The most formidable of the three revolts which marked the period of

William’s absence had for its object the recovery of Dover castle from

its Norman garrison.[199] It is the one rising of the three which has an

intelligible military motive, and it contains certain features which

suggest that it was planned by some one possessed of greater political

ability than can be credited to the ordinary English thegn. Count

Eustace of Boulogne, the man of highest rank among the French

auxiliaries of the Conqueror, had already received an extensive grant of

land in England as the reward for his services in the campaign of

Hastings, but he had somehow fallen into disfavour with the king and had

left the country. The rebel leaders knowing this, and judging the count

to be a competent leader, chose for once to forget racial differences in

a possible chance of emancipation, and invited him to cross the Channel

and take possession of Dover castle. Eustace, like Stephen of Blois, a

more famous count of Boulogne, found it an advantage to control the

shortest passage from France to England; he embarked a large force of

knights on board a number of vessels which were at his command, and made

a night crossing in the hope of finding the garrison within the castle

off their guard. At the moment of his landing Odo of Bayeux and Hugh de

Montfort happened to have drawn off the main body of their troops across

the Thames; a fact which suggests that the rebels had observed unusual

secrecy in planning their movements. The count was therefore able to

occupy the town, and to lay siege to the castle without hindrance, but

failed to take the garrison by surprise, as he had hoped, and met a

spirited resistance. The assault lasted for some hours, but the garrison

more than held their own, and at last Eustace gave his troops the signal

to retire to their ships, although it was known that a delay of two days

would have brought large reinforcements to the side of the insurgents.

It must also have been known that the same time would have brought Odo

of Bayeux with his trained troops within dangerous proximity to Dover;

and the impossibility in the eleventh century of successfully conducting

a siege against time is some excuse for Eustace’s rather ignominious

withdrawal. The first sign of retreat, however, was turned to the

advantage of the garrison, who immediately made a sally and threw the

besiegers into a state of confusion which was heightened by a false

rumour that the bishop of Bayeux was at hand. A large part of the

Boulogne force was destroyed in a desperate attempt to reach the ships,

a number of men apparently trying to climb down the face of the cliffs

on which Dover castle stands. Count Eustace himself, who knew the

neighbourhood, became separated from his men and escaped on horseback to

an unrecorded port, where he was fortunate enough to find a ship ready

to put out to sea. The English, thus deprived of their leader, dispersed

themselves over the country, and so avoided the immediate consequences

of their rout, since the Norman force in Dover was not strong enough to

hunt down the broken rebels along all their scattered lines of

retreat.[200]

With his kingdom outwardly restored to order, but simmering with

suppressed revolt, William set sail from Dieppe on the 6th of December,

and landed at Winchelsea on the following day. Queen Matilda was still

left in charge of Normandy, but her eldest son, Robert, was now

associated with her in the government, and Roger de Beaumont, who had

been the leading member of her council during her regency in 1066, on

this occasion accompanied his lord to England.[201] The king kept his

Christmas feast at Westminster; a ceremony in which the men of both

races joined on an equal footing, and for the moment there may have

seemed a possibility that the recent disorders had really been the last

expiring efforts of English nationalism. Yet the prospect for the new

year was in reality very threatening. The political situation in England

at this time is well described by Ordericus Vitalis, who tells us that

every district of which William had taken military possession lay at his

command, but that in the extreme north and west men were only prepared

to render such obedience as pleased themselves, wishing to be as

independent of King William as they had formerly been independent of

King Edward and his predecessors.[202] This attitude, which supplies a

partial explanation of the overthrow of England in 1066, and a partial

justification of the harrying of Northumbria in 1069, supplies also a

clue to the purpose underlying William’s ceaseless activity during the

next two years. At Exeter, Stafford, and York, William was, in effect,

teaching his new subjects that he would be content with nothing less

than the unqualified submission of the whole land; that England was no

longer to be a collection of semi-independent earldoms, but a coherent

state, under the direct rule of a king identified with Wessex no more

than with Northumbria or East Anglia. The union of England, thus brought

at last into being, was no doubt achieved almost unconsciously under the

dictation of the practical expediency of the moment, but this does not

detract from the greatness of the work itself, nor from the strength and

wisdom of the Conqueror whose memorial it is.

Meanwhile, danger from a distant quarter was threatening the Norman

possession of England. Events which were matters of very recent history

had proved that English politics were still an object of interest to the

rulers of Norway and Denmark; and the present was an opportunity which

could not fail to attract any Scandinavian prince who would emulate the

glory of the great kings of the last generation. The death of Harold

Hardrada, which had thrown the Norwegian claims on England into abeyance

for a time, had left Swegn Estrithson, king of Denmark, unquestionably

the most considerable personage in the Scandinavian world; and to him

accordingly the English leaders, or such at least of them as were at

liberty, had appealed for help during the preceding months.[203] As a

Dane himself and the nephew of Cnut, Swegn Estrithson could command the

particular sympathy of the men of Northumbria and would not be

unacceptable to the men of the southern Danelaw; no native claimant

possessed similar advantages in respect to anything like so large a part

of England. Swegn indeed, whose prevailing quality was a caution which

contrasts strangely with the character of his Danish ancestors and of

his great Norwegian rival, had delayed taking action up to the present,

but it was the fear that a northern fleet might suddenly appear in the

Humber which had really been the immediate cause of William’s return

from Normandy.

