of Europe was unmistakable. From Rome to Trondheim every ruler to whom
the concerns of England were a matter of interest realised that a
revolutionary step had been taken. From the crude narrative of the Latin
historian of the Norwegian kings, as from the conventional periods of
the papal chancery, we gather that the accession of Harold was regarded
as an act of usurpation, although there is no unanimity as to the
personality of the rightful heir whom he had supplanted. Old claims,
long dormant, were revived; the kings of Norway and Denmark remembered
that England had once belonged to the Scandinavian world. Had Edgar the
Etheling or William of Normandy been elected, murmurings from this
quarter at least would no doubt have been heard, but they would have
lost half their force: the former could have appealed to the prevailing
sentiment in favour of hereditary right; the latter could in addition
have poured at once into England a military force sufficient to meet all
possible invaders on equal terms. Harold had neither of these
safeguards, and his oath to William had given to the most powerful
section of his opponents an intelligible ground on which to base their
quarrel. Seldom in any country has a new dynasty been inaugurated under
circumstances so full of foreboding.
All this, of course, meant a corresponding increase of strength to
William. Vague as is our knowledge of the negotiations with the several
powers whose good-will was desirable for his enterprise, we can see that
he brought them at least into a general attitude of friendly neutrality.
We are told that the Emperor Henry IV. promised the unqualified support
of Germany if it should be needed,[99] and also that Swegen Estrithson
of Denmark joined William’s side, though our informant adds that the
Danish king proved himself in effect the friend of William’s enemies.
The French crown was, as we have seen, under the influence of Baldwin of
Flanders, William’s father-in-law; and so long as a war of succession
distracted Anjou, William need fear no danger from that quarter. Maine
was a dependency of the Norman duchy. Nothing, in fact, in William’s
history is more remarkable than the way in which, at the very moment of
his great attempt, the whole political situation was in his favour. No
invasion of England would have been possible before 1060, when King
Henry of France and Geoffrey Martel were removed from William’s path,
while the growth of King Philip to manhood and the formation of Flanders
into an aggressive anti-Norman state under Robert the Frisian would have
increased William’s difficulties a thousandfold if Edward the Confessor
had lived for five years longer. In great part William’s advantageous
position in 1066 was due to his own statesmanship; in no small degree it
resulted from the discredit which the national cause of England suffered
in the eyes of Europe from the election of Harold; but above all it must
be set down to William’s sheer good luck. William the Conqueror, like
Napoleon, might have believed in his star without incurring the reproach
of undue superstition.
Of all William’s negotiations that which was most characteristic of the
temper in which he pursued his claim was an appeal to the head of the
church to decide between his right and that of Harold:
“That no rashness might stain his righteous cause he sent to the Pope,
formerly Anselm, bishop of Lucca, asserting the justice of the war he
had undertaken with all the eloquence at his command. Harold neglected
to do this; either because he was too proud by nature, or because he
mistrusted his own cause, or because he feared that his messengers
would be hindered by William and his associates, who were watching all
the ports. The Pope weighed the arguments of both sides, and then sent
a banner to William as an earnest of his kingdom.”[100]
The nature of this transaction should not be misunderstood. By inviting
the papal arbitration William was in no sense mortgaging any of the
royal prerogatives in the island which he hoped to conquer. His action,
that is, does not in any way resemble the step which his descendent John
took a hundred and fifty years later, when he surrendered his kingdom to
Innocent III. to be held thenceforward as a papal fief.[101] William was
simply submitting his cause to the court which was the highest
recognised authority in all matters relating to inheritance, and which
was doubly competent to try the present case, involving as it did all
the questions of _laesio fidei_ which arose out of Harold’s oath. Nor
need we doubt that the verdict given represented the justice of the case
as it would be presented to the pope and his advisers; we know at least,
on the authority of Hildebrand himself, that it was not without an
acrimonious discussion that judgment was given in favour of William. It
would seem, in fact, that it required all the personal influence that
Hildebrand could exercise to persuade the leaders of the church to
commit themselves to the support of claims which, if prosecuted, must
inevitably lead to bloodshed. And in later years Hildebrand told William
that his action had been governed by his knowledge of the latter’s
character, and by the hope that when raised to a higher dignity he would
continue to show himself a dutiful subject of the church.[102]
Hildebrand added that he had not been disappointed; and in fact the
attraction of the great island of the west within the influence of the
ideas of the reformed papacy was worth the suppression of a few scruples
on the part of the Curia.
[Illustration:
HAROLD’S OATH
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY]
Seventy years afterwards the papal court was again called upon to
adjudicate in a dispute relating to the succession to the English
throne, and this under circumstances which deserve notice here as
illustrating the nature of William’s appeal. In 1136, immediately, it
would seem, after the coronation of Stephen, his rival, the Empress
Matilda sent envoys to Pope Innocent II. to protest against the
usurpation. Stephen, wiser in his generation than Harold, replied by
sending his own representative, and the case was argued in detail before
a council specially convened for the purpose by the pope. Just as in the
more famous episode of 1066, the point on which the plaintiff’s
advocates grounded their case was the fact that the defendant had taken
an oath to secure the succession of his rival; and it rested with the
pope to decide whether this oath were valid. It is with reference to
this last point that the parallel between the events of 1066 and 1136
ceases: in the latter case the pope by refusing to give judgment tacitly
acquitted Stephen of the guilt of perjury; in 1066 Harold’s neglect to
lay a statement of his case before the papal court produced its natural
result in the definite decision which was given against him.[103] In
either case it will be seen that what is submitted to the Curia is a
question of law, not of politics; the pope is not regarded as having any
right to dispose of the English crown; he is merely asked to consider
the respective titles of two disputants.
Armed thus with the sanction of the church there lay before William the
serious task of raising an army sufficiently large to meet the military
force at his rival’s command on something like equal terms. Such an army
could not possibly be derived from Normandy alone, great as was the
strength of the duchy in comparison with its area. However favourable
the general outlook might be for William’s plans, he cannot have thought
for an instant of staking the whole resources of Normandy upon a single
venture; a venture of which the possible results might be very brilliant
but of which the immediate risk was very great. Nor was it possible for
William by any stretch of feudal law to summon his vassals and their men
to follow him across the Channel as a matter of right and duty; if he
were to obtain their support he was bound to place the expedition before
them as a voluntary enterprise. Thus stated there can have been little
doubt as to the response which would be made to his appeal. The Norman
conquest of Naples and the Norman exploits in Spain had proclaimed to
the world the mighty exploits of which the race was capable, nor need we
believe that the Normans themselves mistrusted their reputation. And
although William’s contemporary biographer, anxious to display the
magnanimity of his hero, has represented the latter’s subjects as
viewing the enterprise with dismay,[104] it is not really probable that
the Norman knighthood was seriously deterred from adventuring itself for
unlimited gains in the rich and neighbouring island by the prospect of
having to fight hard for them.
In the early part of 1066, but most probably after the termination of
William’s cause at Rome, a council of the Norman baronage met at
Lillebonne[105] to discuss the proposed invasion of England. It is plain
that what most exercised the minds of William and his barons was the
difficulty of building, equipping and manning a number of ships
sufficient for the transport of the army within a reasonable time. In
fact it seems probable that one special purpose of the council was to
ascertain the number of ships which each baron was prepared to
contribute towards the fleet—a matter which lay altogether outside the
general question of military service and could only be solved by
amicable agreement between the duke and his vassals taken individually.
William stipulated that the ships should be ready within the year; a
demand which to some at least appeared impossible of fulfilment; and,
indeed, the creation of an entire fleet of transport vessels within six
months is a wonderful illustration of the energy with which the Norman
nobility adopted the cause of the duke. Transport vessels the ships
were, and nothing else, as is evident from the representation of them in
the Bayeux tapestry, and we are bound to conclude that it was well for
William that his passage of the Channel met with no serious opposition
on the part of Harold. As might be expected, the number of ships
actually provided is very variously given by different writers.
Curiously enough the most probable, because the lowest, estimate is made
by a very late authority, the Norman poet Wace, who says that when he
was a boy his father told him that six hundred and ninety-six ships
assembled at St. Valery. There have also come down to us several
statements of the contribution which the greater barons of Normandy made
to the fleet, which are probably true in substance although the lists
differ among themselves and the totals which they imply exceed the
modest figures presented by Wace.[106] It would appear that William’s
two half-brothers headed the list; Robert of Mortain giving a hundred
and twenty ships, Odo of Bayeux a hundred. The counts of Evreux and Eu,
both members of the ducal family, furnished eighty and sixty ships
respectively. William Fitz Osbern, Roger de Beaumont, Roger de
Montgomery, and Hugh d’Avranches gave sixty ships each; Hugh de
Montfort, fifty. Two men who do not appear in the subsequent history, a
certain Fulk the Lame and one Gerald, who, although styled the
seneschal, is difficult to identify at William’s court, gave forty ships
each. Thirty ships were given by Walter Giffard and by Vulgrin, bishop
of Le Mans; and Nicholas, abbot of St. Ouen, and the son of Duke Richard
III. contributed twenty. An interesting figure in the list is Remi, the
future bishop of Lincoln, who in 1066 was only almoner of Fécamp abbey,
but nevertheless provided a ship and manned it with twenty knights. The
Duchess Matilda herself supplied the ship, named the _Mora_, which was
to carry her husband. One fact stands out clearly enough on the surface
of this list—the great bulk of the fleet was supplied by William’s
kinsmen and by men whom we know to have enjoyed his immediate
confidence, and it is significant that we can recognise in this brief
account just those men who received the greatest spoils of the conquered
land. Among these few names the future earldoms of Kent, Shrewsbury,
Hereford, Chester, Buckingham, Warwick, and Leicester are represented.
Doubtless the rest of the Norman nobility in one way or another
contributed in proportion to its wealth, but we have just accounted for
nearly eight hundred vessels, and it is clear that in the all-important
matter of the fleet William found his fullest support among his
relatives and personal friends.
How far this statement would hold good in relation to the army of the
Conquest is a question which we have no detailed means of answering.
Doubtless the lords of Montfort, Longueville, Montgomery, and their
fellows brought the full complement of their vassals to the duke’s
muster, but the essential fact in the composition of William’s army lies
in the width of the area from which it was recruited. From every quarter
of the French kingdom, and from not a few places beyond its borders,
volunteers crowded in to swell the Norman host. Brittany supplied the
largest number of such volunteers, and next to Brittany came Flanders,
but the fame of William’s expedition had spread beyond the Alps, and the
Norman states in South Italy and Sicily sent their representatives.[107]
And this composite character of the army which fought at Hastings had
deep and abiding results. A hundred years after the Conquest, Henry II.
will still be sending out writs addressed to his barons and lieges
“French and English,” and the terminology here expresses a fact of real
importance. The line of racial distinction which was all-important in
later eleventh-century England was not between Englishmen and Normans,
but between Englishmen and Frenchmen. England fell, not before any
province, however powerful, of the French kingdom, but, in effect,
before the whole of French-speaking Europe, and, by her fall, she
herself became part of that whole. For nearly a hundred years England
had been oscillating between the French and the Scandinavian world; the
events of 1066 carried her finally within the influence of Southern
ideas in religion, politics, and culture.
The French auxiliaries of William have often been described as
adventurers, and adventurers in a sense no doubt they were. But the word
should not be pressed so as to imply that they belonged to a social rank
inferior either to their Norman associates or to the English thegnhood
whom they were to displace,—there should be no talk of “grooms and
scullions from beyond the sea”[108] in this connection. Socially there
was little to distinguish a knight or noble from Brittany or Picardy
from Normans like Robert d’Oilly or Henry de Ferrers; nor, rude as their
ideas of comfort and refinement must seem to us, have we any warrant for
supposing that Wigod of Wallingford or Tochi the son of Outi had been in
advance of either in this respect. Like the Normans themselves the
Frenchmen varied indefinitely in point of origin. Some of them were the
younger sons of great houses, some belonged to the lesser baronage, some
to the greater; Count Eustace of Bologne might by courtesy be described
as a reigning prince. Some of the most famous names in the succeeding
history can be traced to this origin—Walter Tirel was lord of Poix in
Ponthieu, Gilbert of Ghent was the ancestor of the medieval earls of
Lincoln. But the best way of realising the prevalence of this non-Norman
element among the conquerors of England is to work through one of the
schedules which the compilers of Domesday Book prefixed to the survey of
each county, giving the names of its land-owners, and to note the
proportion of “Frenchmen” to pure Normans. In Northamptonshire, for
example, among forty-three lay tenants there occur six Flemings, three
Bretons, and two Picards, and Northamptonshire in this respect is a
typical county.
