The history of the Norman conquest of England, its causes and its results, Volume 3 (of 6) · Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)

CHAPTER XII.

THE LATER REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY.[159]

1051–1066.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Divisions of the period.]

The period will fall naturally into four divisions. First [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 events 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._

[Sidenote: Position of William.]

William, at the time of his visit to Eadward, had reached the age of about twenty-four years. The negotiations for [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 houses 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 himself 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.

[Sidenote: 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 daughter 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 [Sidenote: 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 was 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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] And its hardy, sharp-witted, and industrious inhabitants, [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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; [Sidenote: 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 overlord, the Parisian King, he had formed the closest tie of affinity; his wife was Adela, the daughter of King [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 Matilda’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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 the 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 1264.] sheltered the King and the enemies of England in the next great struggle for her freedom. For a long while Gundrada 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 command 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 offences 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

At 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: The marriage delayed.] wife of another man.[203] At all events, the marriage was delayed, and the moment when it was actually celebrated [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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] [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 the Wonder of the World,[207] and which, in its lowest depth of degradation, we have seen merged in a realm of happier [Sidenote: 1860.] omen at the mere approach of the wonder-worker of our own day.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 were 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: His probable motives.] offender.[211] Was his motive in so doing simply disloyalty? Was 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 [Sidenote: 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 his 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. [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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. The 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 entering 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]

[Sidenote: Malger succeeded by Maurilius.]

A Prelate of a very different stamp from Malger succeeded him on the metropolitan throne of Rouen. William [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 education 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: Maurilius leaves Fécamp, and] Halberstadt as one of his spiritual household,[236] till, like Lanfranc,[237] the neophyte sought for a still more complete [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 Church, 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 for his uncanonical marriage; at all events he was known to have spoken his mind freely and openly on the subject.[245] [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 was 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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] The 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, [Sidenote: 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 Rome, 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]

[Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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 account 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 to delay the work of atonement for her fault. Her church [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: consecrated 1077.] of architecture as in a work of war or politics. Eleven years later,[268] William and Lanfranc, now promoted to be the Cæsar 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 [Sidenote: 1086.] the western towers was a later work, and was probably [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 receipt 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 lived to succeed their common father Herlwin in the abbatial chair of Bec, and at last to succeed Lanfranc himself on the [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 a 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 Count 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 1421.] dying injunction of the great English conqueror of France was, at all risks, at all sacrifices, to keep Normandy in full [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 of 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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] [Sidenote: Castle of Eu.] That famous spot, known in modern times as the last home of lawful royalty in France, was marked by a castle, every 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: William Busac.] in their several walks. Their second son, William, called Busac, has left behind him a less worthy name. He is [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 of 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]

[Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: Wide-spread movement] and asserted his own better right to the Duchy. In this movement against Duke William many conspirators, both [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: Description of Arques: its earlier and later history.]

Arques, 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. [Sidenote: 1589.] But Arques had become famous in far earlier times. In the troubled minority of Richard the Fearless, when King [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 narrow 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 [Sidenote: 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 which 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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]

The anarchy which had overspread all Normandy in the days of Duke William’s childhood, now broke forth again, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 passed 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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,” said the Duke, “if once they see me face to face, will [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 Duke 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]

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 of his foes.[334] And so it happened. The King came and went unhurt in person, but he was far from [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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 no 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 spoken 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 the 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 his 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: King Henry retires.]

The Count of Ponthieu was thus slain fighting valiantly.[359] His overlord King Henry escaped the ambush, and pressed on towards the hill of Arques, in the hope of relieving the besieged. But he found Duke William’s wooden castle too strong, and the courage of its defenders too determined, for his attacks upon it to prevail.[360] He accordingly returned home, having done nothing towards the immediate object of his journey, the relief of the besieged Count of Arques.[361] He had however gained some partizans in Normandy, and one Norman fortress at least was betrayed into his hands. Its position shows that the rebellion must have spread far beyond the immediate neighbourhood of [Sidenote: Moulins betrayed to the King by Wimund.] Arques. One Wimund, who commanded the fortress of Moulins, surrendered it to the King.[362] The fortress thus gained by Henry lay on the other side of the Seine, in the County of Hiesmes and Diocese of Seez, on the very frontier of the debateable land of the House of Belesme.[363] [Sidenote: It is garrisoned under Guy of Poitiers or Gascony.] The post was therefore an important one. It received a French garrison, and its command was entrusted to a man of princely rank from a distant quarter of Gaul, whose presence in the royal host is not the least perplexing thing about the story. This was Guy-Geoffrey, Count of Gascony,[364] son of that William of Aquitaine who bore the title of the Great. He was therefore brother of the prince who had suffered so hardly at the hands of Geoffrey of Anjou; he was brother of the reigning Duke, who, from Peter, had changed his name to William,[365] and brother too of Agnes, the wife of the reigning Emperor, whose name was soon to become famous during the minority of her son.[366] Guy-Geoffrey himself, on his accession to his brother’s dominions a few years later, also changed his baptismal name [Sidenote: 1058–1087.] for that so familiar to his family, and reigned as William [Sidenote: Return of Duke William.] the Eighth of Aquitaine and Sixth of Poitiers.[367] By this time Duke William had returned to the siege; he had no longer to fear the commission of any feudal offence by [Sidenote: The besieged hard pressed.] fighting personally against his lord. The defenders of Arques were now sorely pressed by hunger. They contrived to send messages to King Henry; but all was in vain; no help came from their royal ally.[368] At last the sure but slow means to which the Duke had trusted had [Sidenote: The castle surrenders; wretched state of the besieged.] thoroughly done its work; Count William and his garrison surrendered, on the sole condition that the horrors of Alençon were not to be repeated. Safety for life and limb was promised; the gates were opened, and a company came forth in whose sad condition the Norman panegyrist sees at least as much matter for scorn as for pity. Knights of renown throughout France and Normandy came forth with marks of hunger on their faces, and with their necks bowed down alike by hunger and by shame. Some rode on famished horses, whose feeble feet could hardly raise the dust or give forth an audible sound as they crept along. Others came forth on foot, booted and spurred, bearing saddles on their backs, seemingly ready for that last symbolical rite of humiliation in which the vanquished offered himself for the victor to mount upon his back.[369] And, if the proud gentlemen of France and Normandy were brought so low as this, it is not wonderful if the aspect of their more lowly followers, the light-armed troops [Sidenote: Guy of Poitiers surrenders Moulins.] of the garrison, was equally sad.[370] The news soon reached the fortress of Moulins, which was still held by the French troops under Guy of Aquitaine. The Poitevin prince, the brother-in-law of Cæsar, had no mind to tempt the strength of the Norman. He and his garrison, and the garrisons of such other posts as had been occupied by the royal forces, fled [Sidenote: The Duke’s clemency to his uncle.] out of the land without waiting to be attacked.[371] Towards his own subjects the Duke more than kept the terms of his capitulation. Count William was not even required to leave Normandy. He was offered licence to remain in the land and to retain possession of a considerable estate, of which however it need hardly be said that his own famous hill-fortress was not to form a part.[372] But life in his native [Sidenote: Count William of Arques retires to Boulogne.] country had no longer any charms for him. The dispossessed Count and his wife, the sister of the slain Count of Ponthieu, retired to the court of Count Eustace of Boulogne.[373] The fall of one William of Arques led the way to the advancement of the other. The Viscount had had no share in the treasons of the Count. He was not indeed raised to fill a place which the Duke had learned to be [Sidenote: The castle intrusted to William the Viscount.] too dangerous an elevation for any subject. The County of Talou was abolished; the castle of Arques became a ducal possession; but the care of the fortress reared by the William of Arques who figures in Norman history was entrusted to that other William of Arques whose name is written in Domesday.[374]

[Sidenote: Marriage of Duke William. 1053.]

Duke William was now allowed a few months of peace, and, having brought one troublesome matter to a happy end, he seems to have thought it a fitting time to bring another matter of no less moment in his eyes to an end no less happy. It was in this year, therefore probably in the short interval between the French invasion which we have thus far followed and the second invasion which followed it in the next year, that William at last won his long-wished-for bride. Count Baldwin now brought his daughter to the frontier castle of Eu, and William led her thence to his palace at Rouen.[375] I have already discussed the puzzling circumstances of this marriage; I have already spoken of the indignation which it called forth among men so unlike one another as Malger and Lanfranc.[376] Malger, it must not be forgotten, was a brother of the fallen Count of Arques; he may have been concerned in his treason; his deposition may have been his punishment. But the clemency which William showed towards the uncle who had been actually in arms may make us doubt whether he would have taken this kind of revenge on a kinsman who was at least not more guilty.[377]

King Henry had failed to give any help to the defenders of Arques in their last extremity; but hatred towards Normandy was far from being lulled to rest in the breasts [Sidenote: Hatred of the French towards Normandy.] either of the French King or of the French people. We seem to be carried back a hundred years, to the wars waged by Lewis and Hugh and Arnulf against the defenceless childhood of William Longsword. Through the whole extent of the King’s domains, and through the domains of his chief vassals, the feeling of jealousy against Normandy was bitter indeed. The King complained that Normandy, a land which had been part of the immediate possessions of his forefathers, even before they wore a Crown,[378] had now itself become almost a Kingdom.[379] He, a crowned King, the overlord of so many Princes, the ally of the Roman Emperor himself,[380] looked with an evil eye on the one corner of his realm whose master paid him no obedience.[381] We may doubt whether the vassalage of Flanders or Aquitaine, to say nothing of Barcelona, involved more of practical submission than the vassalage of Normandy; but, as I have explained more than once, there was no other among the great vassals of the Crown whose greatness seemed so directly stolen from that of the Crown itself, no other whose fief, by its very position, seemed [Sidenote: Jealousy of the other Princes against William.] so literally to hold its royal overlord in fetters.[382] And jealousy of William and his Duchy was by no means confined to the King and his immediate subjects; nearly all the Princes of Gaul seem to have been for once ready to abet their suzerain against one whom they all equally [Sidenote: Geoffrey Martel;] dreaded and envied. That the Hammer of Anjou was eagerly waiting for the fitting moment to deal another [Sidenote: Theobald of Blois and Champagne;] blow need hardly be said. And the old hereditary grudge may have rankled in the breast of Theobald of Blois, now rejoicing in the higher dignity of Count of Champagne. He had won that County by driving out his nephew Odo,[383] and the favourable reception which the dispossessed prince found at the court of William, his marriage with a near kinswoman of the Duke,[384] may have been either the cause or [Sidenote: William [Peter] of Aquitaine.] the result of his uncle’s enmity. But it is hard to see how the power of Normandy could be threatening to a prince so distant as the Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine. Nor had William given his southern namesake any offence, unless indeed the Duke of Aquitaine thought it his duty to avenge the ignominious escape of his brother from the dominions of the Duke of the Normans. Yet all these princes, we are told, were eager, in an unusual fit of loyalty, to avenge the wrongs of the King whom they all so faithfully served, but to whom the upstart Bastard at Rouen refused all obedience.[385] And all, King and Princes, were specially stirred up by certain members of the royal family, whom it is not easy to identify, but who are said to have thought that Normandy, or some part of it, might form convenient appanages for themselves.[386] A joint expedition against Normandy, on a scale which should surpass all former expeditions, was agreed upon.