At this moment, with the imminent probability of invasion hanging over

the north and east of his kingdom, William was called away from his

head-quarters at London by the necessity of suppressing a dangerous

rising in the extreme west. It is probable that William’s rule had not

yet been commonly recognised beyond the eastern border of Devonshire,

although on the evidence of writs we know that Somerset was already

showing him ostensible obedience. But the main interest of the following

episode lies in the strangely independent attitude adopted by the city

of Exeter. In the eleventh century the capital of Devon could

undoubtedly claim to rank with York, Norwich, and Winchester among the

half-dozen most powerful cities in England. With its strong

fortifications which made it in a sense the key of the Damnonian

peninsula, commanding also important trade routes between England,

Ireland, and Brittany, Exeter in English hands would be a standing

menace to the Norman rule scarcely less formidable than an independent

York. The temper of the citizens was violently anti-Norman, and they

proceeded to take energetic measures towards making good their defence,

going so far as to impress into their service such foreign merchants

within the city as were able to bear arms. We are also told that they

tried to induce other cities to join them in resisting the foreign king,

and it is not impossible that they may have drawn reinforcements from

the opposite shore of Brittany. It was of the first importance for

William to crush a revolt of this magnitude before it had time to

spread, but before taking action, and probably in order to test the

truth of the reports which had come to him as to what was going on in

Devonshire, he sent to demand that the chief men of Exeter should take

the oath of allegiance to him. They in reply proposed a curious

compromise, saying that they were willing to pay the customary dues of

their city to the king, but that they would not swear allegiance to him

nor admit him within their walls. This was almost equivalent to defiance

and elicited from William the remark that it was not his custom to have

subjects on such terms. Negotiations in fact ceased; Devonshire became a

hostile country, and William marched from London, making the experiment,

doubly bold at such a crisis, of calling out the native fyrd to assist

in the reduction of their countrymen.

The men of Exeter, on hearing the news of William’s approach, began to

fear that they had gone too far; and, as the king drew near, the chief

men of the city came out to meet him, bringing hostages and making a

complete capitulation. William halted four miles from the city, but the

envoys on their return found that their fellow-citizens, unwilling

apparently to trust to the king’s mercy, were making preparations for a

continued resistance, and they threw in their lot with their townsmen.

William was filled with fury on hearing the news. His position was

indeed sufficiently difficult. It was the depth of winter; part of his

army was composed of Englishmen whose loyalty might not survive an

unexpected check to his arms, and Swegn of Denmark might land in the

east at any moment. Before investing the city William tried a piece of

intimidation, and when the army had moved up to the walls, one of the

hostages was deliberately blinded in front of the gate. But it would

seem that the determination of the citizens was only strengthened by the

ghastly sight, and for eighteen days William was detained before the

gates of Exeter, despite his constant endeavours either to carry the

walls by assault or to undermine them.

At last, after many of his men had fallen in the attack, it would seem

that the Conqueror for once in his life was driven to offer terms to the

defenders of a revolted city. The details of the closing scene of the

siege are not very clear; but it is probable that the more important

citizens were now, as earlier in the struggle, in favour of submission,

and that they persuaded their fellows to take advantage of King

William’s offer of peace. They had indeed a particular reason for trying

to secure the royal favour, for the chief burden of taxation in any town

fell naturally upon its wealthier inhabitants, and on the present

occasion William seems to have given a promise that the customary

payments due to the king from the town should not be increased. The

poorer folk of Exeter secured a free pardon and a pledge of security for

life and property, but the conduct of their leaders undoubtedly implies

a certain lack of disinterested zeal for the national cause; and the

native chronicler significantly remarks that the citizens gave up the

town “because the thegns had betrayed them.” The other side of the

picture is shown by Ordericus Vitalis, who describes how “a procession

of the most beautiful maidens, the elders of the city, and the clergy

carrying their sacred books and holy vessels” went out to meet the king,

and made submission to him. It has been conjectured with great

probability that the real object of the procession was to obtain from

the king an oath to observe the terms of the capitulation sworn on the

said “sacred books and holy vessels,” and in any case the witness of

Domesday Book shows that Exeter suffered no fiscal penalty for its

daring resistance. To keep the men of Exeter in hand for the future a

castle was built and entrusted to Baldwin de Meules, the son of Count

Gilbert of Brionne, but this was no mark of particular disfavour, for it

was universally a matter of policy for William to guard against civic

revolts by the foundation of precautionary fortresses.[204]

One immediate consequence of the fall of Exeter was the flight and final

exile of one of the two greatest ladies in England at this time. Gytha,

the niece of Cnut, and the widow of Earl Godwine, through whom Harold

had inherited a strain of royal blood, had taken refuge in Exeter, and

now, before William had entered the city, made her escape by water with

a number of other women, who probably feared the outrages which were

likely to occur upon the entry of the northern army. They must have

rounded the Land’s End, and sailed up the Bristol Channel, for they next

appear as taking up their quarters on a dismal island known as the Flat

Holme, off the coast of Glamorgan. Here they stayed for a long while,

but at last in despair the fugitives left their cheerless refuge and

sailed without molestation to Flanders, where they landed, and were

hospitably entertained at St. Omer. Nothing more is recorded of the

countess; but her daughter Gunhild entered the monastic life and died in

peace in Flanders in 1087, some two months before the great enemy of her

house expired at Rouen.

