THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND.
DECEMBER 1066-MARCH 1070.
THE coronation of William had its effect in a moment. It made him really
king over part of England; it put him into a new position with regard to
the rest. As soon as there was a king, men flocked to swear oaths to him
and become his men. They came from shires where he had no real
authority. It was most likely now, rather than at Berkhampstead, that
Edwin and Morkere at last made up their minds to acknowledge some king.
They became William’s men and received again their lands and earldoms as
his grant. Other chief men from the North also submitted and received
their lands and honours again. But Edwin and Morkere were not allowed to
go back to their earldoms. William thought it safer to keep them near
himself, under the guise of honour—Edwin was even promised one of his
daughters in marriage—but really half as prisoners, half as hostages. Of
the two other earls, Waltheof son of Siward, who held the shires of
Northampton and Huntingdon, and Oswulf who held the earldom of Bernicia
or modern Northumberland, we hear nothing at this moment. As for
Waltheof, it is strange if he were not at Senlac; it is strange if he
were there and came away alive. But we only know that he was in
William’s allegiance a few months later. Oswulf must have held out in
some marked way. It was William’s policy to act as king even where he
had no means of carrying out his kingly orders. He therefore in February
1067 granted the Bernician earldom to an Englishman named Copsige, who
had acted as Tostig’s lieutenant. This implies the formal deprivation of
Oswulf. But William sent no force with the new earl, who had to take
possession as he could. That is to say, of two parties in a local
quarrel, one hoped to strengthen itself by making use of William’s name.
And William thought that it would strengthen his position to let at least
his name be heard in every corner of the kingdom. The rest of the story
stands rather aloof from the main history. Copsige got possession of the
earldom for a moment. He was then killed by Oswulf and his partisans,
and Oswulf himself was killed in the course of the year by a common
robber. At Christmas, 1067, William again granted or sold the earldom to
another of the local chiefs, Gospatric. But he made no attempt to
exercise direct authority in those parts till the beginning of the year
1069.
All this illustrates William’s general course. Crowned king over the
land, he would first strengthen himself in that part of the kingdom which
he actually held. Of the passive disobedience of other parts he would
take no present notice. In northern and central England William could
exercise no authority; but those lands were not in arms against him, nor
did they acknowledge any other king. Their earls, now his earls, were
his favoured courtiers. He could afford to be satisfied with this
nominal kingship, till a fit opportunity came to make it real. He could
afford to lend his name to the local enterprise of Copsige. It would at
least be another count against the men of Bernicia that they had killed
the earl whom King William gave them.
Meanwhile William was taking very practical possession in the shires
where late events had given him real authority. His policy was to assert
his rights in the strongest form, but to show his mildness and good will
by refraining from carrying them out to the uttermost. By right of
conquest William claimed nothing. He had come to take his crown, and he
had unluckily met with some opposition in taking it. The crown lands of
King Edward passed of course to his successor. As for the lands of other
men, in William’s theory all was forfeited to the crown. The lawful heir
had been driven to seek his kingdom in arms; no Englishman had helped
him; many Englishmen had fought against him. All then were directly or
indirectly traitors. The King might lawfully deal with the lands of all
as his own. But in the greater part of the kingdom it was impossible, in
no part was it prudent, to carry out this doctrine in its fulness. A
passage in Domesday, compared with a passage in the English Chronicles,
shows that, soon after William’s coronation, the English as a body,
within the lands already conquered, redeemed their lands. They bought
them back at a price, and held them as a fresh grant from King William.
Some special offenders, living and dead, were exempted from this favour.
