“From seeming evil still educing good.”
_Thomson._
The Saxons lost the battle of Hastings. Here, however, they left no blot
on their name. The old historian Daniel justly, as well as forcibly,
remarks, “Thus was tried, by the great assize of God’s judgment in
battle, the right of power between the English and Norman nations; a
battle the most memorable of all others; and, however miserably lost,
yet most nobly fought on the part of England.” The death of Harold, and
the absence of any other competitor, opened the way for William to the
throne. Presenting himself to the nobles of the land, assembled in
London, he was in due form elected to the vacant throne, and was crowned
by Aldred Archbishop of York, on Mid-winter’s day. William never claimed
the English crown by right of conquest. His quarrel was with Harold, not
with the English people, and he denounced him as interfering with his
just claims. The _Saxon Chronicle_ expressly asserts that “Before the
Archbishop would set the crown upon his head, he required of him a
pledge upon Christ’s book, and also swore him, that he would govern this
nation as well as any king before him had at the best done, if they
would be faithful to him.” He never claimed to be the Conqueror of
England in the ordinary sense of the word. In his first charter to
Westminster Abbey, he founds his right to the crown upon the grant of
his relative Edward the Confessor. The _Domesday Book_ was not compiled
until near the close of William’s reign (about the year 1086), yet in it
he is not spoken of as a conqueror. “Throughout the _Survey_,” says Sir
Henry Ellis, “Harold is constantly spoken of as the usurper of the
realm: ‘quando regnum _invasit_.’ Once only is it said ‘quando
_regnabat_.’ Of William it is as constantly said, ‘postquam _venit_ in
Angliam,’ after he came to England. Once only does the expression occur,
‘W. rex _conquisivit_ Angliam,’ when he conquered or acquired
England.”[111] But whatever were William’s rights and original
intentions, it was impossible that he could long reign over England as a
constitutional monarch. It was not likely that the great chiefs who
survived the battle of Hastings would long submit to the rule of a
stranger--hosts of foreigners would necessarily be introduced into the
court, and this, as in the reign of the Confessor, would be a continual
source of heartburning and jealousy--and, above all, the followers of
the King were to be rewarded, and this could only be done by depriving
the Saxon noblemen of their patrimonies. When William won the battle of
Hastings, he bid farewell to peace for ever. His subsequent history was
a continued series of entanglements and broils. One chieftain after
another, one district and then another, became restless under his rule;
each he crushed in succession. At length he became in the strict sense
of the word the Conqueror. He ruled by the sword alone. His own Norman
barons, and even his brother Odo, felt the weight of his iron hand; but
it fell with peculiar force upon his native-born subjects. The writer in
the _Saxon Chronicle_, speaking from his own knowledge, says of William,
“He was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and more powerful
than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those good men who loved
God, but severe beyond measure towards those who withstood his will....
He was a very stern and wrathful man, so that none durst do anything
against his will, and he kept in prison those earls who acted against
his pleasure.... Truly there was much trouble in these times, and very
great distress; he caused castles to be built, and oppressed the
poor.... He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith,
so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded. He loved the
tall stags as if he had been their father. The rich complained and the
poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they
must will all that the king willed, if they would live; or would keep
their lands; or would hold their possessions; or would be maintained in
their rights. Alas! that any man should so exalt himself, and carry
himself in his pride over all!”[112] Ingulph speaks of the entire
subjugation of the English people, and of their systematic exclusion
from offices of honour. “Many of the chief men of the land, for some
time, offered resistance to William, the new king, but, being
afterwards crushed by his might and overcome, they at last submitted to
the sway of the Normans.... So inveterately did the Normans at this
period detest the English, that, whatever the amount of their merits
might be, they were excluded from all dignities; and foreigners who were
far less fitted, be they of any other nation whatever under heaven,
would have been gladly chosen instead of them.”[113] Henry of Huntingdon
uses language which the English of the present day, accustomed as they
are to rear their heads proudly among the nations, can hardly
understand. “In the twenty-first year of the reign of King William, when
the Normans had accomplished the righteous will of God on the English
Nation, and there was now no prince of the ancient regal race living in
England, and all the English were brought to a reluctant submission, so
that _it was a disgrace even to be called an Englishman_, the instrument
of Providence in fulfilling its designs was removed from the
world.”[114] “Many of the people,” as Holinshed tells us, “utterly
refusing such an intolerable yoke of thraldom as was daily laid upon
them, chose rather to leave all, both goods and lands, and after the
manner of outlaws, got them to the woods with their wives, children, and
servants, meaning from henceforth to live upon the spoils of the country
adjoining, and to take whatsoever came next to hand.”
