THE FIRST WARS OF WILLIAM RUFUS.
1090-1092.[479]
[Sidenote: Character of the year 1089.]
[Sidenote: Natural phænomena.]
[Sidenote: The great earthquake. Aug. 11, 1089.]
The rest of the year in which Lanfranc died was unmarked by any
striking public event, political or military. The causes of evil which
had begun to play their part before the Primate’s death, which were
enabled to play it so much more powerfully after his death, were no
doubt already at work; but they had as yet not wrought any open
change, or done anything specially to impress men’s minds. The writers
of the time have nothing to record, except natural phænomena, and it
must be remembered that natural phænomena, and those mostly of a
baleful kind, form a marked feature of the reign of William Rufus.
Even he could hardly be charged with directly causing earthquakes,
storms, and bad harvests; but, in the ideas of his day, it was natural
to look on earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests, either as scourges
sent to punish his evil deeds, or else as signs that some more direct
vengeance was presently coming upon himself. The ever-living belief of
those times in the near connexion between the moral and the physical
world must always be borne in mind in reading their history. And in
the days of William Rufus there was plenty in both worlds to set men’s
minds a-thinking. Lanfranc had not been dead three months before the
land was visited with a mighty earthquake. The strongest
buildings――the massive keeps and minsters lately built or still
building――seemed to spring from the ground and sink back again into
their places.[480] Then came a lack of the fruits of the earth of all
kinds; the harvest was slow in ripening and scanty when it came; men
reaped their corn at Martinmas and yet later.[481]
[Sidenote: Character of the year 1090.]
[Sidenote: Beginnings of foreign adventure.]
[Sidenote: First mention of domestic opposition.]
The next year we find no entries of this kind. There was a mighty stir
in England and in Normandy; but it was not a mere stirring of the
elements. We now enter on the record of the foreign policy and the
foreign wars of the Red King, and we hear the first wail going up from
the oppressed folk within his kingdom. Throughout his reign the growth
of the prince’s power and the grievances of his people go together. In
the former year there was nothing to chronicle but the earthquake and
the late harvest. This year we hear of the first successes of the King
beyond the sea, and we hear, as their natural consequence, that the
“land was fordone with unlawful gelds.”[482]
[Sidenote: The years 1090-1091.]
[Sidenote: Successes in Normandy.]
[Sidenote: Supremacy over Scotland. 1091.]
[Sidenote: Annexation of Cumberland. 1092.]
The two years which followed the death of Lanfranc saw the attempt of
the first year of Rufus reversed. Instead of the lord of Normandy
striving to win England, the lord of England not only strives, but
succeeds, in making himself master of a large part of the Norman
duchy. Having thus become a continental potentate, the King comes back
to his island kingdom, to establish his Imperial supremacy over the
greatest vassal of his crown, and to do what his father had not done,
to enlarge the borders of his immediate realm by a new land and a new
city.
[Sidenote: Close connexion of English and Norman history.]
[Sidenote: The same main actors in both.]
[Sidenote: Normandy the chief seat of warfare.]
[Sidenote: Contrast between Normandy and England as to private war.]
Through a large part then of the present chapter the scene of our
story will be removed from England to Normandy. Yet it is only the
scene which is changed, not the actors. One main result of the coming
of the first William into England was that for a while the history of
Normandy and that of England cannot be kept asunder. The chief men on
the one side of the water are the chief men on the other side. And the
fact that they were so is the main key to the politics of the time. We
have in the last chapter seen the working of this fact from one side;
we shall now see its working from the other side. The same men flit
backwards and forwards from Normandy to England and from England to
Normandy. But of warfare, public and private, during the reign of
William Rufus and still more during the reign of Henry the First,
Normandy rather than England is the chosen field. Without warfare of
some kind a Norman noble could hardly live. And for that beloved
employment Normandy gave many more opportunities than England. The
Duke of the Normans, himself after all the man of a higher lord, could
not be――at least no duke but William the Great could be――in his
continental duchy all that the King of the English, Emperor in his own
island, could be within his island realm. Private war was lawful in
Normandy――the Truce of God itself implied its lawfulness; it never was
lawful in England. And wars with France, wars with Anjou, the endless
struggle in and for the borderland of Maine, went much further towards
taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the Norman duchy, than
the endless strife on the Welsh and Scottish marches could go towards
taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the English kingdom.
Normandy then will be our fighting-ground far more than England; but
the fighting men will be the same in both lands.
[Sidenote: The old and the new generation.]
[Sidenote: Bishop Odo.]
[Sidenote: Hugh. d. 1101.]
[Sidenote: Roger. d. 1094.]
[Sidenote: Robert of Mowbray.]
[Sidenote: William of Warren.]
[Sidenote: Walter Giffard, d. 1102.]
[Sidenote: William of Eu.]
[Sidenote: Robert of Bellême.]
[Sidenote: Robert of Meulan.]
The old companions of the Conqueror were by this time beginning to
make way for a new generation. The rebellion of 1088 saw the last
exploits of some of them. Yet others among them will still be actors
for a while. Bishop Odo, cut off from playing any part in England,
still plays a part in Normandy. The great border earls, Hugh of
Chester and of Avranches, Roger of Shrewsbury and of Montgomery, die
in the course of our tale, but not till we have something more to tell
about both of them, and a good deal to tell about the longer-lived of
the two. Their younger fellow, Robert of Mowbray, after becoming the
chief centre of one part of our story, leaves the world by a living
death. The new Earl of Surrey, if not already dead, passes away
without anything further to record of him; Walter Giffard, old as a
man, but young as an earl, still lives on. But younger men are coming
into sight. William of Eu, the son of the still living Count Robert,
has already come before us as a chief actor in our story, and we shall
see him as the chiefest sufferer. But above all, two men, whom we have
hitherto seen only by fits and starts, now come to the front as chief
actors on both sides of the sea. Before we enter on the details of
Norman affairs, it will be well to try clearly to take in the
character and position of two famous bearers of the same name, great
alike in England, in Normandy, and in France, Robert of Bellême,
afterwards of Shrewsbury, of Bridgenorth, and of both Montgomeries,
and Robert, Count of the French county of Meulan, heir of the great
Norman house of Beaumont, and forefather of the great English house of
Leicester.
[Sidenote: History and character of Robert of Bellême.]
[Sidenote: Succeeds his mother Mabel. 1082.]
[Sidenote: Her inheritance.]
[Sidenote: Succeeds his father at Montgomery, 1094;]
[Sidenote: and his brother at Shrewsbury, 1098.]
[Sidenote: His wife Agnes of Ponthieu.]
[Sidenote: Guy Count of Ponthieu. 1053-1100.]
[Sidenote: Greatness of Robert’s possessions.]
[Sidenote: Great part played by him.]
The two Rogers, fathers of the two Roberts, are still living; but for
the rest of their days they play a part quite secondary to that played
by their sons. Robert of Bellême, the eldest son of Roger of
Montgomery, has already come before us several times, most prominently
as a sharer in the rebellion raised by the present Duke against his
father in Normandy[483] and in the rebellion raised on his behalf
against his brother. As son of the slain Countess Mabel,[484] he was
heir of the house of Talvas, heir alike of their possessions and of
their reputed wickedness. Lord through his mother of the castle from
which he took his name, lord of a crowd of other castles on the
border-lands of Normandy, Perche, and Maine, Robert of Bellême, Robert
Talvas, stands forth for the present as the son of Mabel rather than
as the son of Roger. In after times counties and lordships flowed in
upon him from various sources and in various quarters. The death of
his father gave him the old Norman possessions of the house of
Montgomery; the death of his brother gave him the new English
possessions of that house, the great earldom of Shrewsbury and all
that went with it. We seem to be carried back to past times when we
find that Robert of Bellême was married to the daughter of Guy of
Ponthieu, the gaoler of Harold, and that, at the accession of William
Rufus, Guy had still as many years to reign as the Red King himself.
Guy’s death at last added Ponthieu to the possessions of the house of
Bellême, nominally in the person of Robert’s son William Talvas,
practically in that of Robert himself. The lord of such lands, master
of four and thirty castles,[485] ranked rather with princes than with
ordinary nobles; and even now, when Robert held only the inheritance
of his mother, the extent and nature of his fiefs gave him a position
almost princely. The man alike of Normandy and of France, he could
make use of the profitable as well as the dangerous side of a divided
allegiance, and it is not without reason that we find the lord of the
border-land spoken of by the fitting title of Marquess.[486] From the
death of the Conqueror onwards, through the reigns of Robert and
William, till the day when Henry sent him to a life-long prison,
Robert of Bellême fills in the history of Normandy and England a place
alongside of their sovereigns.
[Sidenote: His character.]
[Sidenote: His surname.]
[Sidenote: His skill in engineering.]
[Sidenote: His special and wanton cruelty.]
[Sidenote: His treatment of his wife]
[Sidenote: and his godson.]
With the inheritance of Mabel and William Talvas, their son and
grandson was believed to have succeeded in full measure to the
hereditary wickedness of their house. That house is spoken of as one
at whose deeds dæmons themselves might shudder,[487] and Robert
himself bears in the traditions of his Cenomannian enemies the
frightful surname which has been so unfairly transferred to the father
of the Conqueror. His name lives in proverbs. In the land of Maine his
abiding works are pointed to as the works of Robert the Devil.
Elsewhere the “wonders of Robert of Bellême” became a familiar
saying.[488] That Robert was a man of no small natural gifts is plain;
to the ordinary accomplishments of the Norman warrior he added a
mastery of the more intellectual branches of the art of warfare. As
the Cenomannian legend shows, he stood at the head of his age in the
skill of the military engineer.[489] Firm and daring, ready of wit and
ready of speech, he had in him most of the qualities which might have
made him great in that or in any other age. But, even in that age, he
held a place by himself as a kind of incarnation of evil. Restless
ambition, reckless contempt of the rights of others, were common to
him with many of his neighbours and contemporaries. But he stands
almost alone in his habitual delight in the infliction of human
suffering. The recklessness which lays waste houses and fields, the
cruelty of passion or of policy which slays or mutilates an enemy,
were common in his day. But even then we find only a few men of whom
it was believed that the pangs of other men were to them a direct
source of enjoyment. In Robert sheer love of cruelty displaced even
greediness; he refused ransom for his prisoners that he might have the
pleasure of putting them to lingering deaths.[490] The received forms
of cruelty blinding and mutilation, were not enough for him; he
brought the horrors of the East into Western Europe; men, and women
too, were left at his bidding to writhe on the sharp stake.[491]
Distrustful of all men, artful, flattering, courteous of speech, his
profession of friendship was the sure path to destruction.[492] The
special vices of William Rufus are not laid to his charge; it is at
least to the credit of Latin Christendom in the eleventh century that
it needs the union of its two worst sinners to form the likeness of an
Ottoman Majesty, Excellency, or Highness in the nineteenth. But his
domestic life was hardly happy. His wife Agnes, the heiress of
Ponthieu, the mother of his one child William Talvas, was long kept by
him in bonds in the dungeons of Bellême.[493] And, more piteous than
all, we read how a little boy, his own godchild, drew near to him in
all loving trust. Some say, in the sheer wantonness of cruelty, some
say, to avenge some slight fault of the child’s father, the monster
drew the boy under his cloak and tore out his eyes with his own
hands.[494]
[Sidenote: His enmity]
[Sidenote: to the men of Domfront;]
[Sidenote: to Helias;]
[Sidenote: to Rotrou of Perche;]
[Sidenote: to the prelates of Seez.]
[Sidenote: Abbot Ralph, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.]
[Sidenote: His imprisonment by Henry. 1110.]
The list of the men, great and small, who were simply wronged and
dispossessed by Robert of Bellême, is long indeed.[495] Some of them,
it is true, were now and then able to revenge their wrongs with their
own arms. He seems, as might have been expected, to have been the
special enemy of all that was specially good in individuals or in
communities. He was the bitter foe of the valiant and faithful men of
Domfront.[496] He was before all things the enemy of Helias of La
Flèche. He was the enemy of his neighbour Count Rotrou of Perche, who
also bears a good character among the princes of his day.[497] As
temporal lord of Seez, he was the enemy of its churches, episcopal and
abbatial; he had not that reverence for the foundation of his father
which is one of the redeeming features in the character of the Red
King. He underwent excommunication from the zeal of Bishop Serlo, and
by the wrongs done by him to Abbot Ralph of Seez, which drove that
prelate to seek shelter in England, he unwittingly gave England a
worthy primate and Anselm a worthy successor.[498] One is inclined to
wonder how such a man gained the special favour of the Conqueror,
whose politic sternness had nothing in common with the fiendish
brutality of Robert.[499] Perhaps, as in William Rufus, the worst
features of his character may for a while have been hidden. It is less
surprising that, in the days of William’s sons, we find him in honour
at the courts of England, Normandy, and France. But at last vengeance
came upon him. When King Henry sent him to spend his days in prison,
it was in a prison so strait and darksome that the outer world knew
not whether he were dead or alive, nor was the time of his death set
down in any record.[500]
[Sidenote: Robert Count of Meulan and Earl of Leicester.]