At or about the time of the council of Lillebonne there is reason to
believe that messages were passing between William and Harold concerning
the fulfilment of the fateful oath. It is fairly certain that William
demanded the surrender of the crown and Harold’s immediate marriage to
his daughter, agreeing in return to confirm him in his earldom of
Wessex, which last is probably what is meant when our rhetorical
informants tell us that William promised to grant half the kingdom to
his rival. Such negotiations were bound to fall through; Harold had gone
too far to withdraw, even if he had been so minded, and William’s object
in making these proposals could only have been to maintain in the eyes
of the world the appearance of a lawful claimant deprived of his
inheritance. Also we may be quite sure that the building of the fleet
was not interrupted during the progress of the negotiations.
The difficulties of Harold’s reign began early. The weakness of his
position was revealed at the outset by the refusal of Northumbria to
accept him as king, a refusal very possibly prompted by Earl Morcar, who
could not be expected to feel much loyalty towards the new dynasty. By
making a special journey to York, Harold succeeded in silencing the
opposition for the moment, and his marriage with Ealdgyth, the sister of
Earls Edwin and Morcar, which may be dated with probability to about
this time,[109] was very possibly intended to conciliate the great
midland house. It would certainly serve as a definite assertion that
Harold had no intention of fulfilling that part of his oath to William
which pledged him to a marriage with the duke’s daughter, nor can we
doubt that Harold realised the expediency of providing an heir to his
crown with the least possible delay. At any rate he seems to have been
enjoying a few weeks of tranquillity after his visit to York when he
received an unmistakable intimation of the coming storm, which was none
the less ominous because its immediate results were insignificant.
Tostig, the dispossessed earl of Northumbria, had spent the winter of
1065–6, as we have seen, with Baldwin of Flanders,[110] a fact which is
suggestive when we remember the relations between Baldwin and William of
Normandy. It is evident that Tostig was spending the period of his
banishment in forming schemes for his restoration, and the fact that his
brother on becoming king dare not or would not recall him made him
inevitably a willing tool of William’s policy. Accordingly, early in
1066 Tostig moved from Flanders into Normandy, appeared at the duke’s
court, and urged him on to an invasion of England. It is quite possible
that he was present at the assembly of Lillebonne; one writer goes so
far as to say that the arguments of Tostig contributed largely to
persuade the Norman nobility to undertake the enterprise,[111] and
William may have derived some little advantage from the fact that he
could point to one man of high rank among the English nation as an
adherent. But it would seem that Tostig was unwilling to await the
development of his host’s plans, and in May he set off from the Cotentin
on an expedition of his own intended to ravage the English coasts. He
landed first in the Isle of Wight, where the inhabitants bought him off
with money and provisions, and then sailed, ravaging the coast of Sussex
and Kent, until he came to Sandwich. At Sandwich he raised a small force
of sailors, but at the same time the news of his expedition was brought
to his brother in London, who at once set out for the Kentish coast.
Before he could reach Sandwich, however, Tostig had started northward
again and finally entered the Humber with sixty ships, harrying the
coast of Lindsey. Upon receiving the news Earls Edwin and Morcar, having
called out the local fyrd, marched with it to the Humber and compelled
Tostig to take refuge in his ships. At this point Tostig was deserted by
the men of Sandwich whom he had impressed, and, his fleet being now
reduced to twelve ships, he made his way to Scotland and spent the
summer, we are told, with King Malcolm.[112]
Tostig’s futile raid has an interest of its own in the glimpse which it
gives us of the English defences just before the Norman invasion. The
evidence of Domesday Book shows that an Anglo-Saxon king had some sort
of naval force permanently at his disposal, and we know that Harold
built and manned a number of ships to keep the Channel against his
Norman rival, but, from whatever cause, the English navy in this
critical year proved itself miserably ineffective.[113] A mere
adventurer, with no foreign aid of any consequence and no local support
in England, Tostig could still spread devastation with impunity along
half the English coast. The story of Tostig’s expedition reads like a
revival of one of the Danish raids of the ninth century—the enemy sacks
a town, the fyrd are summoned and hurry to the spot to find that the
raiders have just left to plunder the nearest unprotected locality.
Clearly the coast defences of England, for all the bitter experience of
the Danish wars, had made no real advance since the days of Alfred, and
it is not unfair to remark that this fact reflects little credit upon
the statesmanship of Harold. He had himself been an exile and had made a
bid for power by a piratical descent upon England very similar to the
present expedition of Tostig’s. If he really possessed the power, during
the last ten years of the Confessor’s reign, with which he is usually
credited, it should not have been impossible for him to create a naval
force strong enough to counteract such attempts for the future. The
events of 1066 are an excellent illustration of the influence of sea
power in history; wind and weather permitting, an invader could land an
army in England at whatever time and place best suited him. As for
Tostig himself, his expedition had been ignominious enough, but before
the year was out he was to earn immortality by his association with the
last great Scandinavian invasion of England and by the part which he is
made to play in the magnificent saga of Stamfordbridge.
The summer visit of Tostig to Scotland must have been interrupted by
another voyage of greater distance and followed by most momentous
consequences. Very possibly he was dissatisfied with the amount of
immediate support which his claims had received from William of
Normandy; at all events he now made application to a prince of higher
rank, more restless spirit, and still more varied experience in the art
of war. Although there are chronological difficulties in the story which
cannot be discussed here, there can be little real doubt that Tostig in
person sailed to Norway, was received by Harold Hardrada, and incited
the most warlike king in Europe to an invasion of England. As a matter
of fact it is probable that Harold Hardrada, like William of Normandy,
would have made his attempt even if Tostig had never come upon the
scene; the passage of the English crown to a subject house, coming at a
time when there was a temporary lull in the chronic warfare between the
three Scandinavian powers, might remind the king of Norway that he could
himself, if he chose, put forward a decent pretext for an adventure
which would be certain to bring him fame and might rival the exploits of
Swegen and Cnut.[114] The extent of the preparations which Harold
Hardrada had evidently made for his enterprise would of itself suggest
that they were independent of the representations of the banished earl
of Northumbria, while on the other hand Tostig plays too prominent a
part in the Norwegian traditions of the expedition for us to reject his
voyage to Norway as mere myth, and his presence may have had some
influence in determining the objective of the invaders when once they
had touched the shores of England.
After making his appeal to Harold Hardrada, Tostig returned to Scotland
and began to raise a force of volunteers there on his own account. Early
in September the king of Norway set sail from the Sogne Fiord near
Bergen, due west to the subject earldom of the Orkneys and Shetlands,
where he was joined by Paul and Erling, the two joint earls, and by a
large reinforcement of the islanders.[115] From the Orkneys Harold
sailed on without recorded incident as far as the Tyne, where he was
joined, according to agreement, by Tostig with his Scottish auxiliaries,
and then the combined force made for the Yorkshire coast and began
offensive operations by a harrying of Cleveland. Passing southward the
invaders encountered an ineffectual resistance at Scarborough and along
the coast of Holderness, but were able to round Spurn Head without any
opposition from the English fleet. The Humber and the inland waters of
Yorkshire lay open to Harold, and it would seem that as the Norwegian
fleet sailed up the Ouse the English fleet retreated up the Wharfe, for
Harold chose to disembark at Riccall, a village some five miles below
the confluence of these rivers. Riccall was chosen as the headquarters
of the fleet, which could easily block at this point any attempt on the
part of the English vessels to break out to the open sea while Harold
and his army marched straight on York. At Fulford, two miles from the
city, the invaders met the fyrd of Yorkshire under Earls Edwin and
Morcar, and the defeat of the local force led to the surrender of York
four days afterwards. The city was not put to the sack; hostages[116]
were exchanged between Harold and the men of York, and it was very
possibly to await the delivery of further sureties from the rest of the
shire that the king moved out of his new conquest to the otherwise
undistinguished village of Stamfordbridge.
On the following day King Harold of England himself arrived at York.
News of what was happening in Yorkshire must have been brought to London
with extraordinary rapidity, for the battles of Fulford and
Stamfordbridge were fought, as men remarked at the time, within five
days of each other. Harold possessed the permanent nucleus of an army in
the famous body of “huscarles” who resided at his court, and with them
he dashed up the great road from London to York, taking along with him
so much of the local militia of the counties through which he passed as
happened to fall in with his line of march. At Tadcaster, where the
north road crosses the Wharfe, he found and inspected the English
“fleet,” and on Monday, the 25th of September, one day after Harold
Hardrada had entered the capital of Northumbria, it opened its gates to
Harold of England. At this time Harold can have done scarcely more than
pass through the city for the same day he covered the ten miles which
separate York from Stamfordbridge and fell unexpectedly upon the
Norwegian army scattered in utter unpreparedness along either bank of
the Derwent. The Norwegians on the right, or York, bank of the Derwent
were driven into the river by the English attack, and then occurred a
strange incident of which the record, curiously enough, is only
preserved in the chronicle of the distant monastery of Abingdon. It was
essential for the English to get possession of the bridge which spanned
the unfordable river before the Norwegians on the left bank should have
time to form up in line of battle, and we are told:
“There was one of the Norwegians who withstood the Englishmen so that
they could not climb over the bridge and gain the victory. Then one of
the Englishmen shot with an arrow and that did nothing, and then came
another under the bridge and stabbed him underneath his coat of mail,
and then Harold king of the English came over the bridge and his army
with him.”[117]
We have no details of the struggle which must have raged along the
rising ground on which the modern village of Stamfordbridge stands, nor
do we know with certainty how Harold Hardrada and Tostig fell, but it is
clear that the result of that day’s fighting was an unequivocal victory
for the English; the men who had been left in charge of the Norwegian
fleet at Riccall were willing to accept peace at Harold’s hands and were
allowed to depart with their ships to Norway. Harold indeed in this
great fight had proved himself a worthy inheritor of the crown of the
West Saxon kings, and it was a strange destiny which ruled that the last
victory in the struggle of three centuries between Englishman and
Northman should fall to no descendant of Egbert or Alfred, but to an
English king who was half a Northman himself by blood. But a stranger
destiny was it which ruled that one week should see the overthrow of the
last great invader from the north and the opening of a new era for
England in the entry of the greater invader from beyond the Channel.
Harold Hardrada fell at Stamfordbridge on Monday, William of Normandy
landed at Pevensey on Thursday.
[Illustration: Penny of Harold Hardrada]
-----
Footnote 92:
The scheme of policy which Green (_Conquest of England_, 522–524, ed.
1883) founded in relation to their marriage rests upon this
assumption.
Footnote 93:
Poem in _Worcester Chronicle_, 1057.
Footnote 94:
_Vita Eadwardi Confessoris_ (R. S.), 410.
Footnote 95:
_Worcester Chronicle_, 1042: “All the people chose Edward and received
him for King, as it belonged to him by right of birth.”
Footnote 96:
Chadwick, _Studies in Anglo-Saxon Institutions_, Excursus iv., p. 355.
Footnote 97:
The one contemporary account of Harold’s oath which we possess is that
given by William of Poitiers (ed. Giles, 108). According to this
Harold swore (1) to be William’s representative (_vicarius_) at
Edward’s court; (2) to work for William’s acceptance as king upon
Edward’s death; (3) in the meantime to cause Dover castle to receive a
Norman garrison, and to build other castles where the duke might
command in his interest. In a later passage William of Poitiers
asserts that the duke wished to marry Harold to one of his daughters.
In all this there is nothing impossible, and to assume with Freeman
that the reception of a Norman garrison into a castle entrusted to
Harold’s charge would have been an act of treason is to read much
later political ideas into a transaction of the eleventh century.
William was Edward’s kinsman and we have no reason to suppose that the
king would have regarded with disfavour an act which would have given
his cousin the means of making good the claim to his succession which
there is every reason to believe that he himself had sanctioned twelve
years before.
