these Emperors who could do nothing for them; and Eudes, the son of
Robert, made himself more great, so that when Charles the Emperor
died a year later, the great men met together and said to themselves:
“As for the Germanies, let them go where they will, but Eudes shall
be our king here.” And Eudes was crowned and anointed in Compiègne,
not two years after his manliness in the great siege, and being so
crowned he rode out eastward to where the northmen were pillaging in
Argonne, and finding there the body of the pirates he destroyed them;
and to this day it is remembered how powerfully he blew his horn in
that fight.
From him and from his father Robert all the kings of France descend.
THE CROWNING OF THE CAPETIAN
(_Sunday, July 3_, A.D. 987)
Let any one who would understand the fortunes of the French wander
for days in the wooded valley of the Oise. There great forests still
clothe the low rounded hills which border the widenings of the slow
river, where it saunters through its pasturages and its marsh, with
tall, delicate aspens in solemn lines to mark its passage. It is a
flat river floor of half a league across and about it the great woods
of Compiègne and of Coucy, and all the others that still bear the
name of their towns or castles, make a sheet of trees. That sheet of
trees may have been a wider thing in the old days, but it remains for
any one who will visit it (and it is a countryside that will harbour
a man for as long as he will, so broad is it and so deep) the memory
of that landscape in which the fortunes of his country changed and
re-arose.
But, in particular, the forest of Coucy and the depths of the tall
trunks understand how the lords hunted there when the Emperor was
still the Emperor, and before France was once again France. See how
there still remain in fragments the lines of the Roman roads that
led from town to town; all the towns that make up this countryside.
Consider Paris, one hard day’s ride away, two or three days’ marches.
Remember Laon on its impregnable horse-shoe hill upon the edge of
those woods, overlooking the plains to the east and the north, and
forming a bulwark and a stronghold for the last of the blood of
Charlemagne.
Then, in your mind, see westward and southward the open land,
Normandy and Anjou, the Island of France, the gardens of Touraine,
Nevers, the high Morvan, the Champagne, crammed with Latinity, and
the valleys of the Allier, of the Cher, and of the Vienne, leading
upwards and southwards into those dead mountains of the centre which
are the frontier against the south. Remember also the good lands that
flank Brittany, and that make an approach and a barrier at once for
that jealous, silent land. Do all this, and you will understand what
happened when the Carolingians fell, and when, in one moment, a new
line of kings that stood for Gaul re-arisen was accepted and crowned
in the person of its ancestor.
France would be. The Germanies learning the Faith, and informed by
the French, were still the Germanies: barbaric, lacking in stone
and in letters; lacking in roads. The Latin speech had not followed
in them the Latin rule, and the Church which had made them human
had hardly welded them into Christendom. It was not possible that
Gaul should any longer be confused with these, unless, indeed, they
would consent to be ruled from Gaul. That, in their newfound faith
and culture, they would not consent to. Yet the imperial line and
the old name of Charlemagne, now wasted for nearly two hundred
years, pretended to control the issue. But France knew itself
again--that is, Gaul knew itself again, through the confusion of how
many centuries, and a symbol must be found for France. The line of
Charlemagne was exhausted. It could present for claimant to universal
rule over the Germanies, as over Gaul, as over Italy, nothing that
men respected, no one whom soldiers followed.
But in Gaul itself was a family and a man.
That Robert who had died at Brissarthe, and who had come, no man knew
whence, but who was so strong, and who was called “The Strong,” had
founded lineage. It was a man of his blood who had held Paris against
the Normans. Men of his blood had claimed the crown and kingship
once, and had been a part of the Empire, and had yet dropped the
claim. But their great estate of land had grown and grown. Their
command over many soldiers had grown therewith. They spoke in the
Latin tongue; they were of us. And of all of those who were of us
they were the richest and, what is much more, the most captaining
family of them. Of that great line Hugh was now the man. For a
hundred years his father and his father’s father and his father
before him had been the true masters of those good river valleys, the
Loire, and the Seine, and the Oise. If there was to be government,
he, Hugh, must come.