[Sidenote: His father Roger of Beaumont.]
[Sidenote: He inherits Meulan from his uncle,]
[Sidenote: and Beaumont from his father.]
[Sidenote: His earldom of Leicester.]
[Sidenote: His exploits at Senlac.]
[Sidenote: His fame for wisdom.]
[Sidenote: Character of his influence with Rufus and Henry.]
[Sidenote: His sons.]
[Sidenote: His last days.]
[Sidenote: His death. 1118.]
[Sidenote: Story of his death-bed.]
The other Robert, the son of the other Roger, was a man of a different
mould, a man who would perhaps seem more in place in some other age
than in that in which he lived. He was the son of the old and worthy
Roger of Beaumont, the faithful counsellor of princes, who, like
Gulbert of Hugleville, refused to share in the spoils of England.[501]
Great, like his namesake, in France, Normandy, and England, Robert
passed through a long life unstained by any remarkable crime, though
it was hinted that, of his vast possessions on both sides of the sea,
some were not fairly come by.[502] He is known in history by the name
of his French county of Meulan, which he inherited from his mother’s
brother, Count Hugh, son of Count Waleran, who withdrew to become a
monk of Bec.[503] From his father, when he too had gone to end
his days in his father’s monastery of Preaux, Robert inherited
the lordship of Beaumont, called, from his father’s name,
Beaumont-le-Roger.[504] He shared in the Conqueror’s distribution of
lands in England, and in after days he received the earldom of
Leicester from King Henry, as his less stirring brother Henry had
already received that of Warwick from the Red King. That he was a
brave and skilful soldier we cannot doubt; his establishment in
England was the reward of good service done at one of the most
critical moments of the most terrible of battles.[505] But the warrior
of Senlac hardly appears again in the character of a warrior; he lives
on for many years as a cold and crafty statesman, the counsellor of
successive kings, whose wisdom, surpassing that of all men between
Huntingdon and Jerusalem, was deemed, like that of Ahithophel, to be
like the oracle of God.[506] His counsels were not always of an
amiable kind. Under Rufus, without, as far as we can see, sharing in
his crimes, he checked those chivalrous instincts which were the
King’s nearest approach to virtue.[507] Under Henry his influence was
used to hinder the promotion of Englishmen in their own land.[508] Yet
on the whole his character stands fair. He discouraged foppery and
extravagance by precept and example; he was the right-hand man of King
Henry in maintaining the peace of the land, and he seems to have
shared the higher tastes of the clerkly monarch.[509] Of Anselm he was
sometimes the enemy, sometimes the friend.[510] His sons were well
taught, and they could win the admiration of Pope and cardinals by
their skill in disputation.[511] The eldest, Waleran, his Norman heir,
plays an unlucky part in the reign of Henry;[512] his English heir
Robert continued the line of the Earls of Leicester.[513] His last
days were clouded by domestic troubles;[514] and he is said to have
formally perilled his own soul in his zeal for the temporal welfare of
his sons. On his death-bed, so the story runs, Archbishop Ralph and
other clergy bade him, for his soul’s health, to restore whatever
lands he had gained unjustly.[515] What then, he asked, should he
leave to his sons? “Your old inheritance,” answered Ralph, “and
whatever you have acquired justly. Give up the rest, or you devote
your soul to hell.” The fond father answered that he would leave all
to them, and would trust to their filial piety to make atonement for
his sins.[516] But we are told that Waleran and Robert were too busy
increasing by wrong what had been won by wrong to do anything for the
soul of their father.[517]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Prominence of the two Roberts.]
These are the two men who, of secondary importance in the tale of the
Conquest and of the reign of the first William, become the most
prominent laymen of the reign of the second. The churchmen of the time
who stand forth conspicuously for good and for evil will have their
place in another chapter. But the two Roberts will, next to the King
and the Ætheling, hold the first place in the tale which we have
immediately to tell, as they held it still in days of which we shall
not have the telling, long after the Ætheling had changed into the
King. The force of him of Bellême, the wit of him of Meulan, had their
full place in the affairs both of Normandy and of England, and both
were brought to bear against the prince and people of Maine.
§ 1. _Normandy under Robert. 1087-1090._
[Sidenote: Temptations to the invasion of Normandy.]
[Sidenote: Interest of those who held land in both countries.]
[Sidenote: Provocation given by Robert.]
[Sidenote: State of Normandy.]
[Sidenote: His invasion likely to be largely welcome.]
That the thought of an invasion of his elder brother’s duchy should
present itself to the mind of William Rufus was not very wonderful.
The fact that it was his elder brother’s duchy might perhaps be of
itself enough to suggest the thought. The dutiful son of his father,
whom alone his father had called to rule of his own free will, might
feel himself in some sort defrauded, if any part of his father’s
dominions was held by a brother whose only claim was the accident of
his elder birth, and whose personal unfitness for the rule of men his
father had emphatically set forth. Indeed, without seeking for any
special motive at all, mere ambition, mere love of enterprise, might
be motive enough to lead a prince like Rufus to a campaign beyond the
sea, a campaign which might make him master of the native dominion of
his father, the land of his own birth. And such schemes would be
supported on grounds of reasonable policy by a large part of the
Norman possessors of the soil of England. Holding, many of them, lands
on both sides of the sea, it was their interest that the same prince
should reign on both sides of the sea, and that they themselves should
not be left open to the dangers of a divided allegiance. They had
failed to carry out this purpose by putting Robert in possession of
England; they might now carry it out by putting William in possession
of Normandy. And the attempt might even be made with some show of
justice. The help which Robert had given to the rebellion against
Rufus might, in the eyes of Rufus, or of a much more scrupulous prince
than Rufus, have been held to justify reprisals. And to a prince
seeking occasions or excuses for an invasion of Normandy the actual
condition of that duchy might seem directly to invite the coming of an
invader. The invader might almost comfort himself with the belief that
his invasion was a charitable work. Any kind of rule, almost any kind
of tyranny, might seem an improvement on the state of things which was
now rife through the whole length and breadth of the Norman land.
William Rufus might reasonably think that no small part of the
inhabitants of Normandy would welcome invasion from an invader of
their own blood, the son of their greatest ruler. And the event showed
that he was by no means mistaken in so thinking.
[Sidenote: The Conqueror foretells the character of Robert’s reign.]
[Sidenote: Utter anarchy of the duchy.]
[Sidenote: Character of Robert.]
[Sidenote: His weak good-nature.]
[Sidenote: Revival of brigandage and private war.]
[Sidenote: Lack of “justice.”]
No words of man were ever more truly spoken than the words in which
William the Great, constrained, as he deemed himself, to leave
Normandy in the hands of Robert, was believed to have foretold the
fate of the land which should be under his rule. Robert was, so his
father is made to call him, proud and foolish, doomed to misfortune;
the land would be wretched where he was master.[518] The Conqueror was
a true prophet; when Robert stepped into his father’s place, the work
of the fifty years’ rule of his father was undone in a moment.
Normandy at once fell back into the state of anarchy from which
William had saved it, the state into which it fell when the elder
Robert set forth for Jerusalem.[519] Once more every man did what was
right in his own eyes. And the Duke did nothing to hinder them. Again
we are brought to that standard of the duties of a sovereign of which
we have heard so often, that standard which was reached by the
Conqueror and by his younger son, but which neither Robert in this
generation nor Stephen in the next strove to reach. Robert, it must
always be noticed, is never charged with cruelty or oppression of any
kind in his own person. His fault was exactly of the opposite kind. He
was so mild and good-natured, so ready to listen to every suppliant,
to give to every petitioner, to show mercy to every offender, that he
utterly neglected the discharge of the first duty of his office, that
which the men of his time called doing justice.[520] William the Great
had done justice and made peace. The smaller brood of thieves and
murderers had been brought to feel the avenging arm of the law.
Thieves and murderers on a greater scale, the unruly nobles of the
duchy, had been forced to keep back their hands from that form of
brigandage which they dignified with the name of private war. Under
Robert both classes of offenders found full scope for their energies.
He did nothing to restrain either. He neither made peace nor did
justice. Brave, liberal, ready of speech, ready of wit and keen of
sight in supporting the cause of another, Robert undoubtedly could be.
But stronger qualities were needed, and those qualities Robert had
not. Sunk in sloth and dissipation, no man heeded him; the land was
without a ruler. Forgetful alike of injuries and of benefits, Robert,
from the first moment of his reign, tamely endured the most flagrant
outrages to the ducal authority, without doing anything to hinder or
to avenge.[521]
[Sidenote: Spread of vice and evil fashions.]
[Sidenote: Weakness of the spiritual power.]
In other respects also Normandy suddenly changed from what it had been
under the great King-duke. William the Great, strict to austerity in
his private life, careful in the observance of all religious duties, a
zealous supporter of ecclesiastical discipline, had made his duchy
into a kind of paradise in ecclesiastical eyes. All this was now swept
away. The same flood of foolish and vicious fashions which overspread
England overspread Normandy also. There is nothing to convict Robert
personally of the special vices of Rufus; but the life of the
unmarried Duke was very unlike the life of his father. And vice of the
grossest kind, the vices of Rufus himself, stalked forth into broad
daylight, unabashed and unpunished.[522] The ecclesiastical power, no
longer supported by the secular arm, was too weak to restrain or to
chastise.[523] As every form of violence, so every form of
licentiousness, had its full swing in the Normandy of Robert Curthose.
[Sidenote: Building of castles.]
[Sidenote: The Conqueror keeps garrisons in the castles of the
nobles.]
[Sidenote: Instances at Evreux, and in the Bellême castles.]
[Sidenote: Robert of Bellême drives out the ducal forces.]
[Sidenote: The like done by the Count of Evreux and others.]
[Sidenote: Robert’s lavish grants.]
[Sidenote: Ivry.]
[Sidenote: Brionne.]
But, above all, this time stood out, like all times of anarchy, as a
time of building and strengthening of castles. One of the means by
which the Conqueror had maintained the peace of the land had been by
keeping garrisons of his own in the castles of such of his nobles as
were likely to be dangerous. He had followed this wise policy with the
castle of Evreux, the stronghold of his kinsman Count William. He had
followed it with the crowd of castles which, as the inheritance of his
mother, had passed to Robert of Bellême, the man who is to be the
leading villain of our present drama. But the precautions of the
Conqueror lasted no longer than his life; his successor might be
defied without danger. At the moment of the King’s death, Robert of
Bellême was on his way to the court to “speak with the King,” in the
ordinary phrase,[524] on some affairs of his own. He had reached
Brionne when he heard of the Conqueror’s death. Instead of going on to
offer his homage or support to the new Duke, he turned back, gathered
his own followers, marched on Alençon, and by a sudden attack drove
the ducal garrison out of the fortress by the Sarthe, the southern
bulwark of Normandy. He did the same with better right on his own hill
of Bellême, which was not strictly Norman soil. He did so with all his
other castles, and with as many of the castles of his neighbours as he
could.[525] The lord of Bellême in short established himself as a
prince who might well bear himself as independent of the lord of
Rouen. Count William of Evreux followed his example; the late King’s
garrison was driven out of the fortress which had arisen within the
walls of the Roman Mediolanum. William of Breteuil, Ralph of Toesny or
of Conches, the nobles of Normandy in general wherever they had the
power, all did the like.[526] They drove out the garrisons; they
strengthened the old fortresses; they raised new ones, adulterine
castles in the phrase of the day, built without the Duke’s licence and
placed beyond his control. Those who were strong enough seized on the
castles of weaker neighbours. The land was again filled with these
robbers’ nests, within whose walls and circuit law was powerless,
lairs, as men said, of grievous wolves, who entered in and spared not
the flock.[527] Some nobles indeed had the decency to go through the
form of asking the Duke for gifts which they knew that he would not
have strength of mind to refuse them. One of them was William of
Breteuil, the son of the famous Earl William of Hereford, the brother
of the rebel Roger,[528] and once a sharer in Robert’s rebellion
against his father. He asked and received the famous tower of Ivry,
the tower of Albereda, the now vanished stronghold which once looked
down on the plain where Henry of Navarre was in after ages to smite
down the forces of the League. This gift involved a wrong to the old
Roger of Beaumont, who had held that great fortress by the Conqueror’s
commission. Roger was accordingly recompensed by a grant of Brionne,
the island stronghold in the heart of Normandy, which had played such
a part in the early wars of the Conqueror.[529] Thus places specially
connected with the memory of the great William, places like Alençon
and Brionne, which had cost him no small pains to win or to recover,
passed away from his son without a thought. Robert gave to every man
everything that he asked for, to the impoverishment of himself and to
the strengthening of every other man against him.[530]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Ætheling Henry.]
