consisted of heaths and moor. In both the east and the west there were
vast tracts of marsh land; fens nearly one hundred miles long severed
East Anglia from the midland counties; sites like that of Glastonbury or
Athelney were almost inaccessible. The beaver still haunted marshy
hollows such as those which lay about Beverley, the London craftsmen
chased the wild boar and the wild ox in the woods of Hampstead, while
wolves prowled round the homesteads of the north. But peace, and the
industry it encouraged, were telling on this waste; stag and wolf were
retreating before the face of man, the farmer’s axe was ringing in the
forest, and villages were springing up in the clearings. The growth of
commerce was seen in the rich trading-ports of the eastern coast. The
main trade lay probably in skins and ropes and ship-masts; and, above
all, in the iron and steel that the Scandinavian lands so long supplied
to Britain. But Dane and Norwegian were traders over a yet wider field
than the northern seas; their barks entered the Mediterranean, while the
overland route through Russia brought the wares of Constantinople and
the East. “What do you bring to us?” the merchant is asked in an old
English dialogue. “I bring skins, silks, costly gems, and gold,” he
answers, “besides various garments, pigment, wine, oil, and ivory, with
brass and copper and tin, silver and gold, and such like.” Men from the
Rhineland and from Normandy, too, moored their vessels along the Thames,
on whose rude wharves were piled a strange medley of goods--pepper and
spices from the far East, crates of gloves and gray cloths (it may be
from the Lombard looms), sacks of wool, iron-work from Liége, butts of
French wine and vinegar, and with them the rural products of the country
itself--cheese, butter, lard, and eggs, with live swine and fowls.
Cnut’s one aim was to win the love of his people, and all tradition
shows how wonderful was his success. But the greatness of his rule hung
solely on the greatness of his temper, and at his death the empire he
had built up at once fell to pieces.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[The illegitimate son of Robert, surnamed Le Diable, duke of
Normandy, and his father’s successor, born 1027; died, 1087.
Claiming right of inheritance under a pretended bequest of Edward
the Confessor, the Saxon king of England, he levied a great army of
adventurers from all Europe, and in the great battle of Senlac, or,
as it is sometimes known, Hastings, he defeated the Saxons and
their King Harold, who had been elected by the voice of the
_Wittenegamotte_, or Great Council of England, on October 14, 1066.
Harold was slain, and the Norman conqueror was crowned. William’s
transcendent abilities as a ruler, though stained by cruelty and
rapacity, made his reign the greatest epoch in early English
history.]
William the Great, as men of his own day styled him, William the
Conqueror, as by one event he stamped himself on our history, was now
Duke of Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large
and patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts him out of
the petty incidents of his age, were as yet only partly disclosed. But
there never was a moment from his boyhood when he was not among the
greatest of men. His life was one long mastering of difficulty after
difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in his name of “the
Bastard.” His father, Duke Robert, had seen Arlotta, the daughter of a
tanner of the town, washing her linen in the little brook by
[Illustration: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.]
Falaise, and, loving her, had made her the mother of his boy. Robert’s
departure on a pilgrimage from which he never returned left William a
child-ruler among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom, and
treason and anarchy surrounded him as he grew to manhood. Disorder broke
at last into open revolt. Surprised in his hunting-seat at Valognes by
the rising of the Bessin and Cotentin districts, in which the pirate
temper and lawlessness lingered longest, William had only time to dash
through the fords of Vire with the rebels on his track. A fierce combat
of horse on the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, to the southeastward of Caen,
left him master of the duchy, and the old Scandinavian Normandy yielded
forever to the new civilization which streamed in with French alliances
and the French tongue. William was himself a type of the transition. In
the young duke’s character the old world mingled strangely with the new,
the pirate jostled roughly with the statesman. William was the most
terrible, as he was the last outcome of the northern race.
The very spirit of the “sea-wolves” who had so long “lived on the
pillage of the world” seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous
strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his
wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. “No knight under heaven,” his
enemies confessed, “was William’s peer.” Boy as he was, horse and man
went down before his lance at Val-ès-dunes. All the fierce gayety of his
nature broke out in the chivalrous adventures of his youth, in his rout
of fifteen Angevins with but five soldiers at his back, in his defiant
ride over the ground which Geoffry Martel claimed from him--a ride with
hawk on fist as though war and the chase were one. No man could bend his
bow. His mace crashed its way through a ring of English warriors to the
foot of the standard. He rose to his greatest heights in moments when
other men despaired. His voice rang out like a trumpet to rally his
soldiers as they fled before the English charge at Senlac. In his
winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of his fainting
troops, and helped with his own hands to clear a road through the
snowdrifts. With the northman’s daring broke out the northman’s
pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon hung raw hides along their
walls in scorn of the baseness of his birth, with cries of “Work for the
tanner!” William tore out his prisoners’ eyes, cut off their hands and
feet, and flung them into the town.
