through them, no more able to drive them back than if they had been the
trees of the forest. Gyrtha, the true-hearted and noble, fell under the
sword of a Norman knight, Leofwyn lay near him in his blood, yet still
Harold’s voice was heard cheering on his men, and still his standard
streamed above their heads.
At sunset, that well-known voice was no longer heard, and the setting
sun beheld Tunstan the White perform the crowning achievement of the
day, uproot the standard banner of Normandy that the morning beams had
seen committed to his charge. Not an earl or thane of Wessex was living;
and heaps of slain lay thick on Heathfield hill, and the valley round a
very lake of blood. Senlac, or Sanglac, was its old name, and sounded
but too appropriate to the French ears of the Conqueror, as, in a moment
of sorrow for the fearful loss of life he beheld, he vowed that here
should stand an Abbey where prayer should be made for pardon for his
sins and for the repose of the souls of the slaughtered. Darkness came
on; but the Saxons, retreating under its cover, were still so undaunted
that the Normans could hardly venture to move about the field except in
considerable parties, and Eustace of Boulogne, while speaking to the
Duke, was felled to the earth by a sudden blow.
In the morning, Gytha, the widow of Godwin, who had lost four children
by the perjury and ambition of one of them, came to entreat permission
to bury. Gyrtha and Leofwyn lay near together at the foot of the banner.
Harold was sought in vain, till Edith of the Swan neck, a lady he had
loved, was brought to help in the melancholy quest.
She declared a defaced and mangled corpse to be that of Harold, and it
was carried, with those of the two brothers, to the Abbey of Waltham,
where it was placed beneath a stone bearing the two sorrowful words,
“Infelix Harold.”
Years passed on, and the people had long become accustomed to the Norman
yoke, when there was much talk among them of a hermit, who dwelt in a
cell not far from the town, in the utmost penitence and humility. He was
seldom seen, his face was deeply scarred, and he had lost his left eye,
and nothing was known of his name or history; but he was deeply revered
for his sanctity, and when Henry Beauclerc once visited Chester, he
sought a private interview with the mysterious penitent.
It is said, that when the hermit lay on his death-bed, he owned himself
to be Harold, son of Godwin, once King of England for seven months. He
had been borne from the bloody hill, between life and death, in the
darkness of the evening, by the two faithful monks, Osgood and Ailric,
and tended in secret till he recovered from his wounds.
Since that time he had been living in penitence and contrition, unknown
to and apart from the world, and died at length, trusting that his forty
years’ repentance might be accepted.
If this tale be true, what a warning might not he have bestowed on
the young prince Henry, destined to run a like course of perjury and
ambition, and to feel it turn back upon him in the dreariness of
desolate old age, when “he never smiled again.” Had not the penitent
Harold more peace at the last than the king Henry?
The same story is told of almost every king missed in a lost battle.
Arthur, borne away to die at Avalon, and believed to be among the
fairies; Rodrigo, the last of the Goths, whose steed Orelio and horned
helmet lay on the banks of the river, and whose name was found centuries
after on a rude gravestone, near a hermitage; James IV., whom the Scots
by turns hoped to see return from pilgrimage, and pitied as they looked
at Lord Home’s border tower; the gallant Don Sebastian, the last of the
glorious race of Portuguese Kings, never seen after his shout of “Let
us die!” in the tumult of Alcaçer, yet long looked for by his loving
people--of each in turn the belief has arisen among the subjects who
clung to the hope of seeing the beloved prince, and dwelt on the
doubt whether his corpse was identified. In the cases of Harold and
Rodrigo--generous men tempted into fearful and ruinous crimes--one would
hope the tale was true, and that the time for repentance was vouchsafed
to them; nor are their stories entirely without authority.