The panegyrist of William lavishes all his rhetoric and all his powers of classical allusion to set forth the greatness of the danger by which Normandy was now [Sidenote: Danger of Normandy.] threatened. Cæsar himself, the conqueror of the Gauls, or a general greater than Cæsar, if Rome herself had produced a greater, might have felt fear at the approach of such a host as was now poured from every region of Gaul upon the devoted Duchy.[387] The whole land was stirred even to its remotest corners. The movement reached to the Ducal Burgundy, the most eastern fief of the Parisian Crown. It aroused the Gascon at the foot of the Pyrenees, and the men who dwelt among the volcanic peaks of less distant Auvergne. All these drew the sword; but France and Britanny, as the nearest of all to the Norman land, were the most eager for its destruction.[388] Through all Normandy, the men of peaceful callings, the priest, the peasant, the burgher, all trembled for their wives, their children, their goods, their very lives. But they thought what a champion they had in their mighty Duke, and their hearts were comforted. Laying aside flourishes like these, and confessing the extreme difficulty of seeing the warriors of Gascony and Auvergne, or even those of Burgundy, there is no doubt that a great and unusual effort was made, both by the King and by those of his great vassals who were [Sidenote: Union of several Princes against Normandy.] most immediately open to his influence. An invasion of Normandy was decreed, which really was planned on a greater scale, and carried out in a more systematic way, than any that had ever gone before it. The whole forces of the royal domain—of France, in the language of the time—together [Sidenote: Guy of Ponthieu and Theobald.] with the forces of Count Theobald and of Count Guy of Ponthieu, were assembled for a combined attack [Sidenote: Seeming absence of Geoffrey of Anjou.] on the Duchy. Guy came, naturally enough, to avenge the death of his brother;[389] what is most to be remarked is the seeming absence of the Prince whom we should have expected to find first at the muster, the restless Hammer of Anjou. Some of his subjects seem indeed to have shared in the expedition, but there is no certain account of Geoffrey himself till the campaign was over.[390] His absence is not easily to be accounted for. The chronicles of his own country do not supply us with any records of other undertakings which might explain his failure to share in an enterprise which one would have thought would have had every charm for him. But, even in his [Sidenote: Double invasion of Normandy. 1054.] absence, the muster was a great one. The forces of the King and his vassals were divided into two armies for the invasion of Normandy at two distinct points. Our Latin authorities, glad as ever to fall back on the geography of a past age, tell us how the forces both of Celtic and of Belgic Gaul were gathered together in two divisions. The Celtic host was to march under the command of the King in person, the forces of the Belgian lands under that of his brother Odo. With Odo was joined in command the King’s special favourite, Reginald of Clermont, not the more famous Clermont in the distant land of Auvergne, but the lowlier Clermont in the nearer land of Beauvais. With them marched two other leaders of the rank of Count, Ralph of Montdidier and he of whom we have already heard, Guy of Ponthieu.[391] The vernacular poet more kindly helps us to the real names of the districts which are veiled under the obsolete titles delighted in by the Latin writers. Normandy was to be invaded on each side of the Seine, and the Seine was taken as the limit alike of the lands to be invaded and of the hosts which [Sidenote: Forces of “Belgic Gaul” under Odo.] were severally to invade them.[392] The Northern, the Belgic, host was to enter the elder Normandy, the first home of Rolf, the French-speaking land of Rouen. They were to enter by way of Beauvais, to advance and ravage the land of Caux, the coast-land to the right of the Seine, the land around the minster of Fécamp and the castle of Lillebonne. They were to harry the whole district and diocese of Rouen, and to carry their ravages up to the metropolis itself.[393] To the muster of Odo came the men of primatial Rheims; the men too of Soissons, once the home of Merovingian royalty, and so soon to become the guerdon of a Norman traitor.[394] There also were the men of Laôn, where the line of the Teutonic Emperor had so long lingered, and the men of Noyons, the city which had beheld the permanent inauguration of the Parisian Kingdom.[395] There marched the forces of Vermandois, whose Carolingian Lord appeared as the loyal homager of the upstart dynasty.[396] The promise of Norman spoil drew the men of Amiens, soon to become the flock of the Prelate whose verse was to hand down to us the minutest contemporary record of Norman victory.[397] Himself, not yet a father of the Church, may well have followed, among the men of his native Ponthieu, to avenge a slaughtered nephew and a self-banished niece.[398] Thither men came from Meulan on the Seine and from Beaumont on the Oise,[399] from the corn-fields of Brie and from the rose-gardens[400] of Provins. By twenties, by hundreds, by thousands, the force of all the lands right of the Seine gathered under the banners of Guy and Odo, to carry slaughter and devastation through those parts of Normandy which lay on their own side of the great Norman river. [Sidenote: Forces of “Celtic Gaul” under the King.] The other muster gathered round the standard of the King himself. Thither came the men of those ancient cities of central Gaul, which, now no less than then, which then no less than in the days of Cæsar and in the old time before him, still sit, each one as a lady for ever,[401] by the banks of their ancient rivers or on the proud crests of their everlasting hills. If their peaceful calling did not keep them by their thrones and altars, the crosses of three Metropolitans might have been borne to the camp of Henry. The men of Bourges and Berry[402] came from around the steep of old Avaricum, whence Ambigatus had sent forth his swarming colonists to more southern lands,[403] and where Vercingetorix had bid defiance to the mightiest of southern invaders.[404] Thither too came the men of Sens, the countrymen of Brennus and his host, the city whose sons had encamped upon the Roman forum and had wound their way round the steep of the Roman capitol.[405] And from the banks of the rushing Loire, from around the towers of Saint Martin and Saint Gatian, came the men of Tours, the fellow-citizens of so many saints, whose land, now crushed beneath the Hammer of Anjou, had once seen [Sidenote: 732.] the Hammer of Christendom break in pieces the hosts of the False Prophet. Thither too came the contingents of the other cities by the great boundary stream, the men of Count Theobald’s Blois and of King Henry’s Orleans. There were the men of the border-land of Perche, and of the King’s own towns of Etampes and Montlhery, towns whose fame, such as it is, was reserved for later days. Thither came the men of the bocage and the men of the plain,[406] the men of the vast cornland which surrounds the hill of Chartres, the hill where Druids had once held their orgies, but where the rites of the heathen had now given way to the learning and holiness of Prelates like Fulbert and like Ivo. Full no doubt of faith in that revered relic before which Rolf and his pirate-host had quailed,[407] the land of the old enemy of Richard the Fearless[408] sent forth its forces to wreak a tardy vengeance on the successor alike of Rolf and of Richard.

[Sidenote: The King’s division assembles at Mantes.]

The host of Celtic Gaul held its trysting-place at a spot doomed to be memorable and fatal above all other spots in the history of the Conqueror. King Henry’s standard was pitched in the border town of Mantes, the town ruled by a grandson of Æthelred, a nephew of Eadward,[409] a prince whose death was to bring undeserved reproach upon the Conqueror’s name and whose city was to behold the last [Sidenote: Description of the town.] and the least worthy of his exploits. Mantes, the frontier post of France against Normandy, was a spot whose position had made it a favourite haunt of William’s Wiking fathers in the days when Rouen was still a post to be won, and when Paris was still a post to be threatened. No other spot lay as a more convenient centre between the two great cities of the Seine. On the left bank, the higher ground on which the town itself stands slopes gently to the river. A range of loftier hills, as all along this part of the course of the Seine, bounds the valley on the other side. But at this point the stream divides, and two large islands, resorts such as the pirates of the North so dearly loved, at once divide and unite by bridges, old and new, the town itself and its suburb of Limay. The islands of the Seine, like the islands of the Loire, had ofttimes seen Rolf and Hasting moor their barks and tell over their plunder; and now it was around those islands that the host assembled which was at last to take vengeance for those old wrongs, and to bring the sons of the Pirates to an utter, if a tardy, submission. The host that gathered at Mantes, the host under the command of the King himself, was to enter and harry the land of Evreux and the land of Rouen; the King of the French would ride by Lisieux to the sea from which the hated intruders could no longer keep him; he would return by Auge, lord of all those lands within the Norman border where the tongue and life of France had taken root, and whose inhabitants had been his brothers-in-arms on the day of Val-ès-dunes.[410] The Bastard might perhaps still be allowed to reign over his old enemies; the rough Northern blood of Bayeux and Coutances might have him, if they would, for their ruler; but the old grant, wrung in the days of weakness from King Charles and Duke Robert, should be recovered by a prince who united the claims of Laôn and of Paris, and who had made up his mind to be no longer kept out of his own Rouen and cut off from the mouth of his own Seine.

[Sidenote: Preparations of William.]

