duke’s demesne and, it would seem, were prepared to invade the loyal
country across the Dive, for they had reached Val-es-dunes before the
king and the duke had arrived there. Like their opponents, they drew up
their army in two divisions, the men of the Cotentin forming the right
wing and those of the Bessin the left. The battle seems to have begun by
a charge of the Cotentin men on the French, but of the struggle which
followed we have only a confused and indefinite account; it appears to
have been a simple cavalry encounter, calling for no special tactical
skill in the leaders of either side. Even in most of the Norman accounts
of the battle William plays a part distinctly secondary to that of his
overlord, although the latter had the ill luck to be unhorsed twice
during the day, once by a knight of the Cotentin and once by the rebel
leader Hamo “Dentatus.” Before long the fight was going decisively in
favour of the loyal party. The rebel leaders seem to have mistrusted
each other’s good faith. In particular Ralf of Brichessart began to fear
treachery; he suspected that Neel de Saint Sauveur might have left the
field, while one of his own most distinguished vassals had been cut down
before his eyes, by the duke’s own hand as later Norman tradition said.
Accordingly, long before the fight was over he left the field, but the
western men were still held together by Neel, who made a determined
stand on the high ground by the church of St. Lawrence. At last he too
gave way, the flight became general, and it was at this point that the
rebel force suffered its heaviest losses, for the broken army tried to
make its way into the friendly land of the Bessin, and the river Olne
lay immediately to the west of the plateau of Val-es-dunes. Large
numbers of the rebels perished in the river and the rest escaped between
Alegmagne and Farlenay, while Guy himself, who had been wounded in the
battle, fled eastward to his castle of Brionne.
The reduction of this fortress must have been for William the most
formidable part of the whole campaign. Even in the middle of the
eleventh century the art of fortification was much more fully developed
than the art of attack, and at Brionne the site of the castle materially
aided the work of defence. The castle itself stood on an island in the
river Risle, which at that point was unfordable, and it was
distinguished from the wooden fortifications common at the time by the
fact that it contained a stone “hall,” which was evidently considered
the crowning feature of its defences.[50] Immediately, it would seem,
after the battle of Val-es-dunes King Henry retired to France, while
William hastened to the siege of Brionne. A direct attack on the castle
being impossible, William built counterworks on either bank of the Risle
and set to work to starve the garrison into surrender. By all accounts
the process took a long time,[51] but at last the failure of supplies
drove Guy to send and ask for terms with William. These were
sufficiently lenient; Guy was required to surrender Brionne and Vernon,
but was allowed to live at William’s court if he pleased. No very
drastic measures were taken with regard to the rebels of lower rank, but
William, realising with true instinct where his real danger had lain,
dismantled the castles which had been fortified against him; and with
the disappearance of the castles the fear[52] of civil war vanished from
Normandy for a while. The capital punishment of rebellious vassals was
not in accordance with the feudal custom of the time.[53] The legal
doctrine of sovereignty, which made the levying of war against the head
of the state the most heinous of all crimes, was the creation of the
revived study of Roman law in the next century; and a mere revolt, if
unaggravated by any special act of treason, could still be atoned for by
the imprisonment of the leaders and the confiscation of their lands. To
this we must add that William as yet was no king, the head of no feudal
hierarchy; the distance that separated him from a viscount of Coutances
was far less than the distance that came to separate a duke of Somerset
from Edward IV. The one man who was treated with severity on the present
occasion was Grimbald of Plessis, on whom was laid the especial guilt of
the attempt on William’s life at Valognes. He was sent into perpetual
imprisonment at Rouen, where he shortly died, directing that he should
be buried in his fetters as a traitor to his lord.[54] Guy of Burgundy
seems to have become completely discredited by his conduct in the war,
life in Normandy became unbearable to him, and of his own free will he
retired to Burgundy, and vanishes from Norman history.
The war was over, and William’s future in Normandy was secured, but the
revolt had indirect results which extended far beyond the immediate
sequence of events. It was William’s duty and interest to return the
service which King Henry had just done to him, and it was this which
first brought him into hostile relations with the rising power on the
lower Loire, the county of Anjou. The history of Anjou is in great part
the record of a continuous process of territorial expansion, which, even
by the beginning of the eleventh century had raised the petty lordship
of Angers to the position of a feudal power of the first rank. Angers
itself, situated as it was in the centre of the original Anjou, was an
excellent capital for a line of aggressive feudal princes, who were
enabled to strike at will at Brittany, Maine, Touraine, or Saintonge,
and made the most of their strategical advantage. With Normandy the
counts of Anjou had not as yet come into conflict; the county of Maine
had up to the present separated the two states, and the collision might
have been indefinitely postponed had not the events of 1047 compelled
William of Normandy to bear his part in a quarrel which shortly
afterwards broke out between the king of France and Count Geoffrey II.
of Anjou.
The first five years of William’s minority had coincided, in the history
of Anjou, with the close of the long reign of Count Fulk Nerra, who for
more than fifty years had been extending the borders of his county with
unceasing energy and an entire absence of moral scruple, and has justly
been described as the founder of the Angevin state. His son and
successor Geoffrey, commonly known in history, as to his contemporaries,
under the significant nickname of Martel, continued his father’s work of
territorial aggrandisement. He had three distinct objects in view: to
round off his hereditary possessions by getting possession of Touraine,
and to extend his territory to the north and south of the Loire at the
expense of the counts of Maine and Poitou respectively. His methods, as
described by Norman historians, were elementary; his favourite plan was
to seize the person of his enemy and allow him to ransom himself by the
cession of the desired territory. This simple device proved effective
with the counts of Poitou and Blois; from the former, even before the
death of Fulk Nerra, Geoffrey had extorted the cession of Saintonge, and
from the latter, after a great victory at Montlouis in 1044, he gained
full possession of the county of Touraine. The conquest of Touraine was
undertaken with the full consent of the king of France; the counts of
Blois, as we have seen, were ill neighbours to the royal demesne, and
King Henry and his successors were always ready to ally themselves with
any power capable of making a diversion in their favour. On the other
hand their policy was not, and could not be, consistent in this respect;
the rudimentary balance of power, which was all that they could hope to
attain at this time, was always liable to be overthrown by the very
means which they took to preserve it; a count of Anjou in possession of
Saintonge and Touraine could be a more dangerous rival to the monarchy
than the weakened count of Blois. Accordingly, less than four years
after the battle of Montlouis, we find King Henry in arms against
Geoffrey Martel, and William of Normandy attracted by gratitude and
feudal duty into the conflict.[55]
When William, archdeacon of Lisieux, the Conqueror’s first biographer,
was living, an exile as he styles himself, in Poitou shortly after this
time, the prowess of the young duke in this campaign was a matter of
current conversation.[56] The Frenchmen, we are told, were brought to
realise unwillingly that the army led by William from Normandy was
greater by far than the whole force supplied by all the other potentates
who took part in the war. We are also told that King Henry had the
greatest regard for his protégé, took his advice on all military
matters, and remonstrated with him affectionately on his too great
daring in the field. William seems in his early days to have possessed a
full share of that delight in battle which is perhaps the main motive
underlying the later romances of chivalry, and his reputation rose
rapidly and extended far. Geoffrey Martel himself said that there could
nowhere be found so good a knight as the duke of Normandy. The princes
of Gascony and Auvergne and even the kings of Spain sent him presents of
horses and tried to win his favour.[57] Also it must have been about
this time that William made overtures to Baldwin, count of Flanders, for
the hand of his daughter, while in 1051 we know that he made a journey,
fraught with memorable consequences, to the court of Edward the
Confessor. In fact, with the subjugation of his barons and his first
Angevin war William sprang at a bound into fame; the political stage of
France lacked an actor of the first order, and William in the flush of
his early manhood was an effective contrast to the subtle and dangerous
count of Anjou.
At some undetermined point in the war an opportunity presented itself
for Geoffrey Martel to gain a foothold in Norman territory. On the
border between Normandy and Maine stand the towns of Domfront and
Alençon, each commanding a river valley and a corresponding passage from
the south into Normandy. Domfront formed part of the great border fief
of Bellême, and at this time it was included in the county of Maine,
over which, as we shall see later, Geoffrey Martel was exercising rights
of suzerainty. Alençon was wholly Norman, but its inhabitants found
William’s strict justice unbearable, and being thus predisposed for
revolt they admitted a strong Angevin garrison sent by Geoffrey Martel.
William decided to retaliate by capturing Domfront, leaving Alençon to
be retaken afterwards.[58] The plan was reasonable, but it nearly led to
William’s destruction, for a traitor in the Norman army gave information
as to his movements to the men of Domfront, and it was only through his
personal prowess that William escaped an ambush skilfully laid to
intercept him as he was reconnoitring near the city. The siege which
followed was no light matter. It was winter, Geoffrey had thrown a body
of picked men into the castle, and, unlike Brionne, Domfront was a hill
fortress, accessible at the time only by two steep and narrow paths. It
would thus be difficult to carry the place by sudden assault; so
William, as formerly at Brionne and later at Arques, established
counterworks and waited for the result of a blockade, harassing the
garrison meanwhile by incessant attacks on their walls. The
counterworks, we are told, consisted of four “castles,” presumably
arranged so as to cover the base of the hill on which Domfront stands,
and William contented himself for the present with securing his own
supplies and preventing any message being carried from the garrison to
the count of Anjou, in the meantime making use of the opportunities for
sport which the neighbouring country offered. At last the men of Domfort
contrived to get a messenger through the Norman lines and Geoffrey
advanced to the relief of his allies with a large army. What followed
may be told in the words of William of Poitiers:
“When William knew this he hastened against him [Geoffrey], entrusting
the maintenance of the siege to approved knights, and sent forward as
scouts Roger de Montgomery and William fitz Osbern, both young men and
eager, who learned the insolent intention of the enemy from his own
words. For Geoffrey made known by them that he would beat up William’s
guards before Domfront at dawn the next day, and signified also what
manner of horse he would ride in the battle and what should be the
fashion of his shield and clothing. But they replied that he need
trouble himself no further with the journey which he designed, for he
whom he sought would come to him with speed, and then in their turn
they described the horse of their lord, his clothing and arms. These
tidings increased not a little the zeal of the Normans, but the duke
himself, the most eager of all, incited them yet further. Perchance
this excellent youth wished to destroy a tyrant, for the senate of
Rome and Athens held such an act to be the fairest of all noble deeds.
But Geoffrey, smitten with sudden terror, before he had so much as
seen the opposing host sought safety in flight with his whole army,
and lo! the path lay open whereby the Norman duke might spoil the
wealth of his enemy and blot out his rival’s name with everlasting
ignominy.”[59]
It is painful to pass from this rhapsody to what is perhaps the grimmest
scene in William’s life. The retreat of Geoffrey, to whatever cause it
is to be assigned, exposed Alençon to William’s vengeance. Leaving a
sufficient force before Domfront to maintain the siege, in a single
night’s march he crossed the water-parting of the Varenne and the
Sarthe, and approached Alençon as dawn was breaking. Facing him was the
fortified bridge over the Sarthe, behind it lay the town, and above the
town stood the castle, all fully defended. On the bridge certain of the
citizens had hung out skins, and as William drew near they beat them,
shouting “Hides for the tanner.”[60] With a mighty oath the young duke
swore that he would prune those men as it were with a pollarding knife,
and within a few hours he had executed his threat. The bridge was
stormed and the town taken, William unroofing the houses which lay
outside the wall and using the timber as fuel to burn the gates, but the
castle still held out. Thirty-two of the citizens were then brought
before the duke; their hands and feet were struck off and flung
straightway over the wall of the castle among its defenders.[61] With
the hasty submission of the castle which followed William was free to
give his whole attention to the reduction of Domfront, and on his return
he found the garrison already demoralised by the news of what had
happened at Alençon, and by the ineffective departure of Geoffrey
Martel. They made an honourable surrender and Domfront became a Norman
possession,[62] the first point gained in the struggle which was not to
end until a count of Anjou united the thrones of Normandy, Maine, and
England.