[Sidenote: He claims his mother’s lands.]
[Sidenote: Lavish waste of Robert.]
[Sidenote: He asks a loan of Henry.]
[Sidenote: Henry buys the Côtentin and Avranchin.]
[Sidenote: Henry’s firm rule.]
In one corner only of the duchy was there a better state of things to
be seen. The Ætheling Henry had received from his dying father a
bequest in money, but no share in his territorial dominions.[531] He
claimed however the English lands which had been held by his mother
Matilda, but which the late King had kept in his own hands after her
death.[532] This claim had not as yet been made good, and Henry’s
possessions still consisted only of his five thousand pounds in money.
With part of this he was presently to make a splendid investment.
While Henry had money but no lands, Robert had wide domains, but his
extravagance soon left him without money. The Norman portion of the
Conqueror’s hoard was presently scattered broadcast among his
mercenary soldiers and other followers. Of these he kept a vast
number; men flocked eagerly to a prince who was so ready to give; but
before long he was without the means of giving or paying any more. He
asked Henry for a gift or a loan. The scholar-prince was wary, and
refused to throw his money away into the bottomless pit of Robert’s
extravagance.[533] The Duke then proposed to sell him some part of his
dominions. At this proposal Henry caught gladly, and a bargain was
struck. For a payment of three thousand pounds, Henry became master of
a noble principality in the western part of the Norman duchy. The
conquest of William Longsword,[534] the colony of Harold
Blaatand,[535] the whole land from the fortress of Saint James to the
haven of Cherbourg, the land of Coutances and Avranches, the castle
and abbey of Saint Saviour,[536] and the house that was castle and
abbey in one, the house of Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea――all this
became the dominion of Henry, now known as Count of the Côtentin. With
these territories he received the superiority over a formidable
vassal; he became lord over the Norman possessions of Earl Hugh of
Chester.[537] Thus the English-born son of the Norman Conqueror held
for his first dominion no contemptible portion of his father’s duchy,
as ruler of the Danish land which in earlier days had beaten back an
English invasion.[538] In that land, under the rule of him who was one
day to be called the Lion of Justice, there was a nearer approach to
peace and order than could be found in other parts of Normandy. The
young Count governed his county well and firmly; no such doings went
on in the lands of Coutances and Avranches as went on in the rest of
the duchy under the no-rule of Duke Robert.[539]
[Sidenote: Henry goes to England. Summer, 1088.]
[Sidenote: William promises him the lands of Matilda.]
[Sidenote: He seizes them again.]
[Sidenote: They are granted to Robert Fitz-hamon.]
Henry, Ætheling on one side of the sea and now Count on the other
side,[540] next thought of crossing the channel to seek for those
estates in his native land which he claimed in right of his
mother.[541] These lands, in Cornwall, Buckinghamshire, and specially
in Gloucestershire, had mostly formed a part of the forfeited
possessions of Brihtric, the man whose name legend has so strangely
connected with that of Matilda.[542] Henry must have reached England
about the time when the rebellion had been put down, and when the new
King might be expected to be in a mood inclined either to justice or
to generosity. William received his brother graciously, and granted,
promised, or pretended to grant, the restitution of the lands of their
mother.[543] Henry, already a ruler on one side of the sea, a sharer
in his father’s inheritance, went back to his peninsula in a character
which was yet newer to him, that of a sharer in his father’s conquest,
a great land-owner on the other side of the sea. But his luck, which
was to shine forth so brightly in after times, forsook him for the
present. If Henry ever came into actual possession of his English
estates, his tenure of them was short. At some time which is not
distinctly marked, the lands which had been Matilda’s were again
seized by William. They were granted to one of the rising men of the
time, one of the few who had been faithful to the King in the late
times of trouble, to Robert Fitz-hamon, perhaps already the terror of
the southern Cymry. Thus the old possessions of Brihtric passed into
the hands of the lord of the castle of Cardiff, the founder of the
minster of Tewkesbury.[544] In the next generation the policy of Henry
was to win them back, if not for himself, yet for his son.[545]
[Sidenote: Influence of Odo with Robert.]
[Sidenote: Autumn, 1088.]
[Sidenote: Henry brings back Robert of Bellême.]
[Sidenote: They are seized and imprisoned.]
[Sidenote: Earl Roger makes war on the Duke.]
[Sidenote: His fortresses.]
If the Count of Coutances failed of his objects in England, a worse
fate awaited him for a season on his return to Normandy. He had
enemies at the court of Duke Robert; first of all, it would seem, his
uncle Odo, lately Earl of Kent and still Bishop of Bayeux. He was now
driven from his earldom to his bishopric, like a dragon, we are told,
with fiery wings cast down to the earth.[546] The tyrant of Bayeux,
the worst of prelates――such are the names under which Odo now appears
in the pages of our chief guide[547]――had again become Robert’s chief
counsellor. His counsel seems to have taken the form of stirring up
the Duke’s mind to abiding wrath against his brother of England, and
against all who were, or were held to be, his partisans.[548] When
Henry left England to come back to Normandy, he brought with him a
dangerous companion in the person of Robert of Bellême. That rebel of
a few months back was now thoroughly reconciled to Rufus. Duke Robert
was even made to believe that his namesake of Bellême, so lately his
zealous supporter, was joined with Henry by a mutual oath to support
the interests of the King of the English at the expense of the Duke of
the Normans.[549] The measures of Robert or of Odo were speedily
taken; the coasts were watched; the voyagers were seized before they
could disembark from their ships.[550] They were put in fetters, and
presently consigned to prisons in the keeping of the Bishop. They had
not even the comfort of companionship in bonds. While the Ætheling,
Count of the Côtentin, was kept in Odo’s episcopal city, the place of
imprisonment for the son of the Earl of Shrewsbury was the fortress of
Neuilly, in the most distant part of Odo’s diocese, near the frontier
stream of Vire which parts the Bessin from Henry’s own peninsula. The
less illustrious captive was the first to find a champion. Earl Roger,
by the licence of the King, left England, crossed into Normandy,
entered into open war with the Duke on behalf of his son, and
garrisoned all his own castles and those of his son against him.
Vassal of three lords, the lord of Montgomery and Shrewsbury, the
father of the lord of Bellême, might almost rank as their peer. As a
prince rather than as a mere baron, Earl Roger took to arms. The
border-fortresses on the frontier ground of Normandy, Maine, and
Perche were all put into a state of defence.[551] Alençon, by the
border stream, was again, as in the days when its burghers mocked the
Tanner’s grandson,[552] garrisoned against his son and successor.
Bellême itself, the cradle of the house of Talvas――the Rock of Mabel,
bearing the name of her who had united the houses of Talvas
and Montgomery, and whose blood had been the price of its
possession――Saint-Cenery on its peninsula by the Sarthe, another of
the spoils of Mabel’s bloody policy――all these border strongholds,
together with a crowd of others lying more distinctly within the
Norman dominions, had again become hostile spots where the Duke of the
Normans was defied.
[Sidenote: Odo’s exhortation to Robert.]
[Sidenote: Rivalry of Normandy and France.]
[Sidenote: The line of Talvas to be rooted out.]
The episcopal gaoler of Bayeux, in his character of chief counsellor
of Duke Robert, is described as keeping his feeble nephew somewhat in
awe. But his counsels, it is added, were sometimes followed, sometimes
despised.[553] Now that all Normandy was in a blaze of civil war, Odo
came to Rouen, and had an audience of the Duke, seemingly in an
assembly of his nobles.[554] If our guide is to be trusted, Robert,
who had no love for hearing sermons even from the lips of his father,
was now condemned to hear a sermon of no small length from the perhaps
even readier lips of his uncle. Odo gave Robert a lecture on the good
government of his duchy, on the duty of defending the oppressed and
putting down their oppressors. A long list of princes are held up as
his examples, the familiar heroes of Persia, Macedonia, Carthage, and
Rome, among whom, one hardly sees why, Septimius Severus takes his
place along with the first Cæsar. On the same list too come the
princes of his own house, the princes whom the warlike French had ever
feared, winding up with the name of his own father, greatest of them
all.[555] In all this we hear the monk of Saint Evroul rather than the
Bishop of Bayeux; but any voice is worth hearing which impresses on us
a clearer understanding of the abiding jealousy between Normandy and
France. But we may surely hear Odo himself in the practical advice
that follows. Now is the time to root out the whole accursed stock of
Talvas from the Norman duchy. They were an evil generation from the
beginning, not one of whom ever died the death of other men.[556] It
is as the son of Mabel, not as the son of Roger, that Robert of
Bellême comes in for this frightful inheritance, and Odo could not
foresee how pious an end the Earl of Shrewsbury was to make in a few
years.[557] He reminded the Duke that a crowd of castles, which had
been ducal possessions as long as his father lived, had been seized on
his father’s death by Robert of Bellême, and their ducal garrisons
driven out.[558] It was the Duke’s duty, as the ruler of the land, as
a faithful son of Holy Church, to put an end to the tyranny of this
usurper, and to give to all his dominions the blessing of lawful
government at the hand of their lawful prince.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Affairs of Maine.]
[Sidenote: Helias and Hildebert.]
[Sidenote: History of Maine under the Conqueror.]
[Sidenote: 1063.]
[Sidenote: 1073.]
[Sidenote: 1083.]
[Sidenote: 1086.]
[Sidenote: Dissatisfaction in Maine.]
[Sidenote: Relations with Fulk of Anjou.]
[Sidenote: Robert’s homage to Fulk.]
But the overthrow of the house of Talvas was not the only work to
which Odo stirred up his nephew. There was another enterprise to be
undertaken before the great lord of the Cenomannian border could be
safely attacked. These early days of Robert lead us on at once to that
side of the continental wars and continental policy of Rufus which
seems to have drawn to itself the smallest amount of English interest
at the time,[559] but which is that on which we are now led to look
with a deeper interest than any other. Before Robert could safely
attack Bellême, he must make sure of Le Mans and of all Maine. Every
mention of that noble city, of its counts and its bishops, its
renowned church, and its stout-hearted citizens, has a charm which is
shared by no other spot between the Loire and the Channel. And at no
stage of its history did the Cenomannian state stand forth with
greater brilliancy than in the last days of its independent being,
when Le Mans had Helias to its count and Hildebert to its bishop.
Those days are still parted from us by a few years; but the advice
given by Odo to Robert brings us to the beginning of the chain of
events which leads straight to them. The historian of William Rufus
must now begin to look forward to the days when Rufus, like his
father, tried his strength against the valiant men of the Cenomannian
land and city, and tried it at a time when land and city could put
forth their full strength back again under a leader worthy of them.