The preparations of Duke William were equal to the [Sidenote: He gathers two armies.] great emergency in which he found himself. He called out the whole force of his Duchy. To meet the twofold invasion he gathered a twofold army, each division of which was to defend one side of the Seine against the [Sidenote: His own division is opposed to the King.] approaching enemy. For his own share he took the defence of the lands on the left bank of the river, the lands threatened by the King in person. Had he cast [Sidenote: Question of the feudal scruple.] away the feudal scruple which we have seen acting upon his mind during the siege of Arques? Did he now deem that so many injuries had at last absolved him from every duty of a vassal, and that he might now, without a stain on his honour or his conscience, go forth, and, if need be, meet his lord in battle face to face? Or did he foresee that, as the event proved, no such meeting would be needful? Did he know that the surest way to avoid meeting his lord face to face was to go forth in person to meet him? However this may be, William now took on himself the immediate duty of protecting the lands against which King Henry was marching, the lands between the [Sidenote: William’s muster from Western Normandy.] Seine and the Dive.[411] For their defence he gathered the forces of the neighbouring districts. The warriors of the hilly land of Auge, where the mouth of the Dive was then a famous haven, came to meet the King who had specially marked out their district as one object of his attack. The men of Falaise and of the whole County of Hiesmes pressed as ever to the standard of the sovereign who was more specially their own. Ralph of Tesson, no longer doubtful, no longer hesitating between his loyalty and his plighted oath, came once more to yield that help which had been found so effectual on an earlier day of battle.[412] All these were men who had fought on William’s side when the French monarch had passed as a deliverer through the lands which he now entered as an enemy. [Sidenote: Loyalty of the Bessin and the Côtentin.] But others came on that day to William’s muster who, at Henry’s former coming, had fought against King and Duke alike. The men of the Bessin were there to atone for the error of the day when they had met their prince in arms. Hamon Dentatus slept in his honoured tomb at Esquay;[413] Grimbald lay with his fettered limbs in some lowlier grave;[414] and, since they were gone, no traitor had disturbed the fidelity of the Saxon land. And it is with a special thrill of pride that the island poet tells us how the Barons of the Côtentin[415] were there too, ready as before to break a lance with the French invader,[416] but this time to break it not as the rebels but as the loyal subjects of their own prince. And from still more distant corners of his Duchy men pressed to William’s standard. The brother whom he had advanced, Robert the son of Herleva and Herlwin, led the men of his county to [Sidenote: Contingent from Mortain,] the ducal muster. He came from the fortress of which the Duke had deprived, perhaps defrauded, his cousin and namesake, now a wanderer and an adventurer in the most distant field of Norman valour.[417] The Lord of Mortain had fixed his home in perhaps the most picturesque of all the picturesque sites in which the Norman chiefs seem to have delighted. His castle on the rock has been wantonly destroyed to make way for one of the barbarous official buildings of modern France. But the land from which Robert brought his warriors still retains its charm; the cliffs, the winding dells, and, rarest sight of all, the waterfalls, great and small, bounding from one rocky stage to another, are there still; the grand and simple church, of a somewhat later age, still remains, and, yet above town and castle, rise still loftier heights, from which the eye may range as far as the Mount of the Archangel. And, [Sidenote: and Avranches.] more distant still[418] than the men of Mortain, came the men of the march against the Breton, the men of Avranches, viscounty and city, where the proudest steep in all the Norman land, crowned, alas, no longer by its vanished minster, takes in the Archangel’s Mount as but one point in a landscape where half Normandy and Britanny seem to lie at the beholder’s feet. From the Coesnon to the Dive, from Seez to Cherbourg, all were there, stout of heart and ready of hand, to guard their country and their sovereign against the attacks of their faithless overlord.

[Sidenote: William’s plan of defence.]

The plan of the Duke was to stand wholly on the defensive. All provisions of every kind were to be moved out of the King’s line of march; the cattle were to be driven to the woods, and the peasants to be sent to take care of them there.[419] He would himself with his division follow the King’s steps; he would encamp near him, and be sure to cut off every man who strayed from the royal camp for forage or plunder.[420] The like policy was enjoined [Sidenote: The leaders beyond the Seine.] on the defenders of the lands beyond the Seine. The men of Caux and of the other districts in that quarter were placed under four of the chief men of their own district. Old Hugh of Gournay, at the head of the men of Braye, came from his frontier town by the minster of Saint Hildebert, the town whose name he was to transfer to more than one spot in conquered England.[421] Count Robert of Eu came from the other frontier town so lately honoured by the marriage rites of his sovereign. William Crespin came from the less famous Bec of the land of Caux,[422] whose name is eclipsed by that more honoured namesake which was then the light of Normandy. And Walter Giffard, who had so well kept the wooden castle below the steep of Arques,[423] was now to take his share in warfare of a freer and a wilder kind. Till the whole force of the land could be got together, the Barons of Eastern Normandy were bidden to watch the foe, to skulk in the woods, and to give the invaders no opportunity for an attack.[424]

[Sidenote: Ravages of the French.]

The right division of the French army, the division of Belgic Gaul, seems to have entered Normandy somewhere near the frontier town of Aumale. They passed on, committing every sort of ravage as they went. Saracens, we are told, could not have done worse.[425] Houses great and small were burned, so were churches and monasteries, moveable goods were carried off, among which, as in old Greek warfare, human prey seems to have been thought not the least valuable. The peasants whom they fell in with were seized and carried off;[426] women were everywhere ravished; children and old men seem to have been dispatched at [Sidenote: They reach Mortemer.] once.[427] In this way they marched on till they reached Mortemer, not Mortemer by the forest of Lions, but a more northern Mortemer, which draws its whole claim to remembrance from the events of this campaign. The country through which they passed may be called hilly; but the hills have no specially marked or picturesque character. The town of Aumale stands on a comparative height, which slopes away by a gradual descent to the west. A bottom, in no way specially marked by nature, divides this hill from another of the same kind, the road over which leads the traveller to the town of Drincourt on the Dieppe, now known as Neufchâtel-in-Braye. From the neighbourhood of this point the river Eaulne flows down to meet the Dieppe and the Varenne [Sidenote: Description of the place.] by the castle of Arques. In the space between the two hills, a little way from the road, and almost hidden by trees, lie the shell of a round tower on its mound, a church of but small attractions, and a few scattered houses and gardens, so far from forming a town that they are hardly [Sidenote: The town destroyed and not rebuilt.] worthy to be called a village. That spot is Mortemer; and the absence of anything remarkable in the Mortemer of the present day is the best witness of the event which made Mortemer famous in the days of William. In those days Mortemer was evidently a town of some size, according to the standard of the eleventh century. There is no sign that the town was fortified; the tower which still remains has doubtless supplanted a donjon of the earlier type; but it was the mere private fortress of the lord and not the defence of the town itself. The change in the condition of the place must have been great. Mortemer could now hardly supply entertainment to a passing traveller; but we are told that the French army took up their head-quarters there, on account of the good and plentiful accommodation which the town afforded.[428] Mortemer became a centre of systematic plunder. The French devoted the day to pillage; the neighbourhood was harried with fire and sword; stores of cattle and wine were brought in to Mortemer; and the night was given to feasting, drinking, and every sort of excess.[429]

[Sidenote: The French at Mortemer surprised by the Normans.]

The Norman leaders had been well served by spies, and they had now found exactly the opportunity for which they had been waiting. One vigorous blow might crush one division of the invaders altogether, and the force of all Normandy might then turn against the other. The four leaders, with Hugh of Montfort, and Roger of Mortemer, the lord of the town in which the enemy had fixed themselves, at the head of the whole levies of the country, made a night march upon the unexpecting invaders. The Norman force reached Mortemer at day-break. They found no preparations for defence; most of the French were still asleep. With the true Norman instinct, fire was the first means of attack resorted to. The Frenchmen were awakened by the burning of the houses in which they were quartered. The confusion was frightful; men had to arm themselves in the midst of the flames and with the enemy pressing around them. One man would fain mount his horse, but he could not find his bridle; another, still less lucky, could not find the door of the house in which he was lodged.[430] The most part strove to cut their way out of the burning town, but they found the head of each street guarded by Norman soldiers.[431] Yet, according to every account, the French, though taken at such a disadvantage, resisted manfully, and kept up the struggle for several hours, from the dawn of a winter’s day, [Sidenote: Utter discomfiture of the French.] till three hours after noon.[432] The great mass of the French were cut to pieces; a few escaped to skulk in the woods, but the greater number were cut down either in the town itself or in the attempt to escape. The burned and charred ruins, the dunghills, the fields and paths around the town, were covered with dead and wounded men. Only those were spared who were worth sparing for the sake of their ransom. Many a Norman soldier, down to the meanest serving-man in the ranks, carried off his French prisoner; many an one carried off his two or three goodly steeds with their rich harness. In all Normandy there was not a prison that was not full of Frenchmen.[433] As for the leaders [Sidenote: Fate of the leaders. Escape of Odo and Reginald.] of the expedition, Odo the King’s brother was among the first to escape; Reginald of Clermont was equally lucky.[434] But the princes of Ponthieu were less fortunate. Waleran, [Sidenote: Death of Waleran of Ponthieu.] the Count’s brother, was slain, fighting valiantly.[435] Count [Sidenote: Imprisonment of Count Guy.] Guy himself was taken prisoner, and was kept as the Duke’s captive at Bayeux for two years. He was at last [Sidenote: He is released on doing homage to William.] released, but only on doing homage and binding himself to the Duke of the Normans for the yearly service of a hundred knights whenever called upon.[436] Ralph of Montdidier fell into the hands of Roger of Mortemer, whose castle, perhaps [Sidenote: Roger of Mortemer releases Ralph of Montdidier through a feudal scruple.] the only stone building in the town, remained standing among the flames. By one of those strange feudal complications which we so often meet with in those times, the Lord of Mortemer had become the man of the Count of Montdidier.[437] Roger remembered his duty to his lord, even when that lord appeared in the guise of an enemy. He tended him friendly in his castle for three days, and then took him to his own house in peace.[438] But this discharge of feudal duty was held by Duke William to be inconsistent with his duty as the vassal and the subject of a greater master. All Roger’s services could not plead against this [Sidenote: Roger banished by the Duke, and his castle confiscated,] ill-timed tenderness to a foe. He was banished from Normandy, and, though after a while he was allowed to return and to receive again the rest of his lands, the castle from which he drew his name was withheld from him. [Sidenote: and bestowed on William of Warren.] That castle the Duke granted to a brave and rising knight, William of Warren,[439] who took his name from a fortress by the northern Varenne which has since exchanged its name for that of Bellencombre.[440] He, like his predecessor Roger, and so many others, was the Duke’s kinsman through the forester of Caux;[441] he lived to become the husband of the Duke’s stepdaughter,[442] to win for himself an Earldom in England, and to be the forefather of one who, two hundred years later, could appeal, like the Bastard himself, to his own sword as the surest tenure by which he held it.[443]

[Sidenote: The news brought to William.]