Footnote 98:
_Vita Edwardi Confessoris_ (R. S.), 432.
Footnote 99:
William of Poitiers, 123.
Footnote 100:
William of Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum_, ii., 299.
Footnote 101:
The statement that William promised, if successful, to hold England as
a fief of the papacy is made by no writer earlier than Wace, who has
no authority on a point of this kind.
Footnote 102:
_Monumenta Gregoriana._
Footnote 103:
Round, _Geoffrey de Mandeville_, 8.
Footnote 104:
William of Poitiers, 124.
Footnote 105:
William of Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum_.
Footnote 106:
The list followed here is that printed by Giles as an appendix to the
_Brevis Relatio_. _Scriptores_, p. 21.
Footnote 107:
Guy of Amiens, 34: “Appulus et Caluber, Siculus quibus jacula fervet.”
Footnote 108:
Kingsley, _Hereward the Wake_, ed. 1889, p. 368.
Footnote 109:
This was Freeman’s final view. _N. C._, iii., 625.
Footnote 110:
Florence of Worcester, 1066.
Footnote 111:
Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 120.
Footnote 112:
_Chronicles of Abingdon, Peterborough, and Worcester_, 1066.
Footnote 113:
John of Oxenedes, a thirteenth-century monk of St. Benet of Holme,
asserts that Harold entrusted the defence of the coast to Ælfwold,
abbot of that house. The choice of an East Anglian abbot suggests that
his appointment was intended as a precaution against the Scandinavian
danger.
Footnote 114:
See Introduction, above, page 48.
Footnote 115:
_Heimskringla_, page 165.
Footnote 116:
Simeon of Durham, 1066.
Footnote 117:
This episode forms the last entry in the Abingdon version of the
_Chronicle_, and it is described in a northern dialect.
CHAPTER V
THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE CONQUEST AND THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
The spring and summer of 1066 must have been a time of restless activity
on the part of William and of those who were associated with him in the
preparations for the great enterprise of the autumn. The building of the
fleet was being pushed forward, and volunteers from kindred states were
continually arriving to be incorporated in the Norman army; this much we
may infer from the fact that by August both fleet and army were ready
for the expedition, but we know scarcely anything as to William’s own
movements in the interval. On the fifteenth of June a council was held
at Bonneville at which Lanfranc was appointed abbot of William’s new
foundation of St. Stephen’s Caen, and three days later Cicely, the
eldest daughter of William and Matilda, was formally dedicated to the
religious life at the consecration of her mother’s house, the sister
monastery of the Holy Trinity. The motives which prompted the duke and
duchess to complete their religious undertakings were widely felt among
the Norman baronage. The conquerors of England appear in a somewhat
unaccustomed light as we read the charters by which they gave or
confirmed land, each to his favoured monastery, “when Duke William was
setting out across the sea.” It was fully realised that the enterprise
might end in utter disaster; the prudent abbot of Marmoutier, for
instance, in case of accidents, secured from Robert, the heir of
Normandy, at his father’s request, a confirmation of all the grants
which the latter had made to the house during his reign.[118]
The temporal affairs of Normandy were also discreetly arranged at this
time. Matilda was appointed regent, and was supported by a council
presided over by Roger de Beaumont, a man of age and experience, and a
personal friend of the duke. No doubt if William had perished in England
Robert would have succeeded him, but, although he was now of sufficient
age to make a voluntary confirmation of his father’s grants of land, he
was clearly not old enough to undertake the government of the duchy
during an interregnum. The fact that the expedition itself provided
employment for the great mass of the fighting men of Normandy would
promise a quiet rule for Matilda and her advisers, nor indeed do we hear
of any disturbances taking place in the duchy while William was across
the Channel.
Before the close of August the fleet was ready at last, and lay at the
mouth of the Dive ready to set sail at any moment.[119] The army also
was ready for embarkation, and the only thing which was lacking to the
expedition was a south wind to carry the fleet to the Sussex coast. But
for six weeks at least that south wind refused to blow, and every week
of delay increased William’s difficulties a hundredfold. Nothing could
have been more discouraging to an army of adventurers than week after
week of compulsory inaction; and the fact that William was able to keep
perfect order, among a force part only of which owed direct allegiance
to him as feudal lord, suggests that he possessed qualities of
leadership which were not very common among the captains of his day. At
more than one crisis in his life William had already shown that he could
possess his soul in patience until the moment arrived at which it was
possible to strike, and he must have succeeded in imparting something of
this spirit to his troops in their vigil by the Dive. In the more
definite work of commissariat we know that he proved himself a master;
for no shortage of provisions was felt at any time during the unexpected
delay, and few eleventh-century armies could have remained for a month
in the same quarters without being driven to find their own means of
subsistence in plunder. William’s biographer was justified in remarking
on the fact that the unarmed folk of the neighbourhood could pass to and
fro without trembling when they saw a body of soldiers;[120] and before
the task of provisioning the army by regular means had become an
impossibility, a west wind served to carry the fleet to a point which
offered a shorter passage across into England than that which was
presented by its original station on the Dive.
Within the county of Ponthieu, which had become a member of the Norman
group of vassal states when Count Guy became William’s “man” after the
battle of Mortemer, the estuary of the Somme supplied an excellent
natural harbour beneath the town of Saint Valery. The passage from the
mouth of the Dive seems to have been accomplished without incident, and
William and his forces took possession of their new quarters on the
twelfth day of September. For more than a fortnight the situation did
not seem to have improved in any way; the wind which was carrying Harold
Hardrada down the coast of Yorkshire kept William locked in the mouth of
the Somme. The weather was cold and squally and we have a contemporary
description of the way in which William kept watching the weathercock on
the church tower and of his joy if for a moment the gale drove it to
point northward.[121] The strain of suspense was now beginning to tell
upon the army:
“The common soldiers, as frequently happens, began to murmur in their
tents that the man must be mad to wish to conquer a foreign country,
that his father had proposed to do the same and had been baffled in
the same way, that it was the destiny of the family to try for things
beyond their reach and to find God for their enemy.”[122]
It was clearly necessary to do something to relieve the prevailing
tension, and the expedient chosen was characteristic of the time; the
relics of the patron saint of the town were brought with great solemnity
out of the church, and the casket which contained them was exhibited to
receive the prayers and offerings of the duke and his army. The result
was a convincing proof of the virtue of the bones of St. Valery; without
further delay the south wind blew.[123]
The same day saw the embarkation of the Norman army, the work being
carried through as quickly as possible in evident fear that the wind
might slip round again to its former quarter. Night was falling before
all was ready, and before the duke, after a final visit to the church of
St. Valery, had given his last orders on the Norman shore. It was
important that the fleet should be prevented from scattering in the
darkness, so each vessel was ordered to carry a light, a lantern of
special power adorning the masthead of the duke’s own ship. With the
same object it was directed that the fleet should anchor as soon as it
was clear of the estuary of the Somme, and await further orders. Through
the dead of night the fleet hung outside the harbour, and it was still
dark when the expedition ventured out at last into the open waters of
the Channel. The great body of the ships, each of which carried a heavy
load of horses in addition to its freight of men-at-arms, was inevitably
outstripped by the unimpeded galley which bore William to his destiny;
and when the dawn began to break, the duke found himself out of sight of
the rest of the fleet, and not yet within view of the English shore. In
these circumstances William cast anchor and breakfasted “as it had been
in his own hall,” says one of his companions; and, under the influence
of the wine with which the _Mora_ was well supplied, his spirits rose,
the prospects of his enterprise seemed golden in the morning light, and
he spoke words of encouragement to his companions. And at last the
sailors reported that the rest of the fleet began to come in sight; the
four ships which first appeared together upon the horizon grew more and
more until the man on the look-out could be made by our imaginative
informant to remark that the masts of the fleet showed like a forest
upon the sea.[124] Then the duke weighed anchor for the last time, and
the south wind still holding carried him and his fleet into Pevensey bay
at nine in the morning; the day being St. Michael’s Eve—by an
appropriate chance, for the archangel was highly honoured in the Norman
land.
William’s landing was entirely undisputed; the good luck which, as we
have noticed, waited on his expedition in its diplomatic antecedents,
attended its military details also. During the summer months, Harold,
making what use he could of the antiquated military system of England,
had called out the fyrd, and lined the south coast with troops, which,
however helpless they might be in a pitched battle with the Norman
chivalry, might have brought considerable inconvenience to William, if
they had been in evidence at the moment of his landing. From May to
September the Sussex coast in general, Hastings and Pevensey in
particular, were guarded by the rural forces of the shire.[125] At last,
about the time when William was moving from the Dive to St. Valery, the
patience and provisions of the fyrd gave out together; the rustics had
been kept away from their homes for four times the customary period of
service without anything happening, and they refused to stay on guard
any longer. They probably would not have made any difference to the
ultimate result in any case, nor need we blame Harold for being unable
to keep them together; but the fact is another illustration of the
hopeless inefficiency of the old English state. And then, one week
before William’s landing, Harold had gathered the whole of such
professional soldiers as England contained, and had spent them in the
life-and-death struggle at Stamfordbridge. Harold Hardrada had fallen,
but his overthrow had gone far to exhaust the military resources of
England, and it was a shattered, if victorious, army which was resting
with Harold Godwinson, at York, when a fugitive from Sussex arrived to
tell that William of Normandy had landed, and that the south lay at his
mercy.
William’s first movements in England were very deliberate. His immediate
care was to fortify his position at Pevensey and so protect his fleet
against surprise. At Pevensey, as afterwards at Lincoln, a line of Roman
walling could be turned to account in the construction of a castle,[126]
which was run up in the course of the day; and having thus, like his
Scandinavian ancestors, secured for himself a base of operations if
events turned out ill, William marched to Hastings, which was to be his
base of operations for the rest of the campaign.[127] At Hastings,
therefore, another castle was thrown up, the building, like nearly all
the castles built during the twenty years which followed the Conquest,
consisting merely of a mound, with wooden defences on the top and a
ditch and one or more outer works below. Hastings is a point of
departure for many roads; a fact which no doubt very largely accounts
for William’s choice of the town as his headquarters; for it could
easily be provisioned by supplies from the neighbouring country, and it
lay very conveniently as a base for an attack on London.
The men of east Sussex were not long before they felt the pressure of
the invading army. Most of the villages in the neighbourhood of Hastings
are recorded in Domesday to have been “waste” at some period between the
death of King Edward and 1066, and the connection between these signs of
ravage and William’s camp at Hastings is sufficiently obvious. But it is
not probable that William attempted any systematic harrying of this
district such as that which three years afterwards he carried out with
grim success in the country beyond the Humber; the Sussex villages, as a
rule, had quite recovered their former prosperity by the date of the
great survey. The passage of foraging parties over the land demanding
provisions, which would be none too readily granted, and the other
incidents of a medieval war of invasion, are enough to account for
depreciation of the kind recorded. Harold himself, as he drew towards
Hastings, left traces of his march in similar cases of temporary
devastation, and there is no reason to suppose that William undertook a
deliberate harrying of Sussex in order to provoke Harold to a general
engagement.[128]
[Illustration: THE BUILDING OF HASTINGS CASTLE FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY]
William, indeed, as yet can hardly have known the result of
Stamfordbridge with any degree of certainty. Rumours of the great battle
in the north would no doubt gradually filter down into Sussex during the
week following the event, but for some days after his arrival at
Hastings William cannot have ignored the possibility that it might be a
Norwegian host which would ultimately appear upon the edge of the downs.
