HOW KING WILLIAM RULED THE LAND.
=1. William’s Government.=--We have thus seen how a foreign prince
won, and how he kept, the kingdom of England, and how little, after he
had once really won it, his rule was disturbed either by revolts at
home or by attacks from abroad. We now ask, What was the nature of his
government in England all this time? The answer must be that with which
we started at first, namely that his government was different both from
that of a lawful native king and from that of a conqueror who had come
in without any show of right. William was no wanton oppressor, and he
no doubt honestly wished to rule his kingdom as well as he could. He
even tried to learn English, that he might the better do his duty as
an English king. He professed to rule according to the law of King
Edward, that is, to rule as well and justly as King Edward had done.
And in fact he made very few changes in the old laws. The changes which
began with his reign were mostly those gradual changes which could not
fail to happen when all circumstances were so greatly changed. The laws
might still be the same; but their working could not be the same, when
the king was a stranger, and when all the greatest estates and offices
had passed into the hands of strangers. By the end of William’s reign
there were very few Englishmen holding great estates; there was no
English earl and only one English bishop. Again, William’s government
was much stronger than that of any king who had been before him; he was
better able to enforce the law, and he did enforce it very strictly.
The English writers give him all praise for making good peace in the
land, that is for severely punishing all wrong-doers. A king who did
this in those days was forgiven much that was bad in other ways. The
special complaint which men made against William’s government was that
he was greedy and covetous, and laid on heavy taxes which men deemed
to be wrongful. This is no doubt true; but it is to be remembered that
regular taxation was then coming in as something new, and that in no
age are men fond of having their money taken from them.
=2. William’s Laws.=--William however did make some new laws. These
laws were solemnly enacted in the regular assemblies of the kingdom;
but then those assemblies were gradually changing from gatherings of
Englishmen into gatherings of Normans. He renewed, as the saying went,
Edward’s Law, with such changes as he said were for the good of the
English people. Some of these changes were made merely for the time,
while there was still a distinction between English and _French_. This
last is the word commonly used to take in both the Normans and all
the other French-speaking people whom William had brought with him.
Frenchmen who had settled in King Edward’s time were to reckon as
Englishmen. Normans and Englishmen were to live in peace, but as the
Normans were often killed privily, a special law was made for their
protection. If the murderer was not to be found, the hundred was to
pay. And for some purposes each nation was to keep its own law. Both
English and Normans used, in doubtful cases, to appeal to the judgement
of God; but the Normans sought to find out the truth by single combat
and the English by the ordeal of hot iron. William allowed both ways,
and ordered that each man might keep the custom of his own nation. He
forbade the slave-trade by which men were sold out of the land, chiefly
to Ireland. This had been forbidden by earlier kings also, but William
himself could not wholly get rid of the evil practice. He forbade the
punishment of death; criminals might be blinded or mutilated, but
not hanged or otherwise killed. This rule he most strictly observed
himself, save only in the case of Waltheof. And just at the end of his
reign, in 1086, in a great assembly at Salisbury, he made what was
in the end the most important law of all. Every man in the land, of
whatever other lord he might be the man, swore to be faithful to King
William in all things, even against his other lord. Of how great moment
this law was we shall see presently.
=3. Changes in the Church.=--Another law of William’s had reference to
the affairs of the Church. It had hitherto been the custom in England
that both civil and ecclesiastical matters should be dealt with in the
general assemblies, both of the whole kingdom and of each shire. In
these last the earl and the bishop sat together. William now ordered
that the bishops should hold separate courts for Church causes. And
all through William’s reign Lanfranc held many synods of the clergy
distinct from the general assemblies of the kingdom. In these synods
bishops and abbots were deposed, and many new canons were made. This
was the time when Pope Gregory the Seventh was trying to forbid the
marriage of the clergy everywhere. In England the secular clergy were
very commonly married, both the parish priests and the canons in the
secular minsters. The rule which Lanfranc laid down was that no canon
should even keep a wife to whom he was already married; but the parish
priests were allowed to keep their wives, only the unmarried were not
to marry, nor was any married man to be ordained. Lanfranc was a monk
and a favourer of monks; new monasteries were founded, above all King
William’s abbey of the Battle, built, in discharge of his vow, on the
hill of Senlac, with its high altar on the spot where Harold’s standard
had stood. And monks were put into some churches where there had before
been secular priests. The ecclesiastical rule of William and Lanfranc
tended on the whole to greater learning and stricter discipline among
the clergy; but these gains were purchased by thrusting strangers into
all the chief places of the Church as well as of the State.