The joyful news, we are told, was carried the same night[444] to the Duke in his quarters on the other side of the Seine. His first impulse was thankfulness to God, who had given him so great a success without any loss, at any rate without any considerable loss, of his own men.[445] His next thought was how to improve the occasion so as to get rid of the other division of the invading army with [Sidenote: His stratagem and message to the King.] even less trouble. He would himself send the news to his royal overlord. We are not told exactly where the two armies were encamped, but it was doubtless somewhere between the Seine and the Dive, and one description places the French army by the side of a river with overhanging cliffs.[446] The camp of the Duke was not far off. A messenger was at once sent off, to announce in a startling way the loss which had fallen on the royal army on the [Sidenote: Ralph of Toesny.] other side of the Seine. Some make the messenger chosen for his task a man of lofty and famous lineage. He was, we are told, Ralph of Toesny or of Conches, the grandson of the famous Roger, the proud descendant of Malahulc, the man who had sought for a kingdom in Spain, and had been one of the scourges of Normandy in the days of William’s childhood.[447] Of Ralph we shall hear again at Senlac, how he refused, like Walter Giffard, to discharge any function, however honourable, which kept him back from dealing his blows against the English.[448] Thus high of birth and of spirit, he and his were connected by marriage with other houses of equal fame. His own wife was of the line of Montfort;[449] his sister was the wife of the famous William Fitz-Osbern,[450] and his son, in after years, when his house was transferred from Normandy to England, became the husband of one of the daughters [Sidenote: Delivery of the message at midnight.] of our martyred Waltheof.[451] Ralph of Toesny then, or it may be some lowlier messenger, rode to the French camp; he climbed, some say a tree, some say a lofty rock, which overlooked the tent of the King.[452] The stillness of the night was broken, the slumbers of the King were disturbed, by a voice, which might seem to come from another world, shouting aloud, “Frenchmen, awake, ye are sleeping too long; go forth and bury your friends who lie dead at Mortemer.” The King and his friends talked together and wondered. But the tidings thus strangely brought to them were soon spread abroad. Some make the Norman Baron reveal himself, and tell in his own person how Odo had fled, how Guy was in bonds, how Waleran was slain.[453] Others seem to make the news come from some other source, from some fugitive escaped from Mortemer, or from that mere mysterious power of rumour which seems to travel faster than any [Sidenote: Panic and retreat of the French army.] post.[454] At all events we are told that a panic fell on King Henry and his host. Before the sun had well dawned, all was ready for a retreat. Horsemen were mounted, sumpter-horses were loaded, the tents and huts which had formed the royal camp were all burning. All faces were now turned, not towards Rouen or Lisieux, but towards Paris or more distant cities. The retreat was a hasty one; men were glad to get as fast as they could out of so dangerous a land. Their march, or rather their flight, was undisturbed by William; King Henry reached his capital in safety, and his Barons and other followers, the mighty armament of all Celtic Gaul, were scattered every man to his own home.[455]

[Sidenote: The story illustrative of Norman craft.]

There is something half romantic, half grotesque, about the details of this campaign. Yet the substance of the tale comes from contemporary writers, and the whole story is eminently characteristic of William, and indeed of his people. No people of warriors were ever more ready than the Normans to exchange, whenever need called for the exchange, the skin of the lion for that of the fox.[456] Assuredly neither William the Bastard nor Robert Wiscard was at all lacking in any form of courage; but it was, after all, their craft rather than their courage which set them so high [Sidenote: Illustration of William’s character.] above the rest of the world. It is quite possible that seven years may have abated somewhat of that impetuous energy of early youth with which William spurred across the plain of Val-ès-dunes to smite the rebel of Bayeux [Sidenote: His policy.] with his own hand.[457] He may have learned—perhaps from the teaching of King Henry himself[458]—that it is not always the duty of a general to thrust himself forward wherever danger happens to be keenest. But it is certain that, twelve years later, William was as ready as he had ever been for deeds of the highest personal prowess, whenever personal prowess was the surest way to success. The difference between William and most men of his age was that he had now learned that it was no mark of wisdom or of courage to run risks which might be avoided, or to jeopard his own life and the lives of his followers, when the same object might be gained by easier means. He had, by this time at least, learned to rise above the follies of mere chivalry, above the mere senseless love of giving and taking blows without an object. Nor had he a spark of that impetuous patriotism which led the nobler soul of Harold to deem no shame so great as the shame of leaving a rood of English ground to be harried by the stranger. We may acquit William of all wanton oppression; we may fully believe that the sufferings of his people roused his indignation.[459] But he could stifle that indignation; he could stand calmly by and behold their sufferings, if he thought that he could gain his object better by biding his time and letting the [Sidenote: Vein of pleasantry in the Norman character.] enemy for a while work his wicked will. And, mingled with all this, there is a certain element of grim merriment, a delight in a joke spoken or acted, which runs through the whole career of the Conqueror. It needed a ready wit to send Roger of Toesny, or any other man, to the top of a tree or of a rock to announce in the dead of the night that the French had been cut to pieces at Mortemer. Here again William is only a representative of his people. A touch of pleasantry, however rough, runs through most Norman sayings and doings. We may be sure that the messenger, whoever he was, thoroughly enjoyed his errand and entered into its spirit. And the policy of William in this campaign, whatever we think of it in any other light, had at least, as his policy commonly had, the merit of success. Most princes of his time would have sought eagerly for a pitched battle. Most of the few princes who might have shrunk from a pitched battle would have been unable to form any intelligible military plan of any other kind. William, evidently seconded by men who understood him, knew how to win victories without fighting. His dominions were invaded by two powerful armies at once. He laid his plans; he bode his time. One army was cut to pieces with hardly the loss of a Norman life. The other was hurried out of the land without so much as striking a blow.

[Sidenote: William fortifies Breteuil as a check on Tillières.]

King Henry seems by this time to have had enough of Norman warfare for a while. We hear vaguely of hostilities still going on,[460] but there is only one act on either side of which we meet with any distinct mention. This is the fortification by the Duke of a post which was intended to check for the future such incursions as his southern march had just undergone. The time had not yet come for William again to demand that fortress of Tillières of which Henry had so unfairly dispossessed him in the early days of his reign.[461] But he now raised a counter-fortress within his own dominions, which was expressly designed to act as a check on Tillières itself.[462] This was at Breteuil on the Iton, a tributary of the Eure, near the wood of its own name, in the Diocese of Evreux, not far [Sidenote: It is entrusted to William Fitz-Osbern.] from Ralph of Toesny’s castle and abbey of Conches. The castle was built, and was committed to the trusty care of William Fitz-Osbern.[463]

[Sidenote: Peace concluded. 1055.]

At last the King sought for peace. His main object was to bring about the redemption of the many French captives who were still lingering in Norman prison-houses. The knights were at last set free on paying their ransoms, but their harness remained as the prey of the victors.[464] [Sidenote: William authorized to make conquests at the expense of Anjou.] A more remarkable article of the peace was that by which the King engaged not to interfere with any conquests which William had made, or might make, at the expense of the Count of Anjou. Henry indeed seems to have done more, and to have promised William the regular feudal investiture of any such possible conquests.[465] This agreement seems to amount almost to proof positive that Geoffrey had not had any share in the late invasion of Normandy. It was seemingly as a punishment for his defection that his possessions were now openly offered to the Norman. Before long we shall again find Henry and Geoffrey allied against William, but just at this moment we must look upon King and Duke as once more allies against the Angevin Count.

[Sidenote: Extension of William’s frontier southwards. 1048–1063.]

It was in William’s earlier days of good service to his overlord that he had first carried his arms, and extended his dominion, beyond the range of hills which seems to form the natural southern frontier of Western Normandy. In his first campaign against the Angevin he had added or restored to his Duchy the Cenomannian fortress of [Sidenote: Domfront.] Domfront,[466] a prize which was no unworthy instalment of the nobler and more distant prize in the same region which was, before many years, to fall into his hands. That first campaign, William’s first deed of prowess beyond the bounds of his own Duchy, had made him master of a fortress which men deemed impregnable, and of a district which, as his earliest conquest, he no doubt looked on with special affection. That part of the ancient Cenomannian Diocese and County which surrounds the hill of Domfront has remained to this day an integral portion of the Norman land. The southern bulwark of William’s Duchy was now the proud fortress by the Varenne, the town which, still largely girded by its ancient walls, abides to this day perched on its ancient eyrie, and has not, like so many greater cities, descended into the plain below. The shattered donjon,[467] reared, like that of his own Falaise, on wild and craggy rocks, looks forth on the wilder and heath-crowned rocks of a rival height, whose distorted strata bear witness to the struggles and revolutions of days before man had yet appeared on earth. The fortress won by the terror of his name, once an outpost threatening the Norman border, was now the surest guard of the Norman heights to the north, the most threatening menace to that boundless plain, broken by gentler hills, which stretched away over the disputed land of Maine towards the home of the hostile Angevin. Around the hill lay the thickly wooded land, rich in the silvan sports so dear to William’s heart, the land which the Hammer of Anjou had yielded without a stroke to the youthful lord of Normandy. Lower down the stream stood what was now his furthest outpost, his own creation [Sidenote: Ambrières.] of Ambrières, another donjon on a height, hard by the point where the Varenne joins the greater stream of the Mayenne. The shattered walls of that donjon still bear the impress of William’s age, though the district in which it stands is no longer entitled to the honours of the Norman name.