The King took to himself the estates of the house of Godwine, save those
of Edith, the widow of his revered predecessor, whom it was his policy to
treat with all honour. The lands too of those who had died on Senlac
were granted back to their heirs only of special favour, sometimes under
the name of alms. Thus, from the beginning of his reign, William began
to make himself richer than any king that had been before him in England
or than any other Western king of his day. He could both punish his
enemies and reward his friends. Much of what he took he kept; much he
granted away, mainly to his foreign followers, but sometimes also to
Englishmen who had in any way won his favour. Wiggod of Wallingford was
one of the very few Englishmen who kept and received estates which put
them alongside of the great Norman landowners. The doctrine that all
land was held of the King was now put into a practical shape. All,
Englishmen and strangers, not only became William’s subjects, but his men
and his grantees. Thus he went on during his whole reign. There was no
sudden change from the old state of things to the new. After the general
redemption of lands, gradually carried out as William’s power advanced,
no general blow was dealt at Englishmen as such. They were not, like
some conquered nations, formally degraded or put under any legal
incapacities in their own land. William simply distinguished between his
loyal and his disloyal subjects, and used his opportunities for punishing
the disloyal and rewarding the loyal. Such punishments and rewards
naturally took the shape of confiscations and grants of land. If
punishment was commonly the lot of the Englishman, and reward was the lot
of the stranger, that was only because King William treated all men as
they deserved. Most Englishmen were disloyal; most strangers were loyal.
But disloyal strangers and loyal Englishmen fared according to their
deserts. The final result of this process, begun now and steadily
carried on, was that, by the end of William’s reign, the foreign king was
surrounded by a body of foreign landowners and office-bearers of foreign
birth. When, in the early days of his conquest, he gathered round him
the great men of his realm, it was still an English assembly with a
sprinkling of strangers. By the end of his reign it had changed, step by
step, into an assembly of strangers with a sprinkling of Englishmen.
This revolution, which practically transferred the greater part of the
soil of England to the hands of strangers, was great indeed. But it must
not be mistaken for a sudden blow, for an irregular scramble, for a
formal proscription of Englishmen as such. William, according to his
character and practice, was able to do all this gradually, according to
legal forms, and without drawing any formal distinction between natives
and strangers. All land was held of the King of the English, according
to the law of England. It may seem strange how such a process of
spoliation, veiled under a legal fiction, could have been carried out
without resistance. It was easier because it was gradual and piecemeal.
The whole country was not touched at once, nor even the whole of any one
district. One man lost his land while his neighbour kept his, and he who
kept his land was not likely to join in the possible plots of the other.
And though the land had never seen so great a confiscation, or one so
largely for the behoof of foreigners, yet there was nothing new in the
thing itself. Danes had settled under Cnut, and Normans and other
Frenchmen under Edward. Confiscation of land was the everyday punishment
for various public and private crimes. In any change, such as we should
call a change of ministry, as at the fall and the return of Godwine,
outlawry and forfeiture of lands was the usual doom of the weaker party,
a milder doom than the judicial massacres of later ages. Even a conquest
of England was nothing new, and William at this stage contrasted
favourably with Cnut, whose early days were marked by the death of not a
few. William, at any rate since his crowning, had shed the blood of no
man. Men perhaps thought that things might have been much worse, and
that they were not unlikely to mend. Anyhow, weakened, cowed, isolated,
the people of the conquered shires submitted humbly to the Conqueror’s
will. It needed a kind of oppression of which William himself was never
guilty to stir them into actual revolt.
* * * * *
The provocation was not long in coming. Within three months after his
coronation, William paid a visit to his native duchy. The ruler of two
states could not be always in either; he owed it to his old subjects to
show himself among them in his new character; and his absence might pass
as a sign of the trust he put in his new subjects. But the means which
he took to secure their obedience brought out his one weak point. We
cannot believe that he really wished to goad the people into rebellion;
yet the choice of his lieutenants might seem almost like it. He was led
astray by partiality for his brother and for his dearest friend. To
Bishop Ode of Bayeux, and to William Fitz-Osbern, the son of his early
guardian, he gave earldoms, that of Kent to Odo, that of Hereford to
William. The Conqueror was determined before all things that his kingdom
should be united and obedient; England should not be split up like Gaul
and Germany; he would have no man in England whose formal homage should
carry with it as little of practical obedience as his own homage to the
King of the French. A Norman earl of all Wessex or all Mercia might
strive after such a position. William therefore forsook the old practice
of dividing the whole kingdom into earldoms. In the peaceful central
shires he would himself rule through his sheriffs and other immediate
officers; he would appoint earls only in dangerous border districts where
they were needed as military commanders. All William’s earls were in
fact _marquesses_, guardians of a march or frontier. Ode had to keep
Kent against attacks from the continent; William Fitz-Osbern had to keep
Herefordshire against the Welsh and the independent English. This last
shire had its own local warfare. William’s authority did not yet reach
over all the shires beyond London and Hereford; but Harold had allowed
some of Edward’s Norman favourites to keep power there. Hereford then
and part of its shire formed an isolated part of William’s dominions,
while the lands around remained unsubdued. William Fitz-Osbern had to
guard this dangerous land as earl. But during the King’s absence both he
and Ode received larger commissions as viceroys over the whole kingdom.
