DOMESDAY BOOK 457
INDEX 503
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
SEAL OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR _Frontispiece_
From Rymer’s _Fœdera_ (published 1704).
JUMIÈGES ABBEY—FAÇADE 66
Reproduced by permission of Levy et ses
Fils, Paris.
JUMIÈGES ABBEY—INTERIOR 80
Reproduced by permission of Levy et ses
Fils, Paris.
THE SIEGE OF DINANT 140
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY
From _Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of
Antiquaries of London_ (published 1819).
SEAL OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR 148
From Rymer’s _Fœdera_ (published 1704).
HAROLD ENTHRONED 158
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY
From _Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of
Antiquaries of London_ (published 1819).
HAROLD’S OATH 162
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY
From _Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of
Antiquaries of London_ (published 1819).
THE BUILDING OF HASTINGS CASTLE 188
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY
From _Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of
Antiquaries of London_ (published 1819).
THE DEATH OF HAROLD 198
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY
From _Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of
Antiquaries of London_ (published 1819).
FOSSE DISASTER, BATTLE OF HASTINGS 204
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY
Reproduced from _Vetusta Monumenta of the
Society of Antiquaries of London_
(published 1819).
ST. JOHN’S CHAPEL, IN THE TOWER OF LONDON 228
CHARTER OF WILLIAM I. TO THE LONDONERS 230
IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE CORPORATION
Facsimile prepared by F. Madan, M. A.,
Reader in Palæography in the University
of Oxford.
THE BAILE HILL, YORK 270
THE SITE OF WILLIAM I.’S SECOND CASTLE
Reproduced from Traill’s _Social England_.
TOMB OF ROBERT COURTHOSE, THE ELDEST SON OF WILLIAM 350
THE CONQUEROR, DUKE OF NORMANDY, GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL
THE EFFIGY IS OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Reproduced from a photograph by Pitcher,
Gloucester, England.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 360
AS CONCEIVED BY A FRENCH PAINTER OF THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY
The original of this picture, now lost, was
painted by an artist when the tomb of the
Conqueror was opened in 1522. A copy
executed in 1708, is preserved in the
sacristy of St Etienne’s Church at Caen;
the present illustration is from a
photograph of that copy.
REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE CHARTER OF WILLIAM THE 382
CONQUEROR TO HYDE ABBEY
Reproduced from _Liber Vitæ of New Minster
and Hyde Abbey, Winchester_. Edited by W.
de Gray Birch.
GAMEL SON OF ORME’S SUNDIAL 388
From _A Short Account of Saint Gregory’s
Minster, Kirkdale_, by Rev. F. W. Powell,
Vicar.
WILLIAM’S WRIT TO COVENTRY 420
From _Facsimiles of Royal and Other
Charters in the British Museum_. Edited
by George F. Warner and Henry J. Ellis.
PLAN OF GREAT CANFIELD CASTLE, ESSEX 440
From _Victoria History of the Counties of
England_.
AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURES TO WINDSOR AGREEMENT 448
Reproduced from _Palæographical Society’s
Facsimiles of Manuscripts and
Inscriptions_.
A PORTION OF A PAGE OF DOMESDAY BOOK 458
THE BEGINNING OF THE BERKSHIRE SECTION
Facsimiles prepared by F. Madan, M.A.,
Reader in Palæography in the University
of Oxford.
A PORTION OF A PAGE OF DOMESDAY BOOK 466
THE BEGINNING OF THE BERKSHIRE SECTION
Facsimiles prepared by F. Madan, M.A.,
Reader in Palæography in the University
of Oxford.
COINS
[1]PENNY OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR 62
[2]DENIER OF GEOFFREY MARTEL 95
[2]DENIER OF HENRY I. OF FRANCE 125
[2]DENIER OF CONAN II. OF BRITTANY 142
[2]PENNY OF HAROLD HARDRADA 179
[1]PENNY OF HAROLD II. 210
[2]DENIER OF BALDWIN OF LILLE 266
[2]PENNY OF SWEGN ESTUTHSON 303
[2]DENIER OF ROBERT LE FRISON 343
[2]DENIER OF PHILIP I. OF FRANCE 375
[3]PENNY OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 406
[3]PENNY OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 456
[3]PENNY OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 501
GENEALOGICAL CHARTS FACING PAGE
502
TABLE A—THE DUCAL HOUSE OF NORMANDY
TABLE B—THE COUNTS OF BRITTANY
TABLE C—THE DESCENDANTS OF ARLETTE
TABLE D—THE COUNTS OF MAINE
TABLE E—THE COUNTS OF THE VEXIN
TABLE F—THE SUCCESSION IN 1066
TABLE G—THE COUNTS OF FLANDERS
TABLE H—THE EARLS OF NORTHUMBRIA
MAPS
MAP OF EASTERN NORMANDY AND THE BORDER COUNTIES 64
MAP OF YORKSHIRE IN 1066–1087 268
MAP OF WESTERN NORMANDY 360
MAP OF ENGLAND IN 1087 374
MAP OF EARLDOMS, MAY, 1068 412
MAP OF EARLDOMS, JANUARY, 1075 414
MAP OF EARLDOMS, SEPTEMBER, 1087 416
-----
Footnote 1:
From the Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum, Anglo-Saxon
Series.
Footnote 2:
From the _Traité de Numismatique du Moyen Age_, by Arthur Engel and
Raymond Serrure.
Footnote 3:
From the Handbook of the Coins of Great Britain and Ireland in British
Museum.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
INTRODUCTION
I
Since the current of barbarian immigration which overthrew the
civilisation of Rome in the West, probably no national movement of the
kind has more profoundly affected the general course of history than the
expansion of Scandinavia which fills the ninth and tenth centuries.
Alike in their constructive and destructive work, in the foundation of
new communities on conquered soil, as in the changes produced by
reaction in the states with which they came in contact, the Northmen
were calling into being the most characteristic features of the
political system of medieval Europe. Their raids, an ever-present danger
to those who dwelt near the shores of the narrow seas, wrecked the
incipient centralisation of the Carolingian Empire, and gave fresh
impetus to the forces which were already making for that organisation of
society which we describe as feudalism; and yet in other lands the
Northmen were to preserve their own archaic law and social custom longer
than any other people of Germanic stock. The Northmen were to bring a
new racial element into the life of Western Europe, but whether that
element should adapt itself to the conditions of its new environment, or
whether it should develop new forms of political association for itself,
was a question determined by the pre-existing facts of history and
geography.
For the geographical extent of Scandinavian enterprise is as remarkable
as its political influence. At the close of the third quarter of the
tenth century it seemed likely that the future destinies of northern
Europe would be controlled by a great confederation of Scandinavian
peoples. In the parent lands of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden three strong
kingdoms had been created by Harold Fair Hair, Gorm the Old, and Eric of
Upsala; the Orkneys and Shetlands formed a Norwegian earldom, and a
number of vigorous Norse principalities had been planted along the east
coast of Ireland. In the extreme north Scandinavian adventurers were
already settling the inhospitable shores of Greenland, and lawless
chieftains from Norway had created the strange republic of Iceland,
whose stormy life was to leave an imperishable memorial in the wonderful
literature of its sagas. Normandy was still the “pirates’ land” to the
ecclesiastical writers of France, and the designation was correct in so
far that the duchy still maintained frequent relations with the
Scandinavian homeland and had as yet received no more than a superficial
tincture of Latin Christianity. England, at the date we have chosen, was
enjoying a brief respite between two spasms of the northern peril, but
the wealthiest portion of the land was Scandinavian in the blood of its
inhabitants, and within twenty years of the close of the century the
whole country was to be united politically to the Scandinavian world.
The comparative failure of this great association of kindred peoples to
control the subsequent history of northern Europe was due in the main to
three causes. In the first place, over a great part of this vast area
the Scandinavian element was too weak in mere numbers permanently to
withstand the dead weight of the native population into which it had
intruded itself. It was only in lands such as Iceland, where an
autochthonous population did not exist, or where it was reduced to utter
subjugation at the outset, as in the Orkneys, that the Scandinavian
element permanently impressed its character upon the political life of
the community. And in connection with this there is certainly to be
noted a distinct decline in the energy of Scandinavian enterprise from
about the middle of the eleventh century onward. For fully a hundred
years after this time the Northern lands continued to send out sporadic
bodies of men who raided more peaceful countries after the manner of the
older Vikings, but Scandinavia produced no hero of more than local
importance between Harold Hardrada and Gustavus Vasa. The old spirit was
still alive in the North, as the stories of the kings of Norway in the
_Heimskringla_ show; but the exploits of Magnus Bareleg and Sigurd the
Jerusalem-farer are of far less significance in general history than the
exploits of Swegen Forkbeard and Olaf Tryggvasson, and trade and
exploration more and more diverted the energy which in older times would
have sought its vent in warlike adventure. And of equal importance with
either of the causes which have just been described must be reckoned the
attraction of Normandy within the political system of France. By this
process Normandy was finally detached from its parent states; it
participated ever more intimately in the national life of France, and
the greatest achievement of the Norman race was performed when, under
the leadership of William the Conqueror, it finally drew England from
its Scandinavian connections, and united it to the richer world of
western Europe. It was the loss of England which definitely compelled
Scandinavia to relapse into isolation and comparative political
insignificance.
But the Norman Conquest of England was a many-sided event, and its
influence on the political destiny of Scandinavia is not its most
important aspect. The events of 1066 derive their peculiar interest from
the fact that they supply a final answer to the great problem which
underlies the whole history of England in the eleventh century—the
problem whether England should spend the most critical period of the
Middle Ages in political association with Scandinavia or with France.
The mere fact that the question at issue can be stated in this simple
form is of itself a matter of much significance; for it implies that the
continuance of the independent life of England had already in 1000
become, if not an impossibility, at least a very remote contingency. To
explain why this was so will be the object of the following pages, for
it was the weakness of the Anglo-Saxon polity which permitted the
success of William of Normandy, as it gave occasion of conquest to Cnut
of Denmark before him, and the ill governance on which their triumph was
founded takes its main origin from events which happened a hundred years
before the elder of them was born.
At the beginning of the third quarter of the ninth century, England was
in a state of utter chaos under the terrible strain of the Danish wars.
Up to the present it has not been possible to distinguish with any
certainty between the various branches of the great Scandinavian race
which co-operated in the attack on England, nor is the question of great
importance for our immediate purpose. The same may be said of the
details of the war, the essential results of which were that the midland
kingdom of Mercia was overrun and divided in 874 into an English and a
Danish portion; that England, north of the Humber, became a Danish
kingdom in or about 875; and that Wessex, after having been brought to
the brink of ruin by that portion of the Northern host which had not
founded a permanent settlement in the north, was saved by its King
Alfred in a victory which he won over the invaders at Edington in
Wiltshire, in 878. As a result of this battle, and of some further
successes which he gained at a later date, Alfred was enabled to add to
his dominions that half of the old kingdom of Mercia which the Danes had
not already appropriated[4]; a district which included London and the
shires west of Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and
Derbyshire. For the first half of the tenth century, the main interest
of English history centres round the relations between the rulers of
Wessex and its Mercian dependency, and the people of the Danelaw.
As the final result of twenty years of incessant warfare, the Danes had
succeeded in establishing three independent states on English soil.
Guthrum, the leader with whom Alfred had fought at Edington, founded in
East Anglia and the eastern midlands a short-lived kingdom which had
been reconquered by Edward the Elder before his death in or about 924.