Definite news, however, at some unspecified date, was brought to William
by a message from an unexpected quarter.[129] Robert, the son of Wymarc,
a Breton knight, who in some unknown way could claim kindred with both
William and Edward, had been “staller” or master of the horse to the
latter, and had stood together with Harold and Stigand by the king’s
deathbed. Whether he had actually been present at the battle of
Stamfordbridge is uncertain; but shortly after the fight he sent a
messenger to William to advise a speedy withdrawal to Normandy before
something worse happened to him. The message ran that Harold had
destroyed the huge forces of the king of Norway, himself the bravest man
in the world, and that now, inspired by victory, he was turning upon the
duke with a great and enthusiastic army. Rather unwisely Robert went on
to add that the Normans were no match for the English, either in numbers
or bravery, and that William, who had always shown himself discreet
hitherto, would do well to retire at once, or at all events to keep
within his fortifications and avoid a battle in the open field. To this
well-meaning person William replied that his one desire was to come to
blows with Harold, that although Robert’s advice might have been better
expressed yet he thanked him for it, and that if he had with him but ten
thousand instead of sixty thousand men[130] he would never retire
without wreaking vengeance on his enemy. It is not unlikely that
Robert’s message was really inspired by Harold himself, and from one or
two turns of expression in William’s reply we may perhaps gather that he
suspected as much; although it might be thought that Harold, who had
seen something of his rival in past years, cannot have had much hope of
getting rid of him by mere intimidation. However this may be, it is
interesting to find Robert, a prominent member of a class which has
suffered much abuse because of an assumed lack of patriotism towards its
adopted country, playing a part which so admirably saves his duty to his
king and his kinsman alike.
We have two poetical accounts of the way in which the news of William’s
landing was brought to Harold at York. Wace, the Norman poet of the
twelfth century, tells how a Sussex “chevalier” heard the shouting of
the “peasants and villeins” as the fleet drew in to the shore, and how,
attracted by the noise, he came out, hid behind a hill and lay there
until the work of disembarkation was over and the castle at Pevensey
thrown up; then riding off with lance and sword, night and day, to York,
to tell the king the news of what he had seen.[131] Guy, bishop of
Amiens, who wrote within a short time of the event, makes the news of
the Norman arrival be borne by a rustic from Hastings, not Pevensey; and
the details which are told to Harold relate to the devastation caused by
the invaders near Hastings, not to the landing itself.[132] Perhaps
these two stories are not quite incompatible with each other; but we
need not attempt to reconcile them here, in view of the undoubted fact
that Harold was informed of William’s landing within some three days of
the event.
At this crisis Harold acted with astonishing energy. Taking with him his
faithful huscarles, a body sadly thinned by the battle of a few days
before, he hurried southwards by way of Tadcaster, Lincoln, Stamford,
and Huntingdon, the same route which in the reverse direction he had
followed in the previous week; now as then drawing into his force the
fyrd of the shires through which he passed. Edwin and Morcar were
directed to raise the levies of their respective earldoms, and in their
expected absence the government of the north was entrusted to
Marleswegen, the sheriff of Lincolnshire,[133] an Englishman who remains
little more than a name in the narrative of the Conquest, but who, if
Harold had triumphed at Hastings might probably have played an important
part in the history of the following years. How far Harold really
believed in the fidelity of the northern earls is uncertain; they had
shown no overt signs of disaffection during the last months since he had
married their sister. On the other hand, considering the long-standing
rivalry between his house and theirs, and their probable share in the
Northumbrian difficulties at the beginning of his reign, Harold was
perhaps not altogether surprised that Edwin and Morcar, in the words of
Florence of Worcester, “withdrew themselves and their men from the
conflict.” With the best intentions they would have found it difficult
to join him in time for the battle; it would not have been easy for them
to raise the fyrd from all the shires between the Humber and the Tweed
on the one part and between the fens and the Severn on the other, and to
bring the troops to London within the five days which Harold spent
there. For on October 11th,[134] a fortnight after the battle of
Stamfordbridge, Harold set out from London on his last march towards the
Sussex downs.
It is an interesting, but not very profitable, speculation how far
Harold was justified in staking his all upon the result of a single
battle with the invader. With our knowledge of what happened it is
natural to condemn him; he was condemned by the general opinion of the
historians of the next generation, and very possibly their sentence is
right. On the other hand we cannot but feel that we know very little of
the real facts of the case; even the essential question of the relative
numbers of the English and Norman armies cannot be answered with any
degree of accuracy. It may be argued with much plausibility that the
wisest course for Harold would have been to let William work his will
upon the unfortunate inhabitants of Sussex, trusting to time and the
national feeling likely to be aroused by the ravages of an invader to
bring an overwhelming superiority in numbers over to his side. This, we
may be sure, would have been the course taken by William himself in such
a case, but Harold was probably by nature incapable of playing a waiting
game of this kind. His ability, so far as we can tell, lay in sudden
assaults and surprises; the more deliberate processes of generalship
were foreign to his temperament. And then there remains the fact that
the loyalty of Mercia and Northumbria was at least doubtful; delay on
Harold’s part might only mean that Edwin and Morcar with their forces
would have time to come over effectively to William’s side, while
another great victory so soon after Stamfordbridge would have placed
Harold in a position from which, for the time being, he could defy all
rivals. At any rate he took the step, and paid the penalty of failure.
But, whatever we may think of the general wisdom of Harold’s strategy,
it is impossible to deny that he showed a general’s appreciation of the
tactical possibilities of the ground on which he chose to put the fate
of England to the test. After a forced march through the thick woods
which at that time covered the Sussex downs, the king halted his army on
a barren ridge of ground seven miles north-east of the town of Hastings.
It is plain from all the narratives of the forthcoming encounter that
the ridge in question was quite unoccupied at the time of the battle;
and when the English chroniclers wish to describe its site they can only
tell us that Harold and William came together “by the hoar
apple-tree.”[135] The strength of the position was determined, not so
much by the general elevation of the ground, which at no point reaches a
greater height than 300 feet above sea level, as by the fact that it was
surrounded by country very hilly and much broken by streams, and that
its physical features lent natural support to the disposition of an army
which relied for success on its capacity for stolid resistance. The
position was undoubtedly chosen by Harold with the object of forcing his
enemy to an immediate battle; for William could not move either east or
west from Hastings without exposing his base to an English attack; and
Harold, who knew that the main strength of a Norman army lay in its
troops of mailed horsemen, had been careful to offer battle on a site in
which the cavalry arm would be placed by the ground at a natural
disadvantage.[136]
From the nature of the case it has come about that we possess very
little information either as to the numbers of the English army or as to
the details of its formation on the day of battle. The Norman writers,
on whom we are compelled to rely, have naturally exaggerated the former,
nor did any survivor from the English army describe the order of its
battle array to the chroniclers of Worcester or Peterborough. In recent
studies of the great battle there is manifested a strong unwillingness
to allow to either the English or the Norman host more than a small
proportion of the numbers which used to be assigned to it thirty years
ago.[137] It is very improbable that William led more than 6000 men into
action on October 15, 1066, and there is good reason for doubting
whether the knightly portion of his army can have exceeded 5000. Small
as this last number may appear, every man included in it was an
efficient combatant; but the English force was largely composed of
rustics impressed from the shires through which Harold had rushed on his
great march from York to London after the battle of Stamfordbridge, and
even so, it is far from certain that the native force was materially
stronger than the army of invasion. With regard to its distribution, we
know that the English line of battle seemed convex to the Normans on
their approach from the south-east,[138] and it is probable that it ran
for some 800 yards along the hill of battle, the flanks being thrown
well back so as to rest upon the steep bank which bounds the ridge
towards the north. It is certain that the English troops were drawn up
in extremely close order, and it is a natural assumption that Harold
would place the kernel of his army, the huscarles who had survived
Stamfordbridge, in the front rank; stationing his inferior troops in the
rear so as to support the huscarles in resisting the impact of the
Norman cavalry.[139] On the highest point of the whole line, a spot now
marked by the high altar of the Abbey church of Battle, Harold planted
his standard; and it was round the standard that the fight was most
stoutly contested, and that, after seven hours of struggle, the king at
last fell.
In speaking of the generalship displayed by Harold’s rival on this
occasion, it is important to beware of the associations aroused by
modern military terminology. At least if we speak of him as a strategist
or tactician, we should be careful to remember that strategy and tactics
themselves had attained to but a rudimentary stage of development in
Northern Europe in the eleventh century. Recent studies of the battle of
Hastings, the one fight of the period in regard to which we possess a
considerable amount of detailed information, have brought out the fact
that William’s host was far too stiff and unwieldy a body to perform the
complicated evolutions by which it used to be assumed that the day was
won.[140] We should be committing a grave error if we were to suppose
that the Norman army possessed that mobility and capacity for concerted
action among its several divisions which belonged to the forces led by
Turenne or Marlborough. Feudal battles were determined more by the event
of simple collisions of large masses of men than by their manœuvres
when in the field: the skill of a great feudal captain lay chiefly in
his ability to choose his ground so as to give his side the preliminary
advantage in the shock of battle; apart from the example of his personal
valour he had but little influence upon the subsequent fortunes of the
day. On the present occasion William was compelled to fight on the
ground of his opponent’s choice; and this initial disadvantage cost the
Norman leader an indefinite number of his best troops, and, even after
the issue of the battle had been decided, protracted the English
resistance until nightfall had put an end to the struggle. On the other
hand, there was one fatal weakness in the English host which must have
been recognised by the other side already before the fight had begun.
The fact that Harold, for all effective purposes, was totally unprovided
with either archers or cavalry exposed his army to a method of attack
which he was quite unable to parry, and the arrangement of the Norman
line of battle shows that William from the first relied for success on
this advantage. The battle of Hastings was won by the combination of
archery and cavalry against infantry whose one chance of success lay in
the possibility that it might keep its formation unbroken until the
strength of the offensive had been exhausted.[141]
[Illustration:
THE DEATH OF HAROLD
(FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY)]]
In the early morning of the 14th of October the Norman army moved out of
Hastings and advanced across the seven miles of broken country which lay
between the English army and the sea. The march must have been a
toilsome business, and the rapidity with which it was accomplished is
remarkable.[142] At the point marked by the modern village of Telham,
the road from Hastings to Battle passes over a hill which rises to some
350 feet above sea-level, and commands a view of the English position.
On the far side of this hill it is probable that William halted, waited
for his scattered troops to come together, and then drew them out in
order of battle. In his first line he placed his light-armed infantry,
who probably formed a very inconsiderable portion of his army, and were
unprovided with defensive harness. To these inferior troops succeeded
infantry of a higher class, protected by armour, but, like the
light-armed skirmishers in the front rank, armed only with bows and
arrows and slings. The function of the infantry in the coming encounter
was to harass the English with their missiles and tempt them to break
their ranks. Lastly came the main body of the Norman army, the squadrons
of cavalry, on whom it rested to attack the English line after it had
been shaken by the missiles of the previous ranks.[143] The whole army
was further arranged in three great divisions, the native Normans
composing the centre, the Bretons, under the command of Alan, son of
Count Éon of Penthievre, forming the left wing, and the French
volunteers the right.[144] In the centre of the whole line of advance,
the Norman counterpart of the English standard, there was borne the
consecrated banner which William had received from the pope.[145]
So quickly had the march from Hastings been made that the actual
fighting was opened at about nine in the morning[146] by an advance of
the Norman foot. Galled by a heavy fire from the archers, which could
only be answered very ineffectively by the spears and stones which were
almost the sole missile weapons of the English, numbers of the native
troops broke away from their line, in defiance of the strict orders
issued by Harold to the effect that no man should leave his post. In the
meantime, the Norman cavalry had been steadily making its way to the
front in order to take immediate advantage of the disorder caused in the
English ranks by the fire of the archers. But the knights could only
move their horses slowly up the hill; the solidity of the English
formation had not been seriously affected as yet, and the cavalry were
compelled to attack an unbroken line. The result was disaster. The
Breton auxiliaries on the left fell back, the confusion spread rapidly,
and the English, seizing their advantage, sallied forth and drove the
entire Norman line before them in headlong flight down the hill.[147]
Fortunately William had not joined in this first attack in person, and
when in their panic the Normans believed that their leader had fallen,
they were soon recalled to their senses by the sight of the duke with
bared head, laying about him with his spear, and shouting words of
reproof and encouragement.[148] Mounted as they were, the flying knights
could have but little difficulty in outstripping their pursuers, but, if
we may trust the Bayeux tapestry, a number of English and Normans
perished together in the course of the flight, by falling into a deep
depression in the ground situated somewhere between the base of the hill
and the duke’s post. According to the same authority, the bishop of
Bayeux did good service at this moment, restoring order among the
baggage-carriers and camp-followers, who were apparently becoming
infected with the panic which had seized their masters.[149] Between the
duke and his brother, the flight was checked, and then the knights,
eager to avenge their disgrace, rallied, turned, and cut off their
pursuers from their comrades on the hill, making a wholesale slaughter
of them.[150] Mainly through William’s self-possession the Norman rout
had ended after all in a distinct success gained for his side.