[Illustration: Denier of Geoffrey Martel]
-----
Footnote 4:
The boundary of the Danelaw in its full extent is proved by certain
twelfth-century lists of shires which divide England into
“Westsexenelage,” “Mirchenelage,” and “Danelage.” With regard to
earlier times, the territory of the Five Boroughs is delimited by the
fiscal peculiarities described below (Chapter XII.), and the kingdom
of Northumbria substantially corresponds with Yorkshire as surveyed in
_Domesday Book_, but it is very uncertain how far Guthrum’s kingdom
extended westward after his final peace with Alfred. London was
annexed to Wessex, but the boundary does not seem to have coincided in
any way with the later county divisions.
Footnote 5:
See below, Chapter XII.
Footnote 6:
Chadwick, _Studies in Anglo-Saxon Institutions_, chapter v.
Footnote 7:
Chadwick, _op. cit._
Footnote 8:
Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, 167.
Footnote 9:
See the account of the council at Bretford, below, page 61.
Footnote 10:
See Plummer, _Life and Times of Alfred the Great_, 67.
Footnote 11:
“Unready” here represents the A. S. _unrædig_—“devoid of counsel”—and
is applied to Ethelred because of his independence of the advice of
the witan.
Footnote 12:
_E. H. R._, vii., 209.
Footnote 13:
See Eckel, _Charles le Simple_.
Footnote 14:
This identification cannot be considered certain. See Flodoard, ed. P.
Lauer.
Footnote 15:
The main features of Norman society in the eleventh century are
described in outline by Pollock and Maitland, _History of English
Law_, i., chapter iii., on which the following sketch is founded.
Footnote 16:
The scanty evidence which exists on this matter is summarised by
Pollock and Maitland, _H. E. L._, chapter iii., and by Haskins, _E. H.
R._, Oct., 1907.
Footnote 17:
See on this matter F. Lot, _Fidèles ou Vassaux_.
Footnote 18:
See _Histoire Général de France, Les Premiers Capetiens_, p. 90; also
Sœhnée, _Catalogue des Actes d’Henri I^{er} No. 38._
Footnote 19:
See Bohmer’s _Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie_, 20.
Footnote 20:
The fullest account of Cnut’s reign is given by Freeman. _Norman
Conquest_ i., chapter vi. Freeman was disposed to underrate the value
of Scandinavian evidence, and hence considered Cnut’s reign almost
exclusively from the English standpoint.
Footnote 21:
See the lives of Earls Eric and Eglaf in the notes to the _Crawford
Charters_, No. xii.
Footnote 22:
P. and M., i., 20.
Footnote 23:
The most recent discussion in detail of this episode is that of
Plummer, _Two Saxon Chronicles_, ii. Freeman’s attempt to clear
Godwine of complicity was marked by a very arbitrary treatment of the
contemporary authorities.
Footnote 24:
_Heimskringla_, trans. Morris and Magnusson, vol. iii., p. 10.
Footnote 25:
_Op. cit._, p. 181.
Footnote 26:
This is the duty of “hospitium,” exemption from which was frequently
granted in Anglo-Norman charters.
Footnote 27:
Swegen, Godwine’s eldest son, went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and
died on his way back.
Footnote 28:
See the map of the earldoms in 1066 given by Freeman, _Norman
Conquest_, ii.
Footnote 29:
In the next generation there was a tradition that Gospatric had been
murdered by Queen Edith on her brother’s behalf, Florence of
Worcester, 1065.
Footnote 30:
_Victoria History of Northamptonshire_, i., 262–3.
Footnote 31:
In addition to the future Conqueror one other child was born to Robert
and Arlette—a daughter named Adeliz, who married Count Enguerrand of
Ponthieu; and after Robert’s death Arlette herself became the lawful
wife of a Norman knight named Herlwin of Conteville, whose two sons,
Odo, bishop of Bayeux, and Robert, count of Mortain, play a
considerable part in the succeeding history.
Footnote 32:
Ralf Glaber, iv., 6.
Footnote 33:
_De la Borderie_, _Histoire de Bretagne_, iii., 8–12.
Footnote 34:
Round, _Calendar of Documents Preserved in France_, 526.
Footnote 35:
This grant rests solely on the authority of Ordericus Vitalis, but it
is accepted by Flach, _Les origines de l’ancienne France_, 528–530.
Footnote 36:
The meeting place of this council is only recorded by William of
Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum_, ii., 285.
Footnote 37:
Ordericus Vitalis, iii., 431.
Footnote 38:
Among contemporaries who made the journey may be mentioned Count Fulk
Nerra of Anjou and Archbishop Ealdred of York.
Footnote 39:
Ordericus, ii., 369. Tutorem sui, Ducis.
Footnote 40:
_Gesta Regum_, ii., 285.
Footnote 41:
_Gesta Regum_, ii., 285. “Normannia fiscus regalis erat.” Henry of
Huntingdon, 189.
Footnote 42:
This is the opinion of Luchaire, _Institutions monarchiques_, ii., 17.
Footnote 43:
William of Jumièges, vii., 3.
Footnote 44:
Round, _Calendar of Documents Preserved in France_, No. 37.
Footnote 45:
Round, _Calendar_, No. 251.
Footnote 46:
Luchaire, _Institutions monarchiques_, ii., 233.
Footnote 47:
This is asserted very strongly by Freeman, ii., 201, and is implied by
Luchaire, _Les Premières Capétiens_, 163.
Footnote 48:
The whole story of the duke’s ride from Valognes to Falaise rests upon
the sole authority of Wace, and is only given here as a matter of
tradition.
Footnote 49:
The topography of the battle is derived from Wace.
Footnote 50:
William of Poitiers, 81.
Footnote 51:
Ordericus Vitalis (iii., 342) makes a pointed reference to the length
of time occupied by the present siege in comparison with the capture
of Brionne in a single day by Robert of Normandy in 1090. But it is
impossible to accept his statement that the resistance of Guy of
Burgundy was protracted for three years.
Footnote 52:
William of Poitiers, 81: “Bella domestica apud nos in longum sopivit.”
Footnote 53:
In the imperfectly feudalised state of England a stricter doctrine
seems to have prevailed: see, on Waltheof’s case below, page 338.
Footnote 54:
This rests on no better authority than Wace. We know with more
certainty that the lands which Grimbald forfeited were bestowed by
William upon the See of Bayeux, of which Odo, the duke’s brother,
became bishop in 1048.—_Eng. Hist. Rev._, xxii., 644.
Footnote 55:
“Vicissitudinem post hæc ipse Regi fide studiosissima reddidit.”
Footnote 56:
William of Poitiers, 82.
Footnote 57:
William of Poitiers, 82.
Footnote 58:
William of Poitiers, 87.
Footnote 59:
William of Poitiers, 88.
Footnote 60:
William of Jumièges, vii., 18.
Footnote 61:
William of Jumièges, vii., 18. The duke’s oath is given by Wace:
_Roman de Rou_, 9468.
Footnote 62:
William of Poitiers, 89.
CHAPTER II
REBELLION AND INVASION
Between the first Angevin war and the outbreak of overt hostilities
between Normandy and France, there occurs a period of five or six years
the historical interest of which lies almost entirely in the internal
affairs of the Norman state. It was by no means an unimportant time; it
included one external event of great importance, William’s visit to
England in 1051, but its real significance lay in the gradual
consolidation of his power in Normandy and its results. On the one hand
it was in these years that William finally suppressed the irreconcilable
members of his own family; on the other hand the gradual dissolution of
the traditional alliance between Normandy and the Capetian house runs
parallel to this process and is essentially caused by it. From the very
time when William attained his majority these two powers begin steadily
to drift apart; the breach widens as William’s power increases, and the
support given by the king of France in these years to Norman rebels such
as William Busac and William of Arques is naturally followed by his
invasions of Normandy in 1054 and 1058. As compensation for this
William’s marriage with Matilda of Flanders falls within the same
period, and events ruled that the alliance thus formed was to neutralise
the enmity of the Capetian house at the critical moment of the invasion
of England. There is indeed a sense in which we may say that it was
William’s success in these six years which made the invasion of England
possible; whether consciously or not, William was making indispensable
preparation for his supreme endeavour when he was taking the castles of
his unquiet kinsmen and banishing them from Normandy.
The first of them to go was William surnamed “the Warling,” count of
Mortain and grandson of Duke Richard the Fearless. His fall was sudden
and dramatic. As we have only one narrative of these events it may be
given here at length:
“At that time William named the Warling, of Richard the Great’s line,
was count of Mortain. One day a certain knight of his household,
called Robert Bigot, came to him and said, ‘My Lord, I am very poor
and in this country I cannot obtain relief; I will therefore go to
Auplia, where I may live more honourably.’ ‘Who,’ said William, ‘has
advised you thus?’ ‘The poverty which I suffer,’ replied Robert. Then
said William, ‘Within eight days, in Normandy itself, you shall be
able in safety to seize with your own hands whatever you may require.’
Robert therefore, submitting to his lord’s counsel, bided his time,
and shortly afterwards, through Richard of Avranches his kinsman,
gained the acquaintance of the duke. One day they were talking in
private when Robert among other matters repeated the above speech of
Count William. The duke thereupon summoned the count and asked him
what he meant by talk of this kind, but he could not deny the matter,
nor did he dare to tell his real meaning. Then said the duke in his
wrath: ‘You have planned to confound Normandy with seditious war, and
wickedly have you plotted to rebel against me and disinherit me,
therefore it is that you have promised booty to your needy knight.
But, God granting it, the unbroken peace which we desire shall remain
to us. Do you therefore depart from Normandy, nor ever return hither
so long as I live.’ William thus exiled sought Apulia wretchedly,
accompanied by only one squire, and the duke at once promoted Robert
his brother and gave him the county of Mortain. Thus harshly did he
abuse the haughty kindred of his father and honourably exalt the
humble kindred of his mother.”[63]
The moral of the story lies in its last sentence. The haughty kindred of
the duke’s father were beginning to show themselves dangerous, and
William threw down the challenge to them once for all when he
disinherited the grandson of Richard the Great in favour of the grandson
of the tanner of Falaise. But, apart from the personal questions
involved, the tale is eminently illustrative of William’s conception of
his duty as a ruler. By policy as well as prepossession he was driven to
be the stern maintainer of order; the men who would stir up civil war in
Normandy wished also to disinherit its duke, and from this followed
naturally that community of interest between the ruler and his meaner
subjects as against the greater baronage which was typical of the early
Middle Ages in Normandy and England alike. It is inadvisable to
scrutinise too narrowly the means taken by William to secure his
position; if on the present occasion he exiled his cousin on the mere
information of a single knight, he had already been taught the wisdom of
striking at the root of a rebellion before it had time to grow to a
head. We must not expect too much forbearance from the head of a feudal
state in his dealings with a suspected noble when the banishment of the
latter would place a dangerous fief at the former’s disposal. Lastly, we
may notice the way in which Apulia is evidently regarded as a land of
promise at this time by all who seek better fortune than Normandy can
give them. In the eleventh century, as in the fifteenth, Italy was
exercising its perennial attraction for the men of the ruder north, and
under the leadership of the sons of Tancred of Hauteville a new Normandy
was rising on the wreck of the Byzantine Empire in the West by the
shores of the Ionian Sea.