To the north of Guthrum’s kingdom came the singular association of the
Five Boroughs of Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester, and Stamford,
whose territory most probably comprised the shires to which the first
four of them have given name, together with Rutland and north-east
Northamptonshire. Apart from its anomalous government, of which nothing
is really known, this district is distinguished from Guthrum’s kingdom
by the fact that the Danish invaders settled there in great numbers,
founded many new villages, and left their impress upon the
administrative and fiscal arrangements of the country. The Five Boroughs
were occupied by Edward the Elder and conquered by his son Edmund, but
their association was remembered in common speech as late as the time of
the wars of Ethelred and Swegen, and the district, as surveyed in
_Domesday Book_, is distinguished very sharply from the shires to its
south and west.[5]
Beyond the Humber the Northmen had founded the kingdom of York, which
maintained its independent existence down to Athelstan’s time and which
was only connected with the south of England by the slackest of
political ties when William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey. In this
kingdom, whose history is very imperfectly known, but of which abundant
numismatic memorials remain, the Norwegian element appears to have
predominated over the Danish and its kings were closely connected with
the rulers of the Norse settlements in Ireland. But the peculiar
importance of this Northumbrian kingdom lies in the persistent
particularism which it continued to display long after it had been
nominally merged in the kingdom of the English. Its inhabitants were
barbarous beyond the ordinary savagery of the Anglo-Saxons, and bitterly
resented any attempt to make them conform to the low standard of order
which obtained elsewhere in the land. Among so anarchical a people, it
would be useless to look for any definite political ideas, and the
situation was complicated by the union of Scandinavian Yorkshire with
English Bernicia in one earldom, so that it is difficult to say how far
the separatist spirit of Northumbria was due to the racial differences
which distinguished it from the rest of the land, how far to surviving
memories of the old kingdom which had existed before the wars of the
ninth century, and how far to simple impatience of ordered rule by
whomsoever administered. But the existence of such a spirit is beyond
all doubt; it manifested itself in 957 when Northumbria joined with
Mercia in rejecting King Edwy of Wessex; it is strikingly illustrated in
the northern legend which represents the sons of Ethelred the Unready as
offering Northumbria to Olaf of Norway as the price of his assistance in
their struggle with Cnut; it came to the front in 1065, when the
northern men rebelled against their southern earl, Tostig Godwinsson; it
culminated in the resistance which they offered to William of Normandy,
and was finally suppressed in the harrying to which he subjected their
province in the winter of 1069. For a century and a half the men of
Northumbria had persisted in sullen antagonism to the political
supremacy of Wessex.
But the fact remained that within fifty years of Alfred’s death the
house of Wessex had succeeded in extending its sway, in name at least,
over all the Scandinavian settlers within the limits of England. The
“Rex Westsaxonum” had become the “Rex Anglorum,” and Edmund and Edgar
ruled over a kingdom which to all appearance was far more coherent than
the France of Louis d’Outremer and Hugh Capet. But the appearance was
very deceptive, and the failure of the kings of Wessex was so intimately
connected with the success of William the Conqueror that its causes
demand attention here.
In the first place, the assimilation of the Scandinavian settlers into
the body of the English nation should not hide from us the fact that a
new and disturbing element had in effect been intruded into the native
population. This amalgamation was very far from resulting in a
homogeneous compound. The creation of the “Danelaw” in its legal
sense—that is, a district whose inhabitants obeyed a new law perfectly
distinct from that of any native kingdom—was an event of the greatest
consequence. It imposed a tangible obstacle to the unification of the
country which was never overcome until the entire system of old English
law had become obsolete. The very fact that the geographical area of the
Danelaw did not correspond with that of any English kingdom or group of
kingdoms makes its legal individuality all the more remarkable. The
differences of customary practice which distinguished the east from the
west and south were a permanent witness to the success of the Danes in
England and they applied to just those matters which concerned most
deeply the ordinary life of the common people. A man of Warwickshire
would realise the fact that his limbs were valued at a higher or lower
rate than those of his neighbour of Leicestershire, when he would be
profoundly indifferent to the actions of the ruler of both counties in
the palace at Winchester.
More important for our purpose than these general legal peculiarities
were the manifold anomalies of the Old English land law. Were it not for
the existence of Domesday Book we should be in great part ignorant of
the main features of this system; as it is we need have no hesitation in
carrying back the tenurial customs which obtained in 1066 well beyond
the beginning of the century. So far as the evidence before us at
present goes, it suggests that for an indefinite period before the
Norman Conquest the social structure of the English people had remained
in a condition of unstable equilibrium; in a state intermediate between
the primitive organisation of Anglo-Saxon society and the feudalism,
though rudimentary, of contemporary France. However strong the tie of
kindred may have been in drawing men together into agrarian communities
in former days, by the eleventh century at latest its influence had been
replaced by seignorial pressure and the growth of a manorial economy. Of
itself this was a natural and healthy process, but in England, from a
variety of causes it had been arrested at an early stage. The
relationship between lord and man was the basis of the English social
order, but this relationship over a great part of the country was still
essentially a personal matter; its stability had not universally
acquired that tenurial guarantee which was the rule in the Frankish
kingdom. The ordinary free man of inferior rank was expected to have
over him a lord who would be responsible for his good behaviour, but the
evidence which proves this proves also that in numberless cases the
relationship was dissoluble at the will of the inferior party. In the
Domesday survey of the eastern counties, for example, no formula occurs
with more striking frequency than that which asserts that such and such
a free man “could depart with his land whither it pleased him”; a
formula implying clearly enough that the man in question could withdraw
himself and his land from the control of his temporary lord, and seek,
apparently at any time, another patron according to the dictate of his
own fancy. In such a system there is room for few only of the ideas
characteristic of continental feudalism; it is clear that the man in no
effective sense holds his land of his lord, nor is the former’s tenure
conditional upon the rendering of service to the latter. The tie between
lord and man was that of patronage rather than vassalage; and its
essential instability meant that the whole of the English social order
was correspondingly weak and unstable. The Old English state had
accepted the principle that a man must needs look for protection to
someone stronger than himself, but it had not advanced to the further
idea that, for the mere sake of social cohesion, the relationship thus
created must be made certain, permanent, and, so far as might be,
uniform throughout the whole land.
On the whole it is probable that this result was mainly due to the
peculiar settlement which the Danish question had received in the early
tenth century. Had the Danes conquered Wessex in Alfred’s time, so that
the whole of England had been parcelled out among four or five
independent Scandinavian states, the growth of seignorial control over
free men and their land might have been indefinitely postponed. Had
Alfred’s successors been able to effect the incorporation of the Danelaw
with the kingdom of Wessex, the incipient manorialism of the south might
have been extended to the east and a rough uniformity of custom in this
way secured, giving scope for the gradual development of feudalism
according to the continental model. But the actual course of history
decided that the native kingdom of Wessex should survive, assert its
superiority over the Scandinavian portion of the land, and yet be unable
to achieve the conformity of its alien subjects to its own social
organisation. Such at least is the conclusion suggested to us by the
evidence of Domesday Book. Broadly speaking, Wessex and its border
shires had presented in 1066 social phenomena which Norman lawyers were
able to co-ordinate with the prevailing conditions of their native land.
In Wessex each village would probably belong to a single lord, its land
would fall into the familiar divisions of demesne and “terra
villanorum,” its men would owe labour service to their master. But
beyond the Warwick Avon and the Watling Street, the Normans encountered
agrarian conditions which were evidently unfamiliar to them, and to
which they could not easily apply the descriptive formula which so
admirably suited the social arrangements of the south. They had no
previous knowledge of wide tracts of land whose inhabitants knew no lord
of lower rank than king, earl, or bishop; of villages which furnished a
meagre subsistence to five, eight, or ten manorial lords; of estates
whose owner could claim service from men whose dwellings were scattered
over half a county. In twenty years the Normans, by conscious
alterations, had done more to unify the social custom of England than
had been accomplished by the gradual processes of internal development
in the previous century; but it was the social division, underlying the
obvious political decentralisation of the country, which had sent down
the Old English state with a crash before the first attack of the
Normans themselves.
But social evils of this kind do their work beneath the surface of a
nation’s history, and it is the complete decentralisation of the Old
English commonwealth which first occurs to our minds when we wish to
explain the double conquest which the land sustained in the eleventh
century; a decentralisation expressed in the creation of the vast
earldoms which controlled the politics of England in the last years of
its independence. The growth of these earldoms is in many respects
obscure; to a limited extent they represent old kingdoms which had lost
their independence, but in the main they are fortuitous agglomerations
of territory, continually changing their shape as the intrigues of their
holders or the political sense of the king of Wessex might from time to
time determine. From the narrative of the Danish war presented by the
_Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, it seems certain that each county south of
Thames possessed an earl of its own in the ninth century; but this
arrangement appears to have been modified by Edward the Elder, and it
has been estimated that from the accession of Edward to the close of the
tenth century Wessex and English Mercia were divided into a group of
earldoms whose number never exceeded eight, a change which inevitably
magnified the importance of the individual earl. In the meantime,
Northumbria and the territory of the Five Boroughs were being ruled by
men of Scandinavian blood, who claimed the title of earl but are very
rarely found in attendance at the courts of the King of Wessex.[6] In
the wars of Ethelred II. and Edmund Ironside with Swegen and Cnut, the
issue of each campaign is decided by the attitude of such men as
Aelfric, ealdorman of Hampshire, or Eadric of Mercia, to whom it
belonged of right to lead the forces of their respected earldoms, and
who seem to have carried their troops from one side to the other without
being influenced in the smallest degree by any tie of allegiance which
would bind them permanently to either the English or the Danish king. To
Cnut himself is commonly attributed a reorganisation of the earldoms, in
which their number was temporarily reduced to four, and in which for the
first time Wessex as a whole was placed on an equality with the other
provincial governments. The simplicity of this arrangement was soon
distorted by the occasional dismemberment of the West Saxon and Mercian
earldoms, and by the creation of subordinate governments within their
limits; but throughout the reign of Edward the Confessor it is the earls
of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria who direct the policy of
the kingdom.
The privileges and powers inherent in the dignity of an earl were very
considerable. We have already referred to his military authority, but he
also seems to have enjoyed a judicial prerogative overriding the
competence of the local assemblies of the hundred. His wergild was
seemingly fixed at a higher rate than that of the ordinary noble, and
the fine paid to him for a breach of his peace was half the amount which
would be paid to the king, and double the amount paid to the thegn on
account of a similar offence.[7] More important from the standpoint of
politics was the fact that in every shire certain lands seem to have
been appurtenant to the comital office,[8] and these lands formed a
territorial nucleus around which an unscrupulous man like Godwine could
gather the vast estates of which _Domesday_ reveals him to have been in
possession. In practice, too, it was the earls who seem to have gained
more than any other men of rank by the growth of that system of
patronage which has been described in a preceding paragraph; the natural
influence of their position attracted to them the unattached free men of
their spheres of government, and they became possessed of a body of
personal retainers who might be expected to fight for them at any crisis
in their fortunes and who would not be unduly scrupulous as to the
causes of a quarrel in which they might be called upon to take part.
Fortified by such advantages, the earls were able at an early date to
make their dignities hereditary under all normal circumstances, and the
attempt of Ethelred to nominate an earl of his own choice to Mercia in
the person of Eadric Streona, and of Edward the Confessor to displace
the house of Godwine in Wessex in 1051, led to disaster in each case,
though the occasion of the respective disasters was somewhat different.
Just as the power of the great earls limited the executive freedom of
the monarchy, so in general matters of policy the king’s will was
circumscribed by the opinion of the body of his counsellors, his
Witanagemot. Now and then a strong king might perhaps enforce the
conformity of his witan to his personal wishes; but the majority of the
later Anglo-Saxon kings were not strong, and when, on rare occasions, we
obtain a glimpse into the deliberations of the king and the wise men, it
is the latter who decide the course of action which shall be pursued.[9]
That this was a serious evil cannot possibly be disputed. The political
supremacy of the Witanagemot bears no analogy to constitutional
government in the modern sense of the term: the witan were not
responsible to the nation; they were not, in fact, responsible to
anybody, for a king who tried to insist on their obedience to his will
might find himself, like Ethelred II., deserted by his leading nobles at
some critical moment. Also, if we estimate the merit of a course of
policy by its results, we shall not be disposed to rate the wisdom of
the wise men very highly. In 1066 England was found with an obsolete
army, a financial system out of all relation to the facts on which it
was nominally based, and a social order lacking the prerequisites of
stability and consistency; that the country had recently received a
comprehensive restatement of its ancient laws was due not to its wise
men, but to its Danish conqueror Cnut. The composition of the
Witanagemot—a haphazard collection of earls, bishops, royal officials,
and wealthy thegns—afforded no security that its leading spirits would
be men of integrity and intelligence; if it gave influence to men like
Dunstan and Earl Leofric of Mercia, men who were honestly anxious to
further the national welfare, it gave equal influence to unscrupulous
politicians like Eadric Streona and Godwine of Wessex. The results of
twenty-five years of government by the Witanagemot would supply a
justification, if one were needed, for the single-minded autocracy of
the Anglo-Norman kings.
