ENGLAND UNDER WILLIAM THE FIRST, THE NORMAN CONQUEROR
Upon the ground where the brave Harold fell, William the Norman
afterwards founded an abbey, which, under the name of Battle Abbey, was
a rich and splendid place through many a troubled year, though now it
is a grey ruin overgrown with ivy. But the first work he had to do, was
to conquer the English thoroughly; and that, as you know by this time,
was hard work for any man.
He ravaged several counties; he burned and plundered many towns; he
laid waste scores upon scores of miles of pleasant country; he
destroyed innumerable lives. At length Stigand, Archbishop of
Canterbury, with other representatives of the clergy and the people,
went to his camp, and submitted to him. Edgar, the insignificant son of
Edmund Ironside, was proclaimed King by others, but nothing came of it.
He fled to Scotland afterwards, where his sister, who was young and
beautiful, married the Scottish King. Edgar himself was not important
enough for anybody to care much about him.
On Christmas Day, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey, under the
title of William the First; but he is best known as William the
Conqueror. It was a strange coronation. One of the bishops who
performed the ceremony asked the Normans, in French, if they would have
Duke William for their king? They answered Yes. Another of the bishops
put the same question to the Saxons, in English. They too answered Yes,
with a loud shout. The noise being heard by a guard of Norman
horse-soldiers outside, was mistaken for resistance on the part of the
English. The guard instantly set fire to the neighbouring houses, and a
tumult ensued; in the midst of which the King, being left alone in the
Abbey, with a few priests (and they all being in a terrible fright
together), was hurriedly crowned. When the crown was placed upon his
head, he swore to govern the English as well as the best of their own
monarchs. I dare say you think, as I do, that if we except the Great
Alfred, he might pretty easily have done that.
Numbers of the English nobles had been killed in the last disastrous
battle. Their estates, and the estates of all the nobles who had fought
against him there, King William seized upon, and gave to his own Norman
knights and nobles. Many great English families of the present time
acquired their English lands in this way, and are very proud of it.
But what is got by force must be maintained by force. These nobles were
obliged to build castles all over England, to defend their new
property; and, do what he would, the King could neither soothe nor
quell the nation as he wished. He gradually introduced the Norman
language and the Norman customs; yet, for a long time the great body of
the English remained sullen and revengeful. On his going over to
Normandy, to visit his subjects there, the oppressions of his
half-brother Odo, whom he left in charge of his English kingdom, drove
the people mad. The men of Kent even invited over, to take possession
of Dover, their old enemy Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had led the
fray when the Dover man was slain at his own fireside. The men of
Hereford, aided by the Welsh, and commanded by a chief named Edric the
Wild, drove the Normans out of their country. Some of those who had
been dispossessed of their lands, banded together in the North of
England; some, in Scotland; some, in the thick woods and marshes; and
whensoever they could fall upon the Normans, or upon the English who
had submitted to the Normans, they fought, despoiled, and murdered,
like the desperate outlaws that they were. Conspiracies were set on
foot for a general massacre of the Normans, like the old massacre of
the Danes. In short, the English were in a murderous mood all through
the kingdom.
King William, fearing he might lose his conquest, came back, and tried
to pacify the London people by soft words. He then set forth to repress
the country people by stern deeds. Among the towns which he besieged,
and where he killed and maimed the inhabitants without any distinction,
sparing none, young or old, armed or unarmed, were Oxford, Warwick,
Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln, York. In all these places, and
in many others, fire and sword worked their utmost horrors, and made
the land dreadful to behold. The streams and rivers were discoloured
with blood; the sky was blackened with smoke; the fields were wastes of
ashes; the waysides were heaped up with dead. Such are the fatal
results of conquest and ambition! Although William was a harsh and
angry man, I do not suppose that he deliberately meant to work this
shocking ruin, when he invaded England. But what he had got by the
strong hand, he could only keep by the strong hand, and in so doing he
made England a great grave.