Probably about this time, and possibly not without some connection with
the disaffection of William the Warling, there occurred another abortive
revolt, of which the scene was laid, as usual, in one of the
semi-independent counties held by members of the ducal house. In the
north-east corner of Normandy the town of Eu with its surrounding
territory had been given by Duke Richard II. to his illegitimate brother
William. The latter had three sons, of whom Robert, the eldest,
succeeded him in the county, Hugh, the youngest, subsequently becoming
bishop of Lisieux. The remaining brother, William, surnamed Busac, is a
mysterious person whose appearance in history is almost confined to the
single narrative which we possess of his revolt. The latter is not free
from difficulty; William was not his father’s eldest son, and yet at the
period in question he appears in possession of the castle of Eu, and,
which is much more remarkable, he is represented as laying claim to the
duchy of Normandy itself. At present this is inexplicable, but it is
certain that the duke besieged and took Eu and drove William Busac into
exile. The place of refuge which he chose is very suggestive. He went to
France and attached himself to King Henry, who married him to the
heiress of the county of Soissons, where his descendants were ruling at
the close of the century.[64] It is plain that the king’s opportunist
policy has definitely turned against William of Normandy, when we find a
Norman rebel received with open arms and given an important territorial
position on the border of the royal demesne.[65]
The third and last of this series of revolts can be definitely assigned
to the year 1053. It arose like the revolt of William Busac in the land
east of Seine, and its leader was again one of the “_Ricardenses_,” a
member of a collateral branch of the ducal house. William count of
Arques was an illegitimate son of Duke Richard II., and therefore
brother by the half blood to Duke Robert I., and uncle to William of
Normandy. With the object of conciliating an important member of his
family the latter had enfeoffed his uncle in the county of Arques, the
district between Eu and the Pays de Caux. Before long, however,
relations between the duke and the count became strained; William of
Arques was said to have failed in his feudal duty at the siege of
Domfront, and when a little later he proceeded to fortify the capital of
his county with a castle, it was known that his designs were not
consonant with loyalty towards the interests of his lord and nephew. In
the hope of anticipating further trouble the duke insisted on his legal
right of garrisoning the castle with his own troops, but the precaution
proved to be quite futile, for the count soon won over the garrison,
defied his nephew, and spread destruction over as wide an area as he
could reach from his base of operations. At this time, as at the similar
crisis of 1047, William seems to have been at Valognes; he was certainly
somewhere in the Cotentin when the news of what was happening at Arques
was brought to him.[66] Without a moment’s delay he rode off towards the
scene of the revolt, crossing the Dive estuary at the ford of St.
Clement and so past Bayeux, Caen, and Pont Audemer to the Seine at
Caudebec, and then to Baons-le-Comte and Arques, his companions dropping
off one by one in the course of his headlong ride until only six were
left. Near to Arques, however, he fell in with a party of three hundred
horsemen from Rouen, who had set out with the object of preventing the
men of Arques from carrying supplies into the castle. William had not
yet outgrown the impetuosity which called forth King Henry’s admonitions
in the campaign of 1048: he insisted on delivering an instant attack,
believing that the rebels would shrink from meeting him in person, and
dashed on to the castle regardless of the remonstrances of the Rouen
men, who counselled discretion. Charging up the castle mound he drove
the count and his men within the fortress as he had anticipated, and we
are given to understand that but for their hastily shutting the gates
against him the revolt would have been ended then and there.
The surprise assault having failed, nothing was left but a blockade, and
accordingly William established a counterwork at the base of the castle
and entrusted it to Walter Giffard, lord of the neighbouring estate of
Longueville, while he himself went off, “being called by other
business,” as his panegyrist tells us. As a matter of fact it is
probable that he withdrew from a sense of feudal propriety,[67] for no
less a person than King Henry of France was advancing to the relief of
the garrison. On all grounds it was desirable for William to refrain
from setting a bad example to his barons by actually appearing in arms
against his own overlord, and so the operations against the king were
left to the direction of others. At the outset they were fortunate.
There were still a few barons in the county of Arques who had not joined
the rebels, and one of them, Richard of Hugleville, possessed a castle,
a few miles from Arques itself, at St. Aubin, which lay on the line of
march of the French king. Possibly it was this fact which suggested to
the besiegers the idea of intercepting the king before he reached
Arques; at any rate, they formed a plan of the kind, which proved
successful and curiously anticipates one of the most famous episodes in
the greater battle of Hastings. The king, who had been marching
carelessly with a convoy of provisions intended for the garrison within
Arques, halted near to St. Aubin. In the meantime the Normans before
Arques had sent out a detachment which they divided into two parts, the
greater part secreting itself not far from St. Aubin, while the rest
made a feint attack on the royal army. After a short conflict the latter
division turned in pretended flight, drew out a number of the king’s
army in pursuit, and enticed them past the place where the trap was
laid, whereupon the hidden Normans sallied out, fell on the Frenchmen,
and annihilated them, slaying Enguerrand, count of Ponthieu, and many
other men of note. Notwithstanding this check, the king hurried on to
Arques, and succeeded in throwing provisions into the castle, and then,
eager to avenge the disaster at St. Aubin, he made a savage attack on
the counterwork at the foot of the hill. But its defences were strong
and its defenders resolute: so the king, to avoid further loss, beat a
hasty retreat to St. Denis, and with his withdrawal Duke William
reappeared upon the scene.[68] Then the blockade was resumed in earnest,
and we are told that its severity convinced the count of Arques of his
folly in claiming the duchy against his lord. Repeated messages to King
Henry begging for relief found him unwilling to risk any further loss of
prestige, and at last hunger did its work. The garrison surrendered,
asking that life and limb might be guaranteed to them, but making no
further stipulation, and William of Poitiers gleefully describes the
ignominious manner of their exit from the castle.[69] Here, as after
Val-es-dunes, it was not the duke’s policy, if it lay in his power, to
proceed to extremities against the beaten rebels, and William was
notably lenient to his uncle, who was deprived of his county and his
too-powerful castle, but was granted at the same time a large estate in
Normandy. However, like Guy of Burgundy, he declined to live in the
country over which he had hoped to rule and he went into voluntary exile
at the court of Eustace of Boulogne.
One outlying portion of the duchy remained in revolt after the fall of
Arques. On the south-western border of Normandy the fortress of Moulins
had been betrayed to the king by Wimund, its commander, and had received
a royal garrison under Guy-Geoffrey, brother of the duke of Aquitaine.
The importance of this event lay in the fact that Moulins in unfriendly
hands threatened to cut off communications between the Hiesmois and the
half-independent county of Bellême. Fortunately for the integrity of the
duchy, the fate of Moulins was determined by the surrender of Arques;
the garrison gave up their cause as hopeless, and retired without
attempting to stand a siege.[70]
At some indefinite point in the short interval of peace which followed
the revolt of William of Arques, William of Normandy was married to
Matilda, daughter of Baldwin count of Flanders, in the minster at Eu. On
William’s part the consummation of the marriage was an act of simple
lawlessness noteworthy in so faithful a son of Holy Church, for in 1049
the General Council of Rheims had solemnly forbidden Count Baldwin to
give his daughter to William of Normandy, and had simultaneously
inhibited William from receiving her.[71] A mystery which has not been
wholly solved hangs over the motives which underlay this prohibition;
for genealogical research has hitherto failed to discover any tie of
affinity which might furnish an impediment, reasonable or otherwise, to
the proposed marriage, while at the middle of the eleventh century the
provisions of the canon law on the subject of the prohibited degrees
were much less rigid and fantastic than they subsequently became. Yet
the decree is duly entered among the canons of the Council of Rheims,
and it served to keep William and his chosen bride apart for four years.
Early in 1053, however, Pope Leo IX. had been taken prisoner by the
Normans in Italy at the battle of Aversa, and the coincidence of his
captivity with William’s defiance of the papal censure has not escaped
the notice of historians.[72] By all churchmen of the stricter sort a
marriage celebrated under such conditions was certain to be regarded as
a scandal. Normandy was laid under an interdict, and in the duchy itself
the opposition was headed by two men of very different character.
Malger, the archbishop of Rouen at the time, was a brother of the fallen
count of Arques, and the excommunication which he pronounced against his
erring nephews was probably occasioned as much by the political
grievances of his family as by righteous indignation at the despite done
to the Council of Rheims. William speedily came to an understanding with
the Pope by means of which he was enabled to remove Malger from his
archbishopric, but the marriage was also condemned by the man who both
before and after that event held above all others the place of the
duke’s familiar friend. The career of Lanfranc of Pavia, at this moment
prior of Bec, will be more fittingly considered elsewhere, but his
opposition to William’s marriage was especially significant because of
his great legal knowledge and the disinterestedness of his motives, and
the uncompromising attitude of his most intimate counsellor cut the duke
to the quick. In the outburst of his anger William savagely ordered that
the lands of the monastery of Bec should be harried, and that Lanfranc
himself should instantly depart from Normandy. A chance meeting between
the duke and the prior led to a reconciliation, and Lanfranc was
thereupon employed to negotiate with the papal court for a recognition
of the validity of the marriage. Nevertheless five years passed before
Pope Nicholas II. in 1059 granted the necessary dispensation,
accompanied by an injunction that William and his wife should each build
and endow a monastery by way of penance for their disobedience; and the
reasons for this long delay are almost as difficult to understand as are
the grounds for the original prohibition in 1049. But it is probable
that William, having once taken the law into his own hands and gained
possession of his bride, was well content that the progress of his suit
at Rome should drag its slow length along, trusting that time and the
chances of diplomatic expediency might soften the rigours of the canon
law, and bring the papal curia to acquiescence in the accomplished fact.