The early history of the Witanagemot, like that of so many departments
of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, is beset by frequent difficulties; but
it seems certain that the period following the middle of the tenth
century witnessed a great extension of its actual influence. In part, no
doubt, this is due to the increasing power of its individual members, on
which we have already commented in the case of the earls, but we
certainly should not fail to take into account the personal character of
the kings of England during this time. The last members of the royal
house of Wessex are a feeble folk. Their physical weakness is
illustrated less by the rapidity with which king succeeded king in the
tenth century—for Edmund and Edward the Martyr perished by violence—than
by the ominous childlessness of members of the royal house. Of the seven
kings whose accession falls within the tenth century, four died without
offspring. The average fertility of the royal house is somewhat raised
by the enormous family of Ethelred the Unready; but fifty years after
his death his male line was solely represented by an old man and a boy,
neither of whom was destined to leave issue. Nor do the kings of this
period appear in a much more favourable light when judged by their
political achievements. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edmund make a
creditable group of sovereigns enough, though their success in the work
they had in hand, the incorporation of Scandinavian England into the
kingdom of Wessex, was, as we have seen, extremely limited. Edred, the
next king, crippled as he was by some hopeless disease, made a brave
attempt to assert the supremacy of Wessex over the midlands and north,
but Edwy his successor was a mere child, and under him the southern
kingdom once more becomes bounded by the Thames and Bristol Avon. The
reign of Edgar was undoubtedly regarded by the men of the next
generation as a season of good law and governance, and the king himself
is portrayed as a model prince by the monastic historians of the twelfth
century; but on the one hand the long misery of Ethelred’s time of
itself made men look back regretfully to Edgar’s twenty years of
comparative quiet, and also there can be no doubt that the king’s
association with St. Dunstan gave him a specious advantage in the eyes
of posterity.[10] Nothing in Edgar’s recorded actions entitles him to be
regarded as a ruler of exceptional ability. The short reign of Edward
the Martyr is fully occupied by the struggle between the monastic party
and its opponents, in which the young king cannot be said to play an
independent part at all, and the twenty years during which Ethelred II.
misconducted the affairs of England form a period which for sheer
wretchedness probably has no equal in the national history. Had Ethelred
been a ruler of some political capacity, his title of “the Unready,” in
so far as it implies an unwillingness on his part to submit to the
dictation of the Witanagemot, would be a most honourable mark of
distinction; but the series of inopportune acts[11] and futile
expedients which mark the exercise of his royal initiative were the
immediate causes of a national overthrow comparable only to the Norman
conquest itself. With Edmund Ironside we reach a man who has deservedly
won for himself a place in the accepted list of English heroes and we
may admit his claim to be reckoned a bright exception to the prevailing
decadence of the West Saxon house, while at the same time we realise
that the circumstances of his stormy career left him no opportunity of
showing how far he was capable of grappling with the social and
political evils which were the undoing of his country. And then, after
twenty-five years of Danish rule, the mysterious and strangely
unattractive figure of Edward the Confessor closes the regnal line of
his ancient dynasty. Of Edward we shall have to speak at more length in
the sequel, noting here only the fact that under his ineffective rule
all the centrifugal tendencies which we have considered received an
acceleration which flung the Old English state into fragments before the
first impact of the Norman chivalry.
It follows from all this that, according to whatever standard of
political value we make our judgment, the England of the tenth and
eleventh centuries will be found utterly lacking in all qualities which
make a state strong and keep it efficient. The racial differences which
existed within the kingdom were stereotyped in its laws. The principles
which underlay its social structure were inconsistent and incoherent. It
possessed no administrative system worthy of the name and the executive
action of its king was fettered by the independence of his counsellors
and rendered ineffective by the practical autonomy of the provincial
governments into which the land was divided. The ancient stock of its
kings had long ceased to produce rulers capable of rectifying the
prevailing disorganisation and was shortly to perish through the
physical sterility of its members. Nor were these political evils
counterbalanced by excellence in other fields of human activity. Great
movements were afoot in the rest of Europe. The Normans were
revolutionising the art of war. The Spanish kingdoms were trying their
young strength in the first battles of the great crusade which fills
their medieval history; in Italy the great conception of the church
purified, and independent of the feudal world, was slowly drawing
towards its realisation. England has nothing of the kind to show; her
isolation from the current of continental life was almost complete, and
the great Danish struggle of the ninth century had proved to be the last
work undertaken by independent England for the cause of European
civilisation. In Alfred, the protagonist of that struggle, the royal
house of Wessex had given birth to a national hero, but no one had
completed the task which he left unfulfilled.
II
On turning from the history of England between 950 and 1050 to that of
Normandy during the same period, one is conscious at once of passing
from decadence to growth; and this although the growth of the Norman
state was accompanied by an infinity of disorder and oppression, and the
decadence of England was relieved by occasional manifestations of the
older and more heroic spirit of the race. Nothing is more wonderful in
Norman history than the rapidity with which the pirates’ land became
transformed into a foremost member of the feudal world of France, and
the extraordinary rapidity of the process seems all the more remarkable
from the sparseness of our information with regard to it. The story of
the making of Normandy, as told by the Norman historians, is so infected
with myth that its barest outlines can scarcely now be recovered. We
can, however, see that during the ninth century the north and west
coasts of France had been subjected to an incessant Scandinavian attack
similar in character to the contemporary descents which the Northmen
were making upon England. It is also certain that the settlement of what
is now Normandy did not begin until thirty or forty years after the
conquest of the English Danelaw, and that for a considerable, if
indefinite, term of years new swarms of Northmen were continually
streaming up the valleys which debouch on the Channel seaboard. Of
Rollo, the traditional founder of the Norman state, nothing is
definitely known. The country from which he derives his origin is quite
uncertain. Norwegian sagamen claimed him for one of their own race, the
Normans considered him to be a Dane, and a plausible case has been made
out for referring him to Sweden.[12] His followers were no doubt
recruited from the whole of the Scandinavian north, but it is probable
that the great mass of the original settlers of Normandy were of Danish
origin, and therefore closely akin to the men who in the previous
century had found a home in the valleys of the Yorkshire Ouse and Trent.
As in the case of Guthrum in East Anglia the conquests of Rollo were
defined by a treaty made between the invading chief and the native
potentate of greatest consequence; and the agreement known in history as
the treaty of Claire sur Epte is the beginning of Norman history. Great
obscurity overhangs the terms of this settlement, and we cannot define
with any approach to certainty the extent of territory ceded by it to
the Northmen.[13] On the east it is probable that the boundary line ran
up the Epte, thence to the Bresle, and so down that stream to the port
of Eu; but the extension of the original Normandy towards the west is
very uncertain, and with regard to its southern frontier there was still
room in the eleventh century for border disputes in which William the
Conqueror became engaged at an early date. The succeeding history,
however, proves clearly enough that the Bessin, Cotentin, and Avranchin
formed no parts of Normandy as delimited at Claire sur Epte, and it was
in this last quarter, peopled by an influx of later immigrants, that the
Scandinavian element in the duchy presented the most obstinate
resistance to Romance influences.
The prince with whom Rollo had concluded this memorable treaty was
Charles III., king of the West Franks, and the reputed descendant of
Charlemagne. The importance of the settlement of Claire sur Epte lay in
the future, and in its immediate significance it was little more than an
episode in a struggle which had been carried on for nearly half a
century between the Carolingian sovereign and the powerful house of the
counts of Paris, of which the head at this time was Robert, the
grandfather of Hugh Capet. The conquests of Rollo had been made at the
expense of Count Robert, and Charles III. in his session of Normandy,
like Alfred in the treaty of Wedmore, was abandoning to an invading host
a district which had never been under his immediate rule. It was certain
that the counts of Paris would sooner or later attempt to recover the
valley of the lower Seine, and this fact produced an alliance between
the first two dukes of Normandy and their Carolingian overlords which
lasted for twenty years. The exact nature of the legal tie which united
the earliest dukes of Normandy to the king of France is a disputed
question, but we may well doubt whether Rollo had done more than commend
himself personally to Charles III., and it is not even certain that the
Viking leader had received baptism at the time when he performed the act
of homage. As a final question which still awaits settlement, we may
note that the date of the treaty of Claire sur Epte is itself uncertain,
but that 921 seems the year to which with most probability it may be
referred.
If this is so, the conclusion of this settlement must have been the last
event of importance in the reign of Charles III., for in 922 he was
overthrown by his enemy Robert of Paris, and spent the remaining eight
years of his life in prison. Robert thereupon assumed the title of king,
but was killed in 923; and the crown passed to Rudolph of Burgundy, who
held it until 936. On his death the royal title was offered to Hugh,
surnamed the Great, count of Paris, but he preferred to restore the
Carolingian line, rather than to draw upon himself the enemity of all
his fellow-nobles by accepting the precarious throne himself. Charles
III. had married Eadgifu, one of the many daughters of Edward the Elder
of Wessex, and Louis the Carolingian heir was residing at Athelstan’s
court when Hugh of Paris called on him to accept his inheritance. The
refusal of Hugh the Great to accept the crown did not materially improve
the relations existing between the Carolingian house and the Parisian
county, and Louis “from beyond the sea” found it expedient to maintain
the alliance which his father had founded with the Norman lords of
Rouen. But, long before the accession of Louis d’Outremer, Rollo the old
pirate had died, and William Longsword, his son, felt himself less
vitally dependent on the support of the king of the Franks. In the
confused politics of the period William was able to assert a freedom in
making and breaking treaties and in levying external war no less
complete than that which was enjoyed by the other princes of France. In
general he remained true to the Carolingian friendship; and at the close
of his reign Normandy and the French monarchy were jointly opposed to
the Robertian house, leagued with the counties of Vermandois and
Flanders. The latter county, in particular, was directly threatened by
the growth of a powerful state within striking distance of her southern
borders; and in 943 William Longsword was murdered by Arnulf of
Flanders, the grandson of Alfred of England.
We should naturally wish to know in what way the foundation of Normandy
was regarded by the contemporary rulers of England. It is generally
assumed, and the assumption is reasonable enough, that Athelstan feared
the assistance which the Normans might give to the men of the Danelaw,
and that he endeavoured to anticipate any movement on the part of the
former by forming a series of marriage alliances with powers capable of
forcing Normandy to remain on the defensive. It is probable that
Athelstan’s sister Eadhild married Hugh the Great,[14] the natural enemy
of William Longsword, and we know that Athelstan lent his support to
Alan Barbetorte, who at this time was struggling with indifferent
success to preserve Brittany from being overrun by Norman invaders. On
the other hand, it would be easy to exaggerate the solidarity of feeling
which existed between the Northmen in Normandy and in England; nor do
our authorities countenance the belief that the various continental
marriages of Athelstan’s sisters formed part of any consistent scheme of
policy. There is no evidence that direct political intercourse existed
at any time between Athelstan and William Longsword; although we know
that the Englishmen who were appointed by the king to negotiate for the
reception of Louis d’Outremer in France paid a visit to the court of
Rouen.
The murder of William Longsword was followed by the first of the two
minorities which occur in Norman history, for Richard the illegitimate
heir of the late duke was only a child of ten on his father’s death. The
opportunity was too good to be missed, and Louis d’Outremer succeeded
for a brief period in making himself master of Normandy, not improbably
asserting as a pretext for his intervention a claim to the guardianship
of the young duke. Whatever its legal foundation Louis’s action outraged
the political individuality of the duchy, and when Richard came to years
of discretion he abandoned the traditional Carolingian friendship and
attached himself to the Robertian house. He commended himself to Hugh
the Great, and thus began a friendship between the lords of Paris and
their Norman neighbours which continued for nearly a century and was not
the least among the causes which enabled the Robertian house in 987 to
crown its existing pre-eminence with the royal title. The reign of
Richard I. lasted for more than fifty years, and the history of Normandy
during this period is extremely obscure, but there can be no question
that it witnessed the gradual consolidation of the duchy, and its no
less gradual absorption into the political system of France.