At the close of his greatest victory he refused Harold’s body a grave.
Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him a
hunting-ground, and his harrying of Northumbria left the north of
England a desolate waste. There is a grim, ruthless ring about his very
jests. In his old age Philip of France mocked at the Conqueror’s
unwieldy bulk and at the sickness which confined him to his bed at
Rouen. “King William has as long a lying-in,” laughed his enemy, “as a
woman behind her curtains!” “When I get up,” swore William, “I will go
to mass in Philip’s land, and bring a rich offering for my churching. I
will offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they be,
and steel shall glitter over the fire they make.” At harvest-tide town
and hamlet flaring into ashes along the French border fulfilled the
Conqueror’s vow. There is the same savage temper in the loneliness of
his life. He recked little of men’s love or hate. His grim look, his
pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, spread terror through
his court. “So stark and fierce was he,” says the English chronicler,
“that none dared resist his will.” His graciousness to Anselm only
brought out into stronger relief the general harshness of his tone. His
very wrath was solitary. “To no man spake he, and no man dared speak to
him,” when the news reached him of Harold’s accession to the throne. It
was only when he passed from the palace to the loneliness of the woods
that the king’s temper unbent. “He loved the wild deer as though he had
been their father. Whosoever should slay hart or hind man should blind
him.” Death itself took its color from the savage solitude of his life.
Priests and nobles fled as the last breath left him, and the Conqueror’s
body lay naked and lonely on the floor.
It is not to his victory at Senlac, but to the struggle which followed
his return from Normandy, that William owes his title of the
“Conqueror.” The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly
changed William’s position. He no longer held the land merely as elected
king; he added to his elective right the right of conquest. The system
of government which he originated was, in fact, the result of the double
character of his power. It represented neither the purely feudal system
of the Continent nor the system of the older English royalty. More
truly, perhaps, it may be said to have represented both. As the
successor of Eadward, William retained the judicial and administrative
organization of the older English realm. As the conqueror of England he
introduced the military organization of feudalism so far as was
necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground was
already prepared for such an organization; we have seen the beginnings
of English feudalism in the warriors, the “companions,” or “thegns,” who
were personally attached to the king’s war-band, and received estates
from the folk-land in reward for their personal services. In later times
this feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased, as the bulk
of the nobles followed the king’s example and bound their tenants to
themselves by a similar process of subinfeudation. On the other hand,
the pure freeholders, the class which formed the basis of the original
English society, had been gradually reduced in number, partly through
imitation of the class above them, but still more through the incessant
wars and invasions which drove them to seek protectors among the thegns
at the cost of their independence. Feudalism, in fact, was superseding
the older freedom in England even before the reign of William, as it had
already superseded it in Germany or France. But the tendency was
quickened and intensified by the Conquest; the desperate and universal
resistance of his English subjects forced William to hold by the sword
what the sword had won, and an army strong enough to crush at any moment
a national revolt was necessary for the preservation of his throne. Such
an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of the soil. The
failure of the English risings cleared the way for its establishment;
the greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle or fled into
exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole of their
lands or redeemed a portion of them by the surrender of the rest.
The dependence of the Church on the royal power was strictly enforced.
Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron. No royal tenant could be
excommunicated without the king’s leave. No synod could legislate
without his previous assent and subsequent confirmation of its decrees.
No papal letters could be received within the realm save by his
permission. William firmly repudiated the claims which were now
beginning to be put forward by the court of Rome. When Gregory VII
called on him to do fealty for his realm, the king sternly refused to
admit the claim. “Fealty I have never willed to do, nor do I will to do
it now. I have never promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did
it to yours.”
The Conquest was hardly over when the struggle between the baronage and
the crown began. The wisdom of William’s policy in the destruction of
the great earldoms which had overshadowed the throne was shown in an
attempt at their restoration made by Roger, the son of his minister,
William Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton Ralf de Guader, whom the king had
rewarded for his services at Senlac with the earldom of Norfolk. The
rising was quickly suppressed, Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven
over sea; but the intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in
William’s half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretense of aspiring
by arms to the papacy, Bishop Odo collected money and men; but the
treasure was at once seized by the royal officers, and the bishop
arrested in the midst of the court. Even at the king’s bidding no
officer would venture to seize on a prelate of the Church; it was with
his own hands that William was forced to effect his arrest. “I arrest
not the bishop, but the Earl of Kent,” laughed the Conqueror, and Odo
remained a prisoner till William’s death.