The county of Flanders, with which Normandy at this time became
intimately connected, held a unique position among the feudal states of
the north. Part only of the wide territory ruled by Baldwin IV. owed
feudal service to the king of France, for the eastern portion of the
county was an imperial fief, and the fact of his divided allegiance
enabled the count of Flanders to play the part of an international
power. By contemporary writers Count Baldwin is occasionally graced with
the higher title of Marquis,[73] and the designation well befitted the
man who ruled the wealthiest portion of the borderland between the
French kingdom and the German empire. The constant jealousy of his two
overlords secured him in practical independence, and in material
resources it is probable that no prince between the English Channel and
the Alps could compete with the lord of Bruges and Ghent; for the great
cities of Flanders were already developing the wealth and commercial
influence which in the next generation were to give them the lead in the
movement for communal independence. For some thirty years we find
Baldwin cultivating the friendship of England, as became a ruler whose
subjects were already finding their markets in English ports; and as the
political situation unfolded itself, the part he chose to take in the
strife of parties across the Channel became a matter of increasing
concern for English statesmen. “Baldwin’s land,” as the English
chronicler terms it, was the customary resort of political exiles from
England, and in 1066 it was the attitude of the count of Flanders which,
as we shall see, really turned the scale in favour of William of
Normandy. At the early date with which we are dealing no one could have
foreseen that this would be so, but the value of a Flemish alliance was
already recognised in England by the aggressive house with which William
was at last to come into deadly conflict. In 1051, Tosig, son of Earl
Godwine of Wessex, wedded Judith, Count Baldwin’s sister,[74] and this
fact inevitably gave a political complexion to William’s marriage to
Matilda, two years later. Godwine, as leader of the English
nationalists, and William as ultimate supporter of the Normans in
England, were each interested to secure the alliance of a power which
might intervene with decisive effect on either side and could not be
expected to preserve strict neutrality in the event of war. William was
too shrewd a statesman to ignore these facts; yet after all he probably
regarded his marriage rather as the gratification of a personal desire
than as a diplomatic victory.
Long before the political results of William’s marriage had matured
themselves, the relations between the duke of Normandy and the king of
France had entered upon a new phase. The event of the war of 1053 had
shewn that it was eminently in the interests of the French monarchy that
the growth of the Norman power should be checked before it could proceed
to actual encroachment on the royal demesne; and also that if this were
to be accomplished it would no longer suffice for King Henry to content
himself with giving support to casual Norman factions in arms against
their lawful ruler. This plan had led to ignominious failure, and it was
clear that in future it would be necessary for King Henry to appear as a
principal in the war and test whether the Norman duke was strong enough
to withstand the direct attack of his suzerain. These considerations
produced a phenomenon rarely seen at this date, for the king proceeded
to collect an army in which, through the rhetoric in which our one
contemporary writer veils its composition, we must recognise nothing
less than the entire feudal levy of all France. So rarely does French
feudalism combine to place its military resources at the disposal of its
sovereign that the fact on this occasion is good evidence of the current
opinion as to the strength of Normandy under its masterful duke. In the
war which followed, the territorial principles which found their fullest
expression in the policy of the dukes of Normandy gained a signal
victory over incoherent feudalism represented by the king of France at
the head of the gathered forces of his heterogeneous vassals. Not until
successive kings had reduced the royal demesne to such unity as had
already been reached by Normandy in the eleventh century, could the
French crown attempt successful aggressive war.
In addition to their feudal duty, certain of the king’s associates in
the forthcoming campaign had their individual reasons for joining in an
attack on Normandy. The ducal house of Aquitaine would naturally be
attracted into the quarrel by the failure of Guy-Geoffrey to hold
Moulins in the late war; Guy of Ponthieu had to avenge his brother’s
death at St. Aubin. Little as the several feudal princes of France may
have loved their suzerain, their jealousy would readily be roused by the
exceptional power of one of their own number, and the king seems to have
found little difficulty in collecting forces from every corner of his
realm. From the Midi the counts of Poitou and Auvergne and the
half-autonomous dukes of Aquitaine and Gascony sent contingents; north
of the Loire, every state from Brittany to the duchy of Burgundy was
represented in the royal army with one singular exception. Whatever the
reason of his absence, Geoffrey Martel, William’s most formidable rival,
does not appear in the list of the king’s associates as given by William
of Poitiers.[75] This may be due to a mere oversight on the latter’s
part, or more probably it may be that Geoffrey was too independent to
take part in an expedition which, although directed against his personal
enemy, was commanded by his feudal lord. But with or without his aid the
army which obeyed the king’s summons was to all seeming overwhelmingly
superior to any force which the duke of Normandy could put into the
field.
With so great an army at his disposal, the king could well afford to
divide his forces and make a simultaneous invasion of Normandy at two
different points. The lower course of the Seine supplied a natural line
of demarcation between the spheres of operation of the two invading
armies, and accordingly the royal host mustered in two divisions, one
assembling in the Beauvoisis to ravage the Pays de Caux, the other
assembling at Mantes, and directed at the territory of Evreux, Rouen,
and Lisieux. The first division was drawn from those lands between the
Rhine and the Seine, which owed allegiance to the French crown, and was
placed under the command of Odo the king’s brother and Reginald of
Clermont. The army which gathered at Mantes comprised the Aquitanian
contingent, together with troops drawn from the loyal provinces north of
Loire and west of Seine, and was led by the king in person. The general
plan of campaign is thus intelligible enough, but its ultimate purpose
is not so clear, perhaps because the king himself had formed no plans
other than those which related to the actual conduct of the war. On his
part William formed a scheme of defence corresponding to his enemies’
plan of attack. He took the field in person with the men of the Bessin,
Cotentin, Avranchin, Auge, and Hiesmois, the districts, that is, which
were threatened by the king and his southern army, entrusting the
defence of the Pays de Caux to leaders chosen on account of their local
influence, Count Robert of Eu, Hugh of Gournai, Hugh de Montfort, Walter
Giffard, and Gilbert Crispin, the last a great landowner in the Vexin.
William’s object was to play a purely defensive game, a decision which
was wise as it threw upon the king and his brother the task of
provisioning and keeping together their unwieldly armies in hostile
territory. The invading force moved across the country, laying it waste
after the ordinary fashion of feudal warfare, William hanging on the
flank and rear of the king’s army, cutting off stragglers and foraging
parties and anticipating the inevitable devastation of the land by
removing all provisions from the king’s line of advance. The king had
penetrated as far as the county of Brionne when disaster fell on the
allied army across the Seine. Thinking that William was retiring in
front of the king’s march the leaders of the eastern host ignored the
local force opposed to themselves in the belief, we are told, that all
the knights of Normandy were accompanying the duke. But the count of Eu
and his fellow-officers were deliberately reserving their blow until the
whole of their army had drawn together, and the French met little
opposition until they had come to the town of Mortemer, which they
occupied and used as their headquarters while they ravaged the
neighbourhood in detail at their leisure. Spending the day in plunder
they kept bad watch at night, and this fact induced the Norman leaders
to try the effect of a surprise. Finding out the disposition of the
French force through spies, they moved up to Mortemer by night and
surrounded it before daybreak, posting guards so as to command all the
exits from the town; and the first intimation which the invaders
received of their danger was the firing of the place over their heads by
the Normans. Then followed a scene of wild confusion. In the dim light
of the wintry dawn the panic-struck Frenchmen instinctively made for the
roads which led out of the town, only to be driven in again by the
Normans stationed at these points. Some of course escaped; Odo the
king’s brother and Reginald of Clermont got clear early in the day, but
for some hours the mass of the French army was steadily being compressed
into the middle of the burning town. The Frenchmen must have made a
brave defence, but they had no chance and perished wholesale, with the
exception of such men of high rank as were worth reserving for their
ransoms. Among these last was Count Guy of Ponthieu, whose brother
Waleran perished in the struggle, and who was himself kept for two years
as a prisoner at Bayeux before he bought his liberty by acknowledging
himself to be William’s “man.” The victory was unqualified, and William
knew how to turn it to fullest account.
He received the news on the night following the battle, and instantly
formed a plan, which, even when described by his contemporary
biographer, reads like a romance. As soon as he knew the result of the
conflict he summoned one of his men and instructed him to go to the
French camp and bring to the king himself the news of his defeat. The
man fulfilled his directions, went off, climbed a high tree close to the
king’s tent, and with a mighty voice proclaimed the event of the battle.
The king, awakened by these tidings of disaster from the air, was struck
with terror, and, without waiting for the dawn, broke up his camp, and
made with what haste he might for the Norman border. William, seeing
that his main purpose was in a fair way of achievement, refrained from
harassing the king’s disorderly retreat; the French were anxious to end
so unlucky a campaign, and peace was soon made. According to the treaty
the prisoners taken at Mortemer were to be released on payment of their
ransoms, while the king promised to confirm William in the possession of
whatever conquests he had made, or should thereafter make, from the
territory of Geoffrey of Anjou.[76] Herein, no doubt King Henry in part
was constrained by necessity, but in view of his defeat it was not
inappropriate that he should make peace for himself at the expense of
the one great vassal who had neglected to obey the summons to his
army.[77] And it should be noted that William, though he has the French
king at so great a disadvantage, nevertheless regards the latter’s
consent to his territorial acquisitions as an object worth stipulation;
King Henry, to whatever straits he might be reduced, was still his
overlord, and could alone give legal sanction to the conquests made by
his vassals within the borders of his kingdom.
It would, however, be a mistake to regard this treaty as marking a
return to the state of affairs which prevailed in 1048, when the king
and the duke of Normandy were united against the count of Anjou in the
war which ended with the capture of Alençon. The peace of 1054 was
little more than a suspension of hostilities, each party mistrusting the
other. The first care of the duke, now that his hands were free, was to
strengthen his position against his overlord, and one of the border
fortresses erected at this time was accidentally to become a name of
note in the municipal history of England. Over against Tillières, the
border post which King Henry had taken from Normandy in the stormy times
of William’s minority, the duke now founded the castle of Breteuil, and
entrusted it to William fitz Osbern, his companion in the war of
Domfront.[78] Under the protection of the castle, by a process which was
extremely common in French history, a group of merchants came to found a
trading community or _bourg_. The burgesses of Breteuil, however,
received special privileges from William fitz Osbern and when he, their
lord, became earl of Hereford these privileges were extended to not a
few of the rising towns along the Welsh border. The “laws of Breteuil,”
which are mentioned by name in Domesday Book, and were regarded as a
model municipal constitution for two centuries after the conquest of
England, thus take their origin from the rights of the burgesses who
clustered round William’s border fortress on the Iton.[79]
Another castle built at this time was definitely intended to mark the
reopening of hostilities against the count of Anjou. At Ambrières, near
the confluence of the Mayenne and the Varenne, William selected a
position of great natural strength for the site of a castle which should
command one of the chief lines of entry from Normandy into the county of
Maine. The significance of this will be seen in the next chapter, and
for the present we need only remark that in 1051, on the death of Count
Hugh IV., Geoffrey Martel, by a brilliant _coup d’état_ had secured his
recognition by the Manceaux as their immediate lord, and was therefore
at the present moment the direct ruler of the whole county. On the other
hand, the widow of the late count had sought refuge at William’s court,
and her son Herbert, the last male of the old line of the counts of
Maine, had commended himself and his territory to the Norman duke. For
three years, therefore, William had possessed a good legal pretext for
interference in the internal affairs of Maine; and but for the unquiet
state of Normandy during this time, followed by the recent French
invasion, it is probable that he would long ago have challenged his
rival’s possession of the territory which lay between them. That the
foundation of the castle of Ambrières was regarded as something more
than a mere casual acquisition on William’s part, is shewn by the action
of Geoffrey of Mayenne, one of the chief barons of the county of Maine,
on hearing the news of its intended fortification. With the
punctiliousness which distinguishes all William’s dealings with Geoffrey
Martel, William had sent word to the count of Anjou that within forty
days he would enter the county of Maine and take possession of
Ambrières. Geoffrey of Mayenne, whose fief lay along the river Mayenne
between Ambrières and Anjou, thereupon went to his lord and explained to
him that if Ambrières once became a Norman fortress his own lands would
never be safe from invasion. He received a reassuring answer;
nevertheless, on the appointed day, William invaded Maine and set to
work on the castle according to his declaration; and, although rumour
had it that Geoffrey Martel would shortly meet him, the days passed
without any sign of his appearance. In the meantime, however, the Norman
supplies began to run short, so that William thought it the safest plan
to dismiss the force which he had in the field, and to content himself
with garrisoning and provisioning Ambrières, leaving orders that his men
should hold themselves in readiness to reassemble immediately on
receiving notice from him. Geoffrey Martel, who had probably been
counting on some action of the kind, at once seized his opportunity,
and, as soon as he heard that the Norman army had broken up, he marched
on Ambrières, having as ally his stepson William, duke of Aquitaine, and
Éon, count of Penthievre, the uncle of the reigning duke of Brittany.
