? The Conquest confirmed and undone.Such a question might admit of different answers when the Norman King vanquished the Norman nobility at the head of the English people. In one sense the Conquest was confirmed; in another sense it was undone. How far undone. Men must have felt that the Conquest was undone, that the wergeld of those who fell two-and-twenty years back was indeed paid, when the second Norman host that strove to land on the beach of Pevensey, instead of marching on to Hastings, to Senlac, to London, and to York, was beaten back from the English coast by the arms of Englishmen. They must have felt that it was undone, when the castles on which Englishmen looked as the darkest badges of bondage were stormed by an English host, gathered together at the same bidding which had gathered men together to fight at Sherstone and at Stamfordbridge. He must have been Nithing indeed who did not feel that the wrongs of many days were paid for, when the arch-oppressor, the most loathed of all his race, came forth with downcast looks to meet the jeers and curses of the nation on which he had trampled. Days like the day of Tunbridge, the day of Pevensey, and the day of Rochester, are among the days which make the heart of a nation swell higher for their memory. They were days on which the Englishman overcame the Norman, days which ruled that he who would reign over England must reign with the good will of the English people. Tendencies to union. The fusion of Normans and English was as yet far from being brought to perfection; indeed nothing could show more clearly than those days that the gap between the two nations still yawned in all its fulness. But nothing did more than the work of those days at once to fill up the gap and to rule in what 131 way it should be filled up. Those days showed that the land was still an English land, that the choice of its ruler rested in the last resort with the true folk of the land. Those days ruled that Normans and English should become one people; but they further ruled, if there could be any doubt about the matter, that they were to become one people by the Normans becoming Englishmen, not by the English becoming Normans. It is significant that, in recording the next general rebellion, the Chronicler no longer marks the traitors as “the richest Frenchmen that were on this land;” they are simply “the head men here on land who took rede together against the King.”[368]