It is likely enough that Gytha chose the Flat Holme as her place of

refuge with the hope of joining in a movement which at this time was

gathering head among the English exiles in Ireland. It is at least

certain that, before the summer was over, three of Harold’s illegitimate

sons, who had spent the previous year with the king of Dublin, suddenly

entered the Devon seas with fifty-four ships. They harassed the south

coast of the Bristol Channel, and even made bold to enter the Avon and

attack Bristol itself, but were driven off without much difficulty by

the citizens of the wealthy port, and sailing back disembarked at some

unknown point on the coast of Somerset. Here they were caught and

soundly beaten by the Somersetshire natives under the leadership of

Ednoth, an Englishman who had been master of the horse to Edward the

Confessor, but who was clearly ready to do loyal service to the new

king. Ednoth was killed in the battle, but the raiders were compelled to

take to their ships, and after a brief spell of desultory ravage along

the coast they sailed back to Ireland, having done nothing to weaken the

Norman grip upon the south-west of England, but gaining sufficient

plunder to induce them to repeat their expedition in the course of the

following year.[205]

It was well for William that even at the cost of some loss of prestige

he had gained possession of Exeter in the first months of 1068, for the

remainder of the year saw a general outburst of revolt against the

Norman rule. Before returning to the east of England, William made an

armed demonstration in Cornwall; and it was very possibly at this time

that he established his half-brother, Count Robert of Mortain, in a

territorial position in that Celtic land which shows that the Conqueror

was quite willing upon occasions to create compact fiefs according to

the continental model. Count Robert was never invested with any formal

earldom of Cornwall, but in the western peninsula he occupied a position

of greater territorial strength, if of lower official rank, than that

held by his brother, Bishop Odo, in his distant shire of Kent. The

revolt of Exeter had no doubt taught William that it would be advisable

to take any future rising in Devonshire in the rear by turning Cornwall

into a single Norman estate, and his own presence with an army in the

west at this time would go far to simplify the preliminary work of

confiscation.

His Cornish progress over, King William marched eastwards, disbanded the

fyrd, and kept his Easter feast (March 23d) at Winchester. For a few

weeks the land was at peace, and during this breathing space the Duchess

Matilda came across into England, and was crowned at Westminster on

Whitsunday (May 11th), by Ealdred, archbishop of York. The event was a

clear expression of William’s desire to reign as an English king, for

Matilda stayed in England, and her fourth son, Henry, who was born early

in the next year, possessed in English eyes the precedence, which by

Anglo-Saxon custom belonged to the son of a crowned king and his lady,

born in the land. Robert, the destined heir of Normandy, seems to have

remained in charge of the duchy, and Richard, the Conqueror’s second

son, probably accompanied his mother across the Channel. By a fortunate

chance, we happen to know with exactitude the names of those who were

present at the Whitsuntide festival,[206] and the list is significant.

Among the members of the clerical estate the Norman hierarchy supplied

the bishops of Bayeux, Lisieux, and Coutances, but the arch-bishops of

Canterbury and York and the bishops of Exeter, Ramsbury, Wells, and

London were all of English appointment, although the last four of them

were of foreign birth, and the eight abbots who were present were also

men of King Edward’s day. The laymen who attended the ceremony formed a

more heterogeneous group; Edwin, Morcar, and Waltheof seem strangely out

of place side by side with the counts of Mortain and Eu; with William

Fitz Osbern, Roger de Montgomery and Richard, the son of Count Gilbert

of Brionne. The company which came together in Westminster Abbey on that

Whitsunday supplies a striking picture of the old order which was

changing but had not yet given place to the new, and it is a notable

thing that the ancestress of all Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart kings

should have been crowned in the sight of men who had held the highest

place in the realm in the last days of independent England.

This solemn inauguration of the new dynasty can have been passed but a

few weeks before William had to resume the dreary task of suppressing

his irreconcilable subjects. After a year and a half of acquiescence in

the Norman rule, Earls Edwin and Morcar suddenly made a spasmodic

attempt to raise the country against the foreigners. Their position at

William’s court must have been ignominious at the best, and although, as

we have seen, the king had promised one of his daughters in marriage to

Edwin, he had withheld her up to the present in deference to the

jealousy which his Normans felt for the favoured Englishman. Under the

smart of their personal grievances, Edwin and his brother broke away

from the court, and headed a revolt which, although general in

character, seems to have received most support in Morcar’s earldom of

Northumbria. The rising is also marked by a revival of the alliance

between the house of Leofric and the Welsh princes which had been an

occasional cause of disquiet during the Confessor’s reign; for Bleddyn,

the king of North Wales, came to the assistance of Edwin and

Morcar,[207] as in the previous year he had joined the Herefordshire

raid of Edric the Wild. The rising was the occasion for a general

secession of the leading Englishmen from William’s court, for Edgar the

Etheling and his mother and sisters, together with Marleswegen and many

prominent Northumbrians, headed by Gospatric, their newly appointed

earl, probably fearing that they might be held implicated in the guilt

of Edwin and Morcar, made a speedy departure for the north country.[208]

The focus of disturbance was evidently the city of York. It is not

probable that William had hitherto made any systematic attempt to

establish Norman rule beyond the Humber, but we get a glimpse of the

venerable Archbishop Aldred making strenuous efforts to restrain the

violence of the men of his city. His protestations were useless, and

while the Northumbrians were enthusiastically preparing for war after

the manner of their ancestors, William was taking steps which brought

the revolt to an end within a few weeks without the striking of a single

blow.

It is in connection with these events that Orderic makes the

observations which have already been quoted about the part played by the

Norman castle in thwarting the bravest efforts of insurgent Englishmen.