With William still in the neighbourhood and likely to return at any
moment, it was no time for a leisurely investment, so Geoffrey made
great play with his siege engines, and came near to taking the place by
storm. His attack failed, however, and William, drawing his army
together again, as had been arranged, compelled the count to beat a
hasty retreat. Shortly afterwards Geoffrey of Mayenne was taken
prisoner; and William, with a view to further enterprises in Maine,
seeing the advantage of placing a powerful feudatory of that county in a
position of technical dependence upon himself, kept him in Normandy
until he consented to do homage to his captor.[80] It is also probable
that on this occasion William still further strengthened his position
with regard to Maine by founding on the Sarthon the castle of
Roche-Mabille, which castle was entrusted to Roger of Montgomery, and
derives its name from Mabel, the heiress of the county of Bellême, and
the wife of the castellan.
Three years of quiet followed these events, about which, as is customary
with regard to such seasons, our authorities have little to relate to
us. In 1058 came the third and last invasion of Normandy by King Henry
of France, with whom was associated once more Count Geoffrey of Anjou.
No definite provocation seems to have been given by William for the
attack, but in the interests of the French crown it was needful now as
it had been in 1053 to strike a blow at this over-mighty vassal, and the
king was anxious to take his revenge for the ignominious defeat he had
sustained in the former year. Less formidable in appearance than the
huge army which had obeyed the king’s summons in the former year, the
invading force of 1058 was so far successful that it penetrated into the
very heart of the duchy, while, on the other hand, the disaster which
closed the war was something much more dramatic in its circumstances and
crushing in its results than the daybreak surprise of Mortemer. This
expedition is also distinguished from its forerunner by the fact that
the king does not seem to have aimed at the conquest or partition of
Normandy: the invasion of 1058 was little more than a plunder raid on a
large scale, intended to teach the independent Normans that in spite of
his previous failures their suzerain was still a person to be feared.
The king’s plan was to enter Normandy through the Hiesmois; to cross the
Bessin as far as the estuary of the Dive and to return after ravaging
Auge and the district of Lisieux. Now, as five years previously, William
chose to stand on the defensive; he put his castles into a state of
siege and retired to watch the king’s proceedings from Falaise. It was
evidently no part of the king’s purpose to attempt the detailed
reduction of all the scattered fortresses belonging to, or held on
behalf of, the duke[81]; and this being the case it was best for William
to bide his time, knowing that if he could possess his soul in patience
while the king laid waste his land, the trouble would eventually pass
away of its own accord. And so King Henry worked his will on the unlucky
lands of the Hiesmois and the Bessin as far as the river Seule, at which
point he turned, crossed the Olne at Caen, and prepared to return to
France by way of Varaville and Lisieux. William in the meantime was
following in the track of the invading army. The small body of men by
which he must have been accompanied proves that he had no thought of
coming to any general engagement at the time, but suddenly the
possibilities of the situation seem to have occurred to him, and he
hastily summoned the peasantry of the neighbourhood to come in to him
armed as they were. With the makeshift force thus provided he pressed on
down the valley of the Bavent after the king, who seems to have been
quite unaware of his proximity, and came out at Varaville at the very
moment when the French army was fully occupied with the passage of the
Dive. The king had crossed the river with his vanguard[82]; his
rearguard and baggage train had yet to follow. Seizing the opportunity,
which he had probably anticipated, William flung himself upon the
portion of the royal army which was still on his side of the river and
at once threw it into confusion. The Frenchmen who had already passed
the ford and were climbing up the high ground of Bastebourg to the right
of the river, seeing the plight of their comrades, turned and sought to
recross; but the causeway across the river mouth was old and unsafe and
the tide was beginning to turn. Soon the passage of the river became
impossible, the battle became a mere slaughter, and the Norman poet of
the next century describes for us the old king standing on the hill
above the Dive and quivering with impotent passion as he watched his
troops being cut to pieces by the rustic soldiery of his former ward.
The struggle cannot have taken long; the rush of the incoming tide made
swimming fatal, and the destruction of the rearguard was complete. With
but half an army left to him it was hopeless for the king to attempt to
avenge the annihilation of the other half; he had no course but to
retrace his steps and make the best terms he could with his victorious
vassal. These terms were very simple—William merely demanded the
surrender of Tillières, the long-disputed key of the Arve valley.[83]
With its recovery, the tale of the border fortresses of Normandy was
complete; the duchy had amply vindicated its right to independence, and
was now prepared for aggression.
Thus by the end of 1058 King Henry had been definitely baffled in all
his successive schemes for the reduction of Normandy. With our knowledge
of the event, our sympathies are naturally and not unfairly on the side
of Duke William, but they should not blind us to the courage and
persistency with which the king continued to face the problems of his
difficult situation. In every way, of course, the weakest of the early
Capetians suffers by comparison with the greatest of all the dukes of
Normandy. The almost ludicrous disproportion between the king’s legal
position and his territorial power, his halting, inconsistent policy,
and the ease with which his best-laid plans were turned to his
discomfiture by a vassal who studiously refrained from meeting him in
battle, all make us inclined to agree with William’s panegyrical
biographer as he contemptuously dismisses his overlord from the field of
Varaville. And yet the wonder is that the king should have maintained
the struggle for so long with the wretched resources at his disposal.
With a demesne far less in area than Normandy alone, surrounded by the
possessions of aggressive feudatories and itself studded with the
castles of a restive nobility, the monarchy depended for existence on
the mutual jealousy of the great lords of France and on such vague,
though not of necessity unreal, respect as they were prepared to show to
the successor of Charlemagne. The Norman wars of Henry I. illustrated
once for all the impotence of the monarchy under such conditions, and
the kings who followed him bowed to the limitations imposed by their
position. Philip I. and Louis VI. were each in general content that the
monarchy should act merely as a single unit among the territorial powers
into which the feudal world of France was divided, satisfied if they
could reduce their own demesne to reasonable obedience and maintain a
certain measure of diplomatic influence outside. Accordingly from this
point a change begins to come over the relations between Normandy and
France; neither side aims at the subjugation of the other, but each
watches for such advantages as chance or the shifting feudal
combinations of the time may present. Within a decade from the battle of
Varaville the duke of Normandy had become master of Maine and England,
but in these great events the French crown plays no part.
[Illustration: Denier of Henry I. of France]
-----
Footnote 63:
William of Jumièges, vii., 19.
Footnote 64:
William of Jumièges, vii., 20.
Footnote 65:
The visit of William to England in 1051 will be considered below,
Chapter IV., in its bearing upon the general question of the English
succession.
Footnote 66:
William of Poitiers, 92.
Footnote 67:
This is definitely asserted by William of Malmesbury.
Footnote 68:
See on this episode, Round, _Feudal England_, 382–385.
Footnote 69:
Page 95.
Footnote 70:
William of Jumièges, vii., 7.
Footnote 71:
_Labbè Concilia_, xi., 1412.
Footnote 72:
For example, Freeman, _N. C._, iii., 92.
Footnote 73:
Count Baldwin III. assumed the title of Marquis on the coins which he
issued.
Footnote 74:
_Vita Eadwardi_ (R.S.), 404.
Footnote 75:
Page 97. On this question there is a conflict of evidence William of
Jumièges, whose authority is only second to that of William of
Poitiers, definitely asserts Geoffrey’s participation in the campaign.
See Halphen, _Conté d’Anjou_, 77. On the other hand, although the
argument from the silence of William of Poitiers should not be pressed
too far, the terms of the treaty of 1053 (see below) certainly suggest
that the king held Geoffrey guilty of a breach of feudal duty, and
later writers, such as Orderic, cannot be trusted implicitly in regard
to the detailed history of this period.
Footnote 76:
William of Poitiers, 99.
Footnote 77:
See note, page 112 above.
Footnote 78:
William of Jumièges, vii., 25.
Footnote 79:
See _The Laws of Breteuil_, by Miss M. Bateson, _Eng. Hist. Rev._, xx.
Footnote 80:
William of Poitiers, 99, 100.
Footnote 81:
In a charter abstracted by Round, _Calendar of Documents Preserved in
France_, No. 1256, there is a reference to a knight named Richard who
was seized by mortal illness while defending the frontier post of
Châteauneuf-en-Thimerais in this campaign.
Footnote 82:
William of Poitiers, 101. Wace gives topographical details.
Footnote 83:
William of Jumièges, vii., 28. The battle of Varaville led to the
king’s retreat, but a sporadic war lasted till 1060. It is probable
that Norman chroniclers have attached more importance to the battle
than it really possessed.
CHAPTER III
THE CONQUEST OF MAINE AND THE BRETON WAR
By a curious synchronism both King Henry of France and Count Geoffrey
Martel died in the course of the year 1060; and, with the disappearance
of his two chief enemies of the older generation, the way was clear for
William to attempt a more independent course of action than he had
hitherto essayed. Up to this year his policy had in great measure been
governed by the movements of his overlord and the count of Anjou, both
of them men who were playing their part in the political affairs of
France at the time when he himself was born. From this date he becomes
the definite master of his own fortunes, and the circumstances in which
the king and the count left their respective territories removed any
check to his enterprise and aggression which might otherwise have come
from those quarters. The king was succeeded by his son Philip, at this
time a child of scarcely seven years old, and the government of France
during his minority was in the hands of Baldwin of Flanders, William’s
father-in-law. In Anjou a war of succession broke out which reduced that
state to impotence for ten years. Geoffrey Martel had left no sons, but
had designated as his successor another Geoffrey, nicknamed “_le
Barbu_,” the elder son of his sister Hermengarde by Geoffrey count of
the Gatinais.[84] The younger son, however, Fulk “_le Rechin_,” had
determined to secure the Angevin inheritance for himself, and by the
time that he had accomplished his purpose most of the territorial
acquisitions of Geoffrey Martel had been torn from Anjou by the
neighbouring powers. Saintonge and the Gatinais fell respectively into
the possession of the duke of Aquitaine and the king of France; and,
more important than all, the Angevin acquisition of Maine, the greatest
work of Geoffrey Martel, was reversed when in 1063 William of Normandy
entered Le Mans and made arrangements for the permanent annexation of
the country.
The counts of Maine had never enjoyed such absolute sovereignty over
their territory as was possessed by the greater feudatories of the
French crown.[85] In addition to the usual vague claims which both
Normandy and Anjou were always ready to assert over their weaker
neighbours, and which nobody would take seriously when there was no
immediate prospect of their enforcement, the suzerainty of the king of
France was much more of a reality over Maine than over Flanders or
Aquitaine. In particular the patronage of the great see of Le Mans
rested with the king for the first half of the eleventh century; and
this was an important point, for the bishops of the period are prominent
in the general history of the county. For the most part they are good
examples of the feudal type of prelate, represented in Norman history by
Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances; and several of them were drawn
from a house fertile in feudal politicians, that of the counts of
Bellême, whose great fief lay on the border between Maine and Normandy.