=4. The New Bishops and Abbots.=--We have said already that, as the
bishops and abbots died, or, when there was any pretext for so doing,
were deprived, strangers were appointed, always to the bishoprics,
commonly to the abbeys. Some of the foreign abbots were rude or fierce
men who despised the English. Such was Turold the stern abbot of
Peterborough, of whom we have already heard; such was Paul of Saint
Alban’s, who mocked at the old abbots and pulled down their tombs.
Such too was Thurstan of Glastonbury, who, when his monks refused
to sing the service after a new fashion, brought soldiers into the
church, who slew several of them. But for this King William deposed
him. But William’s prelates were not as a rule like these. Most of the
new bishops worked hard, according to their light, in building their
churches, and reforming their chapters and dioceses. Some of them, in
obedience to one of Lanfranc’s canons, moved their sees from smaller
towns to greater. Thus was the see of Lichfield moved to Chester
(afterwards to Coventry), that of Elmham to Thetford (afterwards to
Norwich), that of Sherborne to Old Salisbury, that of Dorchester to
Lincoln, and, after William’s death, that of Wells to Bath. Some of
the new prelates lived on good terms with their English neighbours;
there is a document in which Saint Wulfstan and his monks of Worcester
enter into a bond of spiritual brotherhood with several abbots, Norman
and English, and their monks. But besides this, Saint Wulfstan did one
good work which was his own. William’s law against the slave-trade was
at first no better kept than the same law when it was put forth by
earlier kings. The men of Bristol still went on selling English slaves
to Ireland. Bristol was in Wulfstan’s diocese. So he went thither many
times, and often preached to the people against their great sin, till
they left off sinning, at least for a while.
=5. King William and the Pope.=--While King William helped Lanfranc in
all his reforms, he would not give up a whit of the authority in the
affairs of the Church which had been held by the kings who had been
before him. Both the English kings and the Norman dukes were used to
invest bishops and abbots by giving them the ring and staff, the badges
of their office. When Hildebrand, who had so greatly favoured William’s
attack on England, became the famous Pope Gregory the Seventh, he tried
with all his might to take away this right from the Emperor and other
princes; but to the King of the English he never said a word about the
matter, and William himself, and for a while his successors after him,
went on investing the prelates just as had been done before. At one
time Pope Gregory wrote to the King, demanding that the payment of a
penny from each house, called _Romescot_ or _Peterpence_, should be
more regularly paid, and not only this, but that the King should become
his man for his kingdom. To this William wrote back that he would pay
the money, because the kings before him had paid it; but that, as no
King of the English before him had ever become the man of the Pope,
so neither would he. We must here remark, not only the way in which
William stood up for the rights of his crown even against so great a
Pope as Gregory, but also the way in which he puts himself exactly in
the place of the Old-English kings. Giving himself out as their lawful
successor, he claims all that was theirs, but he claims nothing more.
=6. The Imprisonment of Bishop Odo.=--There was another act of
William’s which shows how fully minded he was that no privilege and
no favour should hinder him either from carrying out his own will or
from doing whatever he thought was for the good order of his kingdom.
His brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, had got so puffed
up with pride and cruelty that he was no longer to be borne. We may
believe that the King was specially displeased with his doings in the
North when he was sent to punish the riot in which Bishop Walcher was
killed. At last, in 1082, Odo fancied that he was going to be made Pope
whenever Gregory died, and he got together a great company, or rather
an army, in England and Normandy, and was going to set out for Italy.
William was then in Normandy; but he came back to England, called an
assembly, and formally accused his brother. He said that Odo’s misdeeds
could no longer be borne; what would the Wise Men of the land counsel
him to do? The whole assembly held its peace. Then the King said he
must do justice, even against his brother; he bade his barons seize
him. But in those days it was thought a great matter to seize a bishop,
or indeed any priest. So no man stirred. Then King William seized his
brother with his own hands. Odo cried out that it was unlawful to seize
a bishop, and that none but the Pope could judge him. It is said that
Lanfranc had told the King what to say to this. William answered that
he did not seize the Bishop of Bayeux, but that he did seize the Earl
of Kent. So, whatever might become of the Bishop of Bayeux, the Earl of
Kent was kept in prison at Rouen. Pope Gregory pleaded earnestly that
he might be set free; but William kept him in ward till the day of his
own death.