But as yet the land of Maine has neither to deal with so mighty a foe
nor to rejoice in the guardianship of so worthy a champion. In the
stage of the tale which we have now reached, Rufus plays no part at
all, and Helias plays only a secondary part. The general story of Le
Mans and Maine has been elsewhere carried down to the last mention of
them in the days of the Conqueror.[560] It has been told how the land
passed under William’s power in the days before he crossed the sea to
win England[561]――how the city and land had revolted against the
Norman――how, after trying the rule of a foreign branch of their own
princely house, its people had risen as the first free commonwealth
north of the Loire――how they had been again brought into William’s
hand, and that largely by the help of his English warriors[562]――and
how, after the final submission of the city, isolated spots of the
Cenomannian land had again risen against the Norman power. The last
act of this earlier drama was when a single Cenomannian fortress
successfully withstood the whole strength of Normandy and
England.[563] We have seen how Hubert of Beaumont beheld the Conqueror
baffled before his hill fortress of Sainte-Susanne, the shattered keep
which still stands, sharing with Dol in the Breton land the honour of
being the two spots from which William had to turn away, conqueror no
longer.[564] But, if Hubert had beaten back William from his castle,
he had found it expedient to return to his allegiance; and, at the
death of the Conqueror, Maine seems to have been as thoroughly under
William’s power as Normandy and England. Things changed as soon as the
great King had passed away. The land and city which had striven so
often against the Conqueror himself were not likely to sit down
quietly under the feeble rule of Robert. And, besides the standing
dislike of the people of Maine to Norman rule, there was a neighbour
who was likely to be stirred up by his own ambition to meddle in the
affairs of Maine, and to whom the actual provisions of treaties gave
at least a colourable claim to do so. By the terms of the peace of
Blanchelande, the new Duke of the Normans had become the man of Count
Fulk of Anjou for the county of Maine.[565] It is true that the homage
had been of the most formal kind. There had been no reservation of
authority on the part of the superior lord, nor, as far as we can see,
was any service of any kind imposed on the fief, if fief it is to be
called. The homage might almost seem to have been a purely personal
act, a homage expressing thankfulness for the surrender of all Angevin
rights over Maine, rather than an acknowledgement of Angevin
superiority over the land and city. Still Robert, as Count of Maine,
had, in some way or other, become Count Fulk’s man, and Count Fulk
had, in some way or other, become Robert’s lord. A relation was thus
established between them of which the _Rechin_ was sure to take
advantage, whenever the time came.
[Sidenote: Robert Count of Maine.]
[Sidenote: State of things in Maine.]
[Sidenote: Howel.]
[Sidenote: Geoffrey of Mayenne.]
[Sidenote: Helias.]
[Sidenote: His descent and position.]
[Sidenote: Story of Bishop Howel’s appointment.]
[Sidenote: Samson recommends him for the see.]
[Sidenote: Temporal relations of the bishopric of Le Mans.]
[Sidenote: Howel consecrated at Rouen. April 21, 1085.]
Robert, on his father’s death, had taken his title of Prince of the
Cenomannians as well as that of Duke of the Normans,[566] and his
authority seems to have been acknowledged at Le Mans no less than at
Rouen. We may suspect that there was no very deep felt loyalty in the
minds of a people whose rebellious tendencies had deeply impressed the
mind of William the Great. He is said――though we may guess that the
etymology comes rather from the reporter than from the speaker――to
have derived the name of their land and city from their currish
madness.[567] But there was as yet no open resistance. Of the three
chief men in Church and State, Bishop Howel was an active supporter of
the Norman connexion, while Geoffrey of Mayenne and Helias of La
Flèche were at least not ready openly to throw it off. Geoffrey, who
had fought against the Conqueror twenty-five years before,[568] who
had betrayed the young commonwealth of Le Mans fifteen years
before,[569] must have been now advanced in life; but we shall still
hear of him for some years to come. Helias, the chief hero of later
wars, was of a younger generation, and now appears for the first time.
He was, it will be remembered, the son of John of La Flèche and of
Paula the youngest sister of the last Count Herbert.[570] He was
therefore, before any other man in the land, the representative of
Cenomannian independence, as distinguished both from Norman rule and
from Angevin superiority. But his father had, in the Conqueror’s
second Cenomannian war, remained faithful to the Norman, alike against
commonwealth, Lombard, and Angevin.[571] His son for the present
followed the same course. Bishop Howel was in any case a zealous
Norman partisan; according to one story he was a special nominee of
the Conqueror, appointed for the express purpose of helping to keep
the people of Maine in order. According to the local historian, he had
been appointed Dean of Saint Julian’s by his predecessor Arnold, and
was, on Arnold’s death, freely and unanimously chosen to the
bishopric.[572] In Normandy it was believed that King William, on
Arnold’s death, offered the bishopric to one of his own clerks, Samson
of Bayeux, who declined the offer on the ground that a bishop,
according to apostolic rule, ought to be blameless, while he himself
was a grievous sinner in many ways. The King said that Samson must
either take the bishopric himself or find some fit person in his
stead. Samson made his nomination at once. There was in the King’s
chapel a clerk, poor, but of noble birth and of virtuous life, Howel
by name, and, as his name implied, of Breton birth or descent.[573] He
was the man to be bishop of Le Mans. Howel was at once sent for. He
came, not knowing to what end he was called. Young in years, slight
and mean in figure, he had not the stately presence with which Walcher
of Durham had once impressed the mind of Eadgyth, perhaps of William
himself.[574] But Howel was not called upon, like Walcher, to be a
goodly martyr, but only a confessor on a small scale. William was at
first tempted to despise the unconscious candidate for the chair of
Saint Julian. But Samson, who, sinner as he may have been, seems not
to have been a bad preacher or reasoner, warned the King that God
looked not at the outward appearance, but at the heart. William
examined further into Howel’s life and conversation, and presently
gave him the temporal investiture of the bishopric.[575] At the same
time a _congé d’élire_ went to Le Mans, which led to Howel’s “pure and
simple” election by the Chapter.[576] A point both of canon and of
feudal law turned up. The old dispute between the Norman Duke and the
Angevin Count about the advowson of the bishopric had never been
settled; the Peace of Blanchelande was silent on that point. Legally
there can be no doubt that the true temporal superior of the Bishop of
Le Mans was neither Fulk nor William, but their common, if forgotten,
lord King Philip.[577] But, whoever might be his temporal lord, no one
doubted that the Bishop of Le Mans was a suffragan, and the suffragan
highest in rank, of the Archbishop of Tours.[578] Yet, as things
stood, as Tours was in the dominions of Fulk, a subject of William who
went to that metropolis for consecration might have been called on to
enter into some engagement inconsistent with his Norman loyalty. By a
commission therefore from Archbishop Ralph of Tours, Howel received
consecration at Rouen from the Primate of the Normans, William the
Good Soul.[579]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Howel’s Norman loyalty.]
[Sidenote: Robert before Le Mans.]
[Sidenote: General submission of the county.]
[Sidenote: Ballon holds out.]
This story is worth telling, as it is thoroughly characteristic of the
Conqueror; but there is this difficulty about it, that we can hardly
understand either how the historian of the Bishops of Le Mans could
fail to know the succession of the deans of his own church, or else
how the head of the chapter of Saint Julian’s could be lurking as a
poor clerk in King William’s chapel. Be this as it may, there is
thorough agreement as to the episcopal virtues of Howel, as to his
zeal in continuing the works in the church of Saint Julian,[580] and
as to his unwavering loyalty to the Norman house. And, builder and
adorner of the sanctuary as he was, he did not scruple to rob the
altars of the saints of their gold and silver to feed the poor in the
day of hunger.[581] His loyalty to Robert seems to have carried with
it, for a time at least, the submission of the city. The Duke drew
near at the head of his army. Bishop Odo was again in harness as one
of his nephew’s chief captains. With him came not a few of the lords
who had seized castles in the Duke’s despite, but who were
nevertheless ready to follow his banner. There was the elder Ralph of
Toesny, he who had taken the strange message to King Henry after the
day of Mortemer, and who had refused to bear the banner of Normandy on
the day of Senlac.[582] With him was his nephew, William of Breteuil,
the elder and more lucky of the two sons of William Fitz-Osbern. He
had been one of Robert’s companions in his day of rebellion, along
with the younger Ralph of Toesny and with Robert of Bellême, now their
enemy.[583] The host entered Le Mans without resistance, and was
received, we are told, with joy by clergy and citizens alike.[584]
Messages were sent forth to summon the chief men of the county to come
and do their duty to their new lord. Helias came; so did Geoffrey of
Mayenne. When two such leaders submitted, others naturally followed
their example. All the chief men of Maine, it would seem, became the
liegemen of Duke Robert. One obstinate rebel alone, Pagan or Payne of
Montdoubleau, defended with his followers the castle of Ballon against
the new prince.[585]
[Sidenote: The castle of Ballon.]
[Sidenote: Siege of Ballon.]
[Sidenote: August-September, 1088.]
[Sidenote: The castle surrenders.]
The fortress which still held out, one whose name we shall again meet
with more than once in the immediate story of the Red King, was a
stronghold indeed. About twelve miles north of Le Mans a line of high
ground ends to the north in a steep bluff rising above the Cenomannian
Orne, the lesser stream of that name which mingles its waters with the
Sarthe. The river is not the same prominent feature in the landscape
which the Sarthe itself is at Le Mans and at some of the other towns
and castles which it washes; it does not in the same way flow directly
at the foot of the hill. But it comes fully near enough to place
Ballon in the long list of peninsular strongholds. The hill forms a
prominent feature in the surrounding landscape; and the view from the
height itself, over the wooded plains and gentle hills of Maine, is
wide indeed. He who held Ballon against the lord of Normandy, the new
lord of Le Mans, might feel how isolated his hillfort stood in the
midst of his enemies. To the south Le Mans is seen on its promontory;
and, if the mighty pile of Saint Julian’s had not yet reached its
present height, yet the twin towers of Howel, the royal tower by their
side, the abbey of Saint Vincent then rising above all, may well have
caught the eye even more readily than it is caught by the somewhat
shapeless mass of the cathedral church in its present state. To the
north and north-west the eye stretches over lands which in any normal
state of things would have been the lands of enemies, the lands of the
houses of Montgomery and Bellême. But at the moment of Robert’s siege
the defenders of Ballon must have looked to them as friendly spots,
joined in common warfare against the Norman Duke. To the north the eye
can reach beyond the Norman border at now rebellious Alençon, to the
_butte_ of Chaumont, the isolated hill which looks down upon the Rock
of Mabel. To the north-east the horizon skirts the land, at other
times the most dangerous of all, but which might now be deemed the
most helpful, the native home of the fierce house of Talvas. But, even
if Ballon had been begirt on all sides by foes, its defenders might
well venture to hope that they could defy them all. The hill had
clearly been a stronghold even from præhistoric times. The neck of the
promontory is cut off by a vast ditch, which may have fenced in a
Cenomannian fortress in days before Cæsar came. This ditch takes in
the little town of Ballon with its church. A second ditch surrounds
the castle itself, and is carried fully round it on every side. The
castle of Ballon therefore does not, like so many of its fellows,
strictly overhang the stream or the low ground at its foot. At no
point does it, like many other fortresses in the same land, mingle its
masonry with the native rock. Ballon is more like Arques[586] on a
smaller scale than like any of the strictly river fortresses. Within
the ditch, the wall of the castle remains, a gateway, a tower, a house
of delicate detail; but every architectural feature at Ballon is later
than the days of Rufus; the greater part of the present castle belongs
to the latest days of mediæval art. This stronghold, to be fought for
over and over again in the course of our story, now underwent the
earliest of its sieges which concerns us. It held out stoutly for some
time during the months of August and September. The loss on both sides
was great. At last the besieged surrendered, and were admitted to the
Duke’s grace.[587] Robert was for a moment the undisputed lord of all
Maine.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Further schemes of Odo.]
[Sidenote: Robert attacks Saint Cenery.]
[Sidenote: Description and history of the fortress.]
[Sidenote: Monastery of Saint Cenery.]
[Sidenote: The monks flee to Château-Thierry.]
[Sidenote: The castle founded by Geoffrey of Mayenne for William of
Geroy.]
[Sidenote: History of the descendants of Geroy.]
[Sidenote: Roche-Mabille.]
[Sidenote: Saint Cenery seized by Mabel.]