Two sons of Harold, by name Edmund and Godwin, came over from Ireland,
with some ships, against the Normans, but were defeated. This was
scarcely done, when the outlaws in the woods so harassed York, that the
Governor sent to the King for help. The King despatched a general and a
large force to occupy the town of Durham. The Bishop of that place met
the general outside the town, and warned him not to enter, as he would
be in danger there. The general cared nothing for the warning, and went
in with all his men. That night, on every hill within sight of Durham,
signal fires were seen to blaze. When the morning dawned, the English,
who had assembled in great strength, forced the gates, rushed into the
town, and slew the Normans every one. The English afterwards besought
the Danes to come and help them. The Danes came, with two hundred and
forty ships. The outlawed nobles joined them; they captured York, and
drove the Normans out of that city. Then, William bribed the Danes to
go away; and took such vengeance on the English, that all the former
fire and sword, smoke and ashes, death and ruin, were nothing compared
with it. In melancholy songs, and doleful stories, it was still sung
and told by cottage fires on winter evenings, a hundred years
afterwards, how, in those dreadful days of the Normans, there was not,
from the River Humber to the River Tyne, one inhabited village left,
nor one cultivated field—how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where
the human creatures and the beasts lay dead together.
The outlaws had, at this time, what they called a Camp of Refuge, in
the midst of the fens of Cambridgeshire. Protected by those marshy
grounds which were difficult of approach, they lay among the reeds and
rushes, and were hidden by the mists that rose up from the watery
earth. Now, there also was, at that time, over the sea in Flanders, an
Englishman named Hereward, whose father had died in his absence, and
whose property had been given to a Norman. When he heard of this wrong
that had been done him (from such of the exiled English as chanced to
wander into that country), he longed for revenge; and joining the
outlaws in their camp of refuge, became their commander. He was so good
a soldier, that the Normans supposed him to be aided by enchantment.
William, even after he had made a road three miles in length across the
Cambridgeshire marshes, on purpose to attack this supposed enchanter,
thought it necessary to engage an old lady, who pretended to be a
sorceress, to come and do a little enchantment in the royal cause. For
this purpose she was pushed on before the troops in a wooden tower; but
Hereward very soon disposed of this unfortunate sorceress, by burning
her, tower and all. The monks of the convent of Ely near at hand,
however, who were fond of good living, and who found it very
uncomfortable to have the country blockaded and their supplies of meat
and drink cut off, showed the King a secret way of surprising the camp.
So Hereward was soon defeated. Whether he afterwards died quietly, or
whether he was killed after killing sixteen of the men who attacked him
(as some old rhymes relate that he did), I cannot say. His defeat put
an end to the Camp of Refuge; and, very soon afterwards, the King,
victorious both in Scotland and in England, quelled the last rebellious
English noble. He then surrounded himself with Norman lords, enriched
by the property of English nobles; had a great survey made of all the
land in England, which was entered as the property of its new owners,
on a roll called Doomsday Book; obliged the people to put out their
fires and candles at a certain hour every night, on the ringing of a
bell which was called The Curfew; introduced the Norman dresses and
manners; made the Normans masters everywhere, and the English,
servants; turned out the English bishops, and put Normans in their
places; and showed himself to be the Conqueror indeed.
But, even with his own Normans, he had a restless life. They were
always hungering and thirsting for the riches of the English; and the
more he gave, the more they wanted. His priests were as greedy as his
soldiers. We know of only one Norman who plainly told his master, the
King, that he had come with him to England to do his duty as a faithful
servant, and that property taken by force from other men had no charms
for him. His name was Guilbert. We should not forget his name, for it
is good to remember and to honour honest men.
Besides all these troubles, William the Conqueror was troubled by
quarrels among his sons. He had three living. Robert, called Curthose,
because of his short legs; William, called Rufus or the Red, from the
colour of his hair; and Henry, fond of learning, and called, in the
Norman language, Beauclerc, or Fine-Scholar. When Robert grew up, he
asked of his father the government of Normandy, which he had nominally
possessed, as a child, under his mother, Matilda. The King refusing to
grant it, Robert became jealous and discontented; and happening one
day, while in this temper, to be ridiculed by his brothers, who threw
water on him from a balcony as he was walking before the door, he drew
his sword, rushed up-stairs, and was only prevented by the King himself
from putting them to death. That same night, he hotly departed with
some followers from his father’s court, and endeavoured to take the
Castle of Rouen by surprise. Failing in this, he shut himself up in
another Castle in Normandy, which the King besieged, and where Robert
one day unhorsed and nearly killed him without knowing who he was. His
submission when he discovered his father, and the intercession of the
queen and others, reconciled them; but not soundly; for Robert soon
strayed abroad, and went from court to court with his complaints. He
was a gay, careless, thoughtless fellow, spending all he got on
musicians and dancers; but his mother loved him, and often, against the
King’s command, supplied him with money through a messenger named
Samson. At length the incensed King swore he would tear out Samson’s
eyes; and Samson, thinking that his only hope of safety was in becoming
a monk, became one, went on such errands no more, and kept his eyes in
his head.