Domfront then had passed irrevocably into William’s hands, but Ambrières was still, in some way or other, a [Sidenote: Its former occupation by William, [1049];] subject of contention. There seems no doubt that William had occupied and fortified the post in the earlier campaign.[468] Possibly it had been since that time taken and dismantled by Geoffrey; possibly the post was to be made stronger and more extensive, with a view to further conquests in the same direction. At all events, works of some kind at [Sidenote: its present rebuilding or strengthening.] Ambrières, whether works of mere strengthening or of construction from the ground, were just now an object on which William’s mind was eagerly set. His first act after the conclusion of the peace with France, at the very meeting—was it a meeting with the King in person?—at which the peace was signed, was to summon all the chief military tenants of Normandy to appear within forty days to help in carrying on the needful works at Ambrières.[469] A message to the same effect was sent to Count Geoffrey. [Sidenote: William’s challenge to Geoffrey Martel.] The Duke of the Normans would, on the fortieth day, appear at Ambrières with his force and take possession of his fortress.[470] The prospect of so terrible a neighbour struck dread into the heart of the nearest vassal of Anjou, [Sidenote: Geoffrey of Mayenne;] Geoffrey, Lord of Mayenne, a town on the lower course of the river from which it takes its name, and which was, a few years later, to be the scene of one of William’s [Sidenote: his counsel to Geoffrey Martel.] boldest exploits.[471] The Lord of Mayenne poured his forebodings into the ears of his own lord at Angers. If the Normans were allowed to take possession of Ambrières, nothing but ravage and utter destruction would be the fate of the Angevin lands. The heart of Count Geoffrey was lifted up, and he bade his namesake of Mayenne cast him aside as a base and shameful lord, if he allowed the threats of the Norman to be carried [Sidenote: William at Ambrières.] out in act.[472] The appointed day came; the Duke appeared at Ambrières; the works, of whatever nature, were begun.[473] News came that Geoffrey Martel was [Sidenote: Geoffrey’s delay.] on his march. William waited a while, but the enemy came not, and provisions began to fail. Great and small began to complain of the lack of food; and no doubt, in Normandy as well as in England, men were much more ready to fight than to remain under arms without fighting.[474] [Sidenote: William garrisons the castle, and goes away.] The Duke therefore left a garrison in Ambrières, and retired with the remainder of his army, bidding them hold themselves in readiness to assemble again at a moment’s notice.[475] It would have been foolhardiness indeed to have shut himself up without any adequate cause [Sidenote: Geoffrey and his allies come to Ambrières.] within the walls of a border fortress. But, if the Norman historian is to be believed, the Norman Duke’s back was no sooner turned[476] than the Angevin Count and his allies came hastening to the siege of the stronghold of Ambrières. [Sidenote: William of Aquitaine.] With Count Geoffrey came his lord, as he is called[477]—at all events his step-son—Peter, now William, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine.[478] He came perhaps to avenge the ignominious flight of his brother from Moulins;[479] but with him came another chief in whose heart many an old enmity must have been choked, many a bitter remembrance must have been handed over to forgetfulness, before he could consent to take service in the same host as Geoffrey. [Sidenote: Odo of Britanny.] Yet so it was; a Breton prince, Odo, the uncle of the reigning Count Conan,[480] came to fight under the Angevin banner [Sidenote: They besiege Ambrières.] against the common enemy at Rouen. The three princes attacked the castle of Ambrières with all the resources known to the military art of the time. An attempt at a storm was beaten back by the defenders. The archers shot their arrows, the petraria hurled its stones, the ram was dashed against the wall, but all was in vain.[481] Meanwhile the news of the siege, and of the gallant resistance of the [Sidenote: Return of William.] garrison, was borne to Duke William. He collected his troops with all speed, and hastened, with such haste as he knew how to use when haste was needed,[482] to the relief of [Sidenote: Flight of the besiegers.] Ambrières. At his mere approach, we are told, the three allied Counts took to flight.[483] The Lord of Mayenne was less lucky; he was carried off as a prisoner into the [Sidenote: Homage of Geoffrey of Mayenne.] furthest parts of Normandy, and he was not released till he had acknowledged himself the man of Duke William.[484]

[Sidenote: Increase of William’s power.]

The fame of William was no doubt widely spread by this series of successful exploits and stratagems, and his direct influence was distinctly increased by his receiving the homage of the Count of Ponthieu in one direction and [Sidenote: Extension of his frontier towards Anjou.] of the Lord of Mayenne in another. It would seem also that this was the time when William made, in conformity with the licence granted him by King Henry,[485] a further acquisition of Cenomannian territory at the cost of the Count of Anjou. It was not unimportant to him to extend his power as far as might be in the district through [Sidenote: 1049.] which he had, six years before, made his famous night-march from Domfront to Alençon.[486] At a short distance west of Alençon, and south-west of the episcopal town of Seez, the Sarthon, a small tributary of the Sarthe, was the boundary between Normandy and Maine. The Duke now took possession of a point beyond the frontier stream; a castle and town arose, which were entrusted to the care of Roger of Montgomery. It lay in the near neighbourhood of the hereditary possessions of his wife, and from her the new bulwark of Normandy was honoured or disgraced by the name of the Rock of Mabel.[487]

[Sidenote: Three years’ peace. 1055–1058.]

The strength of William’s enemies seems to have been nearly exhausted by their late efforts, or else their courage was chilled by the ill success of their arms. For three years Normandy saw neither rebellion nor foreign war. William thus had time to devote himself either to the prosecution of his vengeance, or to the vindication of ecclesiastical discipline, in the deposition of his uncle the [Sidenote: 1055.] Primate Malger.[488] This took place in the same year as the campaign of Ambrières. After that date, besides the Duke’s quarrel and reconciliation with Lanfranc,[489] there is nothing to recount till, three years later, we come to another, and the last, invasion of Normandy by the combined [Sidenote: Last French and Angevin invasion. August, 1058.] forces of France and Anjou. Geoffrey, the old enemy, was, we are told, ever ready to strike a blow at Normandy,[490] and no doubt the memory of his late losses rankled in his mind. Another great expedition was planned and carried out. In August, when the corn was on the ground,[491] the King and the Count entered Normandy in the quarter most convenient for a junction of French and Angevin forces, in William’s own County of Hiesmes.[492] Their design was a systematic plundering expedition through all Normandy west of the Seine. They were to pass through the district of Hiesmes into the land of Bayeux and Caen; then they were to cross the Dive and, after harrying Auge and the district of Lisieux, to return home with their plunder.[493] Above all things, they were to reach the sea in the districts both west and east of the Dive, and to show that the upstart Duke of the Pirates could no [Sidenote: William’s scheme of defence. He waits at Falaise till the enemy reach the Dive.] longer keep his liege lord barred up in an inland prison. The scheme was laid, and one half of it was carried out. William determined not to attack the invaders on their entrance into his Duchy. His plan was to wait for a favourable moment when he might smite them on their return, gorged with the plunder of his subjects, and no doubt with their discipline and their energy not a little relaxed. He gathered his knights, not indeed for immediate action; he gave orders for the strengthening of castles and the cleansing of their fosses; and then, leaving the open country exposed to the ravages of the enemy, he waited in his own stronghold of Falaise for the moment which [Sidenote: Advance and ravages of the French.] he knew would not fail soon to come.[494] The French and Angevin host entered Normandy, and passed through the land burning and plundering in the usual fashion. They took the town of Hiesmes, which gave its name to the County. They then marched on to Saint Peter on the Dive; they occupied the whole town, and the King was lodged at the great Abbey, then in all the freshness of its new foundation by the pious Lescelina of Eu.[495] They then struck westward, ravaging the whole Bessin; but the city itself, as well as the various castles of the district, seems to have remained untouched. The sea-coast especially, the land of William’s faithful Hubert, was harried as far as the mouth of the Seule. The enemy then marched in a [Sidenote: Caen as yet unfortified.] south-easterly direction to Caen. That town was growing in importance, but as yet it neither contained anything which could withstand the attacks of an enemy nor anything which was likely to remain to later days as a memorial of his visit. Caen was as yet undefended by walls or castle;[496] the foundations of the two great Abbeys which are its chief glory were as yet not laid. Whatever Caen then consisted of, it was certainly sacked, most likely burned. King Henry and Count Geoffrey had now successfully carried out one half of their scheme of ravage. They had now to cross the Dive, and to carry fire and sword into the other half of the doomed region.

The moment for which William had so long been waiting had at last come. His policy had been in some sort a cruel policy for his Duchy; but it now enabled him to strike a vigorous and decisive blow at the retreating enemy. French warfare in Normandy was destined to be successful only when the banners of King and Duke floated side by side. King Henry had shared in the triumph of Val-ès-dunes; his men had been smitten by William’s men in the ambush of Saint Aubin and in the surprise of Mortemer; he had now himself to feel the might of William’s own [Sidenote: They reach the Dive at Varaville.] hand in the second surprise of Varaville. In their march eastward the French had reached the village of that name, the point which had been chosen for their passage across the Dive into the land of Auge. Varaville, now, and probably then, only a small village, lies north-east of Caen, a little way from the left bank of the old frontier stream. It was an old battle-ground of France and Normandy. On that spot, or at least in that neighbourhood, it was that King Harold of Denmark and King Lewis of France had met face to face; [Sidenote: 945.] it was there that the Karling had found his master in the valiant heathen who came to defend the last planted outpost of his race.[497] And now another King of the French, of another line, of another speech, and another royal city, came to undergo an overthrow yet more ignominious at the hands of a Norman Duke who could now hold his own independently alike of French and of Danish help. Varaville was seemingly an usual point for crossing into the lands on the right bank [Sidenote: Description of the spot.] of the river. The contrast between the two sides of the Dive is here very striking. On the left, the side of Varaville, the land is flat, and it was in those days doubtless a mere marsh. A causeway, which still exists, and which is maintained as a modern road, leads from the village to a point where the stream has for many ages been crossed by a bridge, but which, in the eleventh century, seems to have been known only as a ford.[498] Here the French army was to pass over to the opposite side, the land of Auge. There, within the original settlement of Rolf, the country is of quite a different character. The right bank of the Dive is backed at a short distance by a range of hills of height considerable enough to form a very marked object in any country not strictly mountainous. They form in fact a bold and picturesque range, stretching right away to the seashore. Over these hills the army had to make its way into the rich land of Lisieux. [Sidenote: The French vanguard crosses the river.] The vanguard, under the command of the King, had already begun to climb the heights, when unexpected sounds from the rearward smote on their ears. From the high ground of Bastebourg,[499] commanding a view of the whole valley, King Henry turned round only to behold the [Sidenote: William’s march.] utter discomfiture of his host. The Duke of the Normans had laid his plan with all the subtlety of his wily brain, and he was now carrying it out with all the might of his irresistible arm. He had watched the spot, he had watched the hour, which the enemy seem not to have watched, and he came upon them at the very moment when he was able to strike a deadly blow with most effect, and at the same time once more to avoid the necessity of meeting his lord face to face in battle. William knew every movement of the enemy; when the right time was come, he marched forth from Falaise with such troops as he had kept around him, and summoned all the peasantry of the district to join them. They came, armed as they were able to arm themselves, with clubs, darts, anything; no sort of warrior, no sort of weapon, was unfit to bear a part in the enterprise [Sidenote: BATTLE OF VARAVILLE. August, 1058.] which William now designed. He marched in stealth up the valley by Bavent, and reached Varaville in the very nick of time.[500] The King and his vanguard were, as we have seen, far ahead; the long baggage train, rich with Norman spoil, and the whole rear-guard of the army, were still on the left bank. The tide was flowing in, and it soon became impossible to cross. The French stood in perplexity, one half of the army finding itself utterly cut off from the other half.[501] In a moment Duke William was upon them. Every weapon known to Norman warfare was at once in its fullest activity; the lance and the sword of the knight on his destrier, the club and dart of the peasant on foot, [Sidenote: First mention of the Norman archers.] were all alike plied against the unlucky Frenchmen. And along with these older arms, we now hear for the first time of another weapon, destined to be, above all others, terrible and deadly upon a more awful field. For the first time in our story, the thunder-shower of the Norman arrows[502] is heard of as carrying dismay and slaughter among the ranks of the enemy. And no enemy could well be more helpless than those on whom knights, archers, clubmen, were now called on to display their prowess. Encumbered as they were with their baggage train, huddled together on the long, narrow, neglected[503] causeway, resistance [Sidenote: The French rear-guard cut to pieces.] was almost impossible. A desperate effort carried the foremost among them to the banks of the river; but, except to skilful swimmers, the ford was impassable because of the tide. Multitudes fell into the water and were drowned; the surface of the Dive was soon covered with floating bodies and harness.[504] Others strove to escape how they might among the ditches and paths of the marshy shore. They cast away their weapons, and blundered on hopelessly through the unknown and treacherous country. The Normans, knowing the ground, followed, and cut them down without mercy. Of the whole rear-guard of the French army not a man is said to have escaped. All were slain, or taken captive, or swept away by the waters.