The first part of Bishop Odo’s counsel was thus successfully carried
out. But the submission of Maine was in Odo’s scheme only a means to
the thorough rooting out of the house of Bellême. And Robert found
himself in such sure possession of Le Mans and Maine that he could
call on the warriors of city and county to follow him in carrying out
the second part of the Bishop’s scheme. The first point for attack
among the fortresses held on behalf of Earl Roger or his captive son
was the castle of Saint Cenery. This was a border fortress of Normandy
and Maine, one which could boast of a long and stirring history, and
its small remains still occupy a site worthy of the tale which they
have to tell. Just within the Norman border, some miles west of the
town and castle of Alençon, not far from the junction of the lesser
stream of Sarthon with the boundary river, a long narrow peninsula is
formed by the windings of the Sarthe. It forms an advanced post of
Normandy thrust forward with the Cenomannian land on three sides of
it. The greater part of the peninsula consists of a steep and rocky
hill,[588] which, as it draws near to its point, is washed by the
stream on either side, though nearer to the isthmus the height rises
immediately above alluvial meadows between its base and the river. The
site was a tempting one for the foundation of a castle, in days when,
though there might be hostile ground on three sides, yet no bow-shot
or catapult from any hostile point could reach the highest part of the
hill. Yet, as the name of the place is ecclesiastical, so its earliest
memories are ecclesiastical, and its occupation as a fortress was, in
the days of our story, a thing of yesterday. Cenericus or Cenery, a
saint of the seventh century, gave the place its name. A monastery
arose, where a hundred and forty monks prayed around the tomb of their
patron. His memory is still cherished on his own ground. A church
contemporary with our story, a church of the eleventh century crowned
by a tower of the twelfth, rises boldly above the swift stream which
flows below the three apses of its eastern end. Within, the art of a
later but still early age has adorned its walls with the forms of a
series of holy persons, among whom the sainted hero of the spot holds
a chief place.[589] But if the name of Saint Cenery first suggests the
ecclesiastical history of the place, its surname[590] marks a chief
feature in its secular history. The place is still Saint
Cenery-_le-Gerey_. That is, it keeps the name of the famous house of
Geroy, the name so dear to the heart of the monk of Saint Evroul.[591]
For the monastery of Saint Cenery was but short-lived. When the wiking
Hasting was laying waste the land, the monks of Saint Cenery fled away
with the body of their patron, like that of Saint Cuthberht in our own
land, to the safer resting-place of Château-Thierry in the land of
Soissons.[592] As things now stand, the peninsula of Saint Cenery,
with its church and the site of its castle, might suggest, as a lesser
object suggests, a greater, the grouping of abbey and castle on that
more renowned peninsula where the relics of Saint Cuthberht at last
found shelter. The forsaken monastery was never restored. The holy
place lost its holiness; over the tombs of the ancient monks arose a
den of thieves, a special fortress of crime.[593] In other words,
after a century and a half of desolation, a castle arose on the
tempting site which was supplied by the neck of the peninsula.[594]
Fragments of its masonry may still be seen, and its precinct seems to
have taken in the church and the whole peninsula, though in the
greater part of its circuit no defence was needed beyond the steep and
scarped sides of the rocky hill itself. The castle was the work of a
man whose name has been familiar to us for thirty years, a man who was
still living, and who was actually in the host before the fortress of
his own rearing. Geoffrey of Mayenne was closely connected, as kinsman
and as lord, with William the son of Geroy. When Geoffrey fell into
the hands of William Talvas, the faithful vassal ransomed his lord by
the sacrifice of his own castle of Montacute, which stood just beyond
the Sarthon within the borders of Maine. To repair this loss of his
friend, no doubt also to repay the invasion of Cenomannian soil by a
like invasion of Norman soil, and to put some check in the teeth of
the house of Bellême, Geoffrey built the castle of Saint Cenery on the
left bank of the Sarthe, and gave it as a gift of thankfulness to the
son of Geroy.[595] But the inhabitants of the new stronghold, in their
dangerous border position, never knew peace or good luck, but were
visited with every kind of evil.[596] The sons of the pious and
virtuous Geroy yielded to the influence of the spot; they fell into
crime and rebellion, and were punished by banishments and strange
deaths. The second lord of Saint Cenery, Robert the brother of
William, had rebelled against the Conqueror; he had held his fortress
against him, and he had died in a mysterious way of a poisoned
apple.[597] His son and successor Arnold found how dangerous was the
greed and hate of a powerful and unscrupulous neighbour. Nearly north
from Saint Cenery, at much the same distance as Alençon is to the
east, not far from the foot of the hill of Chaumont which makes so
marked a feature in the whole surrounding landscape, on a peninsula
formed by a bend of the Sarthon, just within the borders of Maine as
Saint Cenery is just within the borders of Normandy, rises the
solitary rock which once had been known as Jaugy. There we still trace
the ruins of the castle which bore the name of the cruel Countess, the
despoiler of the house of Jaugy, the castle of the Rock of Mabel.[598]
To the possessor of the Rock of Mabel the mightier rock of Saint
Cenery, forming part of the same natural line of defence, could not
fail to be an object of covetousness. Arnold died of poison, by the
practice of the ruthless wife of Roger of Montgomery. Saint Cenery
became part of the possessions of the fierce line of Bellême; and,
under its present master, it doubtless deserved the strongest of the
names bestowed on it by the monk of Saint Evroul.
[Sidenote: Saint Cenery held by Robert Carrel.]
[Sidenote: The siege.]
[Sidenote: Surrender of Saint Cenery.]
[Sidenote: Robert Carrel blinded.]
[Sidenote: Other mutilations.]
[Sidenote: Question of the military tribunal.]
At this moment Saint Cenery was held on behalf of Robert of Bellême by
a specially valiant captain named Robert Carrel.[599] We have no
details of the siege. We are told nothing of the positions occupied by
the besiegers, or how they became masters of the seemingly impregnable
height. We are told that the resistance was long and fierce; but at
last the castle was taken; and, as failure of provisions is spoken of
as the cause, we may guess that the garrison was driven to surrender.
If so, the surrender must have been to the Duke’s mercy, and the mercy
of Duke Robert or of his counsellors was cruel. The Duke, we are told,
in his wrath, ordered the eyes of Robert Carrel to be put out. The
personal act of the Duke in the case of the rebel leader seems to be
contrasted with the sentence of a more regular tribunal of some kind,
by which mutilations of various kinds were dealt out to others of the
garrison.[600] Yet personal cruelty is so inconsistent with the
ordinary character of Robert that we are driven to suppose either that
some strong personal influence was brought to bear on the Duke’s mind,
or else that Robert Carrel had given some unpardonable offence during
the course of the siege. But it is worth while to notice the words
which seem to imply that the punishment of the other defenders of
Saint Cenery was the work of some body which at least claimed to act
in a judicial character. We can hardly look as yet for the subtlety of
a separate military jurisdiction, for what we should now call a
court-martial. That can hardly be thought of, except in the case of a
standing body of soldiers, like Cnut’s housecarls, with a constitution
and rules of their own.[601] But as in free England we have seen the
army――that is, the nation in arms――act on occasion the part of a
national assembly, so in more aristocratic Normandy the same principle
would apply in another shape. The chief men of Normandy were there,
each in command of his own followers. If Robert or his immediate
counsellors wished that the cruel punishments to be dealt out to the
revolted garrison should not be merely their own work, if they wished
the responsibility of them to be shared by a larger body, the means
were easy. There was a court of peers ready at hand, before whom they
might arraign the traitors.
[Sidenote: Claims of Robert, grandson of Geroy.]
[Sidenote: The castle granted to him.]
But if there were those within Saint Cenery who were marked for
punishment, there was one without its walls who claimed restitution. A
son of Geroy’s son Robert, bearing his father’s name, had, like others
of his family, served with credit in the wars of Apulia and Sicily. He
was now in the Duke’s army, seemingly among the warriors of Maine,
ready to play his part in winning back the castle of his father from
the son of the murderess of his uncle. Geoffrey of Mayenne and the
rest of the Cenomannian leaders asked of the Duke that the son of the
former owner of the castle, Geoffrey’s own kinsman and vassal, should
be restored to the inheritance of his father, the inheritance which
his father held in the first instance by Geoffrey’s own gift. The
warfare which was now waging was waged against the son of the woman by
whom one lord of Saint Cenery had been treacherously slain. The
triumph of right would be complete, if the banished man were restored
to his own, at the prayer of the first giver. The Duke consented;
Saint Cenery was granted afresh to the representative of the house of
Geroy; Geoffrey saw the castle of his own rearing once more in
friendly hands. The new lord strengthened the defences of his
fortress, and held it as a post to be guarded with all care against
the common enemy, the son of Mabel.[602]
[Sidenote: Surrender of Alençon,]
[Sidenote: of Bellême.]
[Sidenote: The other castles ready to surrender.]
[Sidenote: Robert disbands his army.]
Two fortresses were thus won from the revolters; and the success of
the Duke at both places, his severity at one of them, had their effect
on those who still defended other castles for Robert of Bellême.[603]
Alençon, where the great William had wrought so stern a vengeance for
the mockeries of its citizens, stood ready to receive his son without
resistance. So did Bellême itself, the fortress which gave its name to
the descendants of the line of Talvas, the centre of their power,
where their ancient chapel of Mabel’s day still crowns the elder
castle hill, standing, isolated below the town and fortress of later
date.[604] Its defenders made up their minds to submit to the summons
of the Duke, if only the Duke would come near to summon them. So did
the garrisons of all the other castles which still remained in
rebellion. Frightened at the doom of Robert Carrel and his companions,
they stood ready to surrender as soon as the Duke should come. But it
is not clear whether the Duke ever did draw near to receive the
fortresses which were ready to open their gates to him. Robert had had
enough of success, or of the exertions which were needful for success.
It would almost seem as if the siege of Saint Cenery had been as much
as he could go through, and as if he turned back at once on its
surrender. At all events he stopped just when complete victory was
within his grasp. He longed for the idle repose of his palace. His
army was disbanded; every man who followed the Duke’s banner had the
Duke’s licence to go to his own home.[605]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Robert of Bellême still in prison.]
[Sidenote: Earl Roger prays for his son’s release.]
[Sidenote: Robert of Bellême set free.]
[Sidenote: His career.]
All this while, it will be remembered, Robert of Bellême himself was
actually in bonds in the keeping of Bishop Odo. The war had been waged
rather against his father Earl Roger than against himself. But it was
wholly on Robert’s account that it had been waged. Whatever we may
think of the right or wrong of his imprisonment at the moment when it
took place, there can be no doubt that it was for the general good of
the Norman duchy that Robert of Bellême should be hindered from doing
mischief. He was the arch-rebel against his sovereign, the
arch-plunderer of his neighbours, the man who, in that fierce age, was
branded by common consent as the cruellest of the cruel. It was to
break his power, to win back the castles which he had seized, that the
hosts of Normandy and Maine had been brought together; it was for the
crime of maintaining his cause that Robert Carrel and his comrades had
undergone their cruel punishment. But the fates of the chief and of
his subaltern were widely different. Duke Robert, weary of warfare,
was even more than ever disposed to mercy, that is more than ever
disposed to gratify the biddings of a weak good-nature. Earl Roger
marked the favourable moment, when the host was disbanded, and when
the Duke had gone back to the idle pleasures of Rouen. He sent
eloquent messengers, charged with many promises in his name――promises
doubtless of good behaviour on the part of his son――and prayed for the
release of the prisoner.[606] With Duke Robert an appeal of this kind
from a man like Earl Roger went for more than all reasonable
forethought for himself and his duchy. The welfare of thousands was
sacrificed to a weak pity for one man. Robert of Bellême was set free.
His promises were of course forgotten; gratitude and loyalty were
forgotten. Till a wiser sovereign sent him in after days to a prison
from which there was no escape, he went on with his career of plunder
and torture, of utter contempt and defiance of the ducal
authority.[607] But, under such a prince as Robert, contempt and
defiance of the ducal authority was no disqualification for appearing
from time to time as a ducal counsellor.[608]
[Sidenote: Henry set free.]
[Sidenote: Henry strengthens his castles.]
[Sidenote: His partisans.]
[Sidenote: His good government.]
Robert of Bellême was thus set free, because his father had asked for
his freedom. A prince who sought to keep any kind of consistency in
his acts could hardly have kept his own brother Henry in ward one
moment after the prison doors were opened to his fellow-captive. But
it would seem that the gaol-delivery at Bayeux did not follow at once
on that at Neuilly. Henry was still kept in his prison, till, at the
general request of all the chief lords of Normandy, he was set
free.[609] He went back to his county of the Côtentin with no good
will to either of his brothers.[610] Here he strove to strengthen
himself in every way, by holding the castles of his principality, by
winning friends and hiring mercenaries. He strengthened the castles of
Coutances and Avranches, those of Cherbourg by the northern rocks and
of Gavray in the southern part of the Côtentin. Among his counsellors
and supporters were some men of note, as Richard of Redvers, and the
greater name of the native lord of Avranches, Earl Hugh of
Chester.[611] Indeed all the lords of the Côtentin stood by their
Count, save only the gloomy, and perhaps banished, Robert of Mowbray,
Earl of Northumberland. That we find the lords of two English earldoms
thus close together in a corner of Normandy shows how thoroughly the
history of the kingdom and that of the duchy form at this moment one
tale. While the Count and Ætheling was strengthened by such support,
the land of Coutances and Avranches enjoyed another moment of peace
and order, while the rest of Normandy was torn in pieces by the
quarrels of Robert of Bellême and his like.
§ 2. _The first Successes of William Rufus._ 1090.
[Sidenote: Schemes of William Rufus.]
[Sidenote: He consults the Assembly at Winchester. Easter, 1090.]