Some of the greatest fortresses of medieval England derive their origin

from the defensive posts founded by William during the war of 1068. “In

consequence of these commotions,” said Orderic, “the King carefully

surveyed the most inaccessible points in the country, and, selecting

suitable places, fortified them against the raids of the enemy.”[209]

But besides these “inaccessible points” we have seen that William made

it a matter of regular policy to plant a castle in all the greater

boroughs and along all the more important lines of road in the country,

and, the present campaign affords an excellent example of his practice

in this matter. The first fortress recorded as having been built at this

time was the humble earthwork which developed in the next two centuries

into the magnificent castle of Warwick. Henry de Beaumont, son of the

Roger de Beaumont who had been Queen Matilda’s adviser in 1066, was

placed in command of it, and the Conqueror marched northward; but,

possibly before he had left the Avon valley, Edwin and Morcar, now as

ever unable to follow a consistent course of action, suddenly abandoned

their own cause and made an ignominious submission. The surrender of the

rebel leaders did not affect the king’s movements; he continued his

advance, probably harrying the plain of Leicester as he passed across

it, and at Nottingham, on a precipitous cliff overhanging the town, he

placed another castle, commanding the Trent valley at the point where

the river is crossed by one of the great roads from London to the north

of England. The march was resumed without delay, and at some point on

the road north of Nottingham the army was met by the citizens of York,

bringing the keys of their city, and offering to give hostages for their

future good behaviour. The defection of Edwin and Morcar had deprived

the rising of its nominal leaders, and the military occupation of

Nottingham had threatened to isolate the revolted area; but it is

also probable that William’s rapid movements had surprised the

defenders of the northern capital before their preparations were

completed. At York itself a certain Archil, who was regarded by the

Normans as the most powerful man in Northumbria, came in to William and

gave his son as a hostage, and on the line of the city walls, at the

junction of the rivers Ouse and Foss, there arose the third castle of

this campaign, now represented only by the mound on which rests the

famous medieval keep known as “Clifford’s Tower.” The fortress was

garrisoned with picked men, but its castellan, Robert Fitz Richard, is

only known to us through the circumstances of his death in the next

year.

Other matters than the fortifications of York demanded King William’s

attention at this time. Danger was threatening from the side of

Scotland, for the rebels had sought the help of King Malcolm Canmore,

and a great army was gathering beyond the Tweed. The northern frontier

of England was as yet unprotected by the castles of Berwick and

Carlisle, and on the west the possessions of the king of Scots extended

as far south as Morecambe Bay. Also the best English authority asserts

that Edgar the Etheling and his friends had already taken refuge with

King Malcolm on their flight from William’s court, and the marriage of

the etheling’s sister to the Scottish king was very shortly to make the

northern kingdom a _point d’appui_ for all unquiet nationalists in

England. There was clearly good reason for William to define his

position with regard to the king of Scots, and this the more as it would

give him an opportunity of claiming fealty as well as submission at a

moment when he was all-powerful in the north. An ambassador was found in

the person of Bishop Ethelwine of Durham, who had revolted with the rest

of Northumbria, but had made his peace with the Conqueror, and conducted

the present business to a successful issue. King Malcolm sent

representatives to York in company with the bishop of Durham, and

according to the Norman account they swore fealty to William in the name

of their master. It was no part of the Conqueror’s plan to engage in an

unnecessary war in Scotland, and, all the purposes of his northern

journey being for the present accomplished, he turned south again by way

of Lincoln, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, at each of which places the

inevitable castle was raised and garrisoned.[210]

[Illustration: Denier of Baldwin of Lille]

CHAPTER VII

THE DANISH INVASION AND ITS SEQUEL

The year 1068 had closed under a specious appearance of peace, and the

only result of the revolts of Exeter and York had been a proof of the

futility of isolated resistance to a king who could strike with equal

decision at the west or north. The following year opened with two

north-country risings which formed an unconcerted prelude to fifteen

months of incessant strife, in which the strength of the Norman hold on

England was finally tested and proved. The flight of Gospatric in the

previous summer had vacated the Bernician earldom, and at the beginning

of 1069 the Conqueror tried the experiment of appointing a Norman baron

to the command of the border province. His choice fell on one Robert de

Comines, who immediately set out for the north at the head of a force of

five hundred knights. The news of his appointment preceded him, and the

men of Northumbria, who had enjoyed virtual independence for two years,

were not minded to submit quietly to the rule of a foreign earl. A

league was accordingly formed, the members of which bound themselves

either to kill the stranger or to perish in the attempt. Bishop

Ethelwine of Durham had evidently heard rumours of the plot, for as the

earl approached Durham he was met by the bishop, who warned him of the

impending danger. Robert took no heed, and his troops behaved badly as

they entered Durham, killing certain of the bishop’s humbler tenants,

but meeting no armed opposition. The earl was entertained in a house

belonging to the bishop, and his men were quartered all over the town,

in open defiance of the bishop’s warning. But during the night a large

body of Northumbrians moved up to the city, and as dawn broke they burst

through the gates and began a deliberate massacre of the Frenchmen. The

surprise was complete, but the earl and his immediate companions were

aroused in time to enable them to make a fight for their lives. They

could expect no quarter, and their defence was so desperate that the

rebels were unable to break into the house, and at last set it on fire,

the earl and his men perishing in the flames. Of the five hundred

Normans in Durham, only one survivor made his escape.[211]

[Illustration:

YORKSHIRE

1066–1087]

This episode was quickly followed by the death of Robert Fitz Richard,

the governor of York, who perished with a number of his men in an

obscure struggle, which nevertheless left the castle untaken in Norman

hands. Encouraged by these events, Edgar the Etheling, Marleswegen,

Archil, and Gospatric reappeared upon the scene, and made a determined

attack upon the fortress, so that William Malet, who would appear to

have become castellan on Robert Fitz Richard’s death, sent an urgent

message to the king, saying that he must surrender at once unless he

received reinforcements. Upon receiving this appeal, the Conqueror flew

in person to York, scattered the rebels with heavy loss, and planted a

second castle within a few hundred yards of the first, but on the

opposite bank of the Ouse. This fortress, of which the mound, known as

the Baile Hill, still rests against the city wall, was committed to the

charge of no less a person than Earl William Fitz Osbern, and the king

after eight days returned to Winchester to keep his Easter feast there.