[Sidenote: King Henry sees the slaughter from the hills.]

It must not be forgotten that all this went on under the eye of the King of the French—and doubtless of his Angevin ally also—who was looking down from the high ground which the vanguard had already reached. Beneath him in full view lay the plain, the causeway, the stream, the marshes, where the work of death was going on. Like Xerxes, Henry beheld his subjects cut in pieces before his eyes; but unlike Xerxes, he was at least eager to go to their help. The Norman poet tells us how the King saw his men speared and shot down, some struggling in the waters, some bound and borne off as captives.[505] His limbs trembled, his face was hot with rage, he was eager and yet unable to strike a blow or take any step for the rescue of his unfortunate soldiers. In a moment of desperation he proposed to descend the hill, and to seek for some other spot where he might cross the river, and do something at least to avenge, if not to rescue, his rear-guard.[506] But he had men around him who knew the hopelessness of [Sidenote: His retreat.] such an attempt. Their counsels persuaded him to submit to a fate which he could not resist, and to march with all speed out of the Norman land with the half of his army which was still left to him.

[Sidenote: Peace with France; Tillières restored to Normandy.]

The battle, or rather massacre, of Varaville was the last act of the wars between William and Henry. The King was now growing old, and he might well think that he had had enough of Norman warfare. He presently brought himself to ask for peace, and to offer as its price the restoration of the famous fortress of which he had deprived William in his childhood. The terms were accepted; peace was made, and Tillières, so long lost to Normandy, became [Sidenote: Death of Henry. 1060.] once more a bulwark of the Norman frontier.[507] Henry did not long survive this happy ending of this long struggle. Two years afterwards he died. His death was attributed to poison, seemingly accidentally administered.[508] He left his Crown to an heir still under age. The mother of the new [Sidenote: His Russian marriage.] King had been brought from a distant land. Henry saw the difficulty of finding any wife among the princely houses of Western Europe who was not related to him within the forbidden degrees; he was specially warned by the troubles which his father had undergone through his first uncanonical marriage.[509] He therefore sought for a bride in a land among whose princes there was little fear of any kindred or affinity with a King of the French. He married Anne, the daughter of the Russian Duke Yaroslaf.[510] The princes of Russia boasted of a connexion with the Emperors of the East;[511] and the happy ambiguity of the Macedonian name[512] had led the great dynasty which was founded by a Slavonian groom to identify itself with the ancient Kings of Pella and Edessa. The Russian princess brought with her into France the ancient Macedonian name of Philip, and her son became the first of a long line of Kings, princes, and nobles, through whom a name hitherto unknown to Western Europe became one of [Sidenote: Coronation and accession of Philip the First. 1059–60.] the most renowned in French history. In the last year of his father’s lifetime, the young Philip was, according to several precedents, crowned at Rheims, and the ceremony was attended by most of the great vassals of his Kingdom.[513] We do not however hear whether the Duke of the Normans so far honoured his youthful overlord as to make one of the illustrious assemblage. But the ties between Normandy and France were now for a time drawn much more closely than before. Henry had chosen the nearest ally of William as the guardian of his son and as the [Sidenote: Baldwin of Flanders Regent of France.] Regent of his Kingdom. During the minority of the young King, the government of the royal domain was placed in the hands of William’s father-in-law, the “mighty Marquess”[514] of Flanders. Baldwin honourably fulfilled his trust towards France, and we need not say that he kept the peace towards Normandy.[515]

The same year which beheld the death of King Henry beheld also the death of the most inveterate enemy of Normandy among his great vassals. The Angevin chroniclers significantly cut short the Norman warfare of Geoffrey Martel, a sure sign that, however much Norman vanity may have exaggerated in detail, the general result of the struggle cannot have been greatly misrepresented. [Sidenote: Last days and death of Geoffrey Martel. 1060.] Geoffrey’s last days seem to have been clouded over by ill-success in other quarters. He indeed recovered the city of Nantes from Hoel of Britanny.[516] But we also read of his being besieged by his step-son, Peter or William of Poitiers, in the castle of Saumur, on the steep which looks down, not on the Varenne or on the Mayenne, but on the mighty Loire itself.[517] The siege was raised through the sudden death of the Aquitanian prince,[518] and we hear of no further [Sidenote: His dominions divided between his nephews, Geoffrey and Fulk Rechin.] exploit on the part of Geoffrey of the Hammer. On the day before his death he assumed the monastic habit,[519] and, as he left no sons, he divided his dominions between the two sons of his sister Hermengarde, the wife of Alberic, Count of the Gatinois. To his namesake Geoffrey, surnamed the Bearded, he left Anjou and Saintogne, while Fulk Rechin, already known to us as one of our authorities for Angevin history, received the city and county of Tours.[520] Normandy was thus delivered from both her enemies. In her next warfare we shall find her seeking, not merely to defend her borders, but to extend them.

[Sidenote: Coincidence of the Battle of Varaville with Harold’s journey. 1058.]

It may be worth notice that the great invasion of Normandy which ended, so disastrously for the French, in the rout of Varaville, happened in the very year in which there is every reason to believe that Earl Harold made his remarkable journey to examine into the political state of Gaul.[521] His inquiries might perhaps lead him to different conclusions, according as his visit happened before or after the utter discomfiture of Henry and Geoffrey. Yet the campaign of Varaville could do little more than add one more to the many proofs that William was a foe whom no [Sidenote: Harold’s possible negotiations.] enemy could afford to neglect. I have already hinted that the mysterious words of Eadward’s Biographer[522] might perhaps be taken as implying that Harold sought the friendship, if not the actual alliance, of the King or of some of his great vassals, as a support in case of any hostile movements on the part of Normandy. If this be so, we may see in the almost contemporary deaths of so many French princes a reason why such negotiations bore [Sidenote: Changes in the aspect of Gaul by the deaths of Geoffrey Martel and King Henry.] no fruit. King Henry, Geoffrey Martel, William of Aquitaine, all died within two years after Harold’s journey. By their deaths the political state of Gaul was altogether changed, and changed in a direction altogether favourable to William of Normandy. William of Aquitaine was the only one of the three who had a successor at all likely to act as a check upon any designs of his Norman namesake. Guy, Geoffrey, or William, whichever we are to call the prince who made so hasty a flight from Moulins,[523] was not likely to cherish much love for William of Normandy, but he seems to have been mainly occupied by wars with Anjou, and by an expedition into Spain, in which last, by some means or other, he was followed by Norman warriors.[524] In any case his solitary help could be of little service. If Harold hoped to meet any attack on England on the part of William by a diversion in his rear in the form of a joint attack of his continental neighbours, the chance of organizing such a confederacy died with King Henry and Geoffrey Martel. Under the Regency of Baldwin the Court of Paris became the closest ally of Normandy, and the new Count of Anjou seems to have been fully occupied at home. We hear of him chiefly as engaged in asserting certain novel claims over the Abbey of Marmoutiers,[525] and as having, at the very crisis of the fate of England, to defend his dominions against his brother Fulk.[526] He was therefore by no means likely to bear a part in any schemes of policy which reached [Sidenote: England’s lack of continental allies.] as far as Britain.[527] The death of the Emperor Henry a few years earlier had deprived England of another friend. She had in short no continental ally left except Swend of Denmark. I merely throw out these remarks as vague hints on a very obscure subject; but it certainly is striking that the intentionally mystified language of the Biographer should admit of an interpretation which falls in so well with the state of things at the particular moment of Harold’s journey.

§ 3. _The War of Maine. 1060–1064._

The main interest of this period of William’s reign gathers round his great conquest of the Cenomannian County and City. But before we enter on the narrative of that campaign, a few events in the internal history of his Duchy may be usefully cleared out of the way.

William was already beginning to show himself, in the words of the English Chronicler, beyond measure stark to all who withstood his will.[528] The unrestrained exercise [Sidenote: Banishment of various Norman nobles.] of power seems to have wrought its usual bad effect. We now begin to find a prince who had hitherto been distinguished for clemency to rebellious enemies meting out, to say the least, somewhat hasty sentences against some of the chief men of his dominions. We presently find him giving ground for suspicions, unfounded as they doubtless were, that he had learned to stoop to the base trade of the poisoner.[529] Several of his nobles were banished about this time, and every account seems to describe them as banished without just cause, through the false accusations of envious persons. Among these false accusers Roger of Montgomery and his wicked wife Mabel stand pre-eminent.[530] The first recorded victim was Ralph of Toesny, whom we have seen as, according to one account, the bearer of the news of the defeat of Mortemer to the French King.[531] He was banished; but he must have returned within a few years, and he had his share in the Conquest of England. We may say the same of Hugh of Grantmesnil, one of the joint founders of Saint Evroul.[532] The banishment of Arnold of Escalfoy is not wonderful, as both he and his uncle Robert seem to have ventured on open rebellion. They seem even to have taken the Angevin side against their country, either in the wars which have been already described, or in some of the border skirmishes which no doubt still continued. Robert defended his castle against [Sidenote: Mysterious death of Robert the son of Geroy. 1060.] the Duke, and he died by a strange and suspicious death in the year which carried off King Henry and Count Geoffrey. He sat one day in a merry mood by his winter fire with his wife Adelaide, a kinswoman of the Duke. She had four apples in her hand; he snatched two from her in jest; he [Sidenote: Adventures and death of Arnold of Escalfoy. 1063.] ate of them and died.[533] His nephew Arnold succeeded him, and for three years he carried on a devastating warfare in the neighbourhood of Lisieux.[534] He then made peace with the Duke, on condition of going to the wars in Apulia.[535] After a while he returned, but only to die by poison administered to him through the plots of the ruthless daughter of William Talvas.[536]

[Sidenote: Banishment of Abbot Robert of Saint Evroul. 1063.]