Harold had three young children, who wandered about under the care of
their grandmother, Gytha, at one time finding a shelter in the Holms,
those two islets in the British Channel, at another taking refuge in
Ireland, whence they at length escaped to Norway, and the daughter
married one of the Kings of Novgorod, the beginning of the Empire of
Russia. Ulfnoth, the only remaining son of the bold Godwinsons, was the
hostage that Edward the Confessor had placed in the hands of the Duke of
Normandy; he was seized upon once more by William Rufus, and remained in
captivity till his death. The Conqueror kept his vow, and erected the
splendid Battle Abbey on the field that gave him a kingdom. The high
altar stood where Harold’s banner had been planted, and the enclosures
surrounded every spot where the conflict had raged.
They were measured out by the corpses of Normans and Saxons. The
Battle-roll, a list of every Norman who had borne arms there, was lodged
in the keeping of the Abbot, and contains the names of many a good old
English family which has held the same land generation after generation,
English now, though then called the Norman spoiler, but it is to be
feared, that the roll was much tampered with to gratify family vanity.
Battle Abbey was one of the greatest and richest foundations. The Abbot
was a friar, and, according to the unfortunate habit of exempting
monasteries from the Bishop’s jurisdiction, was subject to no government
but the Pope’s; and this led to frequent disputes between the Abbot and
the see of Winchester.
It was overthrown in the Reformation, and is now a mere ruin; but its
beautiful arches still remain to show that, better than any other
conqueror, William knew how to honor a battle-field. There is but one
other Battle Abbey in the world--Batalha in Portugal--which covers the
plain of Aljubarota, where Joao I. won his kingdom from Castile; and as
his wife was a daughter of John of Gaunt, a most noble and high-minded
princess, it is most probable that she suggested the work after the
example of her great ancestor; nay, when the visitor enters the nave,
and is reminded by the architecture of Winchester, it seems as if
Philippa of Lancaster might have both proposed the foundation, and
sent to England for the plan, to the Architect and Bishop, William of
Wykeham.
Nor is Battle Abbey the only remaining monument of Hastings. Matilda’s
own handiwork prepared her thank offering of tapestry, recording her
husband’s victory; and this work, done as it was for a gift to Heaven,
not a vainglorious record, still endures in the very cathedral to which
she gave it, one of the choicest historical witnesses that have come
down to our times. We might be apt to regret that she did not present
her work to Battle Abbey, where it would have been most appropriate;
but as the Puritans would most likely have called it a Popish vestment
savoring of idolatry, we are consoled by thinking it probably owes its
preservation to her having chosen to give it as a hanging on festival
days to the Cathedral at Bayeux, the see of her husband’s half-brother,
Odo, who shared in all the toils and dangers of the expedition, and
whom she has taken especial care to represent for the benefit of the
townspeople of Bayeux; for wherever we find his broad face, large
person, shaven crown, and the chequered red and green suit by which she
expressed his wadded garment, his name is always found in large letters;
and he is evidently in his full glory when we find him, club in hand,
at the beginning of the battle, and these words worked round him: _Odo
Eps._ (episcopus) _baculum tenens, confortat pueros_. He was one of
the bad, warlike Bishops of those irregular times, and brought many
disasters on himself by his turbulence and haughtiness.
Matilda’s tapestry is a long narrow strip, little more than half a
yard in breadth. It begins with Harold’s journey to Normandy, and ends
unfinished in the midst of the battle; and most curious it is. The
drawing is of course rude, and the coloring very droll, the horses being
red and green, or blue, and, invariably, the off-leg of a different
color from the other three, while the ways in which both horses and men
fall at Hastings make the scene very diverting.
Her castles, houses, and more especially Westminster Abbey, are of all
the colors in the rainbow, and much smaller than the persons entering
them, and yet in every figure there is spirit, in every face expression,
and throughout, William, Harold, and Odo, bear countenances which are
not to be mistaken. Harold has moustaches, which none of the Normans
wore. There we find Harold taking his extorted oath; the death of King
Edward, the Saxons gazing with horror at the three-tailed comet; the
ship-building of yellow, green, and red boards, cut out of trees
with most ludicrous foliage; the moon just as it is described; the
disembarkation, where a bare-legged mariner wades out, anchor in hand;
the very comical foraging party; the repast upon landing, where Odo is
saying grace with two fingers raised in benediction, while the meat is
served on shields, and fowls carried round spitted upon arrows. Then
follows the battle, where William is seen raising his helmet by its
nose-guard, and looking exceedingly fierce as he rallies his men; where
horses and men tumble head over heels, and where, finally, Matilda broke
off with a pattern of hawberks traced out, and no heads or legs put
to them. What stayed her hand? Was it her grief at the conduct of her
first-born that took from her all heart to proceed with her memorial,
or was it only the hand of death that closed her toil, her womanly
record of her husband’s achievements?