[Sidenote: His speech.]
[Sidenote: His constitutional language.]
While the duchy of Normandy had thus become one scene of anarchy under
the no-government of its nominal prince, the King of the English had
been carefully watching the revolutions of his brother’s dominions. He
now deemed that the time had come to avenge the wrongs which he deemed
that he had suffered at his brother’s hands. He must have seen that he
had not much to fear from a prince who had let slip such advantages as
Robert had held in his hands after the taking of Saint Cenery. He
watched his time; he made his preparations, and was now ready to take
the decisive step of crossing the sea himself or sending others to
cross it. But even William Rufus in all his pride and self-confidence
knew that it did not depend wholly on himself to send either native or
adopted Englishmen on such an errand. He had learned enough of English
constitutional law not to think of venturing on a foreign war without
the constitutional sanction of his kingdom. In a Gemót at Winchester,
seemingly the Easter Gemót of the third year of his reign,[612] he
laid his schemes before the assembled Witan, and obtained their
consent to a war with the Duke of the Normans. If we may trust the one
report which we have of his speech, William the Red had as good
reasons to give for an invasion of Normandy as his father had once had
to give for an invasion of England. He went forth to avenge the wrongs
which his brother had done to him, the rebellion which he had stirred
up in his kingdom. But he went also from the purest motives of piety
and humanity. The prince who had tried to deprive him of his dominions
had shown himself utterly unable to rule his own. A cry had come into
the ears of him, the Red King, to which he could not refuse to
hearken. It was the cry of the holy Church, the cry of the widow and
the orphan. All were alike oppressed by the thieves and murderers whom
the weakness of Robert allowed to do their will throughout the Norman
land. That land looked back with a sigh to the days of William the
Great, who had saved Normandy alike from foreign and from domestic
foes. It became his son, the inheritor of his name and crown, to
follow in his steps, and to do the same work again. He called on all
who had been his father’s men, on all who held fiefs of his granting
in Normandy or in England, to come forward and show their prowess for
the deliverance of the suffering duchy.[613] But it was for them to
take counsel and to decide. Let the Assembly declare its judgement on
his proposal. His purpose was, with their consent, to send over an
army to Normandy, at once to take vengeance for his own wrongs, and to
carry out the charitable work of delivering the Church and the
oppressed, and of chastising evil-doers with the sword of
justice.[614]
[Sidenote: Its witness to constitutional usage.]
This constitutional language in the mouth of William Rufus sounds
somewhat strange in our ears; the profession of high and holy purposes
sounds stranger still. There is of course no likelihood that we are
reading a genuine report of an actual speech; still the words of our
historian are not without their value. No one would have been likely
to invent those words, unless they had fairly represented the
relations which still existed between a King of the English and the
Assembly of his kingdom. The piety may all come from the brain of the
monk of Saint Evroul; but the constitutional doctrines which he has
worked into the speech cannot fail to set forth the ordinary
constitutional usage of the time. Even in the darkest hour in which
England had any settled government at all, in the reign of the worst
of all our kings, it was not the will of the King alone, not the will
of any private cabal or cabinet, but the will of the Great Council of
the nation, which, just as in the days of King Eadward,[615] decided
questions of peace and war.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: War voted by the Witan.]
[Sidenote: The King stays in England.]
[Sidenote: His policy.]
[Sidenote: His advantages in a a struggle with Robert.]
[Sidenote: Interest of the chief Normans.]
[Sidenote: Position of William and Robert.]
[Sidenote: Power of William’s wealth.]
[Sidenote: Hiring of mercenaries.]
[Sidenote: Bribes.]
[Sidenote: He conquers without leaving England.]
The Witan unanimously agreed to the King’s proposal, and applauded, so
we are told, the lofty spirit――the technical name is used――of the King
himself.[616] War was at once voted, and it might have been expected
that a brilliant campaign would at once have followed on the warlike
vote. We might have looked to see the Red King, the mirror of
chivalry, cross the sea, as his father had done on the opposite
errand, at the head of the whole force of his realm. We might have
looked to see a series of gallant feats of arms take place between the
two hostile brothers. The real story is widely different. William
Rufus did not cross the sea till a year after war had been declared,
and remarkably little fighting happened, both while he stayed in
England and after he set forth for Normandy. But we have seen that
William Rufus, as a true Norman, was, with all his chivalry, at least
as much fox as lion.[617] And a ruler of England, above all, a son of
William the Great, had many weapons at his command, one only of which
could the Duke of the Normans hope to withstand with weapons of the
like kind. Robert was in his own person as stout a man-at-arms as
Rufus, and, if the chivalry of Normandy could only be persuaded to
rally round his banner, he might, as the valiant leader of a valiant
host, withstand on equal terms any force that the island monarch could
bring against him. But courage, and, we may add, whenever he chose to
use it, real military skill, were the only weapons which Robert had at
his bidding. The armoury of the Red King contained a choice of many
others, any one of which alone might make courage and military skill
wholly useless. William, headstrong as he often showed himself, could
on occasion bide his time as well as his father, and, well as he loved
fighting, he knew that a land in such a state as Normandy was under
Robert could be won by easier means. Besides daring and generalship
equal to that of Robert, Rufus had statecraft; and he was not minded
to use even his generalship as long as his statecraft could serve his
turn. He knew, or his ready wit divined, that there were men of all
classes in Normandy who would be willing to do his main work for him
without his striking a blow, without his crossing the sea in person,
almost without a blow being struck in his behalf. He had only to
declare himself his brother’s rival, and it was the interest of most
of the chief men in Normandy to support his claims against his
brother. The very same motives which had led the Normans in England to
revolt against William on behalf of Robert would now lead the Normans
in Normandy to revolt against Robert on behalf of William. Norman
nobles and land-owners who held lands on both sides of the sea had
deemed it for their interest that one lord should rule on both sides
of the sea. They had then deemed it for their interest that that lord
should be Robert rather than William. The former doctrine still kept
all its force; on the second point they had learned something by
experience. If England and Normandy were to have one sovereign, that
sovereign must needs be William and not Robert. There was not the
faintest chance of placing Robert on the royal throne of England;
there was a very fair chance of placing William in the ducal chair of
Normandy. Simply as a ruler, as one who commanded the powers of the
state and the army, William had shown that he had it in his power to
reward and to punish. Robert had shown that it was quite beyond his
power to reward or to punish anybody. He who drew on himself the wrath
of the King was likely enough to lose his estates in England; he who
drew on himself the wrath of the Duke had no need to be fearful of
losing his estates in Normandy. And William had the means of making a
yet more direct appeal to the interests of not a few of his brother’s
subjects, in a way in which it was still more certain that his brother
would not appeal to any of his subjects. The hoard at Winchester was
still well filled. If it had been largely drawn upon, it was again
filled to the brim with treasures brought in by every kind of
unrighteous exactions. Already was the land “fordone with unlawful
gelds;”[618] but the King had the profit of them. But there was no
longer any hoard at Rouen out of which Robert could hire the choicest
troops of all lands to defend his duchy, as William could hire them to
attack it. And the wealth at William’s command might do much even
without hiring a single mercenary. The castles of Normandy were
strong; but few of them were so strong that, in the words of King
Philip――Philip of Macedon, not Philip of France――an ass laden with
gold could not find its way into them.[619] Armed at all points,
master alike of gold and steel, able to work himself and to command
the services of others alike with the head and with the hand, William
Rufus could, at least in contending with Robert, conquer when he chose
and how he chose. And for a while he chose, like the Persian king of
old, to win towns and castles without stirring from his hearth.[620]
[Illustration:
Map illustrating the NORMAN CAMPAIGN. A.D. 1091.
_For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press._ Edwᵈ. Weller]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Submission of Saint Valery.]
[Sidenote: Beginning of English action on the continent.]
The first point of the mainland which the Red King won was one which
lay beyond the strict bounds of the Norman duchy; but no spot, either
in Normandy or in England, was more closely connected with the
fortunes of his house. And it was one which had a certain fitness as
the beginning of such a campaign. The first spot of continental ground
which was added to the dominion of one who called himself King of the
English, and who at least was truly King of England, was the spot from
which his father had set forth for the conquest of England. He won it
by the means which were specially his own. “By his cunning or by his
treasures he gat him the castle at Saint Valery and the havens.”[621]
Englishmen had fought for the elder William in Maine and before
Gerberoi;[622] but that was merely to win back the lost possessions of
the Norman Duke. Now the wealth and the arms of England were used to
win castles beyond the sea for a prince whose possessions and whose
titles up to that moment were purely English. In the history of
England as a power――and the history of England as a power had no small
effect on the history of the English as a people――the taking of Saint
Valery is the beginning of a chain of events which leads on, not only
to the fight of Tinchebray and the first loss of Rouen, but to the
fight of Crecy and the fight of Chastillon, to the taking of Boulogne
and the loss of Calais.
[Sidenote: Submission of Stephen of Aumale.]
[Sidenote: Aumale strengthened as the King’s headquarters.]
[Sidenote: Submission of Count Robert of Eu and his son William;]
Saint Valery had, by the forced commendation of the still reigning
Count Guy, passed under Norman superiority;[623] but it was no part of
the true Norman land. The first fortress within the Norman duchy which
passed into the hands of Rufus was the castle of Aumale, standing just
within the Norman border, on the upper course of the river of Eu. Its
lord, the first of the great Norman nobles to submit to William and to
receive his garrison into his castle, was Stephen, son of Count Odo of
Champagne and of Adelaide, whole sister of the Conqueror,
cousin-german therefore of the two contending princes.[624] Aumale was
won, as Saint Valery had been won, by cunning or by treasure. Stephen
may simply have learned to see that it was better for him to have the
same lord at Aumale and in Holderness, or his eyes may have been yet
further enlightened by the brightness of English gold. But the Red
King had other means at his disposal, and it seems that other means
were needed, if not to win, at least to keep Aumale. The defences of
the castle were greatly strengthened at the King’s cost,[625] and it
became a centre for further operations. “Therein he set his knights,
and they did harms upon the land, in harrying and in burning.”[626]
Other castles were soon added to the Red King’s dominion. Count Robert
of Eu, whom we have heard of alike at Mortemer and in Lindesey,[627]
the father of the man whom we have more lately heard of at Berkeley,
still held the house where William the Great had received Harold as
his guest,[628] hard by the church where he had received Matilda as
his bride.[629] The Count had been enriched with lands in southern
England; he is not recorded as having joined in his son’s rebellion;
and the lord of Eu now transferred the allegiance of his Norman county
to the prince of whom he held his command on the rocks of
Hastings.[630] Aumale and Eu, two of the most important points on the
eastern border of Normandy, are thus the first places which we hear of
as receiving Rufus on the mainland. We shall hear of both names again,
but in quite another kind of tale, before the reign of Rufus is over.
[Sidenote: of Gerard of Gournay.]
[Sidenote: The church of Gournay.]
[Sidenote: Other castles of Gerard.]
[Sidenote: Submission of Earl Walter Giffard.]
[Sidenote: His castle of Longueville.]
The next Norman noble to join the cause of William was another lord of
the same frontier, who held a point of hardly less importance to the
south of Eu and Aumale. This was Gerard of Gournay, son of the warrior
of Mortemer who had gone to end his days as a monk of Bec,[631]
son-in-law of the new Earl of Surrey,[632] husband of perhaps the only
woman on Norman ground who bore the name of English Eadgyth.[633] His
castle of Gournay, from which many men and more than one place[634] in
England have drawn their name, stood on the upper course of the Epte,
close to the French border. The fortress itself has vanished; but the
minster of Saint Hildebert, where the massive work of Gerard’s day has
been partly recast in the lighter style of the next century, still
remains, with its mighty pillars, its varied and fantastic carvings,
to make Gournay a place of artistic pilgrimage. Nor is it hard to
trace the line of the ancient walls of the town, showing how the
border stream of Epte was pressed into the service of the Norman
engineers. The adhesion of the lord of Gournay seems to have been of
the highest importance to the cause of Rufus. The influence of Gerard
reached over a wide district north of his main dwelling. Along with
Gournay, he placed at the King’s disposal his fortress of La Ferté
Saint Samson, crowning a height looking over the vale of Bray, and his
other fortress of Gaillefontaine to the north-east, on another height
by the wood of its own name, overlooking the early course of the
Bethune or Dieppe, the stream which joins the eastern Varenne by the
hill of Arques.[635] Gerard too was not only ready in receiving the
King’s forces into his own castles, but zealous also in bringing over
his neighbours to follow his example.[636] Among these was the lord of
Wigmore, late the rebel of Worcester, Ralph of Mortemer.[637] Old
Walter Giffard too, now Earl of Buckingham in England, had English
interests far too precious to allow him to oppose his island
sovereign. He held the stronghold of Longueville――the north-eastern
Longueville by the Scie, the stream which, small as it is, pours its
waters independently into the Channel between Dieppe and Saint
Valery-in-Caux. There, from a bottom fenced in by hills on every side,
the village, the church where the hand of the modern destroyer has
spared only a few fragments of the days of Norman greatness, the
priory which has been utterly swept away, all looked up to a hill on
the right bank of the stream which art had changed into a stronghold
worthy to rank alongside of Arques and Gisors. Girt about with a deep
ditch, on the more exposed southern side with a double ditch, the hill
was crowned by a shell-keep which still remains, though patched and
shattered, and a donjon which has been wholly swept away. In this
fortress the aged warrior of Arques and Senlac received, like so many
of his neighbours, the troops which William of England had sent to
bring the Norman duchy under his power.