Ode guarded the South and William the North and North-East. Norwich, a
town dangerous from its easy communication with Denmark, was specially
under his care. The nominal earls of the rest of the land, Edwin,
Morkere, and Waltheof, with Edgar, King of a moment, Archbishop Stigand,
and a number of other chief men, William took with him to Normandy.
Nominally his cherished friends and guests, they went in truth, as one of
the English Chroniclers calls them, as hostages.
William’s stay in Normandy lasted about six months. It was chiefly
devoted to rejoicings and religious ceremonies, but partly to Norman
legislation. Rich gifts from the spoils of England were given to the
churches of Normandy; gifts richer still were sent to the Church of Rome
whose favour had wrought so much for William. In exchange for the banner
of Saint Peter, Harold’s standard of the Fighting-man was sent as an
offering to the head of all churches. While William was in Normandy,
Archbishop Maurilius of Rouen died. The whole duchy named Lanfranc as
his successor; but he declined the post, and was himself sent to Rome to
bring the pallium for the new archbishop John, a kinsman of the ducal
house. Lanfranc doubtless refused the see of Rouen only because he was
designed for a yet greater post in England; the subtlest diplomatist in
Europe was not sent to Rome merely to ask for the pallium for Archbishop
John.
Meanwhile William’s choice of lieutenants bore its fruit in England.
They wrought such oppression as William himself never wrought. The
inferior leaders did as they thought good, and the two earls restrained
them not. The earls meanwhile were in one point there faithfully
carrying out the policy of their master in the building of castles; a
work, which specially when the work of Ode and William Fitz-Osbern, is
always spoken of by the native writers with marked horror. The castles
were the badges and the instruments of the Conquest, the special means of
holding the land in bondage. Meanwhile tumults broke forth in various
parts. The slaughter of Copsige, William’s earl in Northumberland, took
place about the time of the King’s sailing for Normandy. In independent
Herefordshire the leading Englishman in those parts, Eadric, whom the
Normans called the _Wild_, allied himself with the Welsh, harried the
obedient lands, and threatened the castle of Hereford. Nothing was done
on either side beyond harrying and skirmishes; but Eadric’s corner of the
land remained unsubdued. The men of Kent made a strange foreign alliance
with Eustace of Boulogne, the brother-in-law of Edward, the man whose
deeds had led to the great movement of Edward’s reign, to the banishment
and the return of Godwine. He had fought against England on Senlac, and
was one of four who had dealt the last blow to the wounded Harold. But
the oppression of Ode made the Kentishmen glad to seek any help against
him. Eustace, now William’s enemy, came over, and gave help in an
unsuccessful attack on Dover castle. Meanwhile in the obedient shires
men were making ready for revolt; in the unsubdued lands they were making
ready for more active defence. Many went beyond sea to ask for foreign
help, specially in the kindred lands of Denmark and Northern Germany.
Against this threatening movement William’s strength lay in the
incapacity of his enemies for combined action. The whole land never rose
at once, and Danish help did not come at the times or in the shape when
it could have done most good.
* * * * *
The news of these movements brought William back to England in December.