The border must not be forgotten. It is a narrow edge above and below.
At first it is worked with subjects from Phaedrus’s fables (on having
translated which was rested the fame of Henry’s scholarship), and very
cleverly are they chosen; for, as if in comment on Harold’s visit to
Rouen, we find in near neighborhood the stork with her head in the
wolf’s mouth, and the crow letting fall her cheese into the fox’s jaws.
Matilda did not upbraid the Normans by working the Parliament of
Lillebonne, but she or her designer surely had it in mind when a herd of
frightened beasts was drawn, an ape in front of them making an oration
to what may be a lion, as it is much bigger than the rest; but as
Matilda never saw a lion, the likeness is not remarkable.
Further on are representations of agriculture, sowing, reaping, &c.
Wherever there is a voyage, fishes swim above and below, and in the
battle there is a border plentiful in dead men.
The Bayeux tapestry--the “Toile de St. Jean,” as it is there called,
from the feast-day when the cathedral was hung with it--remained unknown
and forgotten, till it was brought to light by one of the last people
that could have been expected--Napoleon. He was then full of his plan
for invading England, and called general attention to the toile de St.
Jean, to bring to mind the Norman Invasion, and show that England had
once been conquered.
So she had, but he had to deal with the sons of both victors, and of
those who were slain. Now vanquished, Norman and Saxon were one, and by
the great mercy of Heaven upon their offspring, the English, not one
battle has been fought, since Hastings, with a Continental foe upon
English ground.
May that mercy be still vouchsafed us!
CAMEO VIII. THE CAMP OF REFUGE. (1067-1072.)
_King of England_.
1066. William I.
In the fen country of Lincolnshire, there lived, in the reign of Edward
the Confessor, a wealthy Saxon franklin named Leofric, Lord of Bourn.
He was related to the great Earls of Mercia, and his brother Brand was
Abbot of Peterborough, so that he, and his wife Ediva, were persons of
consideration in their own neighborhood. They had a son named Hereward,
and called, for some unknown, reason, Le Wake, a youth of great height
and personal strength, and of so fierce and violent a disposition, that
he disturbed the peace of the neighborhood to such a degree that he was
banished from the realm. His high spirit found fit occupation in the
armies of foreign princes: and pilgrims and minstrels brought home such
reports of his prowess, that the people of Bourn no longer regarded him
as a turbulent young scapegrace, but considered him as their pride and
glory.
After a brilliant career abroad, Hereward married a Flemish lady, and
was settled on her estates when the tidings reached him that his father
was dead, and that his aged mother had been despoiled of her property,
and cruelly treated, by a Norman to whom William the Conqueror
had presented the estate of Bourn. No sooner did he receive this
intelligence, than he set off with his wife, and, arriving in
Lincolnshire, communicated in secret with his old friends at Bourn,
collected a small band, attacked the Norman, drove him away, and
re-instated Ediva in his paternal home.
But this exploit only exposed him to further perils. Normans were in
possession of every castle around; his cousins, the young Earls Edwin
find Morkar, had submitted to the Conqueror; Edwin was betrothed to
Agatha, William’s daughter; and their sister Lucy was married to an
Angevin named Ivo Taillebois bringing him a portion of their lands, in
right of which he called himself Viscount of Spalding. Their submission
had availed them little; they, as well as Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon
(son of Siward, and husband of the Conqueror’s niece, Judith), were
feeling that a hand of iron was over them, and regretting every day
that he had not made common cause against the enemy before he had
fully established his power. Selfishness, jealousy, and wavering, had
overthrown and ruined the Saxons. Each had sought to secure his own
lands and life, careless of his neighbors. No one had the spirit of
Frithric, Abbot of St. Alban’s, who blocked up the Conqueror’s march
with trunks of trees, and when asked by William why he had injured his
woods for the sake of making an unavailing resistance, replied, “I
did my duty. If every one had done as much, you would not be here.”