The seventh year of the reign of Richard II. was marked by an event of
the first importance for the history of both England and Normandy—the
marriage of Ethelred II. and Emma the duke’s sister. England was at the
time in the very centre of the great Danish war which marks the close of
the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, and it is
distinctly possible that the match may have been prompted by a desire on
Ethelred’s part to close the Norman harbours to his enemies’ ships. But,
apart from all dubious attributions of political motive, the importance
of the marriage lies in the fact that Normandy remains thenceforward a
permanent factor in English politics. The marriage must have produced an
immediate immigration of Normans into England; so early as 1003 we find
a French reeve of Queen Emma in charge of the city of Exeter. The mere
union of the dynasties—the marriage of the representative of the ancient
and decadent royal house of Wessex to the great-granddaughter of the
pirate chief Rollo—was alone a sufficiently striking event. But by
chance it happened that the strain of Norman blood in the offspring of
the marriage came of itself to produce political results of the gravest
consequence. No one in 1002 could foresee that the new queen would bear
a son whose early life would be passed in exile in his mother’s land,
and who would return thence to his father’s inheritance saturated with
Norman ideas of the art of government; still less could anyone foresee
that in virtue of this marriage a Norman duke would one day claim the
throne of England by right of inheritance. But less striking results of
the new alliance would soon enough become apparent. The ubiquitous
Norman trader would become a more frequent visitor to the English ports,
and Normandy would at once become a friendly land to Englishmen crossing
the Channel for purposes of trade or pilgrimage. Nor should the marriage
be considered exclusively from the English standpoint. The reception of
a Norman princess as queen of England proved at least that the Norman
duke was no longer a barbarian intruder among the higher nobility of
France; he might not be a sovereign prince as yet, but he was certainly
a ruler of greater consequence beyond the borders of the French kingdom
than were any of his fellow-vassals of the French crown. It is true that
the alliance of 1002 marks no immediate change in the French relations
of the duke of Normandy; his energies were still confined to the petty
struggles which he, like his father and grandfather, carried on with
varying success against this neighbour or that. But events were soon to
prove how strong a state had really been created in Normandy by the
obscure dukes of the tenth century, and the marriage of Ethelred and
Emma pointed to the quarter in which the strength of Normandy would find
its field at last.
It must be owned that we can only describe the internal condition of
Normandy, as it existed at the beginning of the eleventh century, in
very general terms. Normandy, like the rest of the French kingdom, was
passing through a phase in which the legislative power of the sovereign
was in abeyance; and in default of written laws we can only rely upon
the incidental information afforded by legal documents or by the casual
expressions of later chroniclers.[15] But the main features of Norman
feudalism at this time are fairly certain, and sufficient to point a
contrast with the contemporary constitution of England in almost every
particular in which the details of the two systems are known to us.[15]
In the first place, vassalage had become localised in Normandy. The
relationship between lord and man would in most cases imply that the
latter held his land of the former. So far as we can tell, the course of
Norman feudalism started from a point of departure different from that
with which the English system takes its origin. The history of the terms
employed to designate dependent tenure seems to make this clear. At an
early date a great man’s vassal will hold of him a _precarium_; he will
be a tenant at will, his tenure will be revocable at his lord’s
instance. To the _precarium_ succeeds the _beneficium_; a term which
sufficiently expresses the fact that the tenant’s rights over his land
are derivable from his lord, although it does not, like the older word,
imply their temporary character. In the meantime, the hereditary
principle in regard to dependent tenure is continually securing a wider
extension, and the _feudum_, the fee, the term which ultimately
supplanted the _precarium_ and _beneficium_, denotes an estate which
will in the normal course of things descend to a tenant’s heir. Some
such succession of ideas can distinctly be traced in the Frankish
kingdom, and the Anglo-Saxon land books here and there contain words and
phrases which suggest that the English land law would have followed a
similar development, had it not been arrested by the general dislocation
of society occasioned by the wars of the ninth century. The wide estates
with which the newly converted kings of Wessex, the Hwicce and the
Middle Angles, endowed the churches founded in their dominions afforded
an excellent field for the growth of dependent tenure, which was not
neglected by thegn and free man, anxious to participate in the wealth of
the saints by virtue of discharging military obligations which monks and
clerks could not perform in person. But the Danish wars stripped the
eastern churches of their possessions and peopled the eastern counties
with settlers of approximately equal rank; and when in the century
before the Norman Conquest the land loan reproduces many of the features
of the continental _precarium_, it appears as an exotic institution
rather than as a normal development of previous tenurial custom. It
would be very easy to exaggerate the distinction which exists between
England and Normandy in this matter; the mass of our contemporary
information about Old English land tenure relates to ecclesiastical
estates; but with _Domesday Book_ before us we cannot doubt that the
distinction was very real and of deep importance in connection with the
other divergent features of the Anglo-Saxon social organisation.
Everything, then, seems to show that, for at least a hundred years
before 1086, dependent tenure and the hereditary descent of fiefs had
been recognised features of the land system of Normandy. We also know
that these principles had, long before the conquest of England, produced
their corollaries in the rights of wardship, marriage, and relief, which
a lord would enjoy upon occasion with reference to his vassals.[16]
Women were capable of inheriting land and Norman custom allowed at least
to the duke the privilege of choosing a husband for his female vassal.
The rights of assuming the guardianship of a minor’s land, and of
receiving a money payment upon the succession of a new heir, were
obvious developments of the originally precarious character of the fief,
and we shall see that King Henry of France exercised the former right
over Normandy itself upon the death of Duke Robert in 1035. There does
not seem to be any direct evidence for the existence of the relief as a
Norman custom before 1066, but its appearance in England immediately
after the Conquest is sufficient proof of its previous recognition by
the feudal law of Normandy. None of these customs, so far as we can
tell, had found a place in the social system of independent England.
Private jurisdiction was undoubtedly an essential feature of Norman
feudalism, though we may well doubt whether the principles on which it
was based had ever been defined by Norman lawyers. It is also clear that
the duke possessed upon occasion the power of overruling the judgment of
his barons, and that his exercise of this power was applauded by all who
were interested in the welfare of the humbler classes of society. The
military character of feudalism made it imperative that there should be
some power in the land capable of vindicating right by force, and the
stronger dukes of Normandy were not slow in the assertion of their
judicial supremacy. How far the ubiquitous manorial court of Norman
England represents an imitation of continental practice, and how far it
is referable to the “sake and soke” possessed by Anglo-Saxon thegns, is
a difficult question, and the explanation given by the legal writers of
the generation succeeding the Conquest must be reserved for a later
chapter.
It is, however, clear, that one custom which to modern ideas would be
ruinous to any social order distinguishes Norman life from that of
England in the eleventh century. Private war was a recognised custom in
Normandy. For obvious reasons this custom was fenced round with
stringent regulations; the duke’s license was necessary before a
campaign could be opened and its conduct was subject to his general
supervision. But private war is separated by no certain barrier from
anarchy, and under a weak duke or during a minority the barons of
Normandy would take the law into their own hands. Herein lay the real
cause of the disorders which prevailed during the minority of William
the Conqueror; and in the abeyance of state intervention the church
endeavoured with considerable success to confine the practice within
reasonable limits. The Truce of God, in the limitations which it
enforced upon the operations of war, made life more tolerable for
peasant and burgess, but it was at best an inefficient substitute for
the hand of a strong ruler. William the Conqueror made good peace in
Normandy, as well as in England, and we may well doubt whether even
private war, so long as its legal sanctions were respected, was not less
harmful to the well-being of a community than were the savage outbreaks
of internal strife which from time to time occurred under the helpless
government of Edward the Confessor.
The exact nature of the feudal tie which bound the duke of Normandy to
the king of France is a very difficult question.[17] It undoubtedly
comprised all those obligations which were implied in the performance of
the act of homage, but these would vary indefinitely in stringency
according to the status of the parties concerned. An oath of fealty and
service was certain to be kept only so long as the man to whom the oath
was sworn could compel its observance by the threat of confiscation.
When made between two parties who were for effective purposes equal in
power, there was no certainty that the oath would imply more than an
assertion of dependence on the part of the man who swore. On the other
hand, it would be an error to regard the homage which a duke of Normandy
paid to his overlord merely as a ceremonial form. Even in the early
feudal times the sense of personal honour would generally serve to
prevent a man from wantonly attacking his lord. William the Conqueror,
whenever possible, refrained from violating the fealty which he had
sworn to King Henry; and if put on his defence for his conduct at
Varaville, he would probably have pleaded that the necessity of
self-preservation outweighed all other considerations. But in earlier
times the maintenance of feudal relations between Normandy and France
was less dependent upon the personal loyalty of the reigning duke.
Occasionally, the king of France will confirm the grants of land with
which the duke of Normandy endowed some religious house; he may, as we
have seen, claim the right of wardship over a duchy during a minority.
Also, it should not be forgotten that in the case of the dukes between
Richard I. and Robert I. the traditional alliance between Normandy and
the Capetian dynasty disguised the practical autonomy of the former. So
long as the knights of Normandy were at the disposal of the king of
France for an attack upon Flanders or Blois, the king would not be
concerned to argue the question whether they were furnished to him in
obedience to his claim to feudal service, or merely in pursuance of the
territorial interests of his vassal.
Within the limits of his territory, the duke of the Normans enjoyed an
almost absolute sovereignty. The external limitation of his
authority—the suzerainty of the king of France—was at its strongest very
ineffectual, and within the duchy the barons were to an exceptional
degree subject to the ducal power. All the members of the Norman
baronage stood very much on a level in regard to the extent of their
fiefs, and the political influence which any individual baron might from
time to time exercise depended mainly on his personal favour with the
duke. Here and there among the mass of the Norman nobility we meet with
a family claiming a more ancient origin and a purer descent than that of
the ducal house, and disposed towards insurrection thereby; but such
cases are highly exceptional, and the names which are of most
significance in the history of William the Conqueror are those of men
who held official positions at his court, or were personally related to
his line. In Normandy there were no baronies of the first rank, and the
number of counties was small; also most of them, by the policy of dukes
Richard I. and II., had been granted on appanages to junior members of
the reigning family. One striking exception to the territorial
significance of the Norman baronage existed in the great fief of
Bellême, which lay on the border between Normandy and Maine, and was
regarded as dependent on the French crown.[18] The lords of Bellême in
early times are certainly found behaving as sovereign princes, but it
fortunately happened that the male line of the family became extinct
during William’s reign, and a standing obstacle to the centralisation of
the duchy was removed when Mabel, the heiress of this formidable house,
carried its vast possessions to her husband, the duke’s loyal friend,
Roger de Montgomery.
The ecclesiastical, like the lay, baronage of Normandy had no members
fitted by their territorial influence to lead an opposition to the ducal
power. The greater abbeys of Normandy, Fécamp, St. Wandrille, Jumièges,
had been founded or refounded by the dukes themselves, and the
restoration of the western bishoprics had mainly been the pious work of
Richard I. The re-establishment of the Norman episcopate after the
disorder of the settlement could never have been effected had it not
been for the countenance afforded to the movement by successive dukes,
and the connection between church and state in Normandy was peculiarly
intimate. The rights of patronage, elsewhere jealously guarded by the
king of the French, in Normandy belonged to the duke, and his power of
nominating the official leaders of the church enabled him to govern the
whole ecclesiastical policy of the land. Naturally, there occur from
time to time gross instances of nepotism, as when Odo, Duke William’s
brother, was thrust into the see of Bayeux at the age of ten; but in
general the dukes of Normandy were at pains to select worthy candidates
for bishoprics and abbeys, and in 1066 the spiritual quality of the
Norman episcopate was extraordinarily high. Over the independent
ecclesiastical jurisdiction which had arisen in the duchy under the
influence of the great Cluniac movement the duke kept a steady control;
when in England the Conqueror is found insisting that no ecclesiastical
law shall be introduced into the country without his sanction, he was
but asserting a principle which had governed his conduct in regard to
those matters in Normandy.