He kept the Midwinter feast and assembly at Westminster; there the absent
Eustace was, by a characteristic stroke of policy, arraigned as a
traitor. He was a foreign prince against whom the Duke of the Normans
might have led a Norman army. But he had also become an English
landowner, and in that character he was accountable to the King and Witan
of England. He suffered the traitor’s punishment of confiscation of
lands. Afterwards he contrived to win back William’s favour, and he left
great English possessions to his second wife and his son. Another stroke
of policy was to send an embassy to Denmark, to ward off the hostile
purposes of Swegen, and to choose as ambassador an English prelate who
had been in high favour with both Edward and Harold, Æthelsige, Abbot of
Ramsey. It came perhaps of his mission that Swegen practically did
nothing for two years. The envoy’s own life was a chequered one. He
lost William’s favour, and sought shelter in Denmark. He again regained
William’s favour—perhaps by some service at the Danish court—and died in
possession of his abbey.
It is instructive to see how in this same assembly William bestowed
several great offices. The earldom of Northumberland was vacant by the
slaughter of two earls, the bishopric of Dorchester by the peaceful death
of its bishop. William had no real authority in any part of
Northumberland, or in more than a small part of the diocese of
Dorchester. But he dealt with both earldom and bishopric as in his own
power. It was now that he granted Northumberland to Gospatric. The
appointment to the bishopric was the beginning of a new system.
Englishmen were now to give way step by step to strangers in the highest
offices and greatest estates of the land. He had already made two Norman
earls, but they were to act as military commanders. He now made an
English earl, whose earldom was likely to be either nominal or fatal.
The appointment of Remigius of Fécamp to the see of Dorchester was of
more real importance. It is the beginning of William’s ecclesiastical
reign, the first step in William’s scheme of making the Church his
instrument in keeping down the conquered. While William lived, no
Englishman was appointed to a bishopric. As bishoprics became vacant by
death, foreigners were nominated, and excuses were often found for
hastening a vacancy by deprivation. At the end of William’s reign one
English bishop only was left. With abbots, as having less temporal power
than bishops, the rule was less strict. Foreigners were preferred, but
Englishmen were not wholly shut out. And the general process of
confiscation and regrant of lands was vigorously carried out. The
Kentish revolt and the general movement must have led to many forfeitures
and to further grants to loyal men of either nation. As the English
Chronicles pithily puts it, “the King gave away every man’s land.”
* * * * *
William could soon grant lands in new parts of England. In February 1068
he for the first time went forth to warfare with those whom he called his
subjects, but who had never submitted to him. In the course of the year
a large part of England was in arms against him. But there was no
concert; the West rose and the North rose; but the West rose first, and
the North did not rise till the West had been subdued. Western England
threw off the purely passive state which had lasted through the year
1067. Hitherto each side had left the other alone. But now the men of
the West made ready for a more direct opposition to the foreign
government. If they could not drive William out of what he had already
won, they would at least keep him from coming any further. Exeter, the
greatest city of the West, was the natural centre of resistance; the
smaller towns, at least of Devonshire and Dorset entered into a league
with the capital. They seem to have aimed, like Italian cities in the
like case, at the formation of a civic confederation, which might perhaps
find it expedient to acknowledge William as an external lord, but which
would maintain perfect internal independence. Still, as Gytha, widow of
Godwine, mother of Harold, was within the walls of Exeter, the movement
was doubtless also in some sort on behalf of the House of Godwine. In
any case, Exeter and the lands and towns in its alliance with Exeter
strengthened themselves in every way against attack.
Things were not now as on the day of Senlac, when Englishmen on their own
soil withstood one who, however he might cloke his enterprise, was to
them simply a foreign invader. But William was not yet, as he was in
some later struggles, the _de facto_ king of the whole land, whom all had
acknowledged, and opposition to whom was in form rebellion. He now held
an intermediate position. He was still an invader; for Exeter had never
submitted to him; but the crowned King of the English, peacefully ruling
over many shires, was hardly a mere invader; resistance to him would have
the air of rebellion in the eyes of many besides William and his
flatterers. And they could not see, what we plainly see, what William
perhaps dimly saw, that it was in the long run better for Exeter, or any
other part of England, to share, even in conquest, the fate of the whole
land, rather than to keep on a precarious independence to the aggravation
of the common bondage. This we feel throughout; William, with whatever
motive, is fighting for the unity of England. We therefore cannot
seriously regret his successes. But none the less honour is due to the
men whom the duty of the moment bade to withstand him. They could not
see things as we see them by the light of eight hundred years.