Rheims of the Champagne, the town where Clovis, five hundred years
before, had accepted the Faith and made a unity for Gaul, had in this
moment for its great archbishop one Adalberon, a man very subtle,
and more learned than subtle, stronger in will than either in his
learning or in his subtlety, and perceiving future things.
In those days there was between men a division. The great were very
great. The mass of men were hardly free, and were all very small.
The slaves that had worked for Roman lords in generations now
half-forgotten, if they were no longer slaves, were still mean men;
and the few that could ride by the day through their estates inland
were great above all men--the great bishops, the great counts, the
men of the palace, and the masters of the countryside.
These, then--the Empire now plainly in default, and wealthy Gaul, as
it were, derelict, and the Germanies, in their barbarism, sheering
off--counselled what they should do. They met in an assembly, going
up the northern road from Paris to Senlis; and here there was
great tumult. For each man came with his armed men about him, and
confusedly they knew how mighty a thing was toward.
In that tumult it was Adalberon who spoke: “Charles of Lower
Lorraine,” he said, “has many to speak for him, and he says that the
throne should come to him by right of lineage. But there should not
stand at the head of this kingdom any but he who is great. Hugh, the
commander of armies, is known to you by his deeds, by his descent,
and by the armed men in his troop, who are many. If you will have
government, take him.”
In the further tumult that followed Adalberon persuaded, and Hugh,
coming from those who had saved Paris, and who had commanded armament
in Gaul for now so long, was acclaimed by the great lords as king.
When the time came for the anointing and the crowning, and for this
separation of France again from what was not France, this re-seizing
of the nation to itself, Noyon was the town they chose.
Little Noyon, with its vast arcaded church, strong and Roman, amid
the woods of the Oise, the altar before which Charlemagne himself had
been crowned. To Noyon they came in the midst of those forests of the
Oise, by that strict road of the Romans which bridged the river, and
which is but one of the many that there meet, as in the centre of a
wheel; for the dignity of Noyon, now so forgotten, lay in this--that
men could come to it easily, even in those days of difficulty and of
old arts forgotten.
In Noyon, then, was Hugh crowned.
He had no name but Hugh. Since, however, men must give names to
a family as well as to a man, all the generations after him have
remembered what his nickname was. For he had a nickname, this soldier
and lord, and from his helmet or his hood he was called Hugh Capet,
the man of the head covering--the man of the head or cap. And that is
why this family is called Capetian: a little cause for a great thing.
THE TORRENT
(A.D. 1030)
Down the mountain side there went in long procession, slipping here
and there upon the unbroken frost of the morning, jangling all of
them with bells, mules by the hundred--quite three hundred mules.
They that led them were short, lean men with hard, clean-shaven
faces, bronzed in colour, and on their heads they wore a loose, flat
cap that hung to one side or the other. Each man led his beast, and
each beast was heavily laden as it picked its way down the slope; and
here and there, sitting sideways upon her mount, was a woman of these
hills, holding in her arms a child. The sun had not yet risen behind
the red earth of the eastern peaks. The broken road that had once
been a passage for the Roman armies over the Pyrenees (and that was
now a mere bank, unsurfaced, down which the mules warily shuffled)
was touched everywhere with rime. For it was but the opening of
summer, and the snow still lay everywhere upon the high mountains
around.
At the head of the valley below, fixed in the narrow valley floor,
lay huddled and tangled together such a little mass of dirty brown
as looked like a fantastic chaos of rock. As one came closer one
could see that it was a cluster of human buildings--a town, but a
town so squeezed together, so suspicious of all around, so made for
defence, that, seen from the pass above, it was like the shell of
some armoured animal.
One street alone led through its houses, very narrow indeed (for
up in these mountains nothing goes on wheels)--so narrow that two
loaded mules could barely pass. And this narrow street, under the
first glory of the morning sky, which made a strip of light above
it, was full of the cries of sellers and of grooms, of the stamping
of horses’ feet, and of the innumerable little jingles of steel
which come from bit and bridle and curb, stirrup and scabbard and
halter-chain, and the rings of mail upon a hauberk, wherever men are
gathered together to ride out in arms.