This intimate connection of church and state had, even before the
accession of William, produced a powerful indirect result upon the
ecclesiastical culture of Normandy. In Normandy, as in England, the
Danish wars of the previous century had been fatal to the monastic life
of the districts affected, and with monasticism perished such elements
of literary culture as the Carolingian age could show. It was nearly a
century after the treaty of Claire-sur-Epte before monasticism revived
in Normandy, and this revival was due almost entirely to the importation
of foreign monks into the duchy under the patronage of Richard II. and
his successors. In connection with the newly founded monasteries there
arose schools, some of which in a surprisingly short time rivalled the
older institutions of Chartres and Tours, and participated to the full
in the cosmopolitan culture which underlay the development of medieval
scholasticism. Of these schools, the most famous was undoubtedly that of
Bec, the rise of which well illustrates the character of the revival of
learning in Normandy.[19] The abbey of Bec itself was only a recent
institution, having been founded in 1034 by an unlettered knight, named
Herlwin, who was desirous of living a monastic life in association with
a few chosen companions. Nothing in any way distinguished Bec from half
a dozen other abbeys founded during the same decade, and the house owes
its unique distinction to the circumstance that in 1042 an able young
Italian jurist and grammarian, Lanfranc of Pavia, undertook the
direction of its school. As a logical and speculative theologian
Lanfranc is said to display small original ability, but no one was
better fitted than he by nature to superintend the early development of
an institution to which we may conveniently, if inaccurately, apply the
designation of a university. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the
reputation of the individual teacher was a matter of much greater
importance than were the traditions of the school which he taught, and
the school of Bec, under Lanfranc’s guidance, rapidly became the
education centre of eastern Normandy. Its fame was vastly increased by
the fact that its leader became involved in a theological controversy in
which the whole of the Catholic Church was interested. A famous
theologian, Berengar, a teacher in the school of Tours, had taken upon
himself the task of controverting the received opinion as to the nature
of the Eucharist, and Lanfranc stepped forward as the leading
controversialist on the conservative side. In the dialectical struggle
which followed, the honours of debate fell to Lanfranc; Berengar’s
opinions were condemned both by a provincial synod under Archbishop
Maurilius, of Rouen, and also by a general council held at Rome in 1056,
and Lanfranc, to the men of his time, appeared to be the foremost
theologian in Normandy. But wider duties than the charge of the school
of Bec rapidly devolved upon him as the friend and intimate counsellor
of the duke, and on his translation to the newly founded abbey of St.
Stephen’s, at Caen, his place was taken by a man of greater subtlety of
mind if no less administrative capacity. The career of Anselm of Aosta,
who succeeded Lanfranc in the priorate of Bec, raises issues which lie
beyond the life and reign of William the Conqueror, but reference should
certainly be made to the educational work which Anselm performed in the
days before his name was famous as the champion of Hildebrandine ideas
in the ecclesiastical polity of England. As a teacher, it is probable
that Anselm had no rival among the men of his time, and if his
educational efforts were solely directed at the production of learned
and zealous monks, this does not in the least detract from the greatness
of the work to which the prime of his life was devoted. It is under
Anselm, rather than under Lanfranc, that the influence of the school of
Bec reaches its height, and the gentle character and deep philosophical
insight of the monk from Aosta supply a pleasant contrast to the
practical and at times unscrupulous activity of his predecessor at Bec
and Canterbury.
III
It must be owned that we possess very little information as to the
causes which towards the close of the tenth century led to a revival of
the Scandinavian raids upon England. No consistent tradition upon this
matter was preserved in the north, and the first descent of the Vikings
upon England in 981 provokes no especial comment from the native
chroniclers who have recorded it. Now, as in the previous century, the
Danes had the command of the sea, and the settlements of the
ninth-century Vikings in the east of England offered to their
descendants an excellent base of operations in the heart of the realm.
For the first ten or twelve years after 980 the Danish and Norse raiders
contented themselves with plunder and tribute, and the definite conquest
of England was not achieved before 1013, when Swegen Forkbeard, king of
Denmark, expelled Ethelred from his kingdom and enjoyed a few months’
uncontested reign as the uncrowned king of the land. The English
reaction under Edmund Ironside is a brief although brilliant episode in
the war, but the superior numbers of the enemy told in the end, and from
1016 to 1042 England remained politically united to the Scandinavian
world.
The rule of Cnut, Swegen’s son, met with no opposition on the part of
his English subjects. But although Cnut ruled England with such
strictness and justice that on the eve of the Norman Conquest his reign
was still regarded as a model of good government, his rule was
nevertheless that of a Scandinavian king.[20] All the surviving sons of
Ethelred met with death or banishment at his hands, and his marriage
with Ethelred’s widow was much more probably the result of passion than
of policy. In the personnel of the local government of England his reign
witnessed a complete change. His earldoms were given either to the
companions of his early warfare, such as Eric of Northumbria[21] and his
son Hakon of Worcestershire, or to new men, such as Godwine of Wessex,
whom he had raised from insignificance and could depose at pleasure. So
far as we know only one native family of ancient rank received favour
from the foreign king. The earldom of Mercia, which had been left vacant
by the summary execution of Eadric Streona early in 1017, was given to
Leofwine, a representative of a noble midland family and the father of
the more famous Leofric, the wisest of the counsellors of Edward the
Confessor. Such Englishmen as received secular promotion at Cnut’s hand
received it for the most part in Scandinavia, where the honour which
they enjoyed had apparently become a cause of discontent to the Danes
before Cnut’s death. In general policy also Cnut’s attention was
directed towards the north rather than towards the Romance lands, with
which Ethelred’s marriage had brought England into contact. It is very
probable that Cnut dreamed of an empire which should include England and
the whole of Scandinavia, and it is certain that in 1028 he conquered
Norway and claimed the submission of the king of Sweden. In all this
Cnut was behaving as the heir of Harold Blue-tooth and Swegen Forkbeard,
rather than as the successor of Edgar and Ethelred. His rule brought
peace to England and Englishmen needed no more to induce them to submit
to it.
In the machinery of the English government, it does not appear that
Cnut’s reign marks any changes of importance. He governed England, as he
governed Norway, through viceroys; and if his earls bear more the
character of royal officials than did Ethelred’s ealdormen, this was due
rather to Cnut’s superior power than to any fundamental change in the
character of their positions. Under Edward the Confessor the provincial
governments became again as autonomous as ever. It was a matter of great
importance that Cnut ordered the compilation of a general code of the
law current at this time, a work which may be held to earn for him the
title of the greatest legislator of the eleventh century.[22] When the
battle of Hastings was fought, Cnut’s code was still the newest and most
explicit statement of Old English custom, and the additions which the
Conqueror made to it were few and for the most part of minor importance.
Cnut’s death was followed by the immediate disruption of his empire.
Norway passed to Swegen, his eldest son; and on his death after a brief
and troubled reign was rapidly conquered by Magnus, the son of Cnut’s
Norwegian rival Olaf the Holy. Denmark was taken by Harthacnut, a son of
Cnut and Emma of Normandy, and Harold, the third surviving brother,
secured England and held it for five years. His short reign was marked
by a dramatic event which is of importance as furnishing one of the
ostensible motives assigned by the Conqueror’s apologists for his
invasion of England. In 1036 the Etheling Alfred, son of Ethelred and
Emma, left his secure exile in Normandy and came to England. His object,
we are told, was to visit his mother, the lady Emma, and to take council
with her how he might best endeavour to gain the kingdom for himself. He
therefore landed with but few companions, and before he had seen his
mother he was met by Godwine, the Earl of Wessex, who received him
peaceably and entertained him with lavish hospitality at Guildford.
Thereupon Godwine’s name vanishes from the story, but the same night the
etheling and his party were surrounded by King Harold’s men and taken
prisoners; Alfred was so horribly blinded that he soon died from his
injuries, and his companions were mutilated, imprisoned, or sold as
slaves according to the king’s fancy. The whole affair was clearly the
result of foul treachery and it is impossible to doubt that the surprise
at Guildford was Godwine’s work.[23] The traitorous earl, indeed,
skilfully evaded the penalty of his crime, but when William of Normandy
was about to cross the sea, he was careful to appear as the avenger of
the wrongs which his cousin had suffered thirty years before.
At some time between the death of Cnut in 1035 and the death of Harold
I. in 1040, the latter’s brother Harthacnut, as king of Denmark, had
made a treaty with Magnus of Norway which served as the pretext for
twenty years of war between the two states, and as the foundation of the
Norwegian claims on England which were asserted by Harold Hardrada in
the campaign which ended at Stamfordbridge. The secession of Norway
under Magnus from the Danish connection was not likely to pass
uncontested, and the host of both nations prepared to try the matter in
a great battle at the Elf in the winter following Magnus’s succession.
On both sides, however, there was a strong party in favour of peace, and
a compromise was arranged by which the kings swore brotherhood and
promised that in the event of either dying without a son to succeed him
his dominions should pass to the survivor or his heir.[24] The
succession of Harthacnut to England in 1040 took place without protest
from Magnus, but on the former’s childless death in 1042 the treaty
should have come into operation, and Magnus was careful to claim the
crown of England from Edward the Confessor. Edward denied the Norwegian
king’s right, and he was so strongly supported by the leading men of the
land that Magnus deemed it best to let him reign in peace, but the claim
was undoubtedly present to the mind of Magnus’s heir, Harold Hardrada,
when he started on his memorable expedition in 1066,[25] and it accounts
for the alarm which noblemen of Scandinavian tendencies were able to
arouse in England during the earliest years of Edward’s rule.
The man who had played the leading part in the events which led to the
acceptance of Edward as king of England, was undoubtedly Earl Godwine;
and the chief interest of Edward’s reign lies in the varying fortunes of
the family of which Godwine was the founder. With notable skill the earl
used the influence which he possessed as King Edward’s protector to
further the territorial interests of his family, and within three years
of Edward’s accession Godwine and his sons were in possession of a belt
of earldoms which extended without a break along the south coast of
England, from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. By 1050 the whole of
England was divided between Godwine and his two eldest sons, Swegen and
Harold, Leofric of Mercia, Siward of Northumbria, and Ralf of Mantes, a
nephew of King Edward, who had received from his uncle the earldom of
Hereford, and was making of that distant shire an outpost of Norman
influence already before the middle of the century.
In 1051 the power of the house of Godwine was suddenly overthrown for a
time by an unexpected revolution. The immediate cause of the catastrophe
was very trivial, but there can be little doubt that it was really due
to the jealousy which the king felt at the inordinate power possessed by
the Earl of Wessex. Godwine in 1042 had played the part of a king-maker;
but, like other king-makers, he found that the sovereign whom he had
created began to resent his influence. In the summer of 1051 Count
Eustace of Boulogne, who had married King Edward’s sister, paid a visit
to his brother-in-law, and on his return prepared to cross the Channel
from Dover to the capital of his own country. Arrived at Dover, Eustace
demanded from the citizens entertainment for himself and his suite; a
demand which was seemingly quite in accordance with the custom by which
the inhabitants of a town in the eleventh century were liable to find
quarters for the retinue of a king, or for persons whom the king might
send down to them.[26] On the present occasion, however, the men of
Dover showed signs of disallowing the custom, and a fight ensued in the
streets of the town, in which each side lost some twenty men. Eustace
immediately returned to the king’s court, and demanded the punishment of
the citizens, which was granted to him, and its execution entrusted to
Godwine, within whose earldom Dover lay. The earl flatly refused to
carry out the king’s orders, whether through a magnanimous objection to
the justice of the sentence or through fear of incurring local
unpopularity by enforcing it. Thereupon, Edward for once asserted his
royal independence, and events proved that for the moment at least he
had reserves of strength upon which Godwine and his party cannot have
counted. The king summoned a meeting of the Witanagemot to be held at
Gloucester, at which, among other charges, Godwine was to be accused of
complicity in the death of Alfred the Etheling, fifteen years before.