=7. The New Forest.=--There is no doubt that William was always anxious
to do justice, whenever so to do did not hinder his own plans. And
this makes a great difference between him and mere oppressors who seem
really to like to do mischief. But we have seen that he could do very
dreadful things for the sake of his policy, and after a while he came
to do things only less dreadful for the sake of his own pleasure.
Nearly all men of that time were fond of hunting; William was specially
so. For his pleasure in this way he made a forest in Hampshire, not
far from his capital at Winchester, and, after eight hundred years,
that forest is called the _New Forest_ still. It must be remembered
that a _forest_ does not properly mean land all covered with wood.
There were sure to be wooded parts in a forest, but the whole was not
wood. A forest is land which is kept waste for hunting, and which is
put out of the common law of the land, and ruled by the special and
harsher law of the forest. Very hard punishments were decreed against
either man or beast that meddled with the king’s game. Now, to make or
enlarge his New Forest, William did not scruple to turn tilled land
into a wilderness, to take men’s land from them, and to destroy houses
and churches. Just as men thought that William lost his luck after the
death of Waltheof, so men thought that the New Forest brought a special
curse on his house. Certain it is that three of his house, his two sons
Richard and William, and his grandson a son of Robert, all died in a
strange way in the Forest.
=8. The Great Survey.=--One of the greatest acts of William’s reign,
and that by which we come to learn more about England in his time than
from any other source, was done in the assembly held at Gloucester at
the Christmas of 1085. Then the King had, as the Chronicle says, “very
deep speech with his Wise Men.” This “deep speech” in English is in
French _parlement_; and so we see how our assemblies came by their
later name. And the end of the deep speech was that commissioners were
sent through all England, save only the bishopric of Durham and the
earldom of Northumberland, to make a survey of the land. They were to
set down by whom every piece of land, great and small, was held then,
by whom it had been held in King Edward’s day, what it was worth now,
and what it had been worth in King Edward’s day. All this was written
in a book kept at Winchester, which men called _Domesday Book_. It is a
most wonderful record, and tells us more of the state of England just
at that moment than we know of it for a long time before or after. But
above all things we see how far the land had passed from Englishmen to
Normans and other strangers. There are only a very few Englishmen who
keep great estates at all like those of the chief Normans; but it is
quite a mistake to think that every Englishman was driven out of his
hearth and home. Crowds of Englishmen keep small estates or fragments
of great ones, sometimes held straight of the King, sometimes of a
Norman or an Englishman in William’s favour. And when any man, Norman
or English, had a claim against any other man, Norman or English, it
was fairly set down in the book, for the King to judge of.
=9. The Oath of Allegiance.=--Another act, no less important than the
great survey, followed close upon it. When the survey was made, and the
King knew how all the land in his kingdom was held, he called all the
landowners of any account to a great assembly at Salisbury in August
1086. There they all, of whatever lord they were the men, sware oaths
to King William and became his men. That is to say, William had made
up his mind to hinder in his kingdom the evils which were growing up
in other lands. Elsewhere it was generally held that a man was bound
to fight for his own lord, even against his overlord the king. In
this way the kingdom of Karolingia or France, and the kingdoms held
by the Emperors, broke up into principalities which were practically
independent. Most surely William himself would have been greatly amazed
if a man of the Duke of the Normans had refused to go against the King
of the French. But he took care that there should at least be no such
questions in the kingdom of England. Every man in William’s kingdom
became the King’s man first of all, and was to obey him against all
other men. There never was any one law made in England of greater
moment than this. England for a long time had been getting more united,
when the coming of William brought in two sets of tendencies. On the
one hand the general strength of his government, and the mere fact that
the land was conquered, did much to make the land yet more united. On
the other hand, many of William’s followers had brought with them the
new notions which caused other kingdoms to split in pieces. This wise
law settled that the first set of tendencies should get the upper hand,
and that the land should become more united by reason of the Conquest.
Since William’s day no man has ever thought of dividing the kingdom of
England.
=10. The Last Tax.=--The great survey and the oath of allegiance were
nearly the last acts of William in England. All that he did afterwards
was to lay on one more heavy tax. This was a tax of six shillings on
every hide of land, a tax which could be both more easily and more
fairly raised now that the survey was made. Men cried out more than
ever, and altogether it was a sad and strange time. There were bad
crops and fires and famines, and many chief men both in England and
Normandy died. And now the time came for the great ruler of both those
lands to die also.