This connection of the episcopate of Le Mans with a great Norman family
might be taken as itself implying some extension of Norman influence
over Maine were it not that the house of Bellême, half independent and
altogether unruly, was quite as likely to work against its overlord as
in his favour. In fact, it was largely through the Bellême bishops of Le
Mans that Angevin power came to be established in Maine for a while; the
bishops were steadily opposed to the line of native counts, and looked
to Anjou for a counterpoise. In particular, Bishop Gervase (1036–1058)
brought it about that King Henry made a grant of all the royal rights
over the see to Count Geoffrey Martel for the term of his life, the
bishop taking this step in pursuance of an intrigue against the guardian
of the reigning count, who was at the time a minor. Having served his
turn Gervase quickly fell into disfavour with Geoffrey and endured a
seven years’ imprisonment at his hands; but it was through his false
step that Geoffrey first secured a definite legal position in Mancel
politics.
The counts of Maine themselves are rather shadowy people, but it is
necessary to get a clear idea of their mutual relationships. Count
Herbert, surnamed “_Eveille Chien_,” the persistent enemy of Fulk Nerra
of Anjou and the last of his line to play a part of his own in French
affairs, had died in 1035, leaving a son, Hugh IV., and a daughter,
Biota, married to Walter of Mantes, count of the Vexin Français. Hugh,
being under age, was placed under the governance of his father’s uncle,
Herbert “Bacco,” the regent with whom Bishop Gervase was at enmity. When
the above-mentioned grant of the patronage of the bishopric of Le Mans
to Geoffrey Martel had given the latter a decent pretext for
interference in the quarrel, the expulsion of Herbert Bacco quickly
followed; and while the bishop was in captivity Geoffrey ruled the
country in the name of the young count. Upon his death, in 1051,
Geoffrey himself, in despite of the claims of Hugh’s own children, was
accepted by the Manceaux as count of Maine—for it should be noted in
passing that the Mancel baronage was always attached to Anjou rather
than to Normandy. The date at which these events happened is also worthy
of remark, for it shows that during that rather obscure war in the
Mayenne valley which was described in the last chapter William of
Normandy was really fighting against Geoffrey Martel in his position as
count of Maine. A legal foundation for Norman interference lay in the
fact, which we have already noticed, that Bertha of Blois, the widow of
Hugh III., had escaped into Normandy, and that by her advice her son
Herbert, the heir of Maine, had placed himself and his inheritance under
the protection of his host. William, seeing his advantage, was
determined to secure his own position in the matter. He made an
arrangement with his guest by which the latter’s sister Margaret was
betrothed to his own son Robert, who here makes his first appearance in
history, with the stipulation that if Hugh were to die without children
his claims over Maine should pass to his sister and her husband. We do
not know the exact date at which this compact was made, but it is by no
means improbable that some agreement of the kind underlay that clause in
the treaty concluded with King Henry after Mortemer by which William was
to be secured in all the conquests which he might make from Geoffrey of
Anjou.
On the latter’s death in 1060 Norman influence rapidly gained the upper
hand in Maine.[86] The war of succession in Anjou prevented either of
the claimants from succeeding to the position of Geoffrey Martel in
Maine; and if Count Herbert ruled there at all during the two years
which elapsed between 1060 and his own death, in 1062, it must have been
under Norman suzerainty. With his death the male line of the counts of
Maine became extinct, and there instantly arose the question whether the
county should pass to Walter, count of Mantes, in right of his wife
Biota, the aunt of the dead Herbert, or to William of Normandy in trust
for Margaret, Herbert’s sister, and her destined husband, Robert,
William’s son. In the struggle which followed, two parties are clearly
to be distinguished: one—and judging from events the least
influential—in favour of the Norman succession, the other, composed of
the nationalists of Maine, supporting the claims of Biota and Walter.
The latter was in every way an excellent leader for the party which
desired the independence of the county. As count of the Vexin Français,
Walter had been steadily opposed to the Norman suzerainty over that
district, which resulted from the grant made by Henry I. to Robert of
Normandy in 1032. His policy had been to withdraw his county from the
Norman group of vassal states, and to reunite it to the royal demesne;
he acknowledged the direct superiority of the king of France over the
Vexin, and he must have co-operated in the great invasion of Normandy in
1053; for it was at his capital that the western division of the royal
host assembled before its march down the Seine valley. Even across the
Channel the interests of his house clashed with those of William. Walter
was himself the nephew of Edward the Confessor, and his brother Ralph
who died in 1057 had been earl of Hereford. The royal descent of the
Vexin house interfered seriously with any claim which William might put
forward to the inheritance of Edward the Confessor on the ground of
consanguinity. It is only by placing together a number of scattered
hints that we discover the extent of the opposition to William which is
represented by Walter of Mantes and his house, but there can be no doubt
of its reality and importance.
In Maine itself the leaders of the anti-Norman party seem to have been
William’s own “man” Geoffrey of Mayenne and the Viscount Herbert, lord
of Sainte-Suzanne. There is no doubt that the mass of the baronage and
peasantry of the county were on their side, and this fact led William to
form a plan of operations which singularly anticipates the greater
campaign of the autumn of 1066. William’s ultimate objective was the
city of Le Mans, the capital of Maine and its strongest fortress, the
possession of which would be an evident sanction of his claims over the
county. But there were weighty reasons why he should not proceed to a
direct attack on the city. Claiming the county, as he did, in virtue of
legal right, it was not good policy for him to take steps which, even if
successful, would give his acquisition the unequivocal appearance of a
conquest; nor from a military point of view was it advisable for him to
advance into the heart of the county with the castles of its hostile
baronage unreduced behind him. He accordingly proceeded to the reduction
of the county in detail, knowing that the surrender of the capital would
be inevitable when the whole country around was in his hands. The
initial difficulties of the task were great, and the speed with which
William wore down the resistance of a land bristling with fortified
posts proves by how much his generalship was in advance of the
leisurely, aimless strategy of his times. We know few particulars of the
war, but it is clear that William described a great circle round the
doomed city of Le Mans, taking castles, garrisoning them where necessary
with his own troops, and drawing a belt of ravaged land closer and
closer round the central stronghold of the county. By these deliberate
measures the defenders of Le Mans were demoralised to such an extent
that William’s appearance before their walls led to an immediate
surrender. From the historical point of view, however, the chief
interest of these operations lies in the curiously close parallel which
they present to the events which followed the battle of Hastings. In
England, as in Maine, it was William’s policy to gain possession of the
chief town of the country by intimidation rather than by assault, and
with the differences which followed from the special conditions of
English warfare his methods were similar in both cases. London submitted
peaceably when William had placed a zone of devastation between the city
and the only quarters from which help could come to her; Le Mans could
not hope to resist when the subject territory had been wasted by
William’s army, and its castles surrendered into his hands. Nor can we
doubt that the success of this plan in the valleys of the Sarthe and
Mayenne was a chief reason why it was adopted in the valley of the
Thames.
At Le Mans, as afterwards at London, William, when submission had become
necessary, was received with every appearance of joy by the citizens;
here, as in his later conquest, he distrusted the temper of his new
subjects, and made it his first concern to secure their fidelity by the
erection of a strong fortress in their midst—the castle which William
planted on the verge of the precincts of the cathedral of Le Mans is the
Mancel equivalent of the Tower of London. And, as afterwards in England,
events showed that the obedience of the whole country would not of
necessity follow from the submission of its chief town; it cost William
a separate expedition before the castle of Mayenne surrendered. But the
parallel between the Norman acquisition of Maine and of England should
not be pressed too far; it lies rather in the circumstances of the
respective conquests than in their ultimate results. William was
fighting less definitely for his own hand in Maine than afterwards in
England; nominally, at least, he was bound to respect the rights of the
young Countess Margaret, and her projected marriage with Robert of
Normandy proves that Maine was to be treated as an appanage rather than
placed under William’s immediate rule. And to this must be added that
the conquest of Maine was far less permanent and thorough than the
conquest of England. The Angevin tendencies of the Mancel baronage told
after all in the long run. Before twelve years were past William was
compelled to compromise with the claims of the house of Anjou, and after
his death Maine rapidly gravitated towards the rival power on the Loire.
While the body of the Norman army was thus employed in the reduction of
Maine, William despatched a force to make a diversion by ravaging Mantes
and Chaumont, the hereditary demesne of his rival,—an expedition in its
way also anticipating the invasion which William was to lead thither in
person in 1087, and in which he was to meet his death. Most probably it
was this invasion, of which the details are entirely unknown, which
persuaded Walter of Mantes to acquiesce in the _fait accompli_ in Maine;
at least we are told that “of his own will he agreed to the surrender
[of Le Mans], fearing that while defending what he had acquired by wrong
he might lose what belonged to him by inheritance.” Within a short time
both he and his wife came to a sudden and mysterious end, and there was
a suspicion afloat that William himself was not unconcerned in it. It
was one of the many slanders thrown upon William by Waltheof and his
boon companions at the treasonable wedding feast at Exning in 1075 that
the duke had invited his rival and his wife to Falaise and that while
they were his guests he poisoned them both in one night. Medieval
credulity in a matter of this kind was unbounded; and a sinister
interpretation of Walter’s death was inevitably suggested by the fact of
his recent hostilities against his host.
One check to the success of William’s plans followed hard on the death
of Walter and Biota. Margaret, the destined bride of Robert of Normandy,
died before the marriage could be consummated. In 1063 Robert himself
could not have been more than nine years old; while, although Margaret
must have reached the age of twelve, the whole course of the history
suggests that she was little more than a child, a fact which somewhat
tends to discount the pious legend, in which our monastic informants
revel, that the girl shrank from the thought of marriage and had already
begun to practise the austerities of the religious profession. She left
two sisters both older than herself, whose marriage alliances are
important for the future history of Maine[87]; but their claims for the
present were ignored, and William himself adopted the title of count of
Maine.
Somewhere about the time of these events (the exact date is unknown)
William was seized with a severe illness, which brought him to the point
of death. So sore bestead was he that he was laid on the ground as one
about to die, and in his extreme need he gave the reliquary which
accompanied him on his progresses to the church of St. Mary of
Coutances. No chronicler has recorded this episode, of which we should
know nothing were it not that the said reliquary was subsequently
redeemed by grants of land to the church which had received it in
pledge; yet the future history of France and England hung on the event
of that day.[88]
It was probably within a year of the settlement of Maine that William
engaged in the last war undertaken by him as a mere duke of the Normans,
the Breton campaign which is commonly assigned to the year 1064. As in
the earlier wars with Anjou, a border dispute seems to have been the
immediate occasion of hostilities, though now as then there were grounds
of quarrel between the belligerents which lay deeper. Count Alan of
Rennes, William’s cousin and guardian, had been succeeded by his son
Conan, who like his father was continually struggling to secure for his
line the suzerainty of the whole of Brittany as against the rival house
of the counts of Nantes, a struggle which, under different conditions
and with additional competitors at different times had now been going on
for more than a century. The county of Nantes at this particular time
was held by a younger branch of the same family, and there are some
slight indications that the counts of Nantes, perhaps through enmity to
their northern kinsmen, took up a more friendly attitude towards
Normandy than that adopted by the counts of Rennes. However this may be,
Count Conan appears in the following story as representing Breton
independence against Norman aggression; and when William founded the
castle of Saint James in the south-west angle of the Avranchin as a
check on Breton marauders, Conan determined on an invasion of Normandy,
and sent word to William of the exact day on which he would cross the
border.