Godwine refused to stand his trial, and proceeded to collect troops from
all the family earldoms, a move which was discovered by a similar levy
made on the king’s behalf by the earls of Hereford, Mercia, and
Northumbria. Civil war was averted by the moderation of the chiefs of
the king’s party, who arranged a postponement of the charges against
Godwine until the next Michaelmas, when a gemot was to be held in London
for their discussion. Godwine agreed to this; and, that he might not be
taken unawares, he moved from the west country to Southwark, where he
took up his abode supported by a great host drawn from his earldom. But
the delay was fatal to his cause: his troops lost heart and deserted,
and before long the king was able to decree summary banishment for the
earl and all the family. The earl fled to Flanders, Harold to the Ostmen
of Dublin,[27] and for a year Edward remained the undisputed master of
his own realm.
The royalist party which had achieved this memorable success was in the
main recruited from two sources. The hostility of Mercia and Northumbria
to the domination of a West Saxon earl brought over to the king’s side a
vast number of supporters who were doubtless no more loyal in reality to
the king than were Godwine and his men, but who welcomed so fair an
opportunity of striking a blow at the rule of the southern family. On
the other hand, it is clear that racial feeling entered into the
quarrel, and that the Norman settlers whom Edward had invited to take
land and lordship in England were the avowed enemies of Godwine and his
party. It is only natural to infer that Edward, in addition to the
predilection which he must have felt for men of the race among which he
had found shelter in the days of his exile, should wish to find in them
some counterpoise to the power of the Earl of Wessex and his associates.
It is certain that there was a powerful Norman element at court, and in
the country, which contributed very materially to the king’s success in
1051. The archbishopric of Canterbury and the sees of London and
Dorchester were held by Norman priests, and in Herefordshire, under the
jurisdiction of Earl Ralf, a flourishing Norman colony had been planted
on the Welsh border. Under this Norman influence the art of
castle-building was introduced into England, to the infinite disgust of
the country folk in the neighbourhood of the new fortresses, and the
Earl of Hereford tried very unsuccessfully to induce the local militia,
of which he was the official leader, to serve on horseback in their
campaigns against the Welsh. In another direction, the king’s
“chancery,” which was gradually becoming an organised medium for the
discharge of the king’s legal business, was largely staffed by Norman
clerks, and the service of the royal chapel was in part, at least,
conducted by priests from across the Channel. In the sphere of commerce
the connection between England and Normandy, which can be traced already
in the time of King Ethelred, was steadily becoming closer and more
permanent; before 1066 at least five of the ports of Sussex were in
Norman hands, and Norman merchants possessed a haven of their own in the
estuary of the Thames. We can never hope to form an exact estimate of
the extent of Norman influence in the last days of the Anglo-Saxon
state, but there can be no doubt either of its general significance or
of its importance in lessening the shock occasioned by the rapid
Normanisation of England after 1066.
For the present, however, the Normans in England were not strong enough
permanently to assume the direction of the commonwealth, and in 1052
Godwine and his sons made a triumphant return. The old earl had no
difficulty in recruiting a powerful force in Flanders, and Harold in
Danish Ireland found numbers of adventurers only too eager to follow the
fortunes of a leader who could promise excitement and booty. In the
middle of 1052, Harold, acting no doubt in concert with his father, set
sail from Ireland with nine ships, landed on the coast of Somerset at
Porlock, and there proceeded to slay and harry in true Viking fashion,
passing on round the Land’s End and so along the Channel. In the
meantime Godwine with his Flemish pirates had reached the Isle of Wight
and plundered it until the inhabitants were driven to pay whatever
ransom the earl might demand. Off the Isle of Wight Harold joined forces
with his father, and the earls sailed on past Pevensey and Hastings and
along the Kentish shore, drawing many volunteers from the friendly ports
at which they called, while their crews indulged in sporadic devastation
elsewhere. Without serious opposition the exiles entered the Thames, and
sailed up the river as far as London Bridge; Godwine disembarked at
Southwark and the feeling of the city declared itself unmistakably on
his side. The archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Dorchester made
a hurried escape from the town and rode for their lives to the Essex
coast, where they crossed to Normandy. The king, powerless to protect
his friends in the moment of the reaction, had no option but to restore
Godwine and his family to all their honours and offices, and he was
forced to declare outlaw “all Frenchmen who had raised disorder and
proclaimed bad law and had plotted evil against the land.” He was,
however, even allowed to retain about his person such Normans as
Godwine’s party chose to consider loyal to the king and his people; and
indeed it does not appear that the triumph of the nationalists in 1052
was followed by any considerable exodus of foreign settlers from the
country.
Godwine had thus secured an unequivocal victory, but he and his friends
proceeded to make a false move, the result of which was to throw the
whole influence of the church on to the side of the Norman invader in
1066. The flight of the archbishop of Canterbury had left the
metropolitan see at the mercy of Godwine’s party, and it was immediately
given to Stigand, bishop of Winchester, the leading ecclesiastical
partisan of the earl of Wessex. The act was a gross violation of law and
decency, for the exiled archbishop had been deposed by no clerical
tribunal, and Stigand did not improve his position by continuing to hold
the see of Winchester in plurality with that of Canterbury. The Curia
refused to recognise him as metropolitan, and in 1058 Stigand aggravated
his guilt by accepting the pallium, the badge of the archiepiscopal
rank, from an antipope, thereby in effect giving defiance to that
section of the church which represented its highest ideals, and was
destined to exercise most influence in the coming years. Before long
Stigand’s political associates perceived the mistake that had been made,
and for the next fifteen years the province of Canterbury was, in
matters of spiritual jurisdiction, left without a head. Between 1058 and
1066 Stigand never consecrated a bishop, and at ecclesiastical
ceremonies of especial importance his place was taken by the primate of
York. To all strict churchmen the nominal head of the church in England
was a schismatic, disowned by his own suffragans and banned by the Holy
See; and it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this
fact in preparing the public opinion of Europe to support the enterprise
of William of Normandy in 1066.
Godwine survived his restoration for little more than a year, and on his
death in 1053 his earldom of Wessex passed to Harold as his eldest
surviving son. For thirteen years it is probable that Harold was the
real head of the English government. Until the very close of this period
the internal history of England is almost barren of recorded events, and
its significance lies in the steady aggrandisement of the family of
which Harold was now the head. By the beginning of 1065 the wealthiest
and most warlike parts of the country were divided into earldoms held by
members of the house of Godwine. Wessex, Harold kept under his own rule,
with the addition of the shires of Gloucester and Hereford; Leofwine,
his youngest brother, governed a province comprising Essex, Hertford,
Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex; Gyrth, a third brother, held East
Anglia; to which was added the midland shire of Oxford.[28] Even
Northumbria had been secured by an earl of the family, for Tostig, the
only one of Godwine’s sons for whom King Edward seems to have felt
personal affection, had received the government of that lawless land
upon the death of its native earl, Siward, in 1055. Less obvious, but
equally suggestive of the general trend of Harold’s policy, is the
enormous amount of land of which he held direct possession at the
Confessor’s death. There was scarcely a shire in which a certain number
of estates were not held by the earl of Wessex in 1066; and _Domesday
Book_, in recording the fact of his ownership, will often also record
that it had been acquired by force or injustice. Harold, like his
father, was quite unscrupulous in the advancement of his interests, and
his greed for land and revenue is one of the few traits in his character
of which we can be certain. Of his brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine are very
imperfectly known to us, although in the Norman traditions of the
twelfth century the former is represented as the real hero of the
campaign of Hastings on the English side. But Tostig, the earl of
Northumbria, was a man of stronger character, and the circumstances of
his fall from power demand a brief account in this place.
Tostig’s appointment in 1055 had been an experiment and a rash one. From
the overthrow of the Northumbrian kingdom by Edred, down to the last
year of Harthacnut, a dynasty of native earls had presided over the
north. The succession in the southern half of the earldom, between Tees
and Humber, had been broken in the reign of Cnut, but the ancient family
continued to rule in Bernicia until in 1041 Ealdwulf II., the last earl
of the house, was murdered by Siward the Danish ruler of Yorkshire.
Siward thereupon reunited the two halves of the Northumbrian earldom,
gaining in local eyes some title to the government by his marriage with
Aelflaed, the niece of his victim Eadwulf; and for fourteen years his
ruthless severity kept his province in comparative quiet. In Tostig,
Siward’s successor, the Northumbrians for the first time were expected
to obey a south-country stranger, and hence there was no qualification
to the hatred which Tostig caused by his imitation of his predecessor’s
methods of government. As a personal favourite of the king, Tostig was
absent from his province for long spaces of time, and it is not easy to
understand why the Northumbrians submitted for ten years to the
spasmodic tyranny of a stranger. But at last, in 1064, Tostig entrapped
and murdered two leading thegns of the north, named Gamel the son of
Orm, and Ulf; and at Christmas time in the same year Gospatric, the last
male descendant of the ancient earls of Bernicia, was slain at the
king’s court in Tostig’s interest.[29] For nine months there was ominous
peace in Northumbria, and then, very unexpectedly, in October, 1065, a
great revolt burst out. Two hundred thegns marched to York, held a
meeting in which we may possibly recognise a Northumbrian _gemot_,
deposed Tostig, and offered the earldom to Morcar, brother of Edwin the
reigning earl of Mercia, and grandson of Leofric. These events were
followed by a general massacre of Tostig’s adherents in York, and then
the rebel army, with Morcar, the new earl, at its head, rolled
southwards to force a confirmation of its revolutionary acts from the
king.
At the moment of the outbreak Tostig was absent in Hampshire, hunting
with King Edward. Events had now passed quite beyond his control; Morcar
had been joined by his brother Earl Edwin with the fyrd of Mercia, and a
contingent of Welshmen, and the combined force had reached Northampton,
their line of advance being marked with wholesale ravages which can be
traced very clearly in the pages of the Northamptonshire _Domesday_.[30]
At Northampton the rebels were met by Harold bearing a message from the
king to the effect that, if they were to disperse, their charges against
Tostig should be heard and decided in lawful manner. They returned a
blank refusal to accept Tostig again as their earl, swept on down the
Cherwell Valley, and next appear in occupation of Oxford. In the
meantime Edward had called a council at Bretford near Salisbury, at
which there was a long and angry debate, and Harold was roundly accused
of stirring up the present rising for his own advantage. The earl
cleared himself of the charge with an oath, and the discussion turned to
the measures to be adopted to restore order. Edward himself was for
putting down the revolt by force; but his counsellors urged the
difficulty of conducting a campaign in winter, and the king was seized
with a sudden illness which left the immediate control of affairs in the
hands of Harold. Accordingly Harold paid a second visit to the rebels’
camp, this time at Oxford, and formally granted their demands. Tostig
was outlawed, Morcar was recognised as earl of Northumbria, and
Waltheof, the son of Siward, who might consider himself aggrieved by
this alienation of his father’s earldom, was portioned off with the
midland shires of Northampton, Huntington, Bedford, and Cambridge.
Tostig himself, to the king’s great regret, took ship for Flanders, and
spent the winter at St. Omer.
The above course of events is clear, and attested by good contemporary
authority, but there is evidently much beneath the surface which is not
explained to us. The revolt must clearly have been planned and organised
some time before its actual outbreak, but who was really responsible for
it? It would be natural enough to lay the blame on Edwin and Morcar, and
on any showing they can hardly be acquitted, but it is at least doubtful
whether the causes of the rising do not lie deeper. It is hard to avoid
suspicion that the men who accused Harold in the council at Bretford may
have had knowledge of the facts behind their accusation. It is quite
certain that Harold was forming plans for his own succession to the
throne upon Edward’s death—would those plans be furthered by the
substitution of Morcar for Tostig as earl of Northumbria? From this
point we are in the region of conjecture, but our authorities give us
certain hints which are significant. It was certain that the last wishes
of the king would be a most powerful factor in determining the choice of
his successor; Tostig was Edward’s favourite, Harold might well feel
anxious about the manner in which the old king would use his influence
when the end came. Then, too, there is evidence that Harold about this
time was trying to conciliate the great Mercian family; and the
suspicion is raised that Edwin’s acquiescence in Harold’s schemes in
1066 was not unconnected with Morcar’s elevation in 1065. Lastly,
Harold’s action in granting the demands of the rebels, the moment that
Edward’s illness had given him a free hand, is itself suggestive of some
collusion with the authors of the rising. If Harold’s policy had been
strictly honourable his conduct should hardly have given rise to doubts
like these; and if on the evidence before us we may hesitate to condemn
him outright, we may at least acknowledge that his contemporary accusers
deserved a respectful hearing.