The movement evidently stirred several shires; but it is only of Exeter
that we hear any details. William never used force till he had tried
negotiation. He sent messengers demanding that the citizens should take
oaths to him and receive him within their walls. The choice lay now
between unconditional submission and valiant resistance. But the chief
men of the city chose a middle course which could gain nothing. They
answered as an Italian city might have answered a Swabian Emperor. They
would not receive the King within their walls; they would take no oaths
to him; but they would pay him the tribute which they had paid to earlier
kings. That is, they would not have him as king, but only as overlord
over a commonwealth otherwise independent. William’s answer was short;
“It is not my custom to take subjects on those conditions.” He set out
on his march; his policy was to overcome the rebellious English by the
arms of the loyal English. He called out the _fyrd_, the militia, of all
or some of the shires under his obedience. They answered his call; to
disobey it would have needed greater courage than to wield the axe on
Senlac. This use of English troops became William’s custom in all his
later wars, in England and on the mainland; but of course he did not
trust to English troops only. The plan of the campaign was that which
had won Le Mans and London. The towns of Dorset were frightfully harried
on the march to the capital of the West. Disunion at once broke out; the
leading men in Exeter sent to offer unconditional submission and to give
hostages. But the commonalty disowned the agreement; notwithstanding the
blinding of one of the hostages before the walls, they defended the city
valiantly for eighteen days. It was only when the walls began to crumble
away beneath William’s mining-engines that the men of Exeter at last
submitted to his mercy. And William’s mercy could be trusted. No man
was harmed in life, limb, or goods. But, to hinder further revolts, a
castle was at once begun, and the payments made by the city to the King
were largely raised.
Gytha, when the city yielded, withdrew to the Steep Holm, and thence to
Flanders. Her grandsons fled to Ireland; from thence, in the course of
the same year and the next, they twice landed in Somerset and Devonshire.
The Irish Danes who followed them could not be kept back from plunder.
Englishmen as well as Normans withstood them, and the hopes of the House
of Godwine came to an end.
* * * * *
On the conquest of Exeter followed the submission of the whole West. All
the land south of the Thames was now in William’s obedience.
Gloucestershire seems to have submitted at the same time; the submission
of Worcestershire is without date. A vast confiscation of lands
followed, most likely by slow degrees. Its most memorable feature is
that nearly all Cornwall was granted to William’s brother Robert Count of
Mortain. His vast estate grew into the famous Cornish earldom and duchy
of later times. Southern England was now conquered, and, as the North
had not stirred during the stirring of the West, the whole land was
outwardly at peace. William now deemed it safe to bring his wife to
share his new greatness. The Duchess Matilda came over to England, and
was hallowed to Queen at Westminster by Archbishop Ealdred. We may
believe that no part of his success gave William truer pleasure. But the
presence of the Lady was important in another way. It was doubtless by
design that she gave birth on English soil to her youngest son,
afterwards the renowned King Henry the First. He alone of William’s
children was in any sense an Englishman. Born on English ground, son of
a crowned King and his Lady, Englishmen looked on him as a countryman.
And his father saw the wisdom of encouraging such a feeling. Henry,
surnamed in after days the Clerk, was brought up with special care; he
was trained in many branches of learning unusual among the princes of his
age, among them in a thorough knowledge of the tongue of his native land.
* * * * *
The campaign of Exeter is of all William’s English campaigns the richest
in political teaching. We see how near the cities of England came for a
moment—as we shall presently see a chief city of northern Gaul—to running
the same course as the cities of Italy and Provence. Signs of the same
tendency may sometimes be suspected elsewhere, but they are not so
clearly revealed. William’s later campaigns are of the deepest
importance in English history; they are far richer in recorded personal
actors than the siege of Exeter; but they hardly throw so much light on
the character of William and his statesmanship. William is throughout
ever ready, but never hasty—always willing to wait when waiting seems the
best policy—always ready to accept a nominal success when there is a
chance of turning it into a real one, but never accepting nominal success
as a cover for defeat, never losing an inch of ground without at once
taking measures to recover it. By this means, he has in the former part
of 1068 extended his dominion to the Land’s End; before the end of the
year he extends it to the Tees. In the next year he has indeed to win it
back again; but he does win it back and more also. Early in 1070 he was
at last, in deed as well as in name, full King over all England.