By the majority of Frenchmen it would seem that Brittany was regarded as
a land inhabited by savages; in the eleventh century the peninsula stood
out as distinct from the rest of France as it stands to-day. Its
inhabitants had a high reputation for their courage and simplicity of
life, but they were still in the tribal stage of society, and their
manners and customs were regarded with abhorrence by the ecclesiastical
writers of the time. Like most tribal peoples they had no idea of
permanent political unity; and the present war was largely influenced by
the fact that within the county of Rennes a Celtic chief named Rhiwallon
was holding the town of Dol against his immediate lord on behalf of the
duke of Normandy.[89] Instead of invading Normandy as he had threatened,
Conan was driven to besiege Dol, and it was William’s first object in
the campaign to relieve his adherent there.
What gives exceptional interest to the somewhat unimportant expedition
which followed is the undoubted presence in William’s army of his future
rival for the crown of England, Harold the earl of Wessex.[90] The
reason for, and the incidents connected, with, his visit to Normandy
will have to be considered in a later chapter, but there cannot be any
question as to its reality; and in a famous section, the Bayeux
tapestry, our best record of this campaign, shows us Harold rescuing
with his own hand a number of Norman soldiers who were being swept away
by the Coesnon as the army crossed the border stream of Brittany. On the
approach of the Norman army Conan abandoned the siege of Dol and fell
back on his capital of Rennes; but relations soon seem to have become
strained between Rhiwallon and his formidable ally, for we find
Rhiwallon remarking to William that it mattered little to the country
folk around Dol whether their substance were to be consumed by a Norman
or a Breton army. Possibly it may have been the remonstrances of
Rhiwallon which induced William to retire beyond the Norman border, but
we are told that as he was in the act of leaving Brittany word was
brought to him that Geoffrey (_le Barbu_) count of Anjou had joined
himself to Conan with a large army and that both princes would advance
to fight him on the morrow. It does not appear that William gave them
the opportunity, but the tapestry records what was probably a sequel to
this campaign in the section which represents William as besieging Conan
himself in the fortress of Dinan. From the picture which displays Conan
surrendering the keys of the castle on the point of his spear to the
duke it is evident that the place was taken, but we know nothing of the
subsequent fortunes of the war nor of the terms according to which peace
was made. Within two years of these events, if we are right in assigning
them to 1064, Conan died suddenly,[91] and was succeeded by his
brother-in-law Hoel, count of Cornouaille, who united in his own person
most of the greater lordships into which Brittany had hitherto been
divided.
[Illustration: THE SIEGE OF DINANT FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY]
It may be well at this point briefly to review the position held by
William at the close of 1064. With the exception of his father-in-law of
Flanders, no single feudatory north of the Loire could for a moment be
placed in comparison with him. Anjou and the royal demesne itself were,
for different reasons, as we have seen, of little consequence at this
time. The influence of Champagne under its featureless rulers was always
less than might have been expected from the extent and situation of the
county; and just now the attention of Count Theobald III. was directed
towards the recovery of Touraine from the Angevin claimants rather than
towards any rivalry with the greater power of Normandy. Brittany indeed
had just shown itself hostile, but the racial division between _Bretagne
Brettonante_ and the Gallicised east, which always prevented the duchy
from attaining high rank among the powers of north France, rendered it
quite incapable of competing with Normandy on anything like equal terms.
With the feudal lords to the east of the Seine and upper Loire William
had few direct relations, but they, like the princes of Aquitaine, had
received a severe lesson as to the power of Normandy in the rout of the
royal army which followed the surprise of Mortemer. On the other hand,
Normandy, threaded by a great river, with a long seaboard and good
harbours, with a baronage reduced to order and a mercantile class hardly
less prosperous than the men of the great cities of Flanders, would have
been potentially formidable in the hands of a ruler of far less power
than the future conqueror of England. Never before had Normandy attained
so high a relative position as that in which she appears in the seventh
decade of the eleventh century; and, kind as was fortune to the mighty
enterprise which she was so soon to undertake, its success and even its
possibility rested on the skilful policy which had guided her history in
the eventful years which had followed Val-es-dunes.
[Illustration: Denier of Conan II. of Brittany]
-----
Footnote 84:
See Halphen, _Comté d’Anjou_, p. 133.
Footnote 85:
The history of Maine at this period has recently been discussed by
Flach, _Les origines de l’ancienne France_, vol. iii., p. 543–9.
Footnote 86:
The native Mancel authorities have little to say about the war of
1063, the course of which is described by William of Poitiers, 103 _et
seq._
Footnote 87:
See the table on page 506.
Footnote 88:
Round. _Calendar of Documents Preserved in France_, No. 937.
Footnote 89:
Rhiwallon was brother of Junquené, the archbishop of Dol, whose
presence at the Norman court during William’s minority has been noted
above. De la Borderie, iii., p. [missing].
Footnote 90:
William of Poitiers (109–112) is the sole authority for this war and
he gives no dates. He definitely asserts the presence of Harold and
his companions in the Norman army, and his narrative contains nothing
irreconcilable with the relevant scenes in the Bayeux tapestry. The
war was probably intended to enforce Norman suzerainty over Brittany,
and the rising of Rhiwallon of Dol probably gave William his
opportunity. De la Borderie, _Histoire de Bretagne_, iii., p.
[missing].
Footnote 91:
The canons of Chartres celebrated his obit on December 11th, a fact
which discounts the story in William of Jumièges that Conan was
poisoned by an adherent of William. If William had wished to remove
Conan the latter would certainly have died before William had sailed
for England.
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF THE ENGLISH SUCCESSION
The idea of a Norman conquest of England was no new thing when the
actual blow fell in the autumn of 1066. The fateful marriage of Ethelred
and Emma, sixty years before, had made it impossible that the politics
of the island and the duchy should ever again be independent of each
other; it led directly to the English expedition of Robert of Normandy
in 1034, and in Edward the Confessor it gave England a king who was half
a Norman in blood, and whose ideas of government were derived from the
political conditions of his mother’s land. To whatever aspect of the
history of this period we may turn, this Norman influence will sooner or
later become apparent; in religion and commerce, as in the narrower
field of politics, the Norman is working his way into the main current
of English national life.
All this, however, is somewhat apart from the question as to the date at
which Duke William began to lay plans for carrying out the conquest of
England in his own person. There are two unknown quantities in the
problem: the date at which it was generally recognised that Edward the
Confessor would leave no direct heir to the English throne, and the
king’s own subsequent intentions with respect to the succession. Had
such an heir been forthcoming in 1066 we may be sure that his
inheritance would have been undisturbed from the side of Normandy, for
William’s claim to succeed his childless cousin by right of
consanguinity was something more than a matter of form. Now Edward was
married in 1045, being then in the very prime of life, and we must
certainly allow for the passage of a reasonable period of time before we
can feel certain that the politicians of England and Normandy were
treating the succession as an open question. In particular it is
difficult to be confident that in 1049, when the negotiations for the
marriage of William and Matilda of Flanders were in progress, the
ultimate childlessness of Edward the Confessor was known to be
inevitable.[92]
A similar uncertainty hangs over the plans which the Confessor formed in
the latter event for the future of his kingdom. His Norman blood, his
early residence in the duchy, and the marked predilection which he
showed for men of Norman race, very naturally lead to the impression
that, in the earlier part of his reign at least, his desire was to
provide for the transmission of his inheritance to his mother’s family.
But even this conclusion is not beyond question. Edward on his accession
in 1042 occupied a most difficult position. After twenty-five years of
Danish rule a very distinct party in the state wished to maintain the
Scandinavian connection. Edward’s recognition as king was mainly the
work of Earl Godwine and his party, and the earl expected and could
enforce full payment for his services. Edward would have shown less than
the little intelligence with which he is to be credited if he had failed
to see that some counterpoise to the power of his overmighty subject
might be found by giving wealth and influence to strangers from across
the Channel. Hence arose that stream of Norman immigration which
distinguishes the reign and the consequent formation of a royalist,
non-national party; for each individual settler must have understood
that all he might possess in the island depended on the king’s favour.
Such a policy was bound sooner or later to produce a reaction on the
part of Godwine and his associates; and thus arose the famous crisis of
the autumn of 1051. Godwine, trying to reassert his influence in the
state, fails to carry with him the other earls of England in an attack
on the king’s favourites and is driven to flee the country. What Godwine
resented was clearly the existence of a rival power at court, and the
apathy in his cause of such men as Leofric of Mercia and Siward of
Northumbria suggests that he was not recognised by them as in any real
sense the champion of national as against foreign influences. With his
flight the first period of the reign of Edward the Confessor ends, and
in the interval before his restoration William of Normandy made his
first appearance on the shores of England.
Of this visit we know very little; the native chronicler of Worcester
simply tells us that “Earl William came from over sea with a great
company of Frenchmen, and the king received him and as many of his
companions as pleased him and let them go again.” The question at once
presents itself, did Edward at this time make any promise of the English
crown to William? If he ever did make an explicit promise to this effect
it can scarcely be placed at any other date, for this was the only
occasion after Edward’s departure from Normandy in 1042 on which the
king and the duke are known to have met in person. The fact that such a
promise forms an essential part of the story of the Conquest as told by
all Norman writers is an argument in its favour which would more than
counterbalance the natural silence of the English authorities, were they
much better informed upon matters of high policy than is actually the
case. But, after all, the question is really of secondary importance,
for in the next year Godwine returned to power, and Edward for the rest
of his reign seems to have made no serious attempt to disturb the
ascendency of the English party.
The death of Godwine in 1053 made little immediate difference to the
political situation in general nor to the existing relations between
Normandy and England. The succession of his son Harold to the earldom of
Wessex provokes no comment on the part of the contemporary chroniclers;
the semi-hereditary character of the great earldoms was by this time
recognised for all working purposes. Nevertheless, we can see that the
accession of Harold to a provincial government of the first rank, and
most probably to the unofficial primacy in the state which had been held
by Earl Godwine, takes place among the chief events in the sequence of
causes which ended in the great overthrow of 1066. On the other hand we
should not be led by the actual cause of the history into the assumption
that Harold’s designs upon the crown had already begun at this early
date. With all his personal weakness, King Edward’s own wishes were
likely to be the decisive factor in the choice of his successor, nor
have we any record that Harold opposed the candidate whom we know to
have received the king’s favour shortly after this time.
This candidate, whose appearance in the field with the king’s sanction
was likely to prove fatal to any aspirations to the throne in which
either William or Harold might have begun to indulge, was Edward the
Etheling, son of the famous Edward Ironside, and therefore nephew by the
half-blood to the Confessor. He had been sent by Cnut into remote exile,
and the summons which brought him back to England as its destined heir
was the work of King Edward himself. By a strange chance, immediately on
his arrival in 1057, and before he had even seen the king, the etheling
fell ill and died,[93] and, although there was something about his end
which was rather mysterious, there is nothing to suggest that it was
accelerated in the interest of any other pretender to the crown. With
his death there really passed away the one promising chance of
perpetuating the old English dynasty, for Edgar, the son of the dead
etheling, who was to live until 1126 at least, can only have been the
merest child in 1057.