More important and less conjectural than the nature of Harold’s conduct
is the picture given by these events of the conditions of England in
1065. All the symptoms of political disorganisation on which we have
already commented—the independence of the great earls, the importance of
the executive, the fatuity of the royal counsellors, the personal
weakness of the king—are illustrated by the narrative of Tostig’s
expulsion. For just another year the Old English state was to stand
trembling to its fall, and then the final test of political stability
would be applied and a conquering race would slowly rebuild the social
fabric which it had overthrown.
[Illustration: Penny of Edward the Confessor]
CHAPTER I
THE MINORITY OF DUKE WILLIAM AND ITS RESULTS
Among the famous stories which enliven the history of the early dukes of
Normandy there stands out prominently the tale of the romantic
circumstances which led to the birth of Duke William II., the greatest
of his line. The substantial truth of the legend has never been called
in question, and we may still read in safety how Robert, the young count
of the Hiesmois, the Son of Duke Richard I. and the fourth in descent
from Rollo, was riding towards his capital of Falaise when he saw
Arlette, the daughter of a tanner in the town, washing linen in a
stream, according to one account—dancing, according to another; how he
fell in love at first sight, and carried her off straightway to his
castle; and how the connection thus begun lasted unbroken until Robert’s
death seven or eight years later. The whole course of William’s early
history was determined by the fact of his illegitimacy, and the main
points of the story as we have it must already have been known to the
citizens of Alençon when they cried out “Hides for the tanner” as the
duke came up to their defences in the famous siege of 1049. In fact, the
tale itself is thoroughly in keeping with the sexual irregularity which
was common to the whole house of Rollo, with the single exception of the
great Conqueror himself, and we may admit that there is a certain
dramatic fitness in this unconventional origin of the man who more than
any other of his time could make very unpromising conditions the prelude
to brilliant results.[31] The exact date of William’s birth is not
certain; it is very probable that it fell between October and December,
1027, but in any case it cannot be placed later than 1028, a fact which
deserves notice, for even at the latter date Robert himself cannot
possibly have been older than eighteen and may very well have been at
least a year younger.
[Illustration:
EASTERN NORMANDY
and the border Counties]
The reign of Robert I., by some caprice of historical nomenclature
surnamed the Devil, was a brilliant period of Norman history. Succeeding
to the ducal throne on the sudden, perhaps suspiciously sudden, death of
his brother Richard III., in 1028, Robert, in the six years of his rule,
won for the duchy an unprecedented influence in the affairs of the
French kingdom. The first duty of a Norman duke, that of keeping his
greater vassals in order, Robert seems to have performed very
effectively; we may perhaps measure the strength of his hand by the
outburst of anarchy which followed the news of his death. And his
intervention in the general feudal politics of France, interesting
enough in itself, gains in importance when viewed with reference to the
history of his greater son. William the Conqueror inherited the
rudiments of a policy from his father; throughout much of his reign he
was following lines of action which had been suggested between 1028 and
1035.
This was so with reference to the greatest of all his achievements, the
conquest of England. There seems no reason to doubt that Robert had gone
through the form of marriage with Estrith, the sister of Cnut, and there
is a strong probability that he planned an invasion of England on behalf
of the banished sons of Ethelred. The marriage of Robert’s aunt, Emma,
first to Ethelred and then to Cnut,[32] began, as we have seen, that
unbroken connection between England and Normandy which culminated in the
Norman Conquest. Norman enterprise was already in Robert’s reign
extending beyond the borders of the French kingdom to Spain and Italy;
that it should also extend across the Channel would not be surprising,
for Normandy was connected with England by commercial as well as
dynastic ties. And William of Jumièges, writing within fifty years of
the event, has given a circumstantial account of Robert’s warlike
preparations. According to him the invasion of England was only
prevented by a storm, which threw the duke and his cousin Edward, who
was accompanying him, on to the coast of Jersey. Robert does not seem to
have repeated the attempt, and before it was made again England had
suffered a more subtle invasion of Norman ideas under the influence of
Edward the Confessor.
Nor was Norman intervention lacking at the time beyond the western
border of the duchy. Robert had inherited old claims to suzerainty over
Brittany, and he tried to make them a reality. For some time past
Normandy and Brittany had been drawing nearer to each other; Robert was
himself a Breton on his mother’s side, and if one aunt of his was queen
of England, another was the dowager countess of Brittany. Breton
politics were never quite independent of one or other of the great
powers of north France, Normandy, Anjou, or Blois, each of which could
put forward indeterminate feudal claims over the peninsula. Anjou, under
its restless, aggressive counts, was here as elsewhere a formidable
rival to Normandy, and in face of its competition Robert could not allow
his claims on Brittany to lapse. Hence, when Count Alan repudiated his
homage, a Norman invasion followed, the result of which was a fresh
recognition of Robert’s overlordship, and the establishment of still
closer relations between the two states.[33] Alan is found acting as one
of the guardians of William’s minority—in fact he died, probably from
poison, while besieging the revolted Norman castle of Montgomery in his
ward’s interest—and his successor Conan was never really friendly
towards Normandy. Yet, notwithstanding his hostility, Norman influence
steadily gained the upper hand in Brittany during William’s life. It is
significant that he drew more volunteers for his invasion of England
from Brittany than from any other district not under his immediate rule.
[Illustration: JUMIÈGES ABBEY—FAÇADE]
The relations of Robert with the French crown were still more important.
The ancient alliance between the dukes of Normandy and the Capetian
dynasty which William inherited, and which was to be his chief safeguard
during the first fifteen years of his reign, had been greatly
strengthened by the action taken by Robert in the internal affairs of
the Isle de France. One of the few threads of consistent policy which
run through the complicated history of this period is the persistent
mistrust of successive kings of France towards their formidable
neighbours, the counts of Blois. The possessions of the latter lay
astride the royal demesne in two great blocks, the county of Blois,
which bordered it on the west, and the county of Troyes or Champagne,
which lay along its eastern frontier. The whole territorial group far
exceeded the royal possessions in extent and resources, and its
geographical position gave its lords the strategical advantage as well.
Accordingly, the French kings were driven to seek countervailing support
among their greater vassals, and at this time they found it in the duchy
of Normandy. A similar alliance had been formed in the tenth century
against the Carolingians; the traditional friendship was readily adapted
to new conditions.
Its value was clearly proved by the events which followed the death of
King Robert the Pious. Henry, his eldest surviving son, had been
associated with him in the kingship and designated as his successor, but
Constance the queen dowager intrigued against the eldest brother in
favour of her younger son Robert. Odo II., the able and ambitious count
of Blois, took the side of the latter and drove Henry out of the royal
demesne. He fled to Normandy and was well received by Robert; there
exists a charter of the latter to the abbey of St. Wandrille which Henry
attests as a witness in company with his fellow-exiles, Edward,
afterwards king and confessor, and Edward’s unlucky brother the Etheling
Alfred.[34] Well supported with Norman auxiliaries Henry returned and
conquered the royal demesne piecemeal; and, in return for Robert’s help,
we are told that the king ceded to him the Vexin Français, the district
between the Epte and the Oise.[35]
The internal condition of Normandy at this period might perhaps compare
favourably with that of any of the greater fiefs of north France. A
succession of able dukes had, for the time being, reduced the Norman
baronage to something like order. Other countries also at this time
offered a fairer field for the exercise of superfluous activity; the
more unquiet spirits went off to seek their fortune in Spain or Italy.
But in Normandy, as elsewhere, everything depended on the head of the
state. All the familiar features of feudal anarchy, from the illicit
appropriation of justice and the right of levying taxes to simple
oppression and private war, were still ready to break out under a weak
ruler. And there existed an additional complication in the large extent
of territory which was in the hands of members of the ducal house. The
lax matrimonial relations of the early dukes had added a very dangerous
element to the Norman nobility in the representatives of illegitimate or
semi-legitimate lines of the reigning family. They are collectively
described by William of Jumièges as the “Ricardenses,” and he tells us
with truth that it was these oblique kinsmen of William who felt most
aggrieved at, and offered most opposition to, his accession. They were
especially formidable from the practice, which had been followed by the
early dukes, of assigning counties to younger brothers of the intended
heir. Duke Robert himself had before his accession held the county of
the Hiesmois. Of the illegitimate sons of Richard I., Robert, archbishop
of Rouen, the eldest, held in his lay capacity the county of Evreux; his
next brother, Malger, the county of Mortain; his youngest brother,
William, the county of Eu; while William, the youngest son of Richard
II., possessed the county of Arques. It is noteworthy that each of these
appanages was, at one period or another in the life of William, the
scene of a real or suspected revolt against him.
Such was the general condition of the Norman state when Robert, in the
winter of 1034, meditating a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, held a council
at Fécamp to decide who should be his successor in case of misadventure,
and brought with him in that capacity his seven-year-old son
William.[36] Notwithstanding the discreet reticence of the later writers
who describe the scene, we can see that the proposal was intensely
distasteful to the Norman baronage. To any law-abiding section of the
assembly it must have meant entrusting the welfare of the duchy to the
most doubtful of hazards, and it was a direct insult to the family pride
of the older Norman nobility. Had there existed at this time any member
of the ducal house who combined legitimacy of birth with reasonable
proximity in the scale of succession, Duke Robert would undoubtedly have
had the greatest difficulty in carrying his point. But among his many
kinsmen there was not one who did not labour under some serious
disqualification. Nicholas, the illegitimate son of Richard III., would
have been a possible claimant, but Duke Robert had taken the precaution
of compelling him, child as he was, to become a monk, and he was now
safely bestowed in the ducal monastery of Fécamp.[37] Guy of Brionne,
the son of Robert’s sister, was legitimate indeed, but was younger than
William, and would be counted a member of a foreign house; Malger and
William, Robert’s two surviving brothers, were both illegitimate, and
the former was a churchman. Members of the older line, descending from
Richard I., probably stood too far back from the line of succession to
admit of their appearance as serious competitors, and after all there
was a strong probability that the question would not become a matter of
immediate importance. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem were not infrequent
events at this time[38] and Robert’s age was considerably under thirty.
He had previously secured the assent of his overlord King Henry to his
proposed heir, and the end of the deliberations at Fécamp was the
recognition of William by the Normans as their future duke.
As it happened, Duke Robert’s pilgrimage turned out ill; he died on the
homeward journey, at Nicea, on the second of July, 1035, and the
government fell to William, or rather to the guardians whom his father
had provided for him before his departure. Of these the highest in rank
was Count Alan of Brittany, William’s cousin,[39] with whom were
associated Count Gilbert of Brionne, the ancestor of the mighty house of
Clare,[40] Osbern the seneschal of Normandy, and a certain Thorold or
Thurcytel de Neufmarché, the latter having personal charge of the young
duke. It was an ominous circumstance that each of these men came to a
violent end within five years of William’s accession. The house of
Montgomery alone accounted for two of them: Osbern the seneschal was cut
down in William’s bedroom by William, son of Roger de Montgomery; Count
Alan met his death, as we have seen, during the siege of Montgomery
Castle itself. The assassins of Thurcytel de Neufmarché are not recorded
by name, and a certain amount of confusion hangs over the end of Count
Gilbert of Brionne; but William of Jumièges, a good authority, states
that he fell a victim to murderers hired by Ralf de Wacy, the son of
Archbishop Robert of Rouen. It is at least certain that shortly after
this last event Ralf de Wacy was chosen by William himself, acting, as
is said, upon the advice of his chief men, as his guardian and the
commander of the Norman army.
More important than this list of crimes is the general question of the
relations which existed at this critical period between William and the
king of France. We have seen that Duke Robert had secured the king’s
consent to his nomination of William as the heir of Normandy; and we
have good reason for believing that William after his accession was, in
the feudal sense of the phrase, under the guardianship of his overlord.