For there was in this town an assembly made of farmers and free
men and one or two lords as well. They had come for the beginning
of the summer season, now that the crops were sown, to ride out
south against the Mahommedan, to see what they could see, and take
what they could take. It was for this force that the mules were
coming over the hills to provision it. A great train did every such
expedition need of servitors, and oats, bread twice baked, and salted
meat tied tightly round with strings, olives also, and oil and much
wine; four men, perhaps, afoot for one that fought on horseback; and
many of those afoot were half slaves.
Under the low, thick arch, where the track came in through the town
wall and became the narrow street of the town, swayed in the first
of that long procession of mules. To the cries of the sellers and
the grooms, and to the jingling of steel links, there was now added
the music of little bells. But dominant over all such noises, louder
than them all, and a background of sound upon which all this life was
woven, was the torrent swollen with the melting snow that ran beyond
the houses a few yards to the east, and filled the deep, cool valley
with its rumour. The name of this torrent was Aragon.
Near a wide and ancient door of mouldering oak, that hid a deep, dark
stable beyond, was a farmer from the Canal Roya upon his horse, and
he talked to his lord.
“Those of Jaca, at the beginning of the plain, sent in a man last
night to say that we could catch a few of them beyond the Peña,
beyond the high hill. They camped on the slope of it, marauding. We
should be upon them before the sixth hour. It is not many miles.”
But his lord, looking at the Peña where it stood, a grey wall miles
away, answered him,--
“Their horses are swifter than ours, and they go very light without
armour, God curse them!”
And he spat as he spoke of the Moslem.
Then the farmer said,--
“Two days ago they raided the farm of Peter, the free man, and took
his four serfs away on halters, running behind their horses, and they
burnt a rick of his, and behind them they left a coin. This coin I
bought of Peter.”
He showed it. It was a coin of the mint of Saragossa, and the lord
bent over his saddle and peered curiously at the Arabic script
stamped upon it. Then he made the sign of the Cross slowly over his
broad shoulders.
“These words,” he said, “are in the devil’s language, and with these
they summon Mahound.”
“Sir,” said the farmer, “some day some men now mounted here will ride
into Huesca and cleanse it of the infidel. There is a monk who lives
alone, and is a hermit up on the Peña. The Mahommedans fear him and
will not pass his cave, and God gives him knowledge in dreams. This
man is very old, and this same Lent he said (when he came down into
Jaca for the Adoration of the Cross and the Blessing of the Oils),
this very Lent he said (and from the altar, note you, by leave of
the bishop), that he had seen St. Lawrence standing glorified in the
air, who held a banner, and that Huesca would be ours and Christ’s at
last.”
The lord smiled. “These things are lies,” he said.
“Was not Huesca the town of the great St. Lawrence,” answered the
farmer doggedly, “whom the Emperor of the Romans, possessed by a
devil, roasted upon a gridiron for the Faith? Will he not lead the
host into Huesca at last? And then all the plains will be before us,
whereon we can call upon St. James, and charge!”
But the lord still shook his head and smiled unpleasantly.
“All these things are lies,” he said. “But whatever great lord shall
ride at last into Huesca for Christ, and cleanse it of the infidel,
shall not only conquer it for Christ but for himself. Sancho is our
great master, whom we serve, but whoever can hold Huesca will be a
little king all the same.”
The farmer looked back up the narrow street to the mountains, and he
said, “The lords come riding in from the Major Land, from the broad
Christian land that goes up and away northward for ever beyond the
hills; they come in greater and in greater bands with every season;
they are strong men heavily accoutred. With their aid we shall take
Huesca.”
“But this season,” laughed the lord again, “we shall not take more
than a farm, nor raid more than an orchard, nor carry much home
beyond a few apples, and a little wheat perhaps from the first plough
lands of the infidels in the plain.”
By this time it was full day. There was a new warmth in the air,
and the noise of the torrent seemed louder under the growing light.