As soon as the cavalry had re-formed, the attack on the English position
was resumed; this time under the immediate leadership of the duke. The
struggle at the foot of the hill had given its defenders time to close
their ranks, and the English continued to present an impenetrable front
to the Norman cavalry. All along the line a desperate struggle raged for
some hours, but of its details no tale can be told, although it is
probable that it was at this point in the battle that Gyrth and
Leofwine, Harold’s brothers, fell, and there is good reason for
believing that the former was struck down by the hand of the duke
himself. William, indeed, in all our authorities is represented as the
life and soul of the attack, “more often calling to his men to come on
than bidding them advance” says William of Poitiers; he had three horses
killed under him before the day was over, and he did all that might be
done by a feudal captain to keep his troops together and to inspire them
by his example. But notwithstanding his exertions it is evident that the
English were more than holding their own,[151] and a second repulse
suffered thus late in the day by the Norman cavalry would almost
certainly have passed into a rout of the whole army. At this crisis it
occurred to some cunning brain, whether that of the duke or another,
that it might be possible by feigning flight to tempt the English troops
to break their formation, and then, by turning on suitable ground, to
repeat the success which had ended the real flight in the forenoon. The
movement was easily carried out; a body of Normans rode away, and a
crowd of Englishmen, regardless of everything except the relief from the
immediate strain of keeping their ranks, hurled themselves down the hill
shouting curses and cries of victory. No discipline could have been kept
under the circumstances, and when the galloping knights suddenly spread
out their line, wheeled around their horses, and surrounded the
disordered mob of their pursuers the latter were ridden down and cut to
pieces by scores.[152]
[Illustration:
FOSSE DISASTER, BATTLE OF HASTINGS
FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY]
It is, of course, impossible to estimate the actual extent of the loss
which the English sustained in the episode of the feigned flight, but
there can be little doubt that its success marks the turning-point in
the fortune of the day. No incident in the great battle made a deeper
impression upon the historians who have described it for us, and the
tale of the feigned flight is told in different narratives with great
variety of circumstance and detail. But from the writers who lived
nearest to the time we may infer with tolerable certainty that the
manœuvre in question was a sudden expedient, devised and acted upon
without previous organisation, and also that it was a simple, not a
combined movement. The whole business of decoying the English from the
hill, turning upon, and then surrounding them, was the work of one and
the same body of knights. On the other hand, it is probably incorrect to
speak of the feigned flight in the singular, for our best authority
distinctly asserts that the same stratagem was used twice[153]; fighting
was going on along a front of at least half a mile in length, and
different sections of the Norman army may very well have carried out the
movement at different times, and in complete independence of each other.
However this may be, the effect of the manœuvre was soon apparent.
The English line, though shrunken in numbers, closed its ranks and kept
its formation, wedged together so tightly that the wounded could not
fall behind to the rear, nor even the dead bodies drop to the ground.
But the superior endurance of the Norman troops was beginning to tell;
the English were rapidly losing heart,[154] and the consummation of
William’s victory only waited for the destruction of King Harold, and of
the warriors who fought with him round the standard.
The attack which finally beat down the resistance of the English line
seems to have been delivered from some point to the south-east of the
hill.[155] The battle had already continued for seven or eight hours,
and twilight was beginning to fall,[156] but its approach could only
remind the shaken remnant of the native host that the day was lost, and
the end of the great fight was now very near. It was in the last
confused struggle which raged round the standard in the fading light
that Harold met his death; and then his companions, tired out and
hopeless of reinforcement, yielded the ground they had defended for so
long, and broke away to the north-west along the neck of land which
connects the hill of battle with the higher ridges of the downs beyond
it. The victors followed in hot pursuit; but a strange chance gave to
Harold, in the very hour of his death, a signal revenge over the men at
whose hands he had just fallen. A little to the west of the original
position of the English army one of the head-waters of the Asten had cut
a deep ravine, of which the eastern face was so steep as to be a
veritable trap for any incautious horsemen who might attempt to ride
down it. In the gathering darkness knight after knight, galloping after
the English fugitives in secure ignorance of the ground, crashed down
into this gully; and the name Malfosse, borne throughout the Middle Ages
by the ravine in question, bears witness to the extent of the disaster
which the victorious army suffered at this point.[157] Harold, after he
had lost life and kingdom, was still justified of the ground which he
had chosen as the place of battle.
Late in the night William returned to the battlefield and pitched his
tent there. There could be no doubt that he had gained an unequivocal
victory; his rival was dead, the native army annihilated; he could well
afford to give his troops the rest they needed. The early part of the
following day was spent in the burial of the Norman dead; the work being
carried out under the duke’s immediate care. The English folk of the
neighbourhood soon came in numbers to the battlefield and begged for the
bodies of their fallen kinsfolk, which they were allowed to carry away
for burial; but the unclaimed corpses were left strewn about the hill.
Before long the bodies of Harold, Gyrth and Leofwine were found lying
close together; but Harold’s corpse had been horribly mangled, and,
according to the later romantic story, it was only identified by means
of certain marks upon the body which were known and recognised by the
dead man’s mistress, Edith the Swan-necked. Towards the close of the
morrow of the battle, William returned to his castle at Hastings,
bearing Harold’s body with him for burial upon the shore in
unconsecrated ground as befitted an excommunicate, and an urgent message
from Gytha, Godwine’s widow, offering for her son’s body its weight in
gold, did nothing to shake his purpose.[158] With characteristic irony
William remarked that it was but fitting that Harold in death should be
appointed guardian of the shore and sea, which he had tried to defend in
life; and the dead king’s body, wrapped in a purple robe, was laid out
of sight somewhere among the rocks along the shore of Hastings bay.
Later tradition indeed asserted that Harold before long was translated
from this unhallowed grave to a tomb in the minster of the Holy Cross at
Waltham, which he had founded three years before[159]; but the authority
on which this story depends is none of the best, and, for all that we
really know to the contrary, the last native king of England is still
the guardian of the Sussex shore.
Harold, above all kings in English history with the possible exceptions
of Richard III. and Charles I., was happy in the circumstances of his
death. He gained thereby an immediate release from the performance of an
impossible task, and he was enabled to redeem the personal ambitions
which governed his past life by associating them in the moment of his
fall with the cause of the national independence of England. It has been
possible for historians to regret the outcome of the battle of Hastings
only because it overthrew Harold before he could prove the hopelessness
of the position in which he had placed himself. What chance had he, a
man of uncertain ancestry and questionable antecedents, of completing
the work which had overcome every king before him: the work of
reconciling the antagonism of north to south, of making the royal word
supreme in the royal council, of making the provincial nobility of
England and its dependents the subjects of the king and of the king
only? It may well be that such a task would have proved beyond the power
of any native king, though descended from the immemorial line of Cerdic;
how could it be completed by an ambitious earl, invested indeed with the
royal authority, but crippled in its exercise by the bitter rivalry of
men who had formerly been his fellow-subjects; whose birth was more
noble, whose wealth was scarcely less, who, in opposition to his rule,
could rely upon endless reserves of local patriotism, the one source of
political strength which the land contained? To genius, indeed, all
things are possible, but to ascribe genius to this commonplace,
middle-aged earl would be to do sheer violence to the meaning of words.
Harold will always hold a noble place in the record of English history;
but he owes that place solely to the events of his last month of life,
when the terrible necessity of straining every faculty he possessed in
the support of his trembling throne roused in him a quickness of
perception and a rapidity of action which his uneventful career as earl
of Wessex could never have called into being. Harold was undoubtedly the
best captain that England had seen since the death of Edmund Ironside,
just fifty years before the battle of Hastings; but the work which
Harold had undertaken would have called for quite other powers than
those which he revealed so unexpectedly on the eve of his death. William
the Conqueror, endowed as he was by nature with the faculties of a great
ruler to an extent perhaps without parallel in English history; superior
by the fact that he came in by conquest to all the local jealousies
which distracted Anglo-Saxon politics; and with unique opportunities of
recasting the social and tenurial features of English life; could only
create a strong and uniform government in England after three years of
almost incessant war, the reduction of a third of England to a
wilderness, and the remodelling in principle of the whole fabric of the
English administration, civil and military. When it is remembered that
the resistance to William was made essentially on grounds not of
national feeling, but of local particularism, and that these forces
would undoubtedly have conspired against Harold as they afterwards
conspired against his rival, we can only conclude that fate was kind
which slew Harold in the heat of battle in a noble cause, instead of
condemning him to witness the disintegration of his kingdom, in virtual
impotence, varied only by spasmodic outbreaks of barren civil war.
[Illustration: Penny of Harold II.]
CHAPTER VI
FROM HASTINGS TO YORK
Catastrophic as the battle of Hastings seems to us now, in view of the
later history, its decisive character was not recognised at once by the
national party. The very incoherence of the Anglo-Saxon polity brought a
specious advantage to the national cause, in that the defeat of one part
of the nation by an invader left the rest of the country comparatively
unaffected by the fact. The wars of Edmund Ironside and Cnut, fifty
years before, show us groups of shires one after the other making
isolated attempts to check the progress of the enemy, and few men could
already have realised that the advent of William of Normandy meant the
introduction of new processes of warfare which would render hopeless the
casual methods of Anglo-Saxon generalship. Neither side, in fact,
understood the other. William, on his part expecting that the total
overthrow of the English king with his army would imply the immediate
submission of the whole land, took up his quarters at Hastings on the
day after the battle to receive the homage of all those Englishmen who
might come in person to accept him as their lord. The passage of five
days without a single surrender taught him that the fruits of victory
would not fall into his hands without further shaking, and meanwhile the
English nobility began to form plans for a continued resistance to his
pretensions in the name of another national king.
Who that king should be was the first question which demanded
settlement. There was no hope of preserving the English crown in the
house of Godwine: the events of the past three weeks had been fatal to
all the surviving sons of the old earl, with the exception of Wulfnoth
the youngest, and he was most likely a prisoner or hostage in
Normandy.[160] Harold’s one legitimate son was most probably as yet
unborn; he had at least three illegitimate sons of sufficient age, but
their candidature, if any one had suggested it, would certainly have
been inacceptable to the churchmen on whom it rested to give ultimate
sanction to any choice which might be made. Two alternatives remained:
either a return might be made to the old West Saxon line in the person
of Edgar the Etheling, or a new dynasty might be started again by the
election of Edwin or Morcar. The one advantage which the former
possessed, now as earlier in the year, was the fact that his election
would not outrage the local particularism of any part of the country; it
might not be impossible for Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria to unite
round him in a common cause. Nor was it unnatural that in this hour of
crushing disaster men’s minds should involuntarily turn to the last male
heir of their ancient kings. Apart from these considerations, there was
something to be said in favour of the choice of one of the northern
earls. It must have been clear that Mercia and Northumbria would have to
bear the brunt of any resistance which might subsequently be made to the
invader, whose troops were already occupying the eastern shires of the
earldom of Wessex, and who would be certain before long to strike a blow
at London itself. But the success of Harold’s reign had not been such as
to invite a repetition of the experiment of his election. Edgar the
Etheling was chosen king, and the two brother earls withdrew to
Northumbria, imagining in their own minds, says William of Malmesbury,
that William would never come thither.[161]
This motive gives an interest to their withdrawal which is lost if we
regard it as a mere act of treachery to the national cause. There can be
little doubt that what Edwin and Morcar intended was a partition of the
kingdom between themselves and William, and it is at least questionable
whether such a plan had not a better prospect of success than an attempt
to recover the whole land for a king who had no personal qualities of
leadership, and who could never hope to attach to himself any of that
local sentiment in which lay the only real strength of the national
party. The idea of a divided kingdom was by no means chimerical. Old men
still living could remember the partition made by the treaty of Alney
between Edmund Ironside and Cnut, and it was not a sign of utter folly
for any man to suppose, within a week of the battle of Hastings, that
William, having settled his score with Harold, might content himself
with his rival’s patrimonial earldom of Wessex, leaving the north of
England to its existing rulers. No one at this date could be expected to
understand the extent to which William’s political ideas differed from
those of Cnut; nor need we suppose that Edwin and Morcar were mistaken
as to the reality, though they may have overestimated the military
value, of the feeling for local independence in their two great
earldoms. In the case of Northumbria, indeed, even after William’s
presence had been felt in every part of the land, so acute an observer
as Archbishop Lanfranc insisted on the subordination of the see of York
to that of Canterbury on the ground that an independent archbishop of
York might canonically consecrate an independent king of the
Northumbrians.[162] What was lacking to the plan was not local
separatism, but the skill and consistency of purpose which alone could
turn it to account. Neither the ignominious failure of Edwin and Morcar,
on the one hand, nor the grandiose phrases of chancery clerks about the
“Empire of Britain,” on the other, should blind us to the fact that
England was united only in name until the strong rule of its Norman
lords had made the king’s word as truly law in Yorkshire as in
Middlesex.