The North was making ready for war while the war in the West went on, but
one part of England did nothing to help the other. In the summer the
movement in the North took shape. The nominal earls Edwin, Morkere, and
Gospatric, with the Ætheling Edgar and others, left William’s court to
put themselves at the head of the movement. Edwin was specially
aggrieved, because the king had promised him one of his daughters in
marriage, but had delayed giving her to him. The English formed
alliances with the dependent princes of Wales and Scotland, and stood
ready to withstand any attack. William set forth; as he had taken
Exeter, he took Warwick, perhaps Leicester. This was enough for Edwin
and Morkere. They submitted, and were again received to favour. More
valiant spirits withdrew northward, ready to defend Durham as the last
shelter of independence, while Edgar and Gospatric fled to the court of
Malcolm of Scotland. William went on, receiving the submission of
Nottingham and York; thence he turned southward, receiving on his way the
submission of Lincoln, Cambridge, and Huntingdon. Again he deemed it his
policy to establish his power in the lands which he had already won
rather than to jeopard matters by at once pressing farther. In the
conquered towns he built castles, and he placed permanent garrisons in
each district by granting estates to his Norman and other followers.
Different towns and districts suffered in different degrees, according
doubtless to the measure of resistance met with in each. Lincoln and
Lincolnshire were on the whole favourably treated. An unusual number of
Englishmen kept lands and offices in city and shire. At Leicester and
Northampton, and in their shires, the wide confiscations and great
destruction of houses point to a stout resistance. And though Durham was
still untouched, and though William had assuredly no present purpose of
attacking Scotland, he found it expedient to receive with all favour a
nominal submission brought from the King of Scots by the hands of the
Bishop of Durham.
If William’s policy ever seems less prudent than usual, it was at the
beginning of the next year, 1069. The extreme North still stood out.
William had twice commissioned English earls of Northumberland to take
possession if they could. He now risked the dangerous step of sending a
stranger. Robert of Comines was appointed to the earldom forfeited by
the flight of Gospatric. While it was still winter, he went with his
force to Durham. By help of the Bishop, he was admitted into the city,
but he and his whole force were cut off by the people of Durham and its
neighbourhood. Robert’s expedition in short led only to a revolt of
York, where Edgar was received and siege was laid to the castle. William
marched in person with all speed; he relieved the castle; he recovered
the city and strengthened it by a second castle on the other side of the
river. Still he thought it prudent to take no present steps against
Durham. Soon after this came the second attempt of Harold’s sons in the
West.
Later in this year William’s final warfare for the kingdom began. In
August, 1069 the long-promised help from Denmark came. Swegen sent his
brother Osbeorn and his sons Harold and Cnut, at the head of the whole
strength of Denmark and of other Northern lands. If the two enterprises
of Harold’s sons had been planned in concert with their Danish kinsmen,
the invaders or deliverers from opposite sides had failed to act
together. Nor are Swegen’s own objects quite clear. He sought to
deliver England from William and his Normans, but it is not so plain in
whose interest he acted. He would naturally seek the English crown for
himself or for one of his sons; the sons of Harold he would rather make
earls than kings. But he could feel no interest in the kingship of
Edgar. Yet, when the Danish fleet entered the Humber, and the whole
force of the North came to meet it, the English host had the heir of
Cerdic at its head. It is now that Waltheof the son of Siward, Earl of
Northampton and Huntingdon, first stands out as a leading actor.
Gospatric too was there; but this time not Edwin and Morkere. Danes and
English joined and marched upon York; the city was occupied; the castles
were taken; the Norman commanders were made prisoners, but not till they
had set fire to the city and burned the greater part of it, along with
the metropolitan minster. It is amazing to read that, after breaking
down the castles, the English host dispersed, and the Danish fleet
withdrew into the Humber.
England was again ruined by lack of concert. The news of the coming of
the Danes led only to isolated movements which were put down piecemeal.