The torrent, roaring southward, seemed, with its adventure and its
plunge, a sort of leader; and these mounted men, now gathering into
column for the raid, thought of the south and of the stony path that
led along its banks on, away, over the ford to Jaca: and thence
to the plains and the battle. The torrent of Aragon is a maker of
kingdoms and of soldiers destined to conquer. Though as yet these
Christians had but a few bare parishes of land, hardly held by day
and by night with arms, and the little town of Jaca only for their
bastion, yet in them all, whether doubters or visionaries, there lay
smouldering some certitude of future things, and a promise of the
reconquest of Spain beyond and of the freeing of all Christian land.
So they rode out, in number about four hundred and fifty mounted
men, with many more afoot that made a straggling herd about them and
behind them. So they filed out by the southern gate.
The priests and the women watched them as they went by, and so did
the children in the crowd. There were shrill cries of prophecy and of
warning. To the last of them that rode by a deacon held up the relic
of St. Lawrence, which was a piece of cloth from his tunic. The armed
man bent over the saddle on the near side and kissed it as he passed.
Their marching raised a cloud of dust that blew softly away to the
southward under the summer air, and in a little while the noise of
the horses’ hoofs was lost, and the little place was quiet again.
There was a woman, one of those that had ridden in with the mules.
She stood now by the fountain filling a leathern gourd with water and
crooning a song of the Basques. For she was of the Basque country,
to the east, an unconquered tribe. And with her was her little son,
four years old, who held her skirts and watched the cool, clear water
running into the gourd.
“Mother,” he said, “where do all those tall gentlemen go?”
“They go to fight against the men in white cloaks,” she said, “the
men who serve Mahound. They go to catch them in their camps, and to
bring us home good things--as it says in the song that we sing on
winter evenings,” and she crooned the tune to him.
The little child said, “Mother, what is Mahound?”
“Mahound,” said the woman, “is a great beast that lives in an island
of the sea. He has a head like a goat, and great shining eyes.”
The child looked at her, glorying and delighting to hear the story
again. “And are not his eyes jewels?” he said.
“Yes, baby,” said the woman, “great jewels from the East, such as
there are in kings’ crowns, in the crown of Sancho our king, or in
the middle of that cross which the archbishop bore before him in the
procession when he came down this Lent from Toulouse with the great
lords of the north who were riding to help Leon.”
“And mother,” went on the child again, “is there not a fire behind
those eyes of Mahound, and has he not great gilded horns, and does he
not prophesy from his goat’s mouth?”
He continued to recite all the tale that he knew so well.
“Yes, baby,” said the mother (the gourd was filled, and she was
leading him away by the hand), “and this beast is black all over,
whence they that worship him, the Moriscos, are dark also, and they
grin with white, shining teeth like his. And between him and his
followers and our Christ and His Blessed Mother and His Saints there
is perpetual war.”
As the child so babbled, and as the woman answered him, there still
ran, with its triumphant noise below the houses, the thundering
torrent. The little child caught between two walls the glint of its
water foaming under the sun.
“Mother,” he said, “what is the name of that water?”
She answered in a more solemn tone, “Its name is Aragon, a famous
water; the sick bathe in it and are healed, and from all time it has
baptized Christian men.”
* * * * *
When this child was grown a man, though he was a serf’s child he
became skilful in the riding and the management of a horse and in the
handling even of arms, which the young free men lent him for a jest
in the village games. So at last he went riding as a companion with
one from his village, and was enfranchised. And by the time that he
had taken his farm from his father and had himself bred a son, he
followed the Cid Campeador. At last he, too, grew old. He came back
to his farm to sit by the fire; and his son in turn tilled the land
of those few acres in the hills, and rode out every season farther
and farther south against the oppressors, cleansing the land. Until
there came the rumour of a great marching that was going eastward to
the Holy Places for the recovery of Christ’s grave, and this son of
his, following that rumour, begged of his old father a little store
of gold which he had put by, and went out himself upon Crusade,
leaving the old man by the fire in the Pyrenees.
THE CONQUEROR
(_January to September_, A.D. 1066)
William, the Bastard of Falaise and Lord of all Normandy, had ridden
into St. Germer four days before the feast, and with him a small
retinue very richly dressed.
Upon the day of the feast he stood in the ante-chamber of the
presence near the chapel door with but two to serve him, which two
stood behind and were humble, the one a clerk, the other a treasury
man but a knight. Normandy had on the sword belt and the sheath, but
not the sword. For it is not lawful to carry arms in the presence of
the crown.