Another person who now fell under the Duke’s displeasure was Robert of Grantmesnil, brother of Hugh, and co-founder, and now himself Abbot, of Saint Evroul. He was now deposed and banished by William. I forbear to enter on the interminable details of the negotiations for his restoration, from which I shrank at an earlier stage of my Norman history.[537] But two points are of importance. It is made a distinct charge against William that he ventured to depose a churchman without the sentence of any ecclesiastical Synod, and seemingly without any form of trial at all.[538] One account also distinctly says that the Duke’s motive was hostility to Robert’s family.[539] It is hard to judge on such slight evidence; but it is to be noticed, on the one hand, that William’s special panegyrist is silent on the whole subject of these banishments, and on the other that William’s ecclesiastical government is the part of his character in which we should least readily look for an unworthy motive.

[Sidenote: Synod of Caen. 1061. Ordinance of the Curfew.]

The fortunes of an Abbot bring us once more within the ecclesiastical circle. In the year after King Henry’s death, in a Synod held at Caen by the Duke’s authority, and attended by Bishops, Abbots, and Barons, it was ordered that a bell should be rung every evening, at hearing of which prayer should be offered, and all people should get within their houses and shut their doors.[540] This odd mixture of piety and police seems to be the origin of the famous and misrepresented curfew. Whatever was its object, it was at least not ordained as any special hardship on William’s English subjects.

[Sidenote: The CONQUEST of MAINE. 1063.]

We now come to that great acquisition of William’s arms and policy which ranks in the annals of his reign next to the Conquest of England itself. The various fortunes, the takings and the retakings, of the city of Le Mans and its County, form a constantly recurring subject throughout the remaining history of William and of his sons. And the object struggled for was worthy of the [Sidenote: Old Norman claims over Maine.] struggle. The land and city over which William was now about to extend his long dormant claims was a prize which became one of the proudest jewels in his continental coronet. The Duke of the Normans, even the King of the English, thought it no scorn to add to those loftier titles a third which dated from this earlier conquest. [Sidenote: Beginning of Norman aggrandizement on the Continent.] As Prince or Count of the Cenomannians, William began the first of those stages of continental aggrandizement, which, before another century had passed, extended the sway of the sovereign of England and Normandy from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees, and made him master of the mouths of the Loire and the Garonne no less than of those of the Seine and the Thames. The work had been begun by the conquest of Domfront and Ambrières; it was now to be extended over the whole of the land which lies between [Sidenote: History of Maine.] Normandy and Anjou. A long history, princely, municipal, and episcopal, forms the annals of the Cenomannian [Sidenote: The ancient Cenomanni in Gaul and Italy.] state and city. The Cenomannian tribe[541] was illustrious in the earliest legendary history of Gaul; it shares with the Senones the credit of that ancient colonization in Italy which brought Rome so near to her downfall.[542] But it had no part in the actual beleaguering of Rome by the Senonian [Sidenote: Their close connexion with Rome.] Brennus. The Cenomanni beyond the Alps were ever found among the faithful allies of Rome, just as their mother state remains to this day proud of the relics of Roman dominion. Even during the storm of the Hannibalian War, the Cenomanni remained faithful to the Republic.[543] Their metropolis is perhaps less prominent in the pages of Cæsar than we might have looked for; still the name [Sidenote: The Cenomanni of Gaul support Vercingetorix.] of the tribe occurs among those who sent their contingents to the host of Vercingetorix.[544] Under the Roman domination, we are told that Cenomannia was among the first parts of Gaul to receive the Christian faith, and the local [Sidenote: Early preaching of Christianity.] legend traces that line of Bishops which became so famous in after days up to the very days of the Apostles. [Sidenote: Succession of Bishops of Le Mans.] In the days of Nerva and Trajan the Cenomannian Church was founded by Saint Julian, whose name still lives as the patron of the cathedral of Le Mans. Unlike most of his [Sidenote: Legend of Saint Julian.] apostolic brethren, the crown of martyrdom was not destined for him. He died in peace, having fully organized the local Church, and having been aided in all things by his convert the local Prince Defensor.[545] In this last mythical personage we of course see a personification of the _Defensores Civitatis_, the local Tribunes, under the later [Sidenote: Special ecclesiastical and popular elements in the history of Maine.] Roman and early Frankish rulers.[546] This early friendship between the Bishop and the local magistrate not inaptly prefigures a state of things with which William himself had to contend. The vast power of the local Church sometimes combined with the popular element of the city to [Sidenote: Maine under the Frankish Kings; a march against Bretons and Northmen.] withstand the more distant sovereign.[547] I pass lightly over the days of the Merwings and the early Karlings. In those times the name of Cenomannia, city and district, appears over and over again, as a post of importance, an outpost against Breton enemies and afterwards against Scandinavian invaders.[548] It was not uncommonly placed in the hands of members of the royal house.[549] But these intermediate times do less to illustrate the events with which we are immediately concerned than the history or legends of the earliest days. These last, mythical as they may be, are at least happily invented to adorn the beginnings of a state which so long remained at once so intensely Roman and so intensely ecclesiastical.

[Sidenote: Maine in the tenth century.]

The history of Maine and Le Mans with which we are immediately concerned begins in the tenth century. We have [Sidenote: Alleged grants to Rolf, 924; to Hugh the Great, 924; and to Geoffrey Grisegonelle, 978?] seen[550] that the Norman Dukes put forward some shadow of a claim to Maine by virtue of a grant in the days of King Rudolf, at the same time that Rolf obtained his second grant, that of the district of Bayeux.[551] But the chronicler who records this fact records also a grant of earlier date, but within the same year, to Hugh the Great of Paris.[552] A grant to Geoffrey Grisegonelle of Anjou is also, on no less authority than that of Count Fulk Nerra himself, attributed, by some strange confusion of chronology, to King [Sidenote: Maine part of the Duchy of France.] Robert.[553] On the whole, there can be little doubt that Maine formed a part of the great Duchy of France, and there is still less doubt as to the rivalry and hatred which reigned between the Angevin Counts and the dynasty which we find established in Maine towards the end of [Sidenote: Rivalry of the Counts and Bishops.] the tenth century. There is as little doubt as to the position of the local Bishops, always at variance, sometimes at war, with the local Counts, but keeping up a close connexion both with the King and with the [Sidenote: Count David. 922–970?] Counts of Anjou. I do not presume to decide whether the Hugh, the David, and the Hugh-David, whom we [Sidenote: 955–1015?] hear of as reigning in Maine in the course of the tenth century, and as claiming a descent from Charles the Great, were really one prince, or two, or three.[554] But there is no doubt that a Hugh, whether surnamed after the Hebrew King or not, was reigning late in the tenth and early in the eleventh century, and that he was the father of [Sidenote: Sainfred Bishop of Le Mans. 960–994.] the better known Count Herbert. He had great disputes with Bishop Sainfred of the house of Belesme, a Prelate of whom the chronicler of the Cenomanniam Bishops draws [Sidenote: Fulk Nerra overruns Maine. 987–994?] no favourable picture.[555] He is charged with wasting the revenues of his see in grants to Fulk of Anjou and to Burchard Count of Vendôme, in order to gain their help against the nearer enemy.[556] It was perhaps through the instigation of the Prelate that Fulk invaded Maine, and brought the land and its ruler into vassalage, if not into [Sidenote: Hugh escapes from Tillières. 996–1015.] actual subjection.[557] Hugh appears also as an enemy of Normandy, as an ally of Odo of Chartres in an attempt on Tillières, and as escaping only by a mean disguise from the pursuit of its valiant defenders.[558] This must have been towards the end of his days, as the foundation of Tillières [Sidenote: Herbert Wake-Dog Count 1015–1036.] comes within the reign of Richard the Good. The enmity between the temporal and spiritual chiefs of Maine went on during the reign of Hugh’s famous son Herbert, and [Sidenote: Avesgaud Bishop 994–1036.] during the long episcopate of Avesgaud, the nephew and successor of Sainfred, and like him a member of the border [Sidenote: Herbert wars with the House of Belesme.] house of Belesme.[559] With that house, a house loyal to neither of its lords and terrible to all its neighbours, Count Herbert had much warfare, and we have come across more than one incidental mention of those wars, as affording scope for the valour and faithfulness of the house of Geroy.[560] The impression given by these stories is that the mighty Lords Marchers found the Cenomannian [Sidenote: He disputes with Bishop Avesgaud.] Count at least their match. The ecclesiastical historian implies that this warfare began by William of Belesme coming to the help of his brother the Bishop. It is certain that Avesgaud had constantly to contend against Count Herbert both by temporal and by spiritual arms, and that he called in against him the help both of spiritual and of temporal allies. At one time we find him defending the stronghold of La Fertè Bernard[561] against the Count, who could dislodge him only by the help of a Breton [Sidenote: Fulbert of Chartres excommunicates Herbert.] force obtained from Count Alan.[562] At another time he called in the help of the holy Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, the great letter-writer of the age, who, on what principle of ecclesiastical law it is not easy to see, addressed an epistle of excommunication to the Count of Maine, which brought about a temporary peace.[563] But Herbert was not afraid to measure himself against a much more dangerous enemy. It was in warfare against Fulk of Anjou, whose authority he cast aside, that he won his surname of [Sidenote: His name of Wake-Dog, from his nightly raids against Anjou.] _Wake-Dog_.[564] So constant were the nightly raids of Count Herbert that, not only in the open country, in the flat land of Anjou, but in the fortified towns of the province, nay in the city itself, in Black Angers on its steep by the Mayenne, men and dogs were ever on the alert, and ventured not to slumber.[565] These exploits must belong to the later years of his reign; for, at its beginning, [Sidenote: His share in the battle of Pontlevois. 1016.] we find him acting as an ally or vassal of Anjou at the battle of Pontlevois against Odo of Chartres.[566] Indeed the Angevin writers allow that the victory on their side was in a great measure owing to the courage and conduct of [Sidenote: Fulk imprisons Herbert at Saintes. 1026–1028.] Herbert and his followers.[567] Ten years later, we find Fulk, according to the approved custom of his house, dealing with Herbert much as his son dealt with Theobald of Chartres and with William of Aquitaine.[568] He beguiled him into a visit at Saintes, and there kept him in ward two years till he agreed to the hard conditions on which liberty was offered.[569] After an active reign of twenty-one years, Herbert died. His daughter Biota became the wife of Walter of Mantes, the elder son of Drogo and [Sidenote: Hugh. (1035–1051).] Godgifu, and nephew of King Eadward of England.[570] His young son Hugh succeeded him in the County of Maine, [Sidenote: Regency of Herbert Bacco.] seemingly under the guardianship of a great uncle, Herbert Bacco.[571] Bishop Avesgaud died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and was succeeded in the almost hereditary Bishoprick [Sidenote: Gervase Bishop. 1036–1058.] by his nephew Gervase.[572] This Prelate was the godfather of the young Count, and he is described as his defender against his faithless uncle as well as the defender [Sidenote: He commends the Bishoprick to Geoffrey of Anjou.] of the rights of his own see.[573] He took one step however than which none could be more fatal, and one which illustrates the peculiar position of the Bishoprick. It would seem that, after all the grants that had been made of the temporal sovereignty of Maine, the royal rights over the Church of Le Mans were still in the hands of the King. Whether he held them strictly as King, or as Duke of the French, was now no longer a practical question.[574] In either case the Bishop still held, not of the local Count but of his overlord at Paris. In short, throughout the territories which had formed part of the Duchy of France, the surrender of the royal rights, especially in ecclesiastical matters, was by no means so complete as it was in the great Duchies north and south of the royal dominions.[575] The Count of Anjou or of Maine did not, after all, possess the same undivided and uninterrupted sovereignty within his own states which belonged to the Duke of the Normans. Bishop Gervase, a vassal of the King, unable to defend himself against his neighbour the Count or the Count’s guardian, receiving no help from his own lord, petitioned the King to grant the royal rights over the see, the rights of advocacy and [Sidenote: Herbert Bacco driven out and Hugh restored.] patronage, to the Count of Anjou for life.[576] The grant was made; greater strife than before arose between the Bishop and the guardian uncle; a popular movement, headed by the Prelate, expelled Herbert Bacco, and restored the young Count Hugh to his lawful rights.[577] The Prelate’s next business was to seek, like Jehoiada of old, a wife for the prince whom he had taken under his [Sidenote: Marriage of Hugh.] guardianship. He found one in the sister of Count Theobald,[578] the widow of that Count Alan of Britanny whom we have seen die of poison while besieging a Norman castle.[579] The marriage was supposed to be in some way dangerous to the interests of the Count of Anjou, and Martel now poured forth his whole wrath upon the [Sidenote: Bishop Gervase imprisoned by Geoffrey Martel. 1044–1051.] Bishop who had advised it. By some of his usual tricks, he gained possession of the Bishop’s person, and kept him in prison for seven years. As was usual with the prisoners of an Angevin Count, he had the option of obtaining his liberty by the surrender of some part of his possessions. The ransom demanded by Geoffrey was the surrender of a strong castle which was valiantly defended by the [Sidenote: His liberation demanded by the Council of Rheims. 1049.] Bishop’s soldiers.[580] A demand of the Council of Rheims for the liberation of the Prelate had no effect on the obdurate mind of Geoffrey.[581] Gervase seems all this while to have looked forward to deliverance through his godson, we can hardly say his sovereign, the Count of Maine. But at last he heard that Hugh was dead, [Sidenote: Geoffrey Martel occupies Le Mans. 1051–1061.] that Geoffrey had taken possession of Le Mans, that the citizens had received him joyfully, and had driven out the widow and children of Hugh.[582] Gervase now thought it was time to yield; he gave up his castle, [Sidenote: Release of Gervase; he takes refuge in Normandy. 1061.] but even now he only obtained his freedom on condition of never setting foot in his own city during Geoffrey’s life-time.[583] Banished in this way, he sought for shelter at the court of the Duke of the Normans.[584] It does not seem that William actively interfered on his behalf, but he gave him an honourable reception, and retained him as his guest, till a prospect was opened to the homeless Prelate of obtaining at once a higher and a more peaceful position [Sidenote: Gervase Archbishop of Rheims.] among the Prelates of Gaul. While Gervase tarried in Normandy, the primatial see of Rheims became vacant by the death of its Archbishop Guy. Gervase now obtained the first place among the Prelates and Princes of the Parisian Kingdom, and it fell to his lot to pour the oil of Remigius and Hlodwig on the head of the youthful Philip.[585]