It was, in fact, this vigorous personality of William which proved the
chief safeguard of his throne. “Stark he was,” says the English
chronicler, “to men that withstood him. Earls that did aught against his
bidding he cast into bonds; bishops he stripped of their bishoprics,
abbots of their abbacies. He spared not his own brother; first he was in
the land, but the king cast him into bondage. If a man would live and
hold his lands, need it were that he should follow the king’s will.”
But, stern as his rule was, it gave peace to the land. Even amid the
sufferings which necessarily sprang from the circumstances of the
Conquest itself, from the erection of castles, or the inclosure of
forests, or the exactions which built up the great hoard at Winchester,
Englishmen were unable to forget “the good peace he made in the land, so
that a man might fare over his realm with a bosom full of gold.” Strange
touches of a humanity far in advance of his age contrasted with the
general temper of his government. One of the strongest traits in his
character was his aversion to shed blood by process of law; he formally
abolished the punishment of death, and only a single execution stains
the annals of his reign. An edict yet more honorable to him put an end
to the slave-trade which had till then been carried on at the port of
Bristol. The pitiless warrior, the stern and awful king was a tender and
faithful husband, an affectionate father. The lonely silence of his
bearing broke into gracious converse with pure and sacred souls like
Anselm. If William was “stark” to rebel and baron, men noted that he was
“mild to those that loved God.”
ROBERT GUISCARD.
BY EDWARD GIBBON.
[Born about 1015, died 1085. This Norman adventurer, the sixth son
of a small baron, became Duke of Apulia and Calabria in Italy by
conquest, and founded the Kingdom of Naples, which existed till
1860. Equally distinguished by personal prowess, generalship, and
diplomatic astuteness, he filled a large figure in the affairs of
his time, and was one of the stoutest bulwarks against Saracenic
aggression.]
The pedigree of Robert Guiscard is variously deduced from the peasants
and the dukes of Normandy--from the peasants, by the pride and ignorance
of a Grecian princess; from the dukes, by the ignorance and flattery of
the Italian subjects. His genuine descent may be ascribed to the second
or middle order of private nobility. He sprang from a race of
_valvassors_ or _bannerets_, of the diocese of Coutances, in the lower
Normandy; the castle of Hauteville was their honorable seat, his father
Tancred was conspicuous in the court and army of the duke, and his
military service was furnished by ten soldiers or knights. Two
marriages, of a rank not unworthy of his own, made him the father of
twelve sons, who were educated at home by the impartial tenderness of
his second wife. But a narrow patrimony was insufficient for this
numerous and daring progeny; they saw around the neighborhood the
mischiefs of poverty and discord, and resolved to seek in foreign wars a
more glorious inheritance. Two only remained to perpetuate the race and
cherish their father’s age; their ten brothers, as they successively
attained the vigor of manhood, departed from the castle, passed the
Alps, and joined the Apulian camp of the Normans.
The elder were prompted by native spirit; their success encouraged their
younger brethren, and the three first in seniority--William, Drogo, and
Humphrey--deserved to be the chiefs of their nation and the founders of
the new republic. Robert was the eldest of the seven sons of the second
marriage, and even the reluctant praise of his foes has endowed him with
the heroic qualities of a soldier and a statesman. His lofty stature
surpassed the tallest of his army; his limbs were cast in the true
proportion of strength and gracefulness, and to the decline of life he
maintained the patient vigor of health and the commanding dignity of his
form. His complexion was ruddy, his shoulders were broad, his hair and
beard were long and of a flaxen color, his eyes sparkled with fire, and
his voice, like that of Achilles, could impress obedience and terror
amid the tumult of battle. In the ruder ages of chivalry such
qualifications are not below the notice of the poet or historian. They
may observe that Robert at once, and with equal dexterity, could wield
in the right hand his sword, his lance in the left; that in the battle
of Civitella he was thrice unhorsed, and that in the close of that
memorable day he was adjudged to have borne away the prize of valor from
the warriors of the two armies. His boundless ambition was founded on
the consciousness of superior worth; in the pursuit of greatness he was
never arrested by the scruples of justice, and seldom moved by the
feelings of humanity. Though not insensible of fame, the choice of open
or clandestine means was determined only by his present advantage. The
surname of _Guiscard_[21] was applied to this master of political
wisdom, which is too often confounded with the practice of dissimulation
and deceit; and Robert is praised by the Apulian poet for excelling the
cunning of Ulysses and the eloquence of Cicero. Yet these arts were
disguised by an appearance of military frankness; in his highest fortune
he was accessible and courteous to his fellow-soldiers, and, while he
indulged the prejudices of his new subjects, he affected in his dress
and manners to maintain the ancient fashion of his country.