[Sidenote: Ralph of Toesny and Count William of Evreux.]
[Sidenote: Enmity of their wives.]
[Sidenote: Countess Heloise of Evreux.]
[Sidenote: Isabel of Montfort.]
[Sidenote: War between Conches and Evreux.]
[Sidenote: Ralph in vain asks help of the Duke.]
[Sidenote: He submits to William.]
[Sidenote: Advance of William’s party.]
The domains of all these lords lay in the lands on the right bank of
the Seine, the oldest, but, as I have often remarked, not the truest
Normandy. But the Red King also won a valuable ally in quite another
part of the duchy. This was Ralph of Conches or of Toesny, with whom
we are now most concerned as the husband of the warlike Isabel of
Montfort, and, in that character rather than in any other, the enemy
of the Countess Heloise and of her husband Count William of Evreux.
The rival lords were in fact half-brothers. The old Roger of Toesny,
the warlike pilgrim of Spain,[638] was succeeded by Ralph, who has so
often played his part in our story, and whom we last met in Duke
Robert’s army before Le Mans.[639] The widow of Roger, the mother of
Ralph, had married Richard Count of Evreux, and was by him the mother
of the present Count William.[640] But this near kindred by birth had
less strength to bind the brothers together than the fierce rivalry of
their wives had to set them at feud with one another. The jealousy of
these two warlike ladies kept a large part of Normandy in a constant
uproar. Our historian bitterly laments the amount of bloodshed and
havoc which was the result of their rivalry.[641] Heloise was of the
house of the Counts of Nevers, the Burgundian city by the Loire, a
descent which carries us a little out of our usual geographical
range.[642] Tall, handsome, and ready of speech, she ruled her husband
and the whole land of Evreux with an absolute sway. Her will was
everything; the counsels of the barons of the county went for
nothing.[643] Violent and greedy, she quarrelled with many of the
nobles of Normandy, with Count Robert of Meulan among them, and
stirred up her husband to many disputes and wars to gratify her fierce
passions.[644] At this time some slight which she had received from
the lady of Conches had led her to entangle her husband in a bitter
feud with his half-brother. Isabel or Elizabeth――the two names are, as
usual, given to her indifferently――the wife of Ralph of Toesny, was a
daughter of the French house of Montfort,[645] the house of our own
Simon. Like her rival, she must now have been long past her youth;
but, while Heloise was childless,[646] Isabel was the mother of
several children, among them of a son who has already played a part in
Norman history. This was that younger Ralph of Toesny who married the
daughter of Waltheof and who had taken a part in the present Duke’s
rebellion against his father.[647] Handsome, eloquent, self-willed,
and overbearing, like her rival, Isabel had qualities which gained her
somewhat more of personal regard than the Countess of Evreux. She was
liberal and pleasant and merry of speech, and made herself agreeable
to those immediately about her. Moreover, while of Heloise we read
indeed that she stirred up wars, but not that she waged them in her
own person, Isabel, like the ancient Queens of the Amazons, went forth
to the fight, mounted and armed, and attended by a knightly
following.[648] The struggle between the ladies of Evreux and Conches
was at its height at the moment when the castles of eastern Normandy
were falling one by one into the hands of Rufus. Isabel and Ralph were
just now sore pressed. The lord of Conches therefore went to Duke
Robert and craved his help;[649] but from Duke Robert no help was to
be had for any man. Ralph then bethought him of a stronger protector,
in the sovereign of his English possessions. King William gladly
received such a petition, and bade Count Stephen and Gerard of
Gournay, and all who had joined him in Normandy, to give all the help
that they could to the new proselyte.[650] The cause of the Red King
prospered everywhere; well nigh all Normandy to the right of Seine was
in the obedience of Rufus. All its chief men had, in a phrase which
startles us in that generation, “joined the English.”[651] And for
them the King of the English was open-handed. Into the hoard at
Winchester the wealth of England flowed in the shape of every kind of
unlawful exaction. Out of it it flowed as freely to enable the new
subjects of King William to strengthen the defences of their castles
and to hire mercenaries to defend them.[652]
[Sidenote: Helias of Saint-Saens.]
[Sidenote: He marries Robert’s daughter.]
[Sidenote: His descent.]
[Sidenote: He has Caux as his wife’s dowry.]
[Sidenote: Position of Saint-Saens.]
[Sidenote: Importance of his position.]
[Sidenote: Bures.]
[Sidenote: Helias holds Arques.]
[Sidenote: Faithfulness of Helias towards Robert.]
During all this time Duke Robert himself does not seem to have thought
of striking a blow. But there was one man at least between Seine and
Somme who was ready both to give and to take blows on his behalf.
Robert had given one of his natural children, a daughter born, to him
in his wandering days,[653] in marriage to Helias, lord of
Saint-Saens.[654] Helias, like so many of the Norman nobles, came of a
house which had risen to importance through the loves of Gunnor and
Richard the Fearless.[655] A daughter of one of Gunnor’s sisters
married Richard Viscount of Rouen, and became the mother of Lambert of
Saint-Saens, the father of Helias.[656] Helias and the daughter of
Robert had thus a common, though distant, forefather in the father of
Gunnor. With his wife Helias received a goodly dowry, nothing less, we
are told, than the whole land of Caux.[657] Helias’ own lordship of
Saint-Saens lies on the upper course of the Varenne, in a deep bottom
girt on all sides by wooded hills, one of which, known as the
_Câtelier_, overhanging the town to the north, seems to have been the
site of the castle of Helias. His stronghold has vanished; but the
church on which the height looks down, if no rival to Saint Hildebert
of Gournay, still keeps considerable remains of an age but little
later than that with which we have to do. The possessions of Helias,
both those which he inherited and those which he received with his
wife, made his resistance to the invader of no small help to the cause
of his father-in-law. They barred the nearest way to Rouen, not indeed
from Gournay, but from Eu and Aumale. They came right between these
last fortresses and the domain of Walter Giffard at Longueville. Of
the three streams which meet by Arques, while Helias himself held the
upper Varenne at Saint-Saens, his wife’s fortress of Bures held the
middle course of the Bethune or Dieppe below Gerard’s Gaillefontaine,
and below Drincourt, not yet the New Castle of King Henry.[658] The
massive church, with parts dating from the days of Norman
independence, rises on the left slope of the valley above an island in
the stream. But the site of the castle which formed part of the
marriage portion of Duke Robert’s daughter is hard to trace. But lower
down, nearer the point where the streams meet, the bride of Helias had
brought him a noble gift indeed. Through her he was lord of Arques,
with its donjon and its ditches, the mighty castle whose tale has been
told in recording the history of an earlier generation.[659] A glance
at the map will show how strong a position in eastern Normandy was
held by the man who commanded at once Saint-Saens, Bures, and Arques.
But the son-in-law of Duke Robert deserves our notice for something
better than his birth, his marriage, or his domains. Helias of
Saint-Saens was, in his personal character, a worthy namesake of
Helias of La Flêche. Among the crimes and treasons of that age, we
dwell with delight on the unswerving faithfulness with which, through
many years and amidst all the ups and downs of fortune, he clave to
the reigning Duke and to his son after him.[660] But this his later
history lies beyond the bounds of our immediate tale. What directly
concerns us now is that Helias was the one noble of Normandy whom the
gold of England could not tempt. It would be almost ungenerous to put
on record the fact that, unlike most of his neighbours, he had no
English estates to lose. The later life of Helias puts him above all
suspicion of meaner motives. Saint-Saens, Arques, Bures, and all Caux,
remained faithful to Duke Robert.
[Sidenote: William’s dealings with France.]
[Sidenote: Robert asks help of Philip.]
[Sidenote: Philip comes to help.]
[Sidenote: Meeting of the Norman and French armies.]
[Sidenote: They march on Eu.]
[Sidenote: Philip bribed to go back.]
With this honourable exception, an exception which greatly lessened
the value of his new conquests, William Rufus had won, without
hand-strokes, without his personal presence, a good half of the
original grant to Rolf, the greater part of the diocese of Rouen. He
was soon to win yet another triumph by his peculiar policy. By those
arms which were specially his own, he was to win over an ally, or at
least to secure the neutrality of an enemy, of far higher rank, though
perhaps of hardly greater practical power, than the Count of Aumale
and the aged lord of Longueville. Robert in his helplessness cried to
his over-lord at Paris. Had not his father done the same to Philip’s
father? Had not King Henry played a part at least equal to that of
Duke William among the lifted lances of Val-ès-dunes?[661] Philip had
had his jest on the bulky frame of the Conqueror, and his jest had
been avenged among the candles of the bloody churching at Mantes.[662]
By this time at least, so some of our authorities imply, Philip had
brought himself to a case in which the same jest might have been made
upon himself with a good deal more of point. At the prayer of his
vassal the bulky King of the French left his table and his dainties,
and set forth, sighing and groaning at the unusual exertion, to come
to the help of the aggrieved Duke.[663] It was a strange beginning of
the direct rivalry between England and France. King Philip came with a
great host into Normandy. And Robert must somewhere or other have
found forces to join those of his royal ally. And now was shown the
value of the position which was held by the faithful Helias in the
land of Caux. It must have been by his help that the combined armies
of Robert and Philip were able to march to the furthest point of the
Red King’s new acquisitions, to the furthest point of the Norman duchy
itself, to the castle of Eu, which was held, we are told, by a vast
host, Norman and English.[664] Let an honest voice from Peterborough
tell what followed. “And the King and the Earl with a huge _fyrd_
beset the castle about where the King’s men of England in it were. The
King William of England sent to Philip the Franks’ King, and he for
his love or for his mickle treasure forlet so his man the Earl Robert
and his land, and went again to France and let them so be.”[665] A
Latin writer does not think it needful to allow Philip the perhaps
ironical alternative of the English writer. Love between Philip and
William Rufus is not thought of. We are simply told that, while Philip
was promising great things, the money of the King of England met
him――the wealth of Rufus seems to be personified. Before its presence
his courage was broken; he loosed his girdle and went back to his
banquet.[666]
[Sidenote: The first English subsidy.]
[Sidenote: First direct dealings between England and France.]
[Sidenote: Different position of the two Williams.]
[Sidenote: Relation of England, Normandy, and France.]
[Sidenote: Results of Rufus’ dealings with Philip.]