Weak as the French monarchy seems to be at this time it had not, thus
early in the eleventh century, finally become compelled to recognise the
heritable character of its greater fiefs. Its chances of interfering
with credit would vary with each occasion. If a tenant in chief were to
die leaving a legitimate son of full age, the king in normal cases would
not try to change the order of inheritance; but a dispute between two
heirs, or the succession of a minor, would give him a fair field for the
exercise of his legal rights. Now William of Normandy was both
illegitimate and a minor and his inheritance was the greatest fief of
north France; by taking up the office of guardian towards him the king
would at once increase the prestige of the monarchy, and also strengthen
the ancient friendship which existed between Paris and Rouen. Nor are we
left without direct evidence on this point. William of Malmesbury, in
describing the arrangements made at Fécamp, tells us that Count Gilbert
of Brionne, the only one of William’s guardians whom he mentions by
name, was placed under the surveillance of king Henry[41]; and Henry of
Huntingdon incidentally remarks that in 1035 William was residing with
the king of France and that the revenues of Normandy were temporarily
annexed to the royal exchequer. In view of the statements of these
independent writers, combined with the antecedent probability of the
case, we may consider it probable that William, on his father’s death,
became the feudal ward of his suzerain,[42] and that very shortly after
his own accession he spent some time in attendance at the royal court.
It must be confessed that we know very little as to the events of the
next ten years of William’s life. They were critical years, for in them
William was growing up towards manhood and receiving the while a severe
initiation into the art of government. The political conditions of the
eleventh century did not make for quiet minorities; they left too much
to the strength and discretion of the individual ruler. Private war, for
instance, might be a tolerable evil when duly regulated and sanctioned
by a strong duke; under the rule of a child the custom merely supplied a
formal excuse for the prevailing anarchy. Later writers give various
incidental illustrations of the state of Normandy at this period. We
read, for instance, how Roger de Toeny, a man of most noble lineage, on
returning to Normandy from a crusade against the Moors in Spain, started
ravaging the land of his neighbours in sheer disgust at the accession of
a bastard to the duchy, and was killed in the war which he had
provoked.[43] But such stories only concern the history of William the
Conqueror in so far as they indicate the nature of the evils the
suppression of which was to be his first employment in the coming years.
To turn the fighting energy inherent in feudal life from its thousand
unauthorised channels, and to direct it towards a single aim controlled
and determined by himself, was to be the work which led to his greatest
achievements. In the incessant tumults of the first ten years of his
reign we see the aimless stirring of that national force which it is
William’s truest glory to have mastered and directed to his own ends.
We get one glimpse of William at this time in a charter[44] which must
have been granted before 1037, as it is signed by Archbishop Robert of
Rouen, who died in that year. The document is of interest as it shows us
the young duke surrounded by his court, perhaps at one of the great
church festivals of the year. Among the witnesses we find Counts Waleran
of Meulan, Enguerrand of Ponthieu, and Gilbert of Brionne; the
archbishop of Dol, as well as his brother metropolitan of Rouen; Osbern
the seneschal, and four abbots, including the head of the house of
Fécamp, in whose favour the charter in question was granted. The
presence of the count of Ponthieu and the archbishop of Dol is important
as showing that even at this stormy time the connection between Normandy
and its neighbours to east and west had not been wholly severed; and it
is interesting to see two of William’s unlucky guardians actually, in
attendance on their lord. It may also be noted that at least one other
charter[45] has survived, probably a little later in date, but granted
at any rate in or before 1042, in which among a number of rather obscure
names we find the signature of “Haduiardus Rex,” which strange
designation undoubtedly describes Edward of England, then nearing the
end of his long exile at the court of Normandy.
To this difficult period of William’s reign must apparently be assigned
a somewhat mysterious episode which is recorded by William of Jumièges
alone among our authorities. One of the strongest border fortresses of
Normandy was the castle of Tillières, which commanded the valley of the
Arve and was a standing menace to the county of Dreux. The latter was at
this time in the hands of the crown, but in the tenth century it had
been granted to Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy. He had ceded it
to Count Odo of Blois as the marriage portion of his daughter Mahaut,
but on her speedy death without issue Odo had refused to return it to
his father-in-law; and in the border warfare which followed, the duke
founded the castle of Tillières as a check upon his acquisitive
neighbour.[46] On Odo’s death in 1018 the county of Dreux passed to his
overlord the king of France, but Tillières continued to threaten this
latest addition to the royal demesne. We know very little as to what
went on in the valley of the Arve during the twenty years that followed
Odo’s death, but by the beginning of William’s reign it seems certain
that the Norman claims on Dreux itself had been allowed to lapse, and
the present dispute centres round Tillières alone. At some unspecified
period in William’s minority we find King Henry declaring that, if
William wished to retain his friendship, Tillières must be dismantled or
surrendered. The young duke himself and some of his barons thought the
continued support of the king of France more valuable than a border
fortress and were willing to surrender the castle; but its commander,
one Gilbert Crispin, continued to hold out against the king. Tillières
was thereupon besieged by a mixed force of Frenchmen and Normans, and
William, possibly appearing in person, ordered Gilbert Crispin to
capitulate. He obeyed with reluctance and the castle was at once burned
down, the king swearing not to rebuild it within four years, but within
the stipulated period it seems that the treaty was broken on the French
side. The king at first retired, but not long afterwards he recrossed
the border, passed across the Hiesmois, burned Argentan, and then
returning rebuilt the castle of Tillières in defiance of his oath, while
at the same time it would appear that the viscount of the Hiesmois, one
Thurstan surnamed “Goz,” was in revolt against William and had
garrisoned Falaise itself with French troops. Falaise was at once
invested, William again appearing on the scene to support Ralf de Wacy,
the commander of his army, and it seemed probable that the castle would
be taken by storm; but Thurstan Goz was allowed to come to terms with
the duke and was banished from Normandy, his son Richard continuing in
William’s service as viscount of Avranches. The family is of great
interest in English history, for Hugh the son of the latter Richard was
to become the first earl “palatine” of Chester. And so it may be well to
note in passing that the rebel Thurstan is described by William of
Jumièges as the son of Ansfrid “The Dane,” a designation which is of
interest both as proving the Scandinavian origin of the great house of
which he was the progenitor, and also as suggesting that a connection,
of which we have few certain traces, may have been maintained between
Normandy and its parent lands for upwards of a century after the treaty
of Claire-sur-Epte.
The above is the simplest account that we can give of these
transactions, which are not very important in themselves, but have been
considered to mark the rupture of the old friendship between the
Capetian dynasty and the house of Rollo.[47] But the whole subject is
obscure. The king’s action, in particular, is not readily explicable on
any theory, for there is good reason to believe that at this time he was
actually William’s feudal guardian and certainly a few years later he
appears as fully discharging the duties of that office on the field of
Val-es-dunes; so that it is not easy to see why on the present occasion
he should inflict gratuitous injury on his ward by sacking his towns and
burning his castles. The affair of Tillières would be quite intelligible
if it stood by itself: it was only natural that the king should take
advantage of his position to secure the destruction or surrender of a
fortress which threatened his own frontier, and the fact that William
himself appears as ordering the surrender would alone suggest that he
was acting under the influence of his overlord. But the raid on Argentan
is a more difficult matter. We do not know, for instance, whether there
was any connection between the revolt of Thurstan Goz and the king’s
invasion of the Hiesmois; the mere fact that the rebel commander of
Falaise took French knights into his pay, by no means proves that he was
acting in concert with the French king. The story as we have it suggests
that there may have been two parties in Normandy at this time, one
disposed to render obedience to the king of France as overlord, the
other maintaining the independence of the Norman baronage; a state of
affairs which might readily lead to the armed intervention of the king
of France, half in his own interest, half in that of his ward. But
considering the fact that we owe our knowledge of these events to one
chronicler only, and that he wrote when the rivalry between Normandy and
France had become permanent and keen, we may not improbably suspect that
he antedated the beginning of strife between these two great powers, and
read the events of William’s minority in the light of his later history.
The revolt of western Normandy which took place in the year 1047 marks
the close of this obscure and difficult period in William’s life; it is
in the crisis of this year that something of the personality of the
future Conqueror is revealed to us for the first time. With the battle
of Val-es-dunes William attained his true majority and became at last
the conscious master of his duchy, soon to win the leading place among
the greater vassals of the French crown. For ten years more, indeed, he
was to be confronted, at first by members of his own family, whose
ill-will became at times something more than passive disaffection, and
afterwards by his overlord made jealous by his increasing power, but the
final issue was never again in serious doubt after his barons had once
tried conclusions with him in pitched battle and had lost the game.
[Illustration: JUMIÈGES ABBEY—INTERIOR]
For all this, the revolt of 1047 came near putting a summary close to
William’s career and life. Normandy at this time was far from being a
homogeneous state; apart from the general tendency of feudalism towards
the isolation of individual barons, the greater divisions of the duchy
had as yet little real cohesion; and a line of cleavage which is
all-important in this revolt is marked by the river Dive, which
separates Rouen and its territory, where the ducal power might be
expected to be at its strongest, from the lands of the Bessin and
Cotentin, which were always predisposed to local independence. These
districts, as we have seen, formed no part of the territory ceded to
Rollo by the treaty of Claire-sur-Epte, and it is quite possible that
the course of events in the present year may have been affected by the
distinction between the Gallicised Northmen of the Rouennais and Evrècin
and the more primitive folk of the lands west of Dive. At any rate it
was from the latter quarter that the main strength of the rising was
drawn. The Bessin and Cotentin revolted under their respective
viscounts, Randolf de Brichessart and Neel de Saint Sauveur, the latter
being the most prominent leader in the whole affair; and with them were
associated one Hamo, nicknamed “Dentatus,” the lord of Thorigny and
Creuilly, and Grimbald the seigneur of Plessis. The nominal head of the
revolt was William’s cousin Guy, son of Reginald, count of the
Burgundian Palatinate by Adeliz, daughter of Duke Richard II. of
Normandy, a young man, who up to this time had been the constant
companion of William, and had received from him Brionne and Vernon, two
of the most important castles of eastern Normandy. Guy was one of the
few legitimate members of the ducal family, and he and his confederates
found a justification for their rising in the stain which rested upon
William’s birth. We are told that their ultimate object was to divide
the duchy among themselves, and we may suppose that Guy would have taken
Rouen and the surrounding country with the title of duke, leaving the
western lords in practical independence. The latter took an oath to
support his claims and to depose William, and they put their castles
into a state of defence.
When the revolt broke out William was in the heart of the enemies’
country at Valognes, a town which seems to have been his favourite
hunting seat in the west of Normandy. The opportunity was too good to be
missed, and a plot was laid for his capture which came within an ace of
success, and according to later tradition was only discovered, on the
point of its execution, by Gallet, William’s fool. The duke had gone to
bed when Gallet burst into his room and called on him to escape for his
life. Clad in such garments as came to hand William sprang on horseback,
and rode away through the dead of night eastwards towards his native and
loyal town of Falaise. He took the coast road, crossing the estuary of
the Vire at low water, and by day-break he had covered the forty miles
which separate Valognes from Rye. It so chanced that Hubert the lord of
Rye was standing between his castle mound and the neighbouring church as
the duke came riding by, and recognising his lord he asked the reason of
his haste. Upon learning of his danger Hubert called three of his sons
and bade them escort the duke to Falaise; but even in the capital of his
native province William made no delay, and hastened across the borders
of his duchy to ask help of his overlord and guardian, King Henry of
France.[48] The king and the duke met at Poissy, and a French army
prepared to enter Normandy under the leadership of the king in person,
while on his part William summoned the men of Rouen, Auge, Lisieux,
Evreux, and the Hiesmois, men, that is, from all Normandy east of the
Dive and from the territory belonging to Falaise, west of that river.
The Normans assembled in the latter district and concentrated on the
Meance near Argences; the French army drew together on the Laison
between Argences and Mezidon. King Henry heard mass and arranged his
troops at Valmeray, then crossed the Olne on to the plain of
Val-es-dunes and drew up his men on the bank of the river. In that
position he was joined by William, who had crossed at the ford of
Berangier, and the combined force prepared for battle, the Frenchmen
forming the left wing and the Normans the right.[49]