[Illustration: SEAL OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR]
It would seem then that 1057 is the earliest possible year from which
the rivalry of William of Normandy and Harold Godwinson for the throne
of England can be dated. The recall of Edward the Etheling suggests that
it cannot be placed earlier, while the state of preparedness in which
both parties are found at the beginning of 1066 shows that their plans
must have been formed for some years at least before the Confessor’s
death. And there is one mysterious episode which may very possibly have
some connection with the change in the succession question caused by the
death of Edward the Etheling. In or about 1058 Earl Harold made a tour
on the continent, reaching as far as Rome, but also including Normandy
and North France generally, and we are told that he made arrangements
for receiving help from certain French powers if he should need it at
any time.[94] The passage in which we are told of these negotiations is
very obscure, but it is by no means improbable that Harold, when the
death of the etheling had opened for him a possibility of succeeding to
the crown, may have tried to find allies who would hamper the movements
of his most formidable rival when the critical time came. Also it is not
without significance that 1058 is the year of Varaville, a date at which
French jealousy of Norman power would be at its height. At any rate we
may at this point stop to consider the relative position occupied by the
earl and the duke respectively with respect to their chances of
succeeding to the splendid inheritance of the oldest dynasty in Western
Europe.
The first point which deserves discussion is the nature of the title to
the English crown. “Hereditary” and “elective,” the words which one
naturally contrasts in this connection, are terms of vague and
fluctuating meaning in any case, while it has always been recognised
that neither can be employed in relation to the tenure of the crown at
any period of English history without due qualification. To say simply
that the English monarchy was “elective” at the period with which we are
dealing, is an insufficient statement unless we also consider the limits
within which the choice lay on any given occasion, the process involved
in the act of election, and the body which exercised the elective right.
With regard to the first of these matters there undoubtedly existed an
ancient and deep-seated feeling that a king should only be chosen from a
kingly stock; in the eleventh century the sentiment still survived with
which at an earlier period the nation had demanded that its rulers
should have sprung from the blood of the gods. This idea was far older
than any feeling of nationality, to which it might from time to time run
counter—it helps, for instance, to explain the ease with which the
English had accepted the royal Dane Cnut for their ruler—but with this
highly important reservation it is very improbable that the succession
was determined by anything which could be called general principles. The
crown would naturally pass to the most popular kinsman of the late
ruler, and the question of the exact relationship between the dead king
and his heir would be a secondary matter.
William of Normandy was of sufficiently noble birth to satisfy the
popular sentiment in the former respect, for Rollo himself was the scion
of an ancient line of Norwegian chieftains. Harold on his mother’s side
inherited royal blood, for Gytha, Earl Godwine’s wife, was descended
from the family of the kings of Sweden; but whereas no writer near the
time remarks on this feature in Harold’s descent, the origin of the
“jarls of Normandy” was still a living memory in the north. Far more
important in every way, however, was the undoubted kinship between
William and King Edward, a fact which William made the very foundation
of his claim and which was undoubtedly recognised by the men of the time
as giving him an advantage which could not be gainsaid. At the present
day, indeed, it is rather difficult to understand the influence
exercised by the somewhat distant relationship which was all that united
William and Edward, especially in view of the fact that Edgar, son of
Edward the Etheling, still continued the male line of the royal house of
Wessex. We can only explain it on the ground that in 1066 Edgar was
under the age at which he would be competent to rule independently, and
that the public opinion of the time would not accept a minor as king so
long as there existed another candidate connected with the royal house
and capable of taking up the reins of government in his own hands. In
fact, of the three candidates between whom the choice lay on the
Confessor’s death William, after all, was the one who combined the
greatest variety of desirable qualifications. Edgar was nearest to the
throne by order of birth, but his youth placed him at a fatal
disadvantage; Harold was a man of mature years and of wide experience in
the government, but his warmest supporters could not pretend that he was
a kinsman of King Edward; William was already a ruler whose fame had
spread far beyond the borders of his own duchy, and in the third
generation he could claim a common ancestor with the dead king. Lastly,
we should remember that the fact which under modern conditions would
outweigh all other considerations, the fact that William was a
foreigner, was less important in the eleventh century than at any later
time. It was certainly a disadvantage, but one which was shared in a
less degree by both William’s competitors: if he was a pure Norman,
Harold was half a Dane, Edgar was half a German. The example of Cnut
showed that there was nothing to prevent a man of wholly foreign blood
from receiving general acceptance as king of England; and if the racial
differences which existed in the country prepared the way for his
reception, something of the same work was done for William by those
Normans who had flocked into England under King Edward’s protection.
In all those cases in which the late king had left no single, obvious,
heir to the throne, the succession would naturally be settled by the
great men of the land—by that informal, fluctuating body known as the
“witan.” So far as we can tell, the witan would be guided in part by the
prevailing popular opinion, but more effectually by the known wishes of
the dead sovereign with respect to his successor; we know, for instance,
that both these influences contributed to the election of Edward the
Confessor himself.[95] It is, however, probable that, so far from the
elective nature of the monarchy having been a main principle of English
institutions from the earliest date, the idea was really an importation
of the eleventh century. It has recently been suggested that the action
of the witan in early times with regard to the choice of a new king was
something which would be much better described as “recognition” than as
election in any modern sense, that there is no evidence to prove that
the witan behaved as a united body, and that it was the adhesion of
individual nobles to the most likely heir which really invested him with
the royal power.[96] According to this account, such traces of election
in the wider sense as are discernible in the eleventh century may with
probability be set down to Danish influence, for the three Scandinavian
nations had advanced much further than other Teutonic peoples in the
development of their native institutional forms. But, even so, there is
much in the history of the year 1066 to suggest that the older ideas
still prevailed: William claimed the throne by hereditary right and it
was the submission of Stigand, Edwin, Morcar, Edgar the Etheling, and
the citizens of London, not the vote of any set assembly, which gave
sanction to his claim.
In the light of this anticipation we may now consider the most
perplexing question in William’s life, the truth underlying the famous
story of Harold’s visit to Normandy and the oath which he there swore to
William. Unlike most questions relating to the eleventh century, the
difficulty in the present case arises from the wealth of our information
on the subject; with the exception of those purely English writers
Florence of Worcester and the authors of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the
significance of whose silence will be seen shortly, every historical
writer of the fifty years succeeding the Conquest tells the story at
length, and no two writers tell the same story. And yet we cannot safely
reject the tale as fabulous for two reasons: the silence of those who
wrote with native sympathies proves that there was an element of truth
in the Norman story which they did not feel themselves at liberty to
deny, while the rapid diffusion of the tale itself among writers widely
separated in point of place and circumstance would be unintelligible if
it were the result of sheer invention. Nor is a story necessarily
suspicious because its details are romantic.
The skeleton of the tale is that Harold, happening, for reasons
diversely stated, to be sailing in the Channel, was driven by a storm on
to the coast of Ponthieu, and that being thereby regarded as the lawful
prey of the count he was thrown into prison at Beaurain, evidently to be
held to ransom. While Harold was in prison the Duke of Normandy became
apprised of the fact, and sending to Count Guy, who had become his
feudal dependant after the battle of Mortemer, William had Harold
brought with all honour into the duchy. For an indefinite time the earl
stayed at the court of the duke, and even accompanied him on the Breton
expedition which was described in the last chapter; but before his
departure he placed himself under some obligation to his host, the
nature of which is the key to the whole matter, but with regard to which
scarcely any two writers are in unison. There is no doubt that Harold
became William’s man, and it would seem certain that he took an oath
which bore some reference to the rivalry for the English throne in which
both were evidently engaged. Most writers make the essence of the oath
to be a promise on the part of Harold to do all in his power to secure
the crown for William upon Edward’s death, and there is a powerful
current of tradition which asserts that Harold pledged himself to marry
one of William’s daughters. In other words, Harold undertook to
recognise William as king of England in due season, and to secure for
him the adhesion of such of the English nobility as were under his
influence; his marriage with William’s daughter being doubtless intended
to guarantee his good faith when the critical moment came. Such an
agreement would still leave Harold obviously the first man in England;
indeed the relationship which would have been created between William
and Harold, if it had been carried into effect, would in some respects
have reproduced the relationship in which Edward the Confessor had stood
with regard to Earl Godwine in 1042. This fact makes it difficult to
believe that Harold was necessarily acting under compulsion when he took
the oath; he had many rivals and enemies in England, and it was well
worth his while to secure his position in the event of Edward’s death
before his own plans were mature.[97]
William on his part had everything to gain by causing Harold to enter
into such an engagement. If the oath were kept William would have turned
a probable rival into an ally; if it were broken he would secure all the
moral advantage which would accrue to him from the perjury of his
opponent. But there is no reason to believe that he insisted on Harold
taking the oath merely in order that he might break it, nor is there any
good authority for the famous story that William entrapped Harold into
taking a vow of unusual solemnity by concealing a reliquary beneath the
chest on which the latter’s hand rested while he swore. It was
inevitable that an incident of this kind should gather round it a
mythical accretion: but the whole course of the history proves that some
such episode really took place. William’s apologists could put it in the
forefront of their narratives of the Conquest, and all subsequent
writers have dwelt upon it as a main cause of the invasion; yet,
although scepticism is from time to time expressed upon this detail or
that, not one of the historians of the next century, some of whom were
possessed of distinct critical powers, and had access to good sources of
information, has given a hint that the whole story was a myth.
On January 5, 1066, King Edward died, and on Thursday, January 6th, Earl
Harold was chosen as king by the Witan assembled at Westminster for the
Christmas feast, and crowned that same day by Ealdred, archbishop of
York. We possess a circumstantial account of the last days of Edward,
written only a few years after these events, which describes how the
King, within an hour of his death, had emphatically commended his wife
and his kingdom to the care of Harold.[98] With little debate, as it
would seem, the last wishes of the last king of the line of Egbert were
carried into effect; Harold was chosen king forthwith, and on the same
day the sanction of the church made the step irrevocable. England was
now committed to the rule of a king whose title to the crown depended
solely upon the validity of the elective principle, and whose success or
failure would depend upon the recognition which this principle would
obtain among foreign powers, and upon the support which those who had
chosen to accept him as their lord were prepared to extend to him,
should his claim be challenged. Under the circumstances the choice of
Harold was perhaps inevitable. The dying wish of Edward could not with
decency be disregarded; the scene of the election lay in just that part
of the country where the interest of the house of Godwine was at its
strongest; and if traditional custom were to be disregarded and the
royal line forsaken no stronger native candidate could have been found.
On the other hand, there could be no doubt that the event of that
memorable Epiphany was fraught with danger on every side. Even if it had
not thrown defiance to the most formidable prince in Europe, it founded
an ominous precedent, it showed that the royal dignity was not beyond
the grasp of an aspiring subject, it exposed the crown to intrigues of a
class from which England, weak at the best as was its political
structure, had hitherto been exempt. The Norman Conquest was an awful
catastrophe; but at least it saved England from the perils of an
elective monarchy.
[Illustration:
HAROLD ENTHRONED
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY]