Transcribed from the 1913 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
* * * * *
BY
EDWARD A. FREEMAN
D.C.L., LL.D.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
* * * * *
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S SQUARE, LONDON
1913
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT
_First Edition printed March_ 1888.
_Reprinted July_ 1888, 1890, 1894, 1898, 1903, 1907, 1913
PREFACE
THIS small volume, written as the first of a series, is meant to fill
quite another place from the _Short History of the Norman Conquest_, by
the same author. That was a narrative of events reaching over a
considerable time. This is the portrait of a man in his personal
character, a man whose life takes up only a part of the time treated of
in the other work. We have now to look on William as one who, though
stranger and conqueror, is yet worthily entitled to a place on the list
of English statesmen. There is perhaps no man before or after him whose
personal character and personal will have had so direct an effect on the
course which the laws and constitution of England have taken since his
time. Norman as a Conqueror, as a statesman he is English, and, on this
side of him at least, he worthily begins the series.
16 ST. GILES’, OXFORD,
6_th_ _February_ 1888.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER II
THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM 6
CHAPTER III
WILLIAM’S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 26
CHAPTER IV
THE REIGN OF WILLIAM IN NORMANDY 34
CHAPTER V
HAROLD’S OATH TO WILLIAM 51
CHAPTER VI
THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM 63
CHAPTER VII
WILLIAM’S INVASION OF ENGLAND 82
CHAPTER VIII
THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND 100
CHAPTER IX
THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND 122
CHAPTER X
THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM 147
CHAPTER XI
THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM 181
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
THE history of England, like the land and its people, has been specially
insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences from without.
No land has owed more than England to the personal action of men not of
native birth. Britain was truly called another world, in opposition to
the world of the European mainland, the world of Rome. In every age the
history of Britain is the history of an island, of an island great enough
to form a world of itself. In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain,
we are speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and
Teutons parted from their kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under the
common influences of an island world. The land has seen several
settlements from outside, but the settlers have always been brought under
the spell of their insular position. Whenever settlement has not meant
displacement, the new comers have been assimilated by the existing people
of the land. When it has meant displacement, they have still become
islanders, marked off from those whom they left behind by characteristics
which were the direct result of settlement in an island world.
The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England, has
been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated from without.
But each of those elements has done somewhat to modify the mass into
which it was absorbed. The English land and nation are not as they might
have been if they had never in later times absorbed the Fleming, the
French Huguenot, the German Palatine. Still less are they as they might
have been, if they had not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements
of the Dane and the Norman. Both were assimilated; but both modified the
character and destiny of the people into whose substance they were
absorbed. The conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully lost
in the greater mass of the English people; still we can never be as if
the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the signs of
his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with them into
distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and Australia came
from a land which the Norman once entered as a conqueror. But that those
signs of his presence hold the place which they do hold in our mixed
political being, that, badges of conquest as they are, no one feels them
to be badges of conquest—all this comes of the fact that, if the Norman
came as a conqueror, he came as a conqueror of a special, perhaps almost
of an unique kind. The Norman Conquest of England has, in its nature and
in its results, no exact parallel in history. And that it has no exact
parallel in history is largely owing to the character and position of the
man who wrought it. That the history of England for the last eight
hundred years has been what it has been has largely come of the personal
character of a single man. That we are what we are to this day largely
comes of the fact that there was a moment when our national destiny might
be said to hang on the will of a single man, and that that man was
William, surnamed at different stages of his life and memory, the
Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great.
With perfect fitness then does William the Norman, William the Norman
Conqueror of England, take his place in a series of English statesmen.
That so it should be is characteristic of English history. Our history
has been largely wrought for us by men who have come in from without,
sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as the opposite of conquerors; but in
whatever character they came, they had to put on the character of
Englishmen, and to make their work an English work. From whatever land
they came, on whatever mission they came, as statesmen they were English.
William, the greatest of his class, is still but a member of a class.
Along with him we must reckon a crowd of kings, bishops, and high
officials in many ages of our history. Theodore of Tarsus and Cnut of
Denmark, Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta, Randolf Flambard and
Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Anjou and Simon of Montfort, are all written
on a list of which William is but the foremost. The largest number come
in William’s own generation and in the generations just before and after
it. But the breed of England’s adopted children and rulers never died
out. The name of William the Deliverer stands, if not beside that of his
namesake the Conqueror, yet surely alongside of the lawgiver from Anjou.
And we count among the later worthies of England not a few men sprung
from other lands, who did and are doing their work among us, and who, as
statesmen at least, must count as English. As we look along the whole
line, even among the conquering kings and their immediate instruments,
their work never takes the shape of the rooting up of the earlier
institutions of the land. Those institutions are modified, sometimes
silently by the mere growth of events, sometimes formally and of set
purpose. Old institutions get new names; new institutions are set up
alongside of them. But the old ones are never swept away; they sometimes
die out; they are never abolished. This comes largely of the absorbing
and assimilating power of the island world. But it comes no less of
personal character and personal circumstances, and pre-eminently of the
personal character of the Norman Conqueror and of the circumstances in
which he found himself.
* * * * *
Our special business now is with the personal acts and character of
William, and above all with his acts and character as an English
statesman. But the English reign of William followed on his earlier
Norman reign, and its character was largely the result of his earlier
Norman reign. A man of the highest natural gifts, he had gone through
such a schooling from his childhood upwards as falls to the lot of few
princes. Before he undertook the conquest of England, he had in some
sort to work the conquest of Normandy. Of the ordinary work of a
sovereign in a warlike age, the defence of his own land, the annexation
of other lands, William had his full share. With the land of his
overlord he had dealings of the most opposite kinds. He had to call in
the help of the French king to put down rebellion in the Norman duchy,
and he had to drive back more than one invasion of the French king at the
head of an united Norman people. He added Domfront and Maine to his
dominions, and the conquest of Maine, the work as much of statesmanship
as of warfare, was the rehearsal of the conquest of England. There,
under circumstances strangely like those of England, he learned his trade
as conqueror, he learned to practise on a narrower field the same arts
which he afterwards practised on a wider. But after all, William’s own
duchy was his special school; it was his life in his own duchy which
specially helped to make him what he was. Surrounded by trials and
difficulties almost from his cradle, he early learned the art of enduring
trials and overcoming difficulties; he learned how to deal with men; he
learned when to smite and when to spare; and it is not a little to his
honour that, in the long course of such a reign as his, he almost always
showed himself far more ready to spare than to smite.
Before then we can look at William as an English statesman, we must first
look on him in the land in which he learned the art of statesmanship. We
must see how one who started with all the disadvantages which are implied
in his earlier surname of the Bastard came to win and to deserve his
later surnames of the Conqueror and the Great.