His departure was followed by a renewal of the English attack, now

directed against both the castles, but William Fitz Osbern and his men

gave a good account of themselves against the insurgents.[212]

It was, however, apparent by this time that a spirit of revolt was

generally abroad, and Queen Matilda was sent back into Normandy to

assume command of the duchy once more. No very coherent narrative of the

military events of this year can be extracted from the confused tale of

Ordericus Vitalis or the jejune annals of the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_,

but the outline of the history is fairly plain. We seem to recognise

three distinct areas of revolt: Devon and Somerset, Shropshire and

Staffordshire, and, most dangerous of all, Yorkshire and the north. We

have no reason to suppose that the English leaders had any thought of

uniting in common resistance to the Norman rule; their plans extended to

nothing more than the destruction of single fortresses, the execution of

isolated revenge for local injuries. On the other hand the dispersion of

the centres of revolt incidentally produced some of the effects of

combination; the Normans were compelled to divide their forces, and the

rapidity with which King William dashed about the country from point to

point proved that he at least thought the situation sufficiently

precarious.

[Illustration:

THE BAILE HILL, YORK

THE SITE OF WILLIAM I.’S SECOND CASTLE]

Early in the summer the three sons of Harold repeated their piratical

excursion of the previous year. They landed on the 24th of June in the

mouth of the Taw with sixty-six ships and raided over a large part of

Devonshire, but were beaten off at last by Brian of Penthievre, and

vanish therewith from English history.[213] The local forces were

capable of dealing with an unsupported raid of this kind, but the case

was otherwise with the powerful armament which at this time was being

prepared in the fiords of Denmark. Swegn Esthrithson at last was about

to take action, and the news excited once more the unstable patriotism

of the men of Northumbria. The Danish army was recruited from a wide

area to the south of the Baltic; there were numerous adventurers from

Poland, Frisia, and Saxony, and we read of a contingent of heathen

savages from Lithuania. The fleet was reported to consist of two hundred

and forty vessels; a number capable, if each ship was fully laden, of

carrying a force considerably larger than any army William could put

into the field without calling out the native militia. The expedition

was under the command of Harold and Cnut, the sons of King Swegn, and

Asbiorn, his brother, and included many Danes of high rank, among whom

Christian, bishop of Aarhus, is mentioned by name.[214]

The fleet set sail towards the end of August, and must have hugged the

shores of Frisia and Holland, for it first touched the English coast at

Dover. The royal forces were strong enough to prevent a landing both

here and at Sandwich, where the Danes repeated the attempt, but the

mouth of the Orwell was unguarded, and a body of the invaders

disembarked at Ipswich with the intention of plundering the

neighbourhood. We are, however, told that the “country people,” by which

phrase the English peasantry of the district are probably meant, came

out and, after killing thirty of the raiders, drove the rest to seek

refuge in their ships. A similar descent on Norwich was repulsed by Ralf

de Wader, earl of East Anglia and governor of Norwich castle, and the

Danes passed on towards the Humber. In the meantime, news of these

events was brought to King William, who, we are told, was hunting at the

time in the forest of Dean away on the Welsh border; and he, seeing

where the key to the situation really lay, instantly sent a messenger to

York to warn the garrison and to direct that they should summon him in

person if they were hard pressed by the enemy. He received the

reassuring answer that they would require no assistance from him for a

year to come, and he accordingly continued to leave the defence of the

north in the hands of his subordinates, while the Danes were sailing

along the coast of Lindsey.

It is an interesting question how far the men of the English Danelaw may

have been led by a remembrance of their Scandinavian origin to make

common cause with the army of the king of Denmark at this time. At the

beginning of the century Swegn Forkbeard had been welcomed on this

account by the men of the shires along the lower Trent, and had fixed

his headquarters at Gainsborough in this district. So long as the

Anglo-Saxon legal system retained a semblance of vitality a very

definite barrier of customary law separated the Danelaw from the

counties of the eastern midlands, and the details of its local

organisation still preserved not a few peculiar features, plainly

referable to a northern origin. On the other hand, in the names of the

pre-Conquest owners of land in this district as recorded in Domesday

Book the English element distinctly preponderates, while the

particularism of Northumbria itself was perhaps rather political than

racial. It is probable that the men of Lincolnshire would have preferred

a Danish to either a Norman or an English king, but they play no

distinctive part in the incidents of this campaign, which centres round

the city of York and its approaches by land and water.

While the Danish fleet still hung in the Humber, it was joined by the

English exiles from Scotland, Edgar the Etheling, Gospatric, and

Marleswegen, with whom Waltheof, the earl of Huntingdon, and others of

lesser fame now associated themselves. Edgar, who had been raiding in

Lincolnshire independently of his Danish friends, had narrowly escaped

capture by the garrison of Lincoln castle; but he reached the Humber in

safety though with only two companions, and the combined force, like

that of Harold Hardrada three years before, passed on up the Ouse and

disembarked for a direct attack on York. Volunteers assembled from all

the neighbouring country, and in numbers at least it was a formidable

army which on the 21st of September appeared before the northern

capital, the English forming the van, the Danish host the rear. The

Normans in York made no attempt to hold the city wall, and concentrated

their defence on the two fortresses by the Ouse, setting fire to the

adjoining buildings, so that their timber might not be used to fill up

the castle ditches. The flames spread, the city was gutted, and, what

was worse to the medieval mind, the church of St. Peter was involved in

the ruin. The struggle which followed was soon over; on the very day of

the Danish arrival, while the city was still burning, the garrison of

the castles made a sally, were outnumbered by the enemy within the city

walls and destroyed, after which the capture of the actual

fortifications was an easy matter. The castles themselves were only

wooden structures planted on mounds of earth; their defenders had been

hopelessly weakened by the failure of the sally, and later tradition

recounted in verse how Waltheof, Siward’s son, stood by the gate and

smote down the Normans one by one to the number of a hundred with his

axe as they tried to break away.[215] The castles once taken, the

English hatred of these signs of bondage broke out with fury; the wooden

buildings were instantly broken up and hurled to the ground, and the

luckless William Malet, with his wife and children, a prisoner, was one

of the few Normans in York who survived the day.