Notwithstanding the heavy pressure of these evils good ensued. The
political tempest resulted in the increased purity, health, and peace,
of the national atmosphere.
William established a strong government. Had Harold been unopposed from
without, he would have had rivals from within the nation. The opposition
of his own brother Tostig was but a prelude of what the general result
of his reign would have been. Ambitious men, such as Edwin and Morcar,
the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, would on the least provocation have
espoused the cause of Edgar Atheling, and by rendering the land a scene
of internal discord, have made it an easy prey to new bands of
adventurers from Denmark, Norway, Flanders, and France. William, by the
vigour, and even harshness of his rule, quelled internal dissension, and
bid defiance to foreign rivalry.
The Norman invasion hastened and perfected the establishment of the
feudal system in England. This system had one great defect, which
renders it unfit for the present condition of England--it altogether
overlooked the claims of the lower classes, who always form the great
bulk of the population; still, it produced most beneficial results in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It brought all the great barons of
the empire into subjection to the sovereign, and by defining the
corresponding duties of the mesne lords and inferior tenants, knit the
whole kingdom into one. By this unity the realm was prepared to put down
intestine broils, and to resist foreign aggression. A way too was
prepared for the elevation of the lower classes. The system had but to
be extended in order to define the duties, and to confer corresponding
privileges, upon every member of the community.
Learning and civilization were greatly advanced by the Norman Conquest.
Italy at this time was the focus of the knowledge and refinement of the
world. The light kindled by the genius of Attica, and nurtured by the
philosophy and poetry of the Augustan era, still irradiated the
seven-hilled city. Britain, severed from the main-land by a stormy
channel, had less intercourse with Rome than the nations of the
continent. Though William of Malmesbury may have somewhat overdrawn the
statement, still there is much truth in the picture which he gives of
the social condition of the Saxons at the time of the Conquest. “In
process of time the desire after literature and religion had decayed,
for several years before the arrival of the Normans. The clergy,
contented with a very slight degree of learning, could scarcely stammer
out the words of the sacraments; and a person who understood grammar was
an object of wonder and astonishment. The nobility were given up to
luxury and wantonness. The commonalty, left unprotected, became a prey
to the most powerful, who amassed fortunes, by either seizing on their
property, or by selling their persons into foreign countries; although
it be an innate quality of this people to be more inclined to revelling,
than to the accumulation of wealth. Drinking was a universal practice,
in which they passed entire nights as well as days. They consumed their
whole substance in mean and despicable houses; unlike Normans and
French, who, in noble and splendid mansions, lived with frugality.”[115]
There cannot be a doubt that by the introduction of the refinements of
life the condition of the people was improved, and that a check was
given to the grosser sensualities of our nature. Certain it is that
learning received a powerful stimulus by the conquest. At the period of
the Norman invasion, a great intellectual movement had commenced in the
schools on the continent. Normandy had beyond most other parts profited
by it. William brought with him to England some of the most
distinguished ornaments of the schools of his native duchy; the
consequence of this was that England henceforward took a higher walk in
literature than she had ever done before.[116]
Another important advantage resulting from the Conquest was the
emancipation of the lower classes. At the period of the invasion the
great bulk of the population were in a servile condition. One class of
the people, the churls, were attached to the land, and were transferred
with it from one master to another without the power of choosing their
employer, or taking any steps to improve their condition--another large
class, the thews, were the absolute property of their owners. The
attempts which Alfred and some of the clergy made to remedy this
gigantic evil were attended with but partial success. The Conquest gave
it its death blow. The convulsions which ensued afforded great numbers
the wished-for opportunity of escaping from thraldom. Many of the
landowners, seeing the shipwreck of their fortunes inevitable, made a
virtue of necessity, and manumitted their serfs. One of William’s
regulations had a tendency quietly to complete what was thus
auspiciously begun. He passed a law declaring that every slave who had
resided unchallenged a year and a day in any city or walled town in the
kingdom, should be free for ever.[117] This law became a door of hope to
many, and in due time not one slave was left in England. It had another
very beneficial effect. Men were led to congregate in towns; knowledge
was promoted; a stimulus was given to the cultivation of the refinements
of social life; and the commoners, strong in their numbers, were induced
to assert and maintain their common rights.