According to their own tradition, the men of Kent, coming forward, each
carrying a branch of a tree, so that they advanced unperceived, “a
moving wood,” so encumbered William’s passage that he could not proceed
till he had taken an oath to respect their privileges. London, too,
preserved its rights, owing to the management of a burgess, called
Ansgard, who conducted the treaty with the Normans and would not admit
them into the city till its liberties were secured.
William himself was anxious to be regarded not as a conqueror, but as
reigning by inheritence from the Confessor. For this cause, when Matilda
was crowned, he caused a Norman baron, Marmion of Fontenaye, to ride
into the midst of Westminster Hall, and, throwing down his gauntlet,
defy any man to single combat who denied the rights of William and
Matilda. He himself took the old coronation oath drawn up by St.
Dunstan, and pledged himself to execute justice according to the old
laws of Alfred and Edward.
But William, whatever might be his own good intentions, was pressed by
circumstances. He had lured his Normans across the channel with hopes of
rich plunder in England, and knight and squire, man-at-arms and archer,
were eager for their reward. Norman, Breton, Angevin, clamored for
possession: families of peasants crossed the sea, expecting, in right
of their French tongue, to be gentry at once, and lords of the churl
Saxons; while the Saxons, fully conscious of their own nobility, and
possessors of the soil for five hundred years, derided them in such
rhymes as these:
“William de Coningsby
Came out of Brittany
With his wife Tiffany,
And his maid Manfas,
And his dog Hardigras.”
But the laugh proved to be on the side of the new comers, and the Saxon,
whether Earl, Thane, Franklin, or Ceorl, though he could trace his line
up to Odin, and had held his land since Hengist first won Thanet, must
give place to Hardigras and his master. And though our sympathies are
all with the dispossessed Saxons, and the Normans appear as needy and
rapacious spoilers, there is no cause for us to lament their coming.
Without the Norman aristocracy, and the high spirit of chivalry and
adventure thus infused, England could scarcely have attained her
greatness; for, though many great men had existed among the unmixed
Anglo-Saxon race, they had never been able to rouse the nation from the
heavy, dull, stolid sensuality into which, to this day, an uncultivated
Englishman is liable to fall.
One Norman, the gallant Gilbert Fitz-Richard, deserves to be remembered
as an exception to the grasping temper of his countrymen. He would
accept neither gold nor lands for the services he had rendered at
Hastings. He said he had come in obedience to the summons of his feudal
chief, and not for spoil, and, now his term of service was at an end, he
would go back to his own inheritance, with which he was content, without
the plunder of the widow and orphan.
For it was thus that William first strove to satisfy his followers.
Every rich Saxon widow or heiress who could be found was compelled
to marry a Norman baron or knight; but when there proved to be not a
sufficiency of these unfortunate ladies, he was obliged to find other
pretexts less apparently honorable. Every noble who had fought in the
cause of Harold was declared a traitor, and his lands adjudged to be
forfeited, and this filled the Earldoms of Wessex and Sussex with great
numbers of Normans, who counted their wealth at so many Englishmen
apiece, and made no scruple of putting their own immediate followers
into the manors whence they thrust the ancient owners. As to the great
nobles, they were treated so harshly that they were all longing, if
possible, to throw off the yoke, and make the stand which they should
have made a year ago, when William had won nothing but the single,
hard-fought battle of Hastings.