On the 11th of September, before the Danish army had sighted the walls

of York, Archbishop Ealdred, one of the few Englishmen of high rank who

accepted the Norman Conquest as irreversible, died, being worn out by

extreme age, and grief at the ruin which he foresaw was about to fall on

the men of his province. The fall of York was the most serious check

which had hitherto crossed King William’s plans in Normandy or England;

it might easily lead to the formation of a Danish principality beyond

the Humber; it was certain to give encouragement to rebellious movements

in the south. In his rage at the news the king caused the fugitives who

had told the tale to be horribly mutilated as a warning to his captains

against possible treachery[216] and then set out for the north. As he

drew towards the Northumbrian border, the Danes abandoned their new

conquest, and made for their ships, crossing the Humber in them, and

established themselves among the marshes of the Isle of Axholme. This

movement diverted the king’s march; he struck straight for Lindsey with

a force of cavalry and crushed sundry isolated bodies of the enemy which

were dispersed among the fens. The Danes, finding their position

untenable, took to their ships again and crossed over to the Yorkshire

bank, whither William had no means of following them. He therefore left

part of his troops under the counts of Mortain and Eu, to protect

Lindsey, while he himself turned westwards to suppress a local rising

which had broken out at Stafford.

We know nothing as to the persons who were responsible for this last

revolt, nor have we any clue as to their objects, but it is quite

possible that they were acting in concert with the men who at this time

were laying siege to the new castle of Shrewsbury. William in this year

was contending with men of Celtic as well as of Scandinavian race; for

Bleddyn, king of Gwynedd, for the third time within three years, had

taken arms against the Normans on the Welsh border. To the men of North

Wales, Edric the Wild brought a contingent from Herefordshire, and the

citizens of Chester, which, it would seem, had not as yet been occupied

by the Normans, joined in the attack. The allies were successful in

burning the town of Shrewsbury and getting away before a Norman force

arrived in relief of the castle, but the Staffordshire insurgents were

less fortunate. We are merely told that King William “wiped out great

numbers of the rebels with an easy victory at Stafford,” but the

Domesday survey of the country, in the large proportion of land which it

returns as “waste,” suggests that Staffordshire at this time received at

William’s hand some measure of the doom which was to fall upon Yorkshire

before the year had closed.

In the meantime the revolt of the south-west had run its course. Here as

elsewhere the plans of the revolted English do not seem to have extended

beyond the capture of individual castles; notably the royal fortress

which had been built in Exeter after the the siege of the previous year,

and the private stronghold of Count Robert of Mortain at Montacute in

Somerset. The command against the besiegers of Montacute was assumed by

Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, who speedily scattered the insurgents with

an army drawn from London, Winchester, and Salisbury, the chief towns on

the main road from the east to Devon and Somerset. The situation at

Exeter was complicated by the attitude of the citizens themselves, who

must have been anxious not to forfeit the privileges which they had

obtained from King William by the treaty which had so recently concluded

their own revolt. Accordingly, when the new castle was beset by a host

of Devonians and Cornishmen, the townspeople took the Norman side; and

the garrison on making a sally threw the rebels into a state of

confusion which was completed by the arrival of Brian of Penthievre, who

was advancing to the relief of the castle men.

Now that no further danger was to be apprehended, from the lands between

Trent and Severn King William’s hands were free to deal with the

Northumbrian difficulty. His lieutenants in Lindsey had contrived to

surprise a number of the Danes as they were participating in the village

feasts with which the men of that district were anticipating the

customary orgies of midwinter and to which they had apparently invited

their Danish friends. This, however, was a trivial matter; there was a

probability that the Danes would return to take possession of York, and

when the Conqueror next appears after the battle of Stafford, he is

found at Nottingham on his way to the northern capital. For fifty miles

north of Nottingham he followed the route by which he had advanced on to

York in the previous year, but he received a sudden check at the point

where the road in question crosses the Aire near to the modern town of

Pontefract. The bridge was broken, and the river, swollen most probably

by the winter’s rains, could neither be forded nor crossed in boats,

while the enemy lined the opposite bank in force. On this last account

it was impossible to rebuild the bridge, and for three weeks the army

was kept inactive by this unexpected obstacle. At last a knight called

Lisois de Monasteriis, after examining the river in search of a ford for

miles above and below the camp by the broken bridge, discovered a

practicable crossing somewhere among the hills to the west of Leeds, and

forced a passage with sixty horsemen in despite of the efforts of the

enemy on the left bank. Having demonstrated the possibility of a

crossing at this point Lisois returned to Pontefract; and under his

guidance the whole army passed the Aire, and then wheeled round towards

York through the difficult country which borders the great plain of the

Ouse. As the army drew near to York, news came that the Danes had

evacuated the city, so the king divided his force, sending one

detachment to occupy and repair the ruined castles, and another to the

Humber to keep the Danes in check. But he himself had other work to do,

and did not enter York at this time.