All this time, from the turbulent day of his strange coronation, the
Conqueror had been struggling, you see, at any cost of cruelty and
bloodshed, to maintain what he had seized. All his reign, he struggled
still, with the same object ever before him. He was a stern, bold man,
and he succeeded in it.
He loved money, and was particular in his eating, but he had only
leisure to indulge one other passion, and that was his love of hunting.
He carried it to such a height that he ordered whole villages and towns
to be swept away to make forests for the deer. Not satisfied with
sixty-eight Royal Forests, he laid waste an immense district, to form
another in Hampshire, called the New Forest. The many thousands of
miserable peasants who saw their little houses pulled down, and
themselves and children turned into the open country without a shelter,
detested him for his merciless addition to their many sufferings; and
when, in the twenty-first year of his reign (which proved to be the
last), he went over to Rouen, England was as full of hatred against
him, as if every leaf on every tree in all his Royal Forests had been a
curse upon his head. In the New Forest, his son Richard (for he had
four sons) had been gored to death by a Stag; and the people said that
this so cruelly-made Forest would yet be fatal to others of the
Conqueror’s race.
He was engaged in a dispute with the King of France about some
territory. While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with that King, he
kept his bed and took medicines: being advised by his physicians to do
so, on account of having grown to an unwieldy size. Word being brought
to him that the King of France made light of this, and joked about it,
he swore in a great rage that he should rue his jests. He assembled his
army, marched into the disputed territory, burnt—his old way!—the
vines, the crops, and fruit, and set the town of Mantes on fire. But,
in an evil hour; for, as he rode over the hot ruins, his horse, setting
his hoofs upon some burning embers, started, threw him forward against
the pommel of the saddle, and gave him a mortal hurt. For six weeks he
lay dying in a monastery near Rouen, and then made his will, giving
England to William, Normandy to Robert, and five thousand pounds to
Henry. And now, his violent deeds lay heavy on his mind. He ordered
money to be given to many English churches and monasteries, and—which
was much better repentance—released his prisoners of state, some of
whom had been confined in his dungeons twenty years.
It was a September morning, and the sun was rising, when the King was
awakened from slumber by the sound of a church bell. ‘What bell is
that?’ he faintly asked. They told him it was the bell of the chapel of
Saint Mary. ‘I commend my soul,’ said he, ‘to Mary!’ and died.
Think of his name, The Conqueror, and then consider how he lay in
death! The moment he was dead, his physicians, priests, and nobles, not
knowing what contest for the throne might now take place, or what might
happen in it, hastened away, each man for himself and his own property;
the mercenary servants of the court began to rob and plunder; the body
of the King, in the indecent strife, was rolled from the bed, and lay
alone, for hours, upon the ground. O Conqueror, of whom so many great
names are proud now, of whom so many great names thought nothing then,
it were better to have conquered one true heart, than England!
By-and-by, the priests came creeping in with prayers and candles; and a
good knight, named Herluin, undertook (which no one else would do) to
convey the body to Caen, in Normandy, in order that it might be buried
in St. Stephen’s church there, which the Conqueror had founded. But
fire, of which he had made such bad use in his life, seemed to follow
him of itself in death. A great conflagration broke out in the town
when the body was placed in the church; and those present running out
to extinguish the flames, it was once again left alone.
It was not even buried in peace. It was about to be let down, in its
Royal robes, into a tomb near the high altar, in presence of a great
concourse of people, when a loud voice in the crowd cried out, ‘This
ground is mine! Upon it, stood my father’s house. This King despoiled
me of both ground and house to build this church. In the great name of
God, I here forbid his body to be covered with the earth that is my
right!’ The priests and bishops present, knowing the speaker’s right,
and knowing that the King had often denied him justice, paid him down
sixty shillings for the grave. Even then, the corpse was not at rest.
The tomb was too small, and they tried to force it in. It broke, a
dreadful smell arose, the people hurried out into the air, and, for the
third time, it was left alone.
Where were the Conqueror’s three sons, that they were not at their
father’s burial? Robert was lounging among minstrels, dancers, and
gamesters, in France or Germany. Henry was carrying his five thousand
pounds safely away in a convenient chest he had got made. William the
Red was hurrying to England, to lay hands upon the Royal treasure and
the crown.