While the English leaders were disposing of their crown William was
pursuing his deliberate course towards London by a route roughly
parallel with the coast of Kent and Sussex. His delay at Hastings had
not been time wasted; it allowed his troops to recover from the strain
and excitement of the great battle, and it gave him the opportunity of
receiving badly needed reinforcements from Normandy. On the 20th of
October, six days after the battle, the second stage of the conquest
began; William, with the main body of his army, moved out of Hastings,
leaving a garrison in the newly built castle, and marched across the
border of Kent to Romney. The men of the latter place had cut off a body
of Norman soldiers who had landed there by mistake before the battle of
Hastings; and the most famous sentence written by the Conqueror’s first
biographer relates how William at Romney “took what vengeance he would
for the death of his men.”[163] Having thus suggested by example the
impolicy of resistance, a march of fifteen miles between the Kentish
downs and the sea brought William to the greatest port and strongest
fortress in south England, the harbour and castle of Dover. The
foundation of the castle had probably been the work of Harold while earl
of Wessex, and, standing on the very edge of the famous cliffs
overhanging the sea, the fortress occupied a site which to Englishmen
seemed impregnable, and which was regarded as very formidable by the
Norman witnesses of this campaign.[164] The castle was packed with
fugitives from the surrounding country, but its garrison did not wait
for a formal demand for its surrender. Very probably impressed by what
had happened on the previous day at Romney, they met William half way
with the keys of the castle, and the surrender was duly completed when
the army arrived at Dover. It was William’s interest and intention to
treat a town which had submitted so readily as lightly as possible, but
the soldiers, possibly suspecting that the booty of the rich seaport was
to be withheld from them, got out of hand for once, and the town was set
on fire. William attempted to make good the damage to the citizens, but
found it impossible to punish the offenders as he wished, and ended by
expelling a number of Englishmen from their houses, and placing members
of his army in their stead.[165] Eight days were spent at Dover, during
which the fortifications of the castle were brought up to an improved
standard, and then William set out again “thoroughly to crush those whom
he had conquered.” But before his departure he appointed the castle as a
hospital for the invalided soldiers; for dysentery, which was set down
at the time to over-indulgence in fresh meat and strange water, had
played havoc with the army.[166]
With the surrender of Dover William’s communications with Normandy were
firmly secured, and he now struck out directly towards his destined
capital, along the Roman road which then, as at every period of English
history, formed the main line of communication between London and the
Kentish ports. Canterbury was the first place of importance on the way,
and its citizens followed the prudent example of the men of Dover.
Before William had gone far from Dover, the Canterbury men sent
messengers who swore fealty to him, and gave hostages, and—an act which
was a more unequivocal recognition of his title to the crown—brought him
the customary payment due yearly from the city to the king. From this
point, indeed, William had little reason to complain of the paucity of
surrenders; the Kentishmen, we are told, crowded into his camp and did
homage “like flies settling on a wound.”[167] But the even course of his
success was suddenly interrupted. On the last day of October, he took up
his quarters at a place vaguely described by William of Poitiers as the
“Broken Tower,” and was there seized by a violent illness, which kept
him for an entire month incapable of moving from the neighbourhood of
Canterbury. But, if we can trust the chronology of our authorities, it
was during this enforced delay that William received the submission of
the capital of Wessex. Winchester at this time had fallen somewhat from
its high estate under the West Saxon kings; along with certain other
towns it had been given by Edward the Confessor to his wife Eadgyth as
part of her marriage settlement, and it was now little more than the
residence of the dowager queen. On this account, we are told that
William thought it would be unbecoming in him to march and take the town
by force and arms, so he contented himself with a polite request for
fealty and “tribute.” Eadgyth complacently enough agreed, took counsel
with the leading citizens, and added her gifts to those which were
brought to William on behalf of the city.[168] This ready submission was
a fact of considerable importance. Winchester lay off the track of an
invader whose objective was London, and apart from his illness William
could scarcely have afforded to part with a detachment of his small army
sufficiently large to make certain the capture of the town. Yet the old
capital was a most ancient and honourable city, containing the hall of
the Saxon kings, in which probably were deposited the royal treasure and
regalia; and its surrender with the ostentatious approval of King
Edward’s widow was a useful recognition of William’s claim to be the
true heir of the Saxon dynasty. In his dealings with Winchester the
Conqueror’s example was followed by William Rufus, Henry I., and
Stephen, though the paramount necessity for them of seizing the royal
hoard at the critical moment of their disputed successions made them
each visit the royal city in person.[169]
On his recovery, at or near the beginning of December, William resumed
his advance on London. Doubtless Rochester made a peaceful surrender,
but we have no information as to this, nor as to any further details of
the long march until it brought the Conqueror within striking distance
of London. London, it is plain, was prepared for resistance; and the
narrow passage of the bridge, the only means of crossing the river at
this point, made the city virtually impregnable from the south. William
was not the man to waste valuable troops in a series of hopeless
assaults when a less expensive method might prevail, and on the present
occasion he merely sent out a body of five hundred knights to
reconnoitre. A detachment of the English was tempted thereby to make a
sally, but was driven back across the bridge with heavy loss, Southwark
was burned to the ground,[170] and William proceeded to repeat the plan
which had proved so successful in Maine three years before. Abandoning
all attempt to take the city by storm, he struck off on a great loop to
the west, and his passage can be traced clearly enough in Domesday Book
by the devastation from which a great part of Surrey and Berkshire had
not fully recovered twenty years afterwards. The Thames was crossed at
last at Wallingford, and it was there that William received the
submission of the first Englishman of high rank who realised that the
national cause was doomed. Stigand, the schismatic archbishop of
Canterbury, did homage and swore fealty, explicitly renouncing his
allegiance to Edgar the Etheling, in whose ill-starred election he had
played a leading part.[171] The weakness of Stigand’s canonical
position, which was certain to be called in question if William should
ever be firmly seated on the throne, made it advisable for him to make a
bid for favour by an exceptionally early submission, and it was no less
William’s policy graciously to accept the homage of the man who was at
least the nominal head of the church in England. Probably neither party
was under any misapprehension as to the other’s motives; but in being
suffered to enjoy his pluralities and appropriated church lands for
three years longer Stigand was not unrewarded for his abandonment of the
national cause at the critical moment.
The exact time and place at which the remaining English leaders gave in
their allegiance are rather uncertain. There is some reason, in the
distribution of the lands which Domesday implies to have undergone
deliberate ravage about this time, to suppose that, even when William
was on the London side of the Thames, he did not march directly on the
city, but continued to hold a north-easterly course, not turning
southwards until he had spread destruction across mid-Buckinghamshire
and south-west Bedfordshire. The next distinct episode in the process of
conquest occurred at a place called by the _Worcester Chronicle_
“Beorcham,” where allegiance was sworn to William on a scale which
proved that now at last his deliberate policy had done its intended
work, and that the party of his rival had fallen to pieces without
daring to contest the verdict given at Hastings in the open field. Edgar
the king-elect, and Archbishop Ealdred of York, with the bishops of
Worcester and Hereford, and a number of the more important citizens of
London “with many others met him [William], gave hostages, made their
submission, and swore fealty to him.” And William of Poitiers tells us
that when the army had just come in sight of London the bishop and other
magnates came out, surrendered the city, and begged William to assume
the crown, saying that they were accustomed to obey a king, and that
they wished to have a king for their lord. One is naturally tempted to
combine these two episodes, but this can only be done by abandoning the
old identification of “Beorcham” with Great Berkhampstead, thirty miles
from London, and by assuming the surrender to have taken place when the
army appeared on the edge of the Hertfordshire Chilterns overlooking the
Thames Valley, fifteen miles away, from the high ground of Little
Berkhampstead near Hertford.[172]
Whatever the exact place at which the offer of the crown was made to
William, it was straightway submitted by him to the consideration of the
chiefs of his army. Two questions were laid before them: whether it was
wise for William to allow himself to be crowned with his kingdom still
in a state of distraction, and—this last rather a matter of personal
feeling than of policy—whether he should not wait until his wife could
be crowned along with him. Apart from these considerations, the
assumption of the English crown was a step which concerned William’s own
Normans scarcely less intimately than his future English subjects. The
transformation of the duke of the Normans into the king of the English
was a process which possessed a vital interest for all those Normans who
were to become members of the English state, and William could not well
do less than consult them on the eve of such a unique event. As to the
ultimate assumption of the crown by William, no two opinions were
possible: Hamon, viscount of Thouars, an Aquitanian volunteer of
distinction, in voicing the sentiments of the army, began by remarking
that this was the one object of the enterprise; but he went on to
advocate a speedy coronation on the ground that were William once
crowned king resistance to him would be less likely undertaken and more
easily put down. With quite unintentional irony he added that the wisest
and most noble men of England would surely never have chosen William for
their king, unless they had seen in him a suitable ruler and one under
whom their own possessions and honours would probably be increased. To
guard against any wavering on the part of these “prudentissimi et optimi
viri,” William immediately sent on a detachment to take possession of
London and to build a castle in the city, while he himself, during the
few days which had to pass before the Christmas feast for which he had
fixed his coronation, devoted himself to sport in the wooded country of
south Hertfordshire.[173]
Of the deliberations within London which led to this unconditional
surrender on the part of the national leaders, we know little with any
certainty, but it is not improbable that at some stage in his great
march William had entered into negotiations with some of the chief men
in the etheling’s party. Our most strictly contemporary account of these
events[174] makes the final submission the result of a series of
messages exchanged between the duke and a certain “Esegar” the Staller,
on whom as sheriff of London and Middlesex fell the burden of providing
for the defence of the city. We are given to understand that William
sent privately to “Esegar” asking that he should be recognised as king
and promising to be guided in all things by the latter’s advice. On
receiving the message Esegar decided, rather unwisely, as the event
proved, to try and deceive William; so he called an assembly of the
eldest citizens and, laying the duke’s proposal before them, suggested
that he should pretend to agree with it and thus gain time by making a
false submission. We are not told the exact words of the reply which was
actually sent, but we are informed that William saw through the plan and
contrived to impress the messenger with his own greatness and the
certain futility of all resistance to him to such an extent that the
messenger on his return, by simply relating his experiences, induced the
men of London to abandon the etheling’s cause straightway. The tale
reads rather like an improved version of some simpler negotiations, but
that is no reason for its complete rejection, and we may not
unreasonably believe that, in addition to intimidating the city by his
ravages in the open country, William tried to accelerate matters by
tampering with some at least of those who were holding his future
capital against him.
On Christmas day William was crowned King of England in Westminster
Abbey by Archbishop Ealdred of York, a clear intimation that Stigand’s
opportunist submission would not avail to restore to him all the
prerogatives of the primacy. The ceremony was conducted with due regard,
as it would seem, to all the observances which had usually attended the
hallowing of the Anglo-Saxon kings, only on the present occasion it was
necessary to ask the assembled people in French as well as in English
whether they would accept William as their king. The archbishop of York
put the question in English, Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, that in
French, and the men of both races who were present in the Abbey gave a
vociferous assent. Unfortunately the uproar within the church was
misunderstood by the guard of Norman horsemen who were stationed
outside, and they, imagining that the new subjects of their duke were
trying to cut him down before the altar, sought to relieve his immediate
danger by setting fire to the wooden buildings around,[175] and so
creating a diversion. In this they were quite successful; amid
indescribable confusion the congregation rushed headlong out of the
church, some to save their own property, and some to take advantage of
so exceptional an opportunity of unimpeded plunder. The duke and the
officiating clergy were left almost alone; and in the deserted abbey
William, quivering with excitement,[176] became by the ritual of unction
and coronation the full and lawful successor of Alfred and Athelstan.