It would seem that the Norman passage of the Aire, hazardous as it had

been, had really demoralised the Northumbrian insurgents and their

Danish allies. The latter, as we have seen, fell back on the Humber at

once without striking a blow; the mass of the native English under arms

would seem to have retired simultaneously among the hills of western

Yorkshire, for the Conqueror now turned to their pursuit and to the

definite reduction of the inhospitable land. With grim determination he

worked his way along the wooded valleys which intersect the great

mountain chain of northern England, and deliberately harried that region

so that no human being might find the means of subsistence there.

Resistance isolated and ineffectual he must have met; but now for once

submission brought no favour, and those who perished in the nameless

struggles in which despairing men flung themselves hopelessly upon the

line of his inexorable march, underwent a shorter agony than remained

for those who survived to see their homes, with all their substance,

smouldering in the track of the destroying army. But the spirit was soon

beaten out of the ruined men, and without fearing surprise or ambush

William could divide his army still further and quicken the dismal

process of destruction. Soon his soldiers were scattered in camps over

an area of a hundred miles, and the north and east of Yorkshire

underwent the fate which the Conqueror in person had inflicted on the

West Riding. Before Christmas it is probable that the whole land from

the North Sea to Morecambe Bay had become with the rarest exceptions a

deserted wilderness.

The harrying of Yorkshire is one of the few events of the kind in regard

to which the customary rhetoric of the medieval chronicler is only

substantiated by documentary evidence. From the narratives of Ordericus

Vitalis and Simeon of Durham alone, we should gain a fair impression of

the ghastly reality of the great devastation, but a few columns of the

Domesday survey of Yorkshire, where the attempt is made to estimate the

result of the havoc for the purposes of the royal treasury, are

infinitely the more suggestive. On page after page, with deadly

iteration, manor after manor is reported “waste,” and even in the places

where agricultural life had been re-instituted, and the burned villages

rebuilt, the men who inhabited them formed but pitiful little groups in

the midst of the surrounding ruin. As to the fate of the individuals who

had fled before King William’s army, in the fatal December, no certain

tale can be told. Many sold themselves into slavery in return for food,

many tried to make their way southward into the more prosperous midland

shires; the local history of Evesham Abbey relates how crowds of

fugitives from the districts visited by the Conqueror in this campaign

thronged the streets of the little town, and how each day five of six of

them, worn out by hunger and weariness, died, and received burial by the

prior of the monastery. Many no doubt tried to keep themselves alive in

the neighbourhood of their old homes until the rigour of the winter had

passed away; but fifty years later it was well remembered in the north

how the bodies of those who were now overtaken by famine lay rotting by

the roadsides. Even so late as Stephen’s time, a southern writer,

William of Malmesbury, tells us how the fertile lands of the north still

bore abundant traces of what had passed during the winter of 1069.

The festival of Christmas caused a short break in the grim progress of

King William. His work was not by any means completed in the north; the

Danes were still in the Humber; Chester remained in virtual

independence. And so the regalia and royal plate were brought from the

treasury at Winchester, and the Christmas feast was held at York with so

much of the traditional splendour as the place and occasion permitted.

The ceremony over, the campaign was resumed, and in the New Year the

Conqueror set out to hunt down a body of Englishmen who seem to have

entrenched themselves among the marshes which then lay between the

Cleveland hills and the estuary of the Tees.[217] The rebels, however,

decamped by night on hearing of the king’s advance, and William spent

fifteen days by the Tees, during which time Earl Waltheof made his

submission in person and Gospatric sent envoys who swore fealty on his

behalf. Gospatric was therefore restored to his earldom, and William

returned to York, keeping to the difficult country of the East Riding in

preference to the Roman road which led southward from the Tees near

Darlington down the plain of the Ouse.[218] It is probable that William

chose this route with the object of hunting down any scattered bands of

outlawed Englishmen which might have hung together thus far in this

inaccessible region; but his force suffered severely through the cold,

many of the horses died, and on one occasion he himself lost his way and

became separated from his army with only six companions for an entire

night. York, however, was reached in safety at last, and the reduction

of Northumbria was accomplished.

It was now possible to enter upon the final stage of the campaign, and,

after making the arrangements necessary for the safety of York, William

set out on the last and most formidable of the many marches of this

memorable winter, towards the one important town in England which had

never submitted to his rule. Chester still held out in English hands,

and apart from its strategical importance the citizens of the great port

had definitely attracted King William’s attention by the part which they

had played in the recent siege of Shrewsbury. His hold on the north

would never be secure until he had reduced the town where Irish Vikings

and Welsh mountaineers might at any time collect their forces for an

attack upon the settled midlands. On the other hand, the geographical

difficulties in the way of a direct march from York to Chester were

enormous. From the edge of the plain of York to the Mersey Valley, the

altitude of the ground never descends to a point below 500 feet above

sea level; and, since the Roman highway from York to Manchester had

fallen into ruin, no roads crossed this wild country except such tracks

as served for communication between village and village. But a more

serious cause of danger lay in the fact that the army itself now began

to show ominous symptoms which might easily develop into actual mutiny.

The strain of the protracted campaign was telling upon the men; and the

mercenary portion of the army, represented by the soldiers from Anjou,

Brittany, and Maine, began to clamour for their discharge, complaining

that these incessant marches were more intolerable than even the irksome

duty of castle guard. The Conqueror in reply merely declared that he had

no use for the cowards who wished to desert him,[219] and, trusting

himself to the loyalty of his own subjects in the army, he plunged

straightway into the hills which separate the modern counties of

Yorkshire and Lancashire. Part at least of the route now followed at the

close of January must have lain through districts which had been swept

bare of all provisions in the great harrying of December; and the army

was at times reduced to feed on the horses which had perished in the

swamps, that continually intercepted the line of advance. The storms of

rain and hail which fell at this time were considered worthy of mention

in the earliest account of the march which we possess, and we can see

that nothing but the example of King William’s own courage and endurance

held the army together and brought it down in safety into the Cheshire

plain. Chester would appear to have surrendered without daring to stand

a siege, and with its submission, guaranteed as usual by the foundation

of a castle,[220] the Conqueror’s work was done at last in the north.