The men of Somerset and Dorset and the men of Devonshire and Cornwall
were put down separately, and the movement in Somerset was largely put
down by English troops. The citizens of Exeter, as well as the Norman
garrison of the castle, stood a siege on behalf of William. A rising on
the Welsh border under Eadric led only to the burning of Shrewsbury; a
rising in Staffordshire was held by William to call for his own presence.
But he first marched into Lindesey, and drove the crews of the Danish
ships across into Holderness; there he left two Norman leaders, one of
them his brother Robert of Mortain and Cornwall; he then went westward
and subdued Staffordshire, and marched towards York by way of Nottingham.
A constrained delay by the Aire gave him an opportunity for negotiation
with the Danish leaders. Osbeorn took bribes to forsake the English
cause, and William reached and entered York without resistance. He
restored the castles and kept his Christmas in the half-burned city. And
now William forsook his usual policy of clemency. The Northern shires
had been too hard to win. To weaken them, he decreed a merciless
harrying of the whole land, the direct effects of which were seen for
many years, and which left its mark on English history for ages. Till
the growth of modern industry reversed the relative position of Northern
and Southern England, the old Northumbrian kingdom never fully recovered
from the blow dealt by William, and remained the most backward part of
the land. Herein comes one of the most remarkable results of William’s
coming. His greatest work was to make England a kingdom which no man
henceforth thought of dividing. But the circumstances of his conquest of
Northern England ruled that for several centuries the unity of England
should take the form of a distinct preponderance of Southern England over
Northern. William’s reign strengthened every tendency that way, chiefly
by the fearful blow now dealt to the physical strength and well-being of
the Northern shires. From one side indeed the Norman Conquest was truly
a Saxon conquest. The King of London and Winchester became more fully
than ever king over the whole land.
* * * * *
The Conqueror had now only to gather in what was still left to conquer.
But, as military exploits, none are more memorable than the winter
marches which put William into full possession of England. The lands
beyond Tees still held out; in January 1070 he set forth to subdue them.
The Earls Waltheof and Gospatric made their submission, Waltheof in
person, Gospatric by proxy. William restored both of them to their
earldoms, and received Waltheof to his highest favour, giving him his
niece Judith in marriage. But he systematically wasted the land, as he
had wasted Yorkshire. He then returned to York, and thence set forth to
subdue the last city and shire that held out. A fearful march led him to
the one remaining fragment of free England, the unconquered land of
Chester. We know not how Chester fell; but the land was not won without
fighting, and a frightful harrying was the punishment. In all this we
see a distinct stage of moral downfall in the character of the Conqueror.
Yet it is thoroughly characteristic. All is calm, deliberate, politic.
William will have no more revolts, and he will at any cost make the land
incapable of revolt. Yet, as ever, there is no blood shed save in
battle. If men died of hunger, that was not William’s doing; nay,
charitable people like Abbot Æthelwig of Evesham might do what they could
to help the sufferers. But the lawful king, kept so long out of his
kingdom, would, at whatever price, be king over the whole land. And the
great harrying of the northern shires was the price paid for William’s
kingship over them.
At Chester the work was ended which had begun at Pevensey. Less than
three years and a half, with intervals of peace, had made the Norman
invader king over all England. He had won the kingdom; he had now to
keep it. He had for seventeen years to deal with revolts on both sides
of the sea, with revolts both of Englishmen and of his own followers.
But in England his power was never shaken; in England he never knew
defeat. His English enemies he had subdued; the Danes were allowed to
remain and in some sort to help in his work by plundering during the
winter. The King now marched to the Salisbury of that day, the deeply
fenced hill of Old Sarum. The men who had conquered England were
reviewed in the great plain, and received their rewards. Some among them
had by failures of duty during the winter marches lost their right to
reward. Their punishment was to remain under arms forty days longer than
their comrades. William could trust himself to the very mutineers whom
he had picked out for punishment. He had now to begin his real reign;
and the champion of the Church had before all things to reform the evil
customs of the benighted islanders, and to give them shepherds of their
souls who might guide them in the right way.