But before the crown was placed upon his head the Conqueror swore in
ancient words, which must have sounded ironical amid the noise and
tumult, that he would protect God’s churches and their rulers, would
govern all the people subjected to him with justice, would decree and
keep right law, and would quite forbid all violence and unjust
judgments.[177] And so the seal of the Church was set upon the work
which had been in fact begun on that morning, three months before, when
William and his army disembarked on the shore of Pevensey.
The disorder which had attended the coronation was actually the result
of a misapprehension on the part of William’s own followers, but he
evidently felt that the possibility of a sudden rising on the part of
the rich and independent city was a danger which should not be ignored.
Accordingly, to avoid all personal risk, while at the same time keeping
in close touch with his capital, William moved from London to Barking,
and stayed there while that most famous of all Norman fortresses, the
original “Tower of London,” was being built. Most probably it was during
this stay at Barking that William received the homage of such leading
Englishmen as had not been present at the submission on the
Hertfordshire downs. In particular Edwin and Morcar would seem to have
recognised the inevitable at this time[178]; the coronation of William
as king of all England by the metropolitan of York may have taught them
that a division of the kingdom no longer lay within the range of
practical politics. At any rate William did not think that it would be
well for him to let them out of his sight for a season, and within a few
days of the New Year they are found accompanying him as hostages into
Normandy.
Our sole knowledge of the general state of the country at this most
critical time comes from certain scattered writs which can be proved to
have been issued during the few weeks immediately following the
coronation. The information which they give is but scanty; they were of
course not intended to convey any historical information at all, but
they nevertheless help us to answer the important question how much of
England had really submitted for the time to William’s rule by the end
of 1066, and they do this in two ways. On the one hand, they were
witnessed by some of the more important men, English as well as Normans,
who were present in William’s court; on the other hand, we may safely
acquit William of the folly of sending his writs into counties in which
there was no probability that they would be obeyed. Foremost among the
documents comes a writ referring to land on the border of Wiltshire and
Gloucestershire, which shows us King William, like King Edward before
him, sending his orders to the native authorities of the shire—in the
present case the bishops of Ramsbury and Worcester, and two thegns named
Eadric and Brihtric, with whom, however, Count Eustace of Boulogne is
significantly associated.[179] From the other side of the country comes
a more famous document in which William, “at the request of Abbot
Brand,” grants to the said abbot and his monks of Peterborough the free
and full possession of a number of lands in Lincolnshire and
Nottinghamshire. Leofric, abbot of Peterborough, had been mortally
wounded at the battle of Hastings, and on his death the monks had chosen
their provost Brand as his successor. He, not discerning the signs of
the times, had gone and received confirmation from Edgar the Etheling,
of whose inchoate reign this is the only recorded event; and it required
the mediation of “many good men” and the payment of ten marks of gold to
appease the wrath of William at such an insult to his claim. The present
charter is the sign of William’s forgiveness, but for us its special
interest lies in the fact that it shows us the king’s word already
current by the Trent and Humber, while the appearance among its
witnesses of “Marleswegen the sheriff” shows that the man to whom Harold
had entrusted the command of the north did not see fit to continue
resistance to the new king of England.[180]
[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S CHAPEL, IN THE TOWER OF LONDON]
Much more evidence, if we can trust it, pointing in the same direction,
can be derived from a number of writs in English, which were apparently
granted at this time in favour of Westminster Abbey.[181] Nothing could
be more natural than that William at this time should show especial
favour to the great religious house within whose precincts he had so
recently been crowned, and although the language of these documents is
very corrupt, and the monks of Westminster Abbey were practised and
successful manufacturers of forged charters, there is not sufficient
reason for us to condemn the present writs as spurious. And if genuine,
and correctly dated, they add to the proof that William’s rule was
accepted in many shires which had never yet seen a Norman army. The king
greets Leofwine, bishop of Lichfield and Earl Edwin and all the thegns
of Staffordshire in one writ; Ealdred, archbishop, and Wulfstan, bishop,
and Earl William and all the thegns of Gloucestershire and
Worcestershire in another; and if his rule was accepted in these three
western shires, and also in the eastern counties represented by the
Peterborough document, the submission of the midlands and in fact of the
whole earldom of Mercia would seem to follow as a matter of course. It
is also worth noting that no document relating to Northumbria, the one
part of the country which offered a really protracted resistance to the
Norman Conquest, can be referred to this early period in William’s
reign.
[Illustration:
CHARTER OF WILLIAM I. TO THE LONDONERS
(IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE CORPORATION)]
All this, therefore, should warn us against underrating the immediate
political importance of the battle of Hastings. It did much more than
merely put William into possession of the lands under the immediate rule
of the house of Godwine; the overthrow of the national cause which it
implied brought about so general a submission to the Conqueror that,
with the possible exception of the Northumbrian risings, all subsequent
resistance to him may with sufficient accuracy be described as
rebellion. William, it would seem, at the time of his coronation, was
the accepted king of all England south of the Humber, and the evidence
which suggests this conclusion suggests also that at the outset of his
reign he wished to interfere as little as possible with the native
system of administration. Even in the counties which had felt his
devastating march, English sheriffs continued to be responsible for the
government of their wasted shires. Edmund, the sheriff of Hertfordshire,
and “Sawold,” the sheriff of Oxfordshire, may be found in other writs of
the Westminster series on which we have just commented. The Norman
Conquest was to be followed by an almost complete change in the
personnel of the English administration, but that change was first felt
in the higher departments of government; the sheriffs of Oxfordshire and
Gloucestershire were not displaced, but Earl William Fitz Osbern, Count
Eustace of Boulogne, and Bishop Odo of Bayeux begin to be held
responsible for the execution of the king’s will in the shires where
they had influence.
To the close of 1066 or the beginning of 1067 must also be assigned a
charter of exceptional form and some especial constitutional interest in
which King William grants Hayling Island, between Portsmouth and
Chichester, to the monastery of Jumièges. In this document William is
made to describe himself as lord of Normandy and “basileus” of England
by hereditary right, and to say that, “having undertaken the government
of England, he has conquered all his enemies.” One of these enemies,
namely Earl Waltheof, attests the charter in question, and is flanked in
the list of witnesses by Bishop Wulfwig of Dorchester, who died in 1067,
and by one Ingelric, a Lotharingian priest who is known to have enjoyed
William’s favour in the earliest years of his reign.[182] But it is the
phrase “hereditario jure” which deserves particular attention. Rarely
used in formal documents in later years, when the chancery formulas had
become stereotyped, the words have, nevertheless, a prospective as well
as a reflexive significance. They contain not only an enunciation of the
claims in virtue of which King William had “undertaken the government of
England,” but also a statement of the title by which that government
would be handed down to his descendants. For, whatever may have been the
title to the crown in the old English state, from the Norman Conquest
onwards it has clearly become “hereditary” in the only sense in which
any constitutional meaning can be attached to the word. Not a little of
the evidence which has been adduced in favour of an “elective” tenure of
the crown in Anglo-Norman and Angevin times is really the creation of an
arbitrary construction of the terms employed. “Hereditary right” is not
a synonym for primogeniture; the former words imply no more than that in
any case of succession the determining factors would be the kinship of
the proposed heir to the late ruler and the known intentions of the
latter with respect to his inheritance. Disputed successions there were
in plenty in the hundred and fifty years which followed the Conquest,
but the essence of the dispute in each case was the question which of
two claimants could put forward the best title which did not run counter
to hereditary principles. The strictest law of inheritance is liable to
be affected by extraneous complications when the crown is the stake at
issue, and the disqualification which in 1100 attached to Robert of
Normandy as an incapable absentee, in 1135 to Matilda the empress as a
woman and the wife of an unpopular foreigner, in 1199 to Arthur as an
alien and a minor, should not be allowed to mask the fact that in none
of these cases did the success of a rival claimant contravene the
validity of hereditary ideas. It was inevitable that, where the very
rules of inheritance themselves were vague and fluctuating, the
application made of them in any given instance should be guided by
expediency rather than by a rigid adherence to the strict forms of law;
yet nevertheless we may be sure that William Rufus and Henry I., like
William the Conqueror, would claim to hold the throne of England not
otherwise than “hereditario jure.”
At Barking the submission of the leading Englishmen went on apace.
Besides Edwin and Morcar, Copsige, a Northumbrian thegn, and three other
Englishmen called Thurkill, Siward, and Ealdred, were considered by
Norman writers men of sufficient importance to deserve mention by name,
and in addition to these shadowy figures we are told that many other
“nobles” also came in at this time.[183] No apparent notice was taken by
William of the tardiness of their submissions; all were received to
favour, and among them must very probably be included the victim of the
one great tragedy which stands out above all the disaster of the
Conquest, Waltheof, the son of Siward. Waltheof was confirmed in his
midland earldom of Northampton, and received a special mark of grace in
being allowed to marry the Conqueror’s niece Judith, daughter of
Enguerrand, the count of Ponthieu who had perished in the ambuscade at
St. Aubin in 1054, by Adeliz, the daughter of Robert of Normandy and
Arlette. Nor was this an isolated measure of conciliation, for one of
William’s own daughters was promised to Earl Edwin, and in general it
would seem that at this time any Englishman might look for favour if he
liked to do homage and propitiate the new king with a money gift. The
latter was essential, and from an incidental notice in the _Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle_, and a chance expression in the Domesday of Essex, it has
been inferred that a formal “redemption” of their lands on the part of
the English took place at this time.[184] The direct evidence for so
far-reaching an event is certainly slight, but it would fall in well
with the general theory of the Conquest if all Englishmen by the mere
fact of their nationality were held to have forfeited their lands.
William, it must always be remembered, claimed the throne of England by
hereditary right. He had been defrauded of his inheritance by the
usurpation of Harold, in whose reign, falsely so called according to the
Norman theory, all Englishmen had acquiesced, and might therefore justly
incur that confiscation which was the penalty, familiar alike to both
races, for treason. Stern and even grotesque as this theory may seem to
us, it was something more than a legal fiction, and we should be driven
to assume for ourselves some idea of the kind even if we did not possess
these casual expressions of the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ and the Domesday
scribe. On the one hand, all Englishmen had rejected William’s claim,
and so many as could be hurried down to Hastings in time had resisted
him in the open field; on the other hand, the number of Englishmen who
were still holding land of the king twenty years after the Conquest was
infinitesimal in comparison with the number who had suffered
displacement. It would be natural to connect these two facts, but
nothing is more probable in itself than that, before repeated rebellions
on the part of the English had sharpened the edge of the Norman theory,
the conquered race was given an opportunity of compounding for its
original sin by making a deprecatory payment to the new lord of the
land.
Nevertheless, it is to this period that we must undoubtedly assign the
initial stages of the process which, before twenty years were over, was
to substitute an alien baronage for the native thegnhood of England. It
was clearly necessary that William should give some earnest at least of
the spoils of war to his leading followers, and the amount of land
already at his disposal must have been very considerable. The entire
possessions of the house of Godwine were in his hands, and the one form
of statecraft which that family had pursued with consistency and success
had been the acquisition of landed property, nor do the dubious methods
by which much of that property had been originally acquired seem to have
invalidated King William’s tenure of it. The battle of Hastings,
moreover, had been very fatal to the land-owning class of the southern
shires, and no exception could be taken to William’s right to dispose of
the lands of men who had actually fallen whilst in arms against him.