William the Bastard of Falaise, thus standing in the ante-chamber
of the presence by the chapel door, was taller than his servitors,
yet he looked short, so round and bull-like was his head, with its
close-cropped dark hair, and so broad his neck and shoulders. In that
close-cropped dark hair one could see already lines of grey like
steel, for the man was in his fortieth year.
The two guards that stood before the curtains of the arch moved
backwards. An old man, dressed in the long tunic of a civilian,
which was embroidered everywhere with thread of gold, pulled back the
cloth, and William, striding through, saw beyond, upon a chair that
was carved and gilt for a throne, Philip, the boy who was his lord
and his king, yet no older than one of his own sons. The boy’s face
was heavy and not courageous, but his eyes had in them already that
look of patience and of knowledge which had built up the royal line.
William, Duke of Normandy, designing to conquer England, desired
from his soul to have all France behind him, and secure peace while
he was abroad: therefore had he come to the court of this boy-king
of France, his relative, to offer him the shadow of suzerainty over
England while he should grasp the substance of power in London. But
the boy-king had been warned and was old enough to understand the
ruse.
William, the Duke of Normandy, knelt on the second step of the throne
and took the boy’s hands between his hands and kissed his finger
tips. Then he rose and spoke of his petition. England was his of
right, and he would seize it as of right with his companions; but
he would not hold it against his lord, he would hold it for his
lord. Such things already Philip had seen in the parchment, and
he, William, Lord of Normandy, had come to hear the answer from the
king’s mouth. The boy shook his gold-circled head very gently, but
did not open his lips. Said William the Bastard, Lord of Normandy,
“You are my lord and I am your man, but, a little way from here,
where there are men that are my men and a land over which, under your
allegiance, I am lord, my armies are ready, and from my treasury
I shall have hired others from the east and the west, and even
from Touraine, and there are strangers from the south that will
sail with me; and if God grants me this kingdom, I will not hold
it as king--God forbid that I should make myself equal to my lord.
Therefore the headship of this island (if God gives me victory) is
for you to take, King Philip, as a child may pick up a toy.”
Now when Duke William used these words “as a child,” King Philip
smiled with his lips drawn downwards, and nourished revenge in his
heart; for he knew very well what the great vassal meant, and how he
had cast a net to bring in the power of all France in aid of him, and
to have peace behind him when he sailed. He knew also, by wit of his
own and by councillors, that whoever sat in Westminster beyond the
sea could laugh at writs from Paris, and therefore, relaxing that
smile of his and looking, though not courageous, stern--almost as
though he were already a man grown--Philip refused again.
William, the Bastard of Falaise, Duke of Normandy, rose from his
knees and looked angrily about him, at the servitors of the Court
and at the guard, as he would look at equals, and even at the king
he looked as he would look at an equal, thinking, perhaps, that with
others to aid him he might dethrone that boy. But saying nothing
more, he bowed as a man should to his lord, and turned and strode out
again beyond the curtains; his clerk and his knight of the treasury,
that had stood there for witnesses, following him.
Then he got back into his own land, to Rouen upon the broad Seine,
where the woods are so deep for hunting all around; but he was for
hunting things that do not live in woods, and for a ride into a
farther place than the domains of the Caux country. And in those
woods for many a month men were felling timber and bringing the green
baulks in creaking wagons to the slips of the Channel shore, to
Caudebec, and to Quillebœuf, and to Honfleur, and to the river that
is below Caen--to all the places where men build ships upon the sea
marge of the Normans. And for three months or so he was summoning
by writ his men and their men’s men, and by letters with promise of
pay and of booty he was getting from off his western March the sad
Bretons, and from off his eastern March the pale Picards and the
Lowland men. Until at last he had in Dives mouth a very great fleet
of vessels large and small, the largest so large that fifty knights
with their horses and all their men could cross the sea thereon, and
the smallest boats of four fathoms long, not even decked, and stowed
to the bulwarks with casks and stores, and the garnered oats of that
year’s harvest, and wheat and little mills for grinding.