He grasped with a rapacious, that he might distribute with a liberal
hand; his primitive indigence had taught the habits of frugality; the
gain of a merchant was not below his attention, and his prisoners were
tortured with slow and unfeeling cruelty to force a discovery of their
secret treasure. According to the Greeks, he departed from Normandy with
only five followers on horseback and thirty on foot; yet even this
allowance appears too bountiful. The sixth son of Tancred of Hauteville
passed the Alps as a pilgrim, and his first military band was levied
among the adventurers of Italy. His brothers and countrymen had divided
the fertile lands of Apulia, but they guarded their shares with the
jealousy of avarice; the aspiring youth was driven forward to the
mountains of Calabria, and in his first exploits against the Greeks and
the natives it is not easy to discriminate the hero from the robber. To
surprise a castle or a convent, to ensnare a wealthy citizen, to plunder
the adjacent villages for necessary food, were the obscure labors which
formed and exercised the powers of his mind and body. The volunteers of
Normandy adhered to his standard; and, under his command, the peasants
of Calabria assumed the name and character of Normans.
As the genius of Robert expanded with his fortune, he awakened the
jealousy of his elder brother, by whom, in a transient quarrel, his life
was threatened and his liberty restrained. After the death of Humphrey
the tender age of his sons excluded them from the command; they were
reduced to a private estate by the ambition of their guardian and uncle,
and Guiscard was exalted on a buckler and saluted Count of Apulia and
general of the republic. With an increase of authority and of force he
resumed the conquest of Calabria, and soon aspired to a rank that should
raise him forever above the heads of his equals. By some acts of rapine
or sacrilege he had incurred a papal excommunication, but Nicholas II
was easily persuaded that the divisions of friends could terminate only
in their mutual prejudice; that the Normans were the faithful champions
of the Holy See, and it was safer to trust the alliance of a prince than
the caprice of an aristocracy. A synod of one hundred bishops was
convened at Melphi, and the count interrupted an important enterprise to
guard the person and execute the decrees of the Roman pontiff. His
gratitude and policy conferred on Robert and his posterity the ducal
title, with the investiture of Apulia, Calabria, and all the lands, both
in Italy and Sicily, which his sword could rescue from the schismatic
Greeks and the unbelieving Saracens. This apostolic sanction might
justify his arms, but the obedience of a free and victorious people
could not be transferred without their consent, and Guiscard dissembled
his elevation till the ensuing campaign had been illustrated by the
conquest of Consenza and Reggio. In the hour of triumph he assembled his
troops, and solicited the Normans to confirm by their suffrage the
judgment of the vicar of Christ; the soldiers hailed with joyful
acclamations their valiant duke, and the counts, his former equals,
pronounced the oath of fidelity with hollow smiles and secret
indignation.
After this inauguration Robert styled himself, “by the grace of God and
St. Peter, Duke of Apulia, Calabria, and hereafter of Sicily”; and it
was the labor of twenty years to deserve and realize these lofty
appellations. Such tardy progress in a narrow space may seem unworthy of
the abilities of the chief and the spirit of the nation, but the Normans
were few in number, their resources were scanty, their service was
voluntary and precarious. The bravest designs of the duke were sometimes
opposed by the free voice of his parliament of barons; the twelve counts
of popular election conspired against his authority, and against their
perfidious uncle the sons of Humphrey demanded justice and revenge. By
his policy and vigor Guiscard discovered their plots, suppressed their
rebellions, and punished the guilty with death or exile; but in these
domestic feuds his years and the national strength were unprofitably
consumed. After the defeat of his foreign enemies--the Greeks,
Lombards, and Saracens--their broken forces retreated to the strong and
populous cities of the sea-coast. They excelled in the arts of
fortification and defense; the Normans were accustomed to serve on
horseback in the field, and their rude attempts could only succeed by
the efforts of persevering courage. The resistance of Salerno was
maintained above eight months; the siege or blockade of Bari lasted
nearly four years. In these actions the Norman duke was the foremost in
every danger; in every fatigue the last and most patient. As he pressed
the citadel of Salerno a huge stone from the rampart shattered one of
his military engines, and by a splinter he was wounded in the breast.
Before the gates of Bari he lodged in a miserable hut or barrack,
composed of dry branches, and thatched with straw--a perilous station,
on all sides open to the inclemency of the winter and the spears of the
enemy.
The Italian conquests of Robert correspond with the limits of the
present kingdom of Naples, and the countries united by his arms have not
been dissevered by the revolutions of seven hundred years.
THOMAS À BECKET, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
BY DAVID HUME.
[Born in 1119, died by assassination in the Cathedral Church of
Canterbury in 1170. For a long time the Chancellor of England and
favorite adviser of the king, Henry II, he became on his
installation as archbishop the resolute advocate of papal
aggression against the rights and claims of the English kings to
the supreme control of national affairs.]