Even the despotic measures of the king had a beneficial influence upon
the lower grades of society. The thanes and aldermen of the Confessor’s
days being deprived of their lands, were glad to hold a small portion of
them as the inferior tenants of the great Norman barons. Hence sprung
the yeomanry of England, who, in days of difficulty and danger, have
often proved themselves the mainstay of the country. The Saxon noblemen,
in descending from their high estate, brought with them their
independence of feeling and high spirit. They were chastened but not
crushed. They not only maintained their own freedom of thought, but
infused a portion of their energy into the newly emancipated class below
them. Formerly the difference in social position between the landed
proprietor and the tiller of the soil was so great, that there could be
little friendly intercourse between them, and no unity of interest; but
now, by the formation of a middle class, the two extremes of society
were linked together, and all classes placed in a position to benefit
the rest, as well as to be benefited by them. The hope of rising in the
social scale now dawned upon the lower orders.
Another signal benefit resulted from the Conquest. It brought to our
English soil a host of men renowned in their own persons and those of
their descendants for all that is great in art and arms, for all that is
noble in knightly enterprise and chivalric feeling. Strike out from the
page of history the deeds of the Montfords, the Marmions, the Warrens,
the Nevilles, the Percys, the Beauchamps, the Bruces, the Balliols, the
Talbots, the Cliffords, and a host of others who fought with William at
Hastings, or followed in his wake, what a blank would be left. True,
they were not always found contending on the side of liberty and truth;
but, on the whole, they contributed to the developement of England’s
liberties and enlightenment and power, and left an example of
indomitable energy and manly bearing which mankind to the latest ages
will do well to copy.
One other view of the subject we must take. England required
chastisement, but shall the oppressor on that account go free? The
chroniclers most favourable to William do not conceal the harshness and
covetousness which disfigured the latter part of his reign. They tell
us, too, of the evils which afflicted his age, and pursued him beyond
the tomb. His eldest son rose in rebellion against him. Many of his own
nobles joined the undutiful youth; even his beloved wife Matilda
favoured him. In the New Forest, which he had wrongfully appropriated to
his own pleasures, his son Richard was slain, during his lifetime. His
son William, who succeeded him, came to a violent end in the same
place. A grandson also is said to have perished in it. Whilst ravaging
Mantes, in revenge for an idle jest, he met with his own death stroke.
No sooner had he ceased to breathe than his lifeless body was forsaken
by his family and domestics. When all that remained of the once potent
William was about to be committed to the tomb, the man from whom he had
wrested the site forbade his burial; some of the bystanders ‘of their
charity’ satisfied the claim, and the Conqueror was laid in an
eleemosynary grave. At a subsequent period that grave was violated, and
his bones dispersed.
His followers, bent upon enriching themselves at the expense of justice,
did not escape. Many of them rose in rebellion, and were crushed. Others
suffered in the troubles which ensued upon his death. In the struggle
between Stephen and Matilda, dreadful was the havoc committed upon the
followers of William and their children. During the Wars of the Roses,
nearly all the great families founded at the Conquest suffered
calamities differing little in kind or degree from those which the
victors of Hastings inflicted upon the old nobility of the land. History
gives emphasis to the divine injunction, “Fret not thyself because of
evil doers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity: for
they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green
herb.”