From Chester he moved to Stafford, where another castle was raised and

garrisoned, and then marched directly across England to Salisbury, at

which place the army was disbanded, with the exception of the men who

had protested against the present expedition and were now kept under

arms for forty days longer as a mark of the king’s disfavour.

In the meantime, by a skilful piece of diplomacy, William had been

insuring himself against active hostility on the part of the Danish

fleet. Earl Asbiorn and his associates had taken but little gain as yet

from their English adventure; and the earl proved very amenable when a

secret embassy came to him from the king, promising him a large sum of

money and the right of provisioning his men at the expense of the

dwellers along the coast for the remainder of the winter, on the sole

condition that he should keep the peace towards the royal troops

thenceforward until his departure. The earl, thus made secure of some

personal profit, agreed to the terms, and until the spring was far

advanced, the Danish ships still hung in the English waters.

The harrying of Northumbria, the most salient event of these twelve

months of ceaseless activity, was a measure which it would be impossible

to justify and impertinent to excuse. It was the logical result of the

opposition of an irreconcilable people to an inflexible conqueror. After

the battle of Hastings had shattered the specious unity of the old

English state, each of its component parts might still have secured

peace by full submission, or honour by consistent and coherent

resistance; the men of Northumbria took the one course which was certain

to invite disaster, nor, terrible as was the resultant suffering, can we

say that vengeance was undeserved. War in the eleventh century was at

best a cruel business, but we cannot fairly accuse the Conqueror of

deliberately aggravating its horrors without the impulse of what he must

have regarded as necessity. He had to deal with a people whom he could

not trust, who had sworn submission and had broken their oaths, and the

means at his disposal were few. He could not deport the population of

Northumbria as Cromwell was to deport the native Irish under not

dissimilar circumstances; his Normans were too few as yet to garrison

effectively all the wild land between the Humber and the Scottish

border. The one course which remained to the Conqueror was for him to

place the rebels beyond the possibility of revolting again, and he

followed this course with terrible success. And it was on this

account—that Northumbria was wasted, not in the heat of wars, but

deliberately, at the bidding of political necessity—that the act seemed

most dreadful to the chroniclers who have described it. Men were only

too well accustomed to the sight of ruined villages, of starving women

and children; but these things seemed less terrible as the work of

Scotch and Danish freebooters than as the conscious intention of the

crowned king of the land. Nor must we forget that we do not know how far

King William was really sinning against the current military practice of

his time. The monastic chroniclers, whose opinion of the case commends

itself to us in virtue of its humanity, were men brought by the fact of

their vocation to a clearer sense of the value of the individual life

than that possessed by the lay world around them. We know what Ordericus

Vitalis thought of the great harrying, perhaps even what William of

Poitiers, the Conqueror’s own chaplain, thought of it, but we do not

know how it appeared to William Fitz Osbern or Roger de Montgomery.

According to his approved custom, the Conqueror kept the Easter

following these events at Westminster, and the feast was attended by

three papal legates of high rank whose presence marks the beginning of

the ecclesiastical reformation which we shall have to consider in its

place as the counterpart of the legal and administrative changes

produced by the Norman Conquest. In the meantime, however, the broken

national party was gathering its forces for a last stand, and the focal

point of the English resistance shifts to the extreme east of the land.

At each stage in the Norman Conquest there is always one particular

district round which the main interest centres for the time, the

operations of war elsewhere being of subsidiary importance. It was the

men of Kent and Sussex who bore the brunt of the first shock of the

invasion; it was the men of the north who held the field in 1069, and

now, in the last period of English resistance, our attention is

concentrated on the rectangular tract of land which lies between

Welland, Ermine Street, Ouse, and Wash. Even at the present day, after

eight centuries of drainage, it is not difficult to reconstruct the

geographical features which in 1070 made the Fenland the most

inaccessible part of England south of the Humber. Except for a narrow

tract north of Huntingdon and St. Ives, no part of this district rises

to one hundred feet above sea-level, and in great part it was still

covered with the swamps and meres of stagnant water which gave to the

eastern half of this region the name of the Isle of Ely. In so far as

cultivation had already extended into this inhospitable quarter, it may

fairly be set down to the credit of the five great abbeys of

Peterborough, Thorney, Crowland, Ramsey, and Ely, which dominated the

fens and round which the events of the campaign of 1070 arrange

themselves.

Abbot Brand of Peterborough, whose recognition of Edgar the Etheling as

king had so deeply moved the Conqueror’s wrath at the time of his

coronation, had died on November 27, 1069.[221] At this moment King

William was in the thick of his Northumbrian difficulties, and it does

not appear that any appointment to Peterborough was made until the

quieter times of the following spring. In or before May, however, the

abbey was given to a man whose selection for the post proves that the

king had received warning of the coming disquiet in the east. Thorold of

Fécamp, abbot of Malmesbury, had probably made himself useful in north

Wiltshire while William was engaged beyond the Humber, for the

reputation for militant severity which he had created in the south was

the reason for his translation to a post of danger in the Fenland. “By

God’s splendour,” said King William, “if he is more of a knight than an

abbot I will find him a man who will meet all his attacks, where he can

prove