[Sidenote: Death of Geoffrey. 1060. Herbert’s hopes revive.]

The affairs of Normandy and Maine have now become directly connected, and the connexion between the two countries becomes closer at every moment. The death of Geoffrey seemed to open to Herbert a chance of recovering the dominions which he had never possessed.[586] The years during which Le Mans was occupied by Geoffrey had been spent by the widow and children of Hugh in some part of [Sidenote: Herbert’s three sisters.] Germany.[587] Besides Herbert, Hugh had three daughters, whose marriages and betrothals are of no small moment in the history. One, Gersendis, was first married to Theobald of Chartres.[588] By him she was divorced, and this divorce [Sidenote: Gersendis, married, 1st, to Theobald of Chartres; 2nd, to Azo of Liguria.] was one of the many irregularities in that way which called down the censures of Pope Leo and the Fathers of Rheims.[589] She then made a more splendid alliance beyond the Alps. She became the second wife of the famous Azo, Marquess of Este and Liguria, renowned in his own day for his wealth, his good fortune, and for attaining, though not till long after the marriage and the death of Gersendis, the age of a hundred years.[590] By his first wife Cunegund he became the ancestor of the House of Brunswick, and the children of Gersendis of Maine produced the long line of Lords, Marquesses, and Dukes of Ferrara and Modena. How this marriage affected the history of Maine, of Normandy, and of England, we shall Another sister mother of Helias of La Flèche. [Sidenote: Another sister mother of Helias of La Flèche.] see at a later stage. Another sister married John of La Flèche, and by him became the mother of three sons. One of them bore the familiar Teutonic name of Gilbert; the two others were honoured with the patriarchal appellations of Enoch and Elijah, and the bearer of the last name, under the modified form of Helias or Helie, plays an important [Sidenote: Margaret.] part in the history of the next generation.[591] Margaret, the other daughter, who must have been many years younger than Gersendis, and of whose beauty and virtues we read rapturous descriptions, was still unmarried.[592] Herbert now [Sidenote: Herbert applies to Duke William. 1061.] addressed himself to the Duke of the Normans. William’s own days of trial and persecution were now over; he had come forth honourably out of all his difficulties; he had smitten all his enemies at home and abroad; he was now well fitted to appear either as a protector or as a conqueror. Moreover he was actually in possession of part of the Cenomannian County; all his conquests up to this time, Domfront, Ambrières, and the Rock of Mabel,[593] had been made at what might be called the expense of Herbert himself. There was no great chance of recovering them from the prince who had so vigorously clutched the straw at the moment of his birth,[594] and who in his later days as firmly refused to take off his clothes before he went to bed. But, at any rate, more might be gained by way of submission [Sidenote: He _commends_ himself to William.] than by way of aggression. Herbert therefore _commended_[595] himself to William; he became his man; he engaged to hold Maine as a fief of Normandy, according to the ancient grant which Rolf had received from King Rudolf.[596] Special terms, all favourable to the lord, were attached to the [Sidenote: Terms of the homage; William to have Maine, if Herbert died childless, and Margaret to marry Robert.] homage. If Herbert died childless, Duke William’s lordship was to be converted into immediate sovereignty; the Duke of the Normans was to become the Count of the Cenomannians.[597] But, in order that the principality might still remain to the descendants of its ancient lords, Herbert’s sister Margaret was to be given in marriage to William’s young son Robert.[598] William himself would thus be the only interloper; Robert would reign in right of his wife, and in the next generation, a descendant, if only in the female line, of Herbert Wake-Dog would again rule upon the steep of Le Mans.[599]

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

[Sidenote: William’s preparations for war.]

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

[Sidenote: Position and history of Le Mans.]

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

[Sidenote: Submission of Walter.]

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

[Sidenote: Geoffrey of Mayenne still holds out.]

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

[Sidenote: Succession of deaths in the House of Maine.]

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

[Sidenote: Importance of the conquest of Maine; its connexion with the conquest of England.]

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

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

[Sidenote: Position of William and Harold.]

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

[Sidenote: Contradictory nature of the different stories.]

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: Harold’s splendid reception at Rouen.]

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

[Sidenote: The Breton war; uncertainty of our accounts.]

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

[Sidenote: Norman accounts of Breton manners.]

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

[Sidenote: The Castle of Saint James founded by William.]

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

[Sidenote: Character of eastern Britanny; the language now no longer Celtic.]

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

[Sidenote: Flight of Conan.]

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

[Sidenote: Probability that Harold accompanied William in more than one expedition.]

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

[Sidenote: William attacks the town—employment of fire.]

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

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

[Sidenote: Form of the oath, said to be on the relics of the saints.]

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

[Sidenote: Harold returns to England, perhaps leaving Wulfnoth as a hostage.]

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

[Sidenote: Impossibility of fixing the details, but some groundwork of truth in the story.]

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

[Sidenote: the place,]

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

[Sidenote: or the nature, of the oath.]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: William’s apparent motives—to entrap Harold into breach of his oath.]

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

[Sidenote: Probable real nature of the oath.]

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

[Sidenote: Case of an oath on relics.]

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

[Sidenote: Harold’s sin lay not in breaking the oath, but in taking it.]

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

[Sidenote: Utter obscurity of the whole matter.]

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

[Sidenote: Summary.]

I may seem, in the course of this long chapter, to have wandered far away from Harold and from England. But the whole career of the Conqueror is an essential part of my subject. Every step in that career is a step towards the great enterprise of his life. Every event which illustrates his character belongs alike to the history of both the lands over which he ruled. We have now seen him completely establish himself within his own Duchy; we have seen him successful alike against domestic and against foreign enemies; we have seen him extend his dominions by a continental conquest which seemed almost designed as a forestalling of his coming conquest beyond the sea. We again entered on the direct stream of English history, when we reached that obscure and mysterious event, which, in some way or another, placed the hero of England in his power. Our long episode is therefore over. We return to the point where we left the affairs of England. Harold, in Norman eyes the faithless vassal of William, is chosen and consecrated to the Crown which William claimed as his own. We have now to see what steps William took, when the news reached him of what he deemed, or professed to deem, so great a wrong. A few bootless attempts at negotiation alone separate us from actual wars and rumours of wars. A few more pages, and we shall have fairly entered on the central scene of the great tragedy. We shall soon have to look on the last warfare of Teutonic England under the King of her own choice. We shall soon have to behold the twofold invasion, the twofold struggle, the last and greatest victory of Harold, his first and his last defeat.

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