Some of the Norman adventurers took great state on them, all the more,
probably, because they had been nobodies in their own country. One of
the most haughty of all was the Spalding Viscount, Ivo, whose surname of
Taillebois seems to betray somewhat of his origin in Anjou. He was
noted for his pompous language and insolent bearing; he insisted on his
vassals kneeling on one knee when they addressed him, and he and his
men-at-arms took every opportunity of tormenting the Saxons. He set
his dogs at their flocks, lamed or drowned their cattle, killed their
poultry, and, above all, harassed a few brethren of the Abbey of
Croyland, who inhabited a grange not far from Spalding, to such a
degree, that he obliged them at last to retreat to the Abbey, and then
filled the house with monks from Anjou; and though the Abbot Ingulf was
William’s secretary, he could obtain no redress.
Such a neighbor as this was not likely to allow the re-instated Ediva to
remain at Bourn in peace, and Hereward found that he must continue in
arms, for her protection and his own. He placed his wife, Torfrida, in
a convent, and, collecting his friends around him, kept up a constant
warfare with the Normans, until at length he succeeded in fortifying the
Isle of Ely, and establishing there what he called the Camp of Refuge,
as it gave shelter to any Saxon who had suffered from the violence of
the Normans, or would not adopt the new habits they tried to enforce.
The weak, helpless, and aged, were sheltered by the monastery and its
buildings; the strong, enrolled in Hereward’s gallant band. Some of them
were of higher rank than himself, and in order that he might be on a par
with them, as well as with his Norman enemies, he sought the order of
knighthood from his uncle, Abbot Brand.
The Normans in general were knighted by lay nobles, and though their
prince, William Rufus, received the order from Lanfranc, they would not
acknowledge Hereward as a knight, though they could not help respecting
his truth, honor, and courage; and it was a common saying among them,
that if there had been only four men like him in England, they should
never have gained a footing there. No wonder, when he never hesitated to
fight singly with seven Normans at once, and each of his five
principal followers was a match for three. They were Ibe Winter, his
brother-in-arms; Eghelric, his cousin; Ital; Alfric; and Sexwald.
Many fugitives of high rank did Hereward receive in his Camp of Refuge.
He had nearly been honored by the presence of his hereditary sovereign,
Edgar the Etheling, but the plan failed. He did, however, shelter his
two cousins, Morkar and Edwin. They had suffered much from the insolence
of the Normans, and experienced the futility of the promises in which
they had trusted, until at length they had been driven to join a rising
in the North. It had been quickly suppressed, and the worst of all the
cruelties of the Normans had avenged it, while the two earls, now become
outlaws, fled to the Camp of Refuge. Thence Edwin was sent on a mission
to Scotland, but on the way he was attacked by a party of his enemies
and slain, after a gallant resistance. He was the handsomest man of his
time, and his betrothed, Agatha, was devotedly attached to him; it is
even said that the stern William himself wept when the bloody head of
his daughter’s lover was presented to him. A curious gold ornament
has been of late years found in the field where Edwin was killed, and
antiquaries allow us to imagine that it might have been a love-token
from the Norman princess to the Saxon earl.
Another fugitive in Hereward’s camp was the high-spirited Abbot
Frithric, whose steady opposition to the illegal encroachments of the
Normans had given great offence to William. Once Frithric had combined
with other influential ecclesiastics to require of the Conqueror another
oath to abide by the old English laws, and thus brought on himself an
accusation of rebellion and sentence of banishment. He assembled his
monks, and told them the time was come when, according to the words of
Holy Scripture, they must flee from city to city, bade them, farewell,
and, taking nothing with him but a few books, safely reached the Camp of
Refuge, where he soon after died.
Thorold, the new Norman Abbot of Malmesbury, kept a body of archers in
his pay, and whenever his monks resisted any of his improper measures,
he used to call out, “Here, my men-at-arms!” At length the Conqueror
heard of his proceedings. “I’ll find him his match!” cried William. “I
will send him to Peterborough, ‘where Hereward will give him as much
fighting as he likes.”
To Peterborough, then, Thorold was appointed on the death of Hereward’s
uncle, Abbot Brand, while the poor monks of Malmesbury received for
their new superior a certain Guerin de Lire, who disinterred and threw
away the bones of his Saxon predecessors, and took all the treasure in
the coffers of the convent, in order that he might display his riches in
the eyes of those who had seen him poor.