Even in this simple way, the king had become possessed of no small
territory out of which he could reward his followers, and the
complicated nature of the Anglo-Saxon land-law assisted him still
further in this respect. If, for instance, a thegn of Surrey had
“commended” himself and his land to Harold as earl of Wessex, King
William would naturally inherit all the rights and profits which were
involved in the act of commendation: he could make a grant of them to a
Norman baron, and thus, without direct injury being done to any man, the
Norman would become possessed of an interest in the land in question,
which, under the influence of the feudal ideas which accompanied the
Conquest, would rapidly harden into direct ownership. In fact, there
exists a considerable quantity of evidence which would suggest that a
portion at least of the old English land-owning class was not displaced
so much as submerged; that the Norman nobility was superimposed upon it
as it were, and that the processes of thought which underlay feudal law
invested the newcomers with rights and duties which made them in the
eyes of the state the only recognised owners of the lands they held. We
possess no detailed account of the great “confiscation” earlier than the
Domesday Survey of twenty years after the battle of Hastings, and apart
from the changes which must have occurred in the course of nature in
that time, the great survey is not the sort of authority to which we
should look for an accurate register of the fluctuating and inconsistent
principles of a law of ownership which was derived from, and had to be
applied to, conditions which were unique in Western Europe. But _a
priori_ it is not probable that all the thousands of cases in which an
English land-owner has disappeared, and is represented by a Norman
successor, should be explained by exactly the same principle in every
instance. In one case the vanished thegn may have set out with Harold to
the place of battle, and his holding have been given outright by the new
king to some clamorous follower; in another, a dependent of the English
earl of Mercia may have become peaceably enough a dependent of the
Norman earl of Shrewsbury, and have sunk into the undifferentiated
peasant class before the time arrived for Domesday to take cognisance of
him; a third Englishman may have made his way to the court at Barking
and bought his land of the Conqueror for his own life only, leaving his
sons to seek their fortunes in Scotland or at Constantinople. The
practical completeness of the actual transfer from the one race to the
other should not lead us to exaggerate the simplicity of the measures by
which it was brought about.[185]
One word should perhaps be said here about the character of the
Anglo-Saxon thegnhood, on which the Conqueror’s hand fell so heavily. It
was far from being a homogeneous class. At one end of the scale were
great men like Esegar the Staller or Tochi the son of Outi, whose wide
estates formed the bulk of the important Domesday fiefs of Geoffrey de
Mandeville and Geoffrey Alselin. But, on the other hand, a very large
proportion of the total number of men styled “thegns” can have been
scarcely superior to the great mass of the peasantry whom the Norman
lawyers styled collectively “villeins.” When we find in a
Nottinghamshire village five thegns, each in his “hall,” owning between
them land worth only ten shillings a year,[186] we see that we must
beware of the romantic associations aroused by the word “thegn.” These
men can have been distinguished from the peasantry around them by little
except a higher personal status expressed in a proportionately higher
_wergild_, and their depression into the peasant class would be rendered
fatally easy by the fact that the law of status was the first part of
the Anglo-Saxon social system to become antiquated. When the old rules
about _wer_ and _wite_ had been replaced by the new criminal
jurisprudence elaborated by the Norman conquerors, the one claim of
these mean thegns to superior social consideration vanished. And lastly,
it should be noted that where the Domesday Survey does reveal members of
the thegnly class continuing to hold land directly of the king in 1086,
it shows us at the same time that the class is very far from being
regarded as on an equality with the Norman baronage. The king’s thegns
are placed after the tenants in chief by military service, even after
the king’s servants or “sergeants” of Norman birth; they are only
entered as it were on sufferance, under a heading to themselves, at the
very end of the descriptions of the several shires in which they are to
be found.[187] They belonged in fact to an order of society older than
the Norman military feudalism which supplanted them, and by the date of
the Domesday Survey they were rapidly becoming extinct as a class in the
shires south of the Humber, but no financial record like Domesday Book
could be expected to tell us what became of them. Mere violent
dispossession would no doubt be a great part of the story if told, but
much of the change would have to be set down to the silent processes of
economic and social reorganisation.
There remains one other legal document, more famous than any of these
which we have considered, which was most probably granted at or about
this time. The city of London had to be rewarded for its genuine, if
belated, submission, and the form of reward which would be likely to
prove most acceptable to the citizens would be a written security that
their ancient customs and existing property should be respected by the
new sovereign. And so “William the king greets William the bishop and
Geoffrey the port-reeve and all the burghers, French and English, within
London,” and tells them that they are to enjoy all the customs which
they possessed in King Edward’s time, that each man’s property shall
descend to his children, and that the king himself will not suffer any
man to do them wrong.[188] Yet, satisfactory as this document may have
been as a pledge of reconciliation between the king and his capital, it
nevertheless bears witness in its formula of address to a significant
change. Geoffrey the port-reeve is a Norman; he is very probably the
same man as Geoffrey de Mandeville, the grandfather of the turbulent
earl of Essex of Stephen’s day,[189] and his appearance thus early in
the place of Esegar the Staffer suggests that the latter had gained
little by his duplicity in the recent negotiations. It was of the first
importance for William to be able to feel that London at least was in
safe hands; he could not well entrust his capital and its new fortress
to a man who had so recently held the city against him.
William’s rule in England was by this time so far accepted that he could
afford to recross the Channel and show himself to his old subjects
invested with his new dignities. The regency of Matilda and her advisers
had, as far as we know, passed in perfect order, but it was only fitting
that William should take the earliest opportunity of proving to the men
of the duchy the perfect success of the enterprise, the burden of which
they had borne with such notable alacrity. It was partly no doubt as an
ostensible mark of confidence in English loyalty that, before crossing
the Channel, William dismissed so many of his mercenary troops as wished
to return home[190]; but their dismissal coincides in point of time with
a general foundation of castles at important strategic points all over
the south of England. The Norman castle was even more repugnant than the
Norman man-at-arms to the Anglo-Saxon mind, and when the native
chronicler gives us his estimate of William’s character and reign he
breaks out into a poetic declamation as he describes the castles which
the king ordered to be built and the oppression thereby caused to poor
men.[191] But deeper than any memory of individual wrong must have
rankled the thought that it was these new castles which had really
rendered hopeless for ever the national cause of England; that local
discontent might seethe and murmur in every shire without causing the
smallest alarm to the alien lords ensconced in their stockaded mounds.
The Shropshire-born Orderic, writing in his Norman monastery, gives us
the true military reason for the final overthrow of his native country
when he tells us that the English possessed very few of those
fortifications which the Normans called castles, and that for this
reason, however brave and warlike they might be, they could not keep up
a determined resistance to their enemies. William himself had learned in
Normandy how slow and difficult a task it was to reduce a district
guarded by even the elementary fortifications of the eleventh century;
he might be confident that the task would be impossible for scattered
bodies of rustic Englishmen, in revolt and without trained leadership.
But for the present there seems to have been no thought of revolt; the
castles were built with a view to future emergencies. No very elaborate
arrangements were made for the government of England in William’s
absence. It was entrusted jointly to William Fitz Osbern, the duke’s
oldest friend, and Odo of Bayeux, his half-brother, who were to be
assisted by such distinguished leaders of the army of invasion as Hugh
de Grentmaisnil, Hugh de Montfort, and William de Warenne. The bishop of
Bayeux was made primarily responsible for the custody of Kent, with its
all-important ports, and the formidable castle of Dover. Hugh de
Grentmaisnil appears in command of Hampshire with his headquarters at
Winchester; his brother-in-law, Humphrey de Tilleul, had received the
charge of Hastings castle when it was built and continued to hold it
still; William Fitz Osbern, who had previously been created earl of
Hereford, seems to have been entrusted with the government of all
England between the Thames and the earldom of Bernicia, with a possible
priority over his colleagues.[192] On his part, William took care to
remove from the country as many as possible of the men round whom a
national opposition might gather itself. Edgar the Etheling, earls
Edwin, Morcar, and Waltheof, with Archbishop Stigand, and a prominent
Kentish thegn called Ethelnoth, were requested to accompany their new
king on his progress through his continental dominions.[193] We cannot
but suspect that William must have felt the humour as well as the policy
of attaching to his train three men each of whom had hoped to be king of
the English himself; but it would have been impossible for the native
leaders to refuse to grace the protracted triumphs of their conqueror,
and early in the year the company set sail, with dramatic fitness, from
Pevensey.
In the accounts which we possess of this visit, it appears as little
more than a series of ecclesiastical pageants. William was wisely
prodigal of the spoils of England to the churches of his duchy. The
abbey church of Jumièges, whose building had been the work of Robert,
the Confessor’s favourite, was visited and dedicated on the 1st of July,
but before this the king had kept a magnificent Easter feast at
Fécamp[194] where, thirty-two years before, Duke Robert of Normandy had
prevailed upon the Norman baronage to acknowledge his seven-year-old
illegitimate son as his destined successor. The festival at Fécamp was
attended by a number of nobles from beyond the Norman border, who seem
to have regarded Edwin and Morcar and their fellows as interesting
barbarians, whose long hair gave unwonted picturesqueness to a formal
ceremony. At St.-Pierre-sur-Dive, where William had spent four weary
weeks in the previous autumn, waiting for a south wind, another great
assembly was held on the 1st of May, to witness the consecration of the
new church of Notre Dame. Two months later came the hallowing of
Jumièges; and the death of Archbishop Maurilius of Rouen, early in
August, seems to have given occasion for another of these great councils
to meet and confirm the canonical election of his successor. The monks
of Rouen cathedral had chosen no less a person than Lanfranc of Caen as
their head, but he, possibly not without a previous consultation with
his friend and lord King William, declined the office, and when on a
second election John, bishop of Avranches, was chosen, Lanfranc went to
Rome and obtained the pallium for him.[195] Whether Lanfranc’s journey
possessed any significance in view of impending changes in the English
Church, is unfortunately uncertain for lack of evidence; but his refusal
of the metropolitan see of Normandy suggests that already he was
privately reserved for greater things. In any case, he is the man to
whom we should naturally expect William to entrust such messages as he
might think prudent to send to the Pope concerning his recent
achievements and future policy in England.
From his triumphal progress in Normandy, William was recalled by bad
news from beyond the Channel. Neither of his lieutenants seems to have
possessed a trace of the more statesmanlike qualities of his chief.
William Fitz Osbern, good soldier and faithful friend to William as we
may acknowledge him to have been, did not in the least degree understand
the difficult task of reconciling a conquered people to a change of
masters, and Bishop Odo has left a sinister memory on English soil.
William’s departure for Normandy was signalised by a general outbreak of
the characteristic vices of an army of occupation, in regard to which
the regents themselves, according to the Norman account, were not a
little to blame. Under the stimulus of direct oppression, and in the
temporary absence of the dreaded Conqueror, the passive discontent of
the English broke out into open revolt in three widely separated parts
of the kingdom.
Of the three risings, that in the north was perhaps the least
immediately formidable, but the most suggestive of future difficulties
for the Norman rulers. Copsige, the Northumbrian thegn who had submitted
at Barking, had been invested with the government of his native
province, but the men of that district continued to acknowledge an
English ruler in Oswulf, the son of Eadwulf, who had been subordinate
earl of Bernicia under Morcar. Copsige in the first instance was able to
dispossess his rival, but the latter bided his time, collected around
him a gang of outlaws, and surprised Copsige as he was feasting one day
at Newburn-on-Tyne. The earl escaped for a moment, and took sanctuary in
the village church; but his refuge was betrayed, the church was
immediately set on fire, and he himself was cut down as he tried to
break away from the burning building.[196] The whole affair was not so
much a deliberate revolt against the Norman rule as the settlement of a
private feud after the customary Northumbrian fashion, and it may quite
possibly have taken place before William had sailed for Normandy. Oswulf
was able to maintain himself through the following summer, but then met
his end in an obscure struggle with a highway robber, and the province
was left without an earl until the end of the year, when Gospatric, the
son of Maldred, a noble who possessed an hereditary claim to the title,
came to court and bought the earldom outright from William.[197] In the
meantime, however, the Northumbrians were well content with a spell of
uncontested anarchy, and they made no attempt to assist the insurgents
elsewhere in the country.
The leader of the western rising was a certain Edric, nicknamed the
“Wild,” whom the Normans believed to be the nephew of Edric Streona, the
famous traitor of Ethelred’s time. This man had submitted to the
Conqueror, but apparently refused to accompany him into Normandy, and
the Norman garrison of Hereford castle began to ravage his lands. In
this way he was driven into open revolt, and he thereupon invited
Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, the kings of Gwynedd and Powys, to join him in a
plundering expedition over Herefordshire, which devastated that country
as far as the river Lugg, but cannot have done much to weaken the Norman
military possession of the shire.[198] Having secured much booty, Edric
withdrew into the hills with his Welsh allies, and next appears in
history two years later, when he returned to play a part in the general
tumult which disquieted England in 1069.