Thus the special weapons of Rufus could overcome even kings at a
distance. But, ludicrous as the tale sounds in the way in which it is
told, this negotiation between Philip and William is really, in an
European, and even in an English point of view, the most important
event in the whole story. We should hardly be wrong in calling this
payment to Philip the first instance of the employment of English
money in the shape of subsidies to foreign princes. For such it in
strictness was. It was not, like a Danegeld, money paid to buy off a
foreign invader. Nor was it like the simple hiring of mercenaries at
home or abroad. It is, like later subsidies, money paid to a foreign
sovereign, on condition of his promoting, or at least not thwarting,
the policy of a sovereign of England. The appetite[667] which was now
first awakened in Philip of Paris soon came to be shared by other
princes, and it lasted in full force for many ages. Again, we have now
for the first time direct political dealings between a purely insular
King of England――we may forestall the territorial style when speaking
of England as a state rather than of Englishmen as a nation――and a
French King at Paris. The embassies which passed between Eadward and
Henry, even when Henry made his appeal on behalf of Godwine,[668]
hardly make an exception. William the Great had dealt with France as a
Norman duke; if, in the latter part of his reign, he had wielded the
strength of England as well as the strength of Normandy, he had
wielded it, as far as France was concerned, wholly for Norman
purposes. But William the Red, though his position arose wholly out of
the new relations between England and Normandy, was still for the
present a purely English king. The first years of Rufus and the first
years of Henry the First are alike breaks in the hundred and forty
years of union between England and Normandy.[669] Had not a Norman
duke conquered England, an English king would not have been seeking to
conquer Normandy; but, as a matter of fact, an English king, who had
no dominions on the mainland, was seeking to conquer Normandy. And he
was seeking to win it with the good will, or at least the neutrality,
of the French King. This was a state of things which could have
happened only during the few years when different sons of the
Conqueror ruled in England and in Normandy. Whenever England and
Normandy were united, whether by conquest or by inheritance, the old
strife between France and Normandy led England into the struggle. But
at the present moment an alliance between England and France against
Normandy was as possible as any other political combination. And the
arts of Rufus secured, if not French alliance, at least French
neutrality. But either alliance or neutrality was in its own nature
destructive of itself. Let either Normandy win England or England win
Normandy, and the old state of things again began. The union of
England and Normandy meant enmity between England and France, an
enmity which survived their separation.[670] Friendly dealings between
William and Philip were a step towards the union of England and
Normandy, and thereby a step towards that open enmity between England
and France which began under Rufus himself and which lasted down to
our fathers’ times. The bribe which Philip took at Eu has its place in
the chain of events which led to Bouvines, to Crécy, and to Waterloo.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: State of Normandy.]
[Sidenote: Private wars not interrupted by the invasion.]
[Sidenote: Action of Robert of Bellême.]
[Sidenote: Robert of Meulan claims the tower of Ivry.]
[Sidenote: He is imprisoned, but set free at the intercession of his
father.]
[Sidenote: Robert takes Brionne.]
But while things were thus, unknown to the actors in them, taking a
turn which was permanently to affect the history of mankind, the
immediate business of the time went on as before in the lands of
Northern Gaul. In Normandy that immediate business was mutual
destruction――civil war is too lofty a name; in Maine it was
deliverance from the Norman yoke. I am not called on to tell in detail
the whole story of every local strife between one Norman baron and
another, not even in those rare cases when the Duke himself stepped in
as a judge or as a party in the strife. Those who loved nothing so
well as slaughter, plunder, and burning, had now to make up for the
many years during which the strong hand of William the Great had kept
them back from those enjoyments. They had no thought of stopping,
though the kings of England and France, or all the kings of the earth,
should appear in arms on Norman soil. Many a brilliant feat of arms,
as it was deemed in those days, must be left to local remembrance;
even at events which closely touched many of the chief names of our
story we can do no more than glance. The revolt of Maine will have to
be spoken of at length in another chapter; among strictly Norman
affairs we naturally find Robert of Bellême playing his usual part
towards his sovereign and his neighbours, and we find the tower of
Ivry and the fortified hall of Brionne ever supplying subjects of
strife to the turbulent nobles. We see Robert of Bellême at war with
his immediate neighbour Geoffrey Count of Perche,[671] and driving
Abbot Ralph of Seez to seek shelter in England.[672] We also find him
beaten back from the walls of Exmes by Gilbert of Laigle and the other
warriors of his house, the house of which we have heard in the
Malfosse of Senlac and beneath the rocks of Sainte-Susanne.[673]
William of Breteuil loses, wins, and loses again, his late grant of
the tower of Ivry, and the second time he is driven to give both the
tower and the hand of his natural daughter as his own ransom from a
specially cruel imprisonment at the hands of a rebellious vassal.[674]
Brionne forms the centre of a tale in which its new lord and his son,
the other Roger and the other Robert of our story, play over again the
part of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his son of Bellême. Robert of
Meulan comes from England to assert his claim among others to the
much-contested tower of Ivry. The Duke reminds him that he had given
Brionne to his father in exchange for Ivry. The Count of Meulan gives
a threatening answer.[675] The Duke, with unusual spirit, puts him in
prison, seizes Brionne, and puts it into a state of defence. Then the
old Roger of Beaumont, old a generation earlier,[676] obtains, by the
recital of his own exploits, the deliverance of his son.[677] He then
prays, not without golden arguments, for the restitution of
Brionne.[678] The officer in command, Robert son of Baldwin, asserts
his own hereditary claim, and, at the head of six knights only, stands
a siege, though not a long one, against the combined forces of the
Duke and of the Count of Meulan and his father.[679] This siege is
remarkable. The summer days were hot; all things were dry; the
besiegers shot red-hot arrows against the roof of the fortified hall,
and set fire to it.[680] So Duke Robert boasted that he had taken in a
day the river-fortress which had held out for three years against his
father.[681]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Advance of Rufus.]
[Sidenote: The war of Conches and Evreux.]
[Sidenote: Movement at Rouen.]
These events concern us only because we know the actors, and because
they helped to keep up that state of confusion in the Norman duchy
which supplied the Red King at once with an excuse for his invasion,
and with the means for carrying out his schemes. It must be remembered
that the two stories are actually contemporary; while Robert was
besieging Brionne, the fortresses of eastern Normandy were already
falling one by one into the hands of Rufus. It is even quite possible
that Robert of Meulan’s voyage from England to Normandy, and the
demands made by him and his father on the Duke, were actually planned
between the cunning Count and the Red King as a means of increasing
the confusion which reigned in the duchy. But there are tales of local
strife which concern us more nearly. The war of the half-brothers, the
war of the Amazons, the strife between Conches and Evreux, between
Isabel and Heloise, is an immediate part of the tale of William Rufus.
The lord of Conches was strengthened in his struggle with his brother
by forces directly sent to his help by the King’s order.[682] The war
went on; and, while it was still going on, a far more important
movement began in the greatest city of Normandy, a movement in which
the King of the English was yet more directly concerned. Up to this
time his plans had been everywhere crowned with success. His campaign,
if campaign we can call it, had begun soon after Easter. Half a year
had passed, and nearly the whole of the oldest, though not the truest,
Normandy had fallen into his hands without his stirring out of his
island realm. It now became doubtful whether Robert could keep even
the capital of his duchy.
[Sidenote: November, 1090.]
[Sidenote: State of things in Rouen.]
[Sidenote: The municipal spirit.]
[Sidenote: Conan demagogue or tyrant.]
[Sidenote: Conan’s treaty with William.]
[Sidenote: The citizens favour William.]
[Sidenote: A party for Robert.]
[Sidenote: A day fixed for the surrender to William.]
[Sidenote: Robert sends for help.]
The month of November of this year saw stirring scenes alike in the
streets of Rouen and beneath the walls of Conches. But, while Conches
was openly aided by the King’s troops, no force from England or from
the parts of Normandy which William had already won had as yet drawn
near to Rouen. Rufus knew other means to gain over the burghers of a
great city as well as the lords of castles and smaller towns. The
glimpse which we now get of the internal state of the Norman
metropolis tells us, like so many other glimpses which are given us in
the history of these times, just enough to make us wish to be told
more. A state of things is revealed to us which we are not used to in
the history of Normandy. Rouen appears for a moment as something like
an independent commonwealth, though an enemy might call it a
commonwealth which seemed to be singularly bent on its own
destruction. The same municipal spirit which we have seen so strong at
Exeter and at Le Mans[683] shows itself now for a moment at Rouen. We
may be sure that under the rule of William the Great no man had
dreamed of a _commune_ in the capital of Normandy. His arm, we may be
sure, had protected the men of Rouen, like all his other subjects, in
the enjoyment of all rights and privileges which were not inconsistent
with his own dominion. But in his day Rouen could have seen no
demagogues, no tyrants, no armies in civic pay, no dealings of its
citizens with any prince other than their own sovereign. But the rule
of William the Great was over; in Robert’s days it may well have
seemed that the citizens of so great a city were better able to rule
themselves, or at all events that they were entitled to choose their
own ruler. When the arts of Rufus, his gifts and his promises, began
to work at Rouen in the same way in which they had worked on the
castles of the eastern border, his agents had to deal, not with a
prince or a lord, but with a body of citizens under the leadership of
one of whom one doubts whether he should be called a demagogue or a
tyrant. We seem to be carried over two hundred and forty years to the
dealings of Edward the Third with the mighty brewer of Ghent. The
Artevelde of Rouen was Conan――the name suggests a Breton origin――the
son of Gilbert surnamed Pilatus. He was the richest man in the city;
his craft is not told us; but we must always remember that a citizen
was not necessarily a trader.[684] His wealth was such that it enabled
him to feed troops of mercenaries and to take armed knights into his
pay.[685] Another leading citizen, next in wealth to Conan, was
William the son of Ansgar,[686] whose name seems to imply the purest
Norman blood. Conan had entered into a treaty with William, the object
of which, we are told, was to betray the metropolis of Normandy and
the Duke of the Normans――the sleepy Duke, as our guide calls him――into
the power of the island King.[687] Nor was this merely the scheme of
Conan and William; public feeling in the city went heartily with them.
A party still clave to the Duke; but the mass of the men of Rouen
threw in their lot with Conan, and were, like him, ready to receive
William as their sovereign instead of Robert.[688] They may well have
thought that, in the present state of things, any change would be for
the better; the utter lawlessness of the time, which might have its
charms for turbulent nobles, would have no charms for the burghers of
a great city. Or the men of Rouen may have argued then, much as the
men of Bourdeaux argued ages later, that they were likely to enjoy a
greater measure of municipal freedom, under a King of the English,
dwelling apart from them in his own island, than they would ever win
from a Duke of the Normans, holding his court and castle in Rouen
itself. Yet the friends of Robert might have their arguments too. The
party of mere conservatism, the party of order, would naturally cleave
to him. But other motives might well come in. True friends of the
_commune_ might doubt whether William the Red was likely to be a very
safe protector of civic freedom. They might argue that, if they must
needs have a master, their liberties were less likely to be meddled
with under such a master as Robert. But the party of the Duke’s
friends, on whatever grounds it stood by him, was the weaker party. A
majority of the citizens was zealous for William. A day was fixed by
Conan with the general consent, on which the city was to be given
up,[689] and the King’s forces were invited to come from Gournay and
other points in his obedience. Robert seems to have stayed in the
capital which was passing from him; but he felt that, if he was to
have supporters, he must seek for them beyond its walls. He sent to
tell his plight to those of the nobles of Normandy in whom he still
put any trust.[690] And he also hastened to seek help in a
reconciliation with some neighbours and subjects with whom he was at
variance.
[Sidenote: Henry and Robert of Bellême come to the Duke’s help.]
[Sidenote: Danger of the example of Rouen.]
[Sidenote: Others who help Robert.]
[Sidenote: November 3, 1090.]
[Sidenote: Henry at Rouen.]
It is certainly a little startling, after the history of the past
year, to find at the head of the list of Duke Robert’s new allies the
names of the Ætheling Henry and of Robert of Bellême. We may well
fancy that they took up arms, not so much to support the rights of the
Duke against the King as to check the dangerous example of a great
city taking upon itself to choose among the claims of kings, dukes,
and counts. Robert of Bellême may indeed have simply hastened to any
quarter from which the scent of coming slaughter greeted him. But
Henry the Clerk could always have given a reason for anything that he
did. Popular movements at Rouen might supply dangerous precedents at
Coutances. The Count of Coutances too might have better hopes of
becoming Duke of Rouen, if Rouen were still held for a while by such a
prince as Robert, than he could have if the city became either the
seat of a powerful commonwealth or the stronghold of a powerful king.
But, from whatever motive, Henry came, and he was the first to
come.[691] Others to whom the Duke’s messengers set forth his desolate
state[692] came also. Robert of Bellême, so lately his prisoner, Count
William of Evreux and his nephew William of Breteuil, all hastened, if
not to the deliverance of Duke Robert, at least to the overthrow of
Conan. And with them came Reginald of Warren, the younger son of
William and Gundrada,[693] and Gilbert of Laigle, fresh from his
victory over his mightiest comrade.[694] At the beginning of November
Duke Robert was still in the castle of Rouen; but his brother Henry
was now with him within its walls, and the captains who had come to
his help were thundering at the gates of the rebellious city.
[Illustration:
ROUEN
_For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press._ E. Weller.]
[Sidenote: Rouen in the eleventh century.]
[Sidenote: Position of the city.]
[Sidenote: The ducal castles.]
[Sidenote: The eastern side of the city.]
[Sidenote: The archbishopric.]
[Sidenote: Abbey of Saint Ouen.]
[Sidenote: Priory of Saint Gervase.]
[Sidenote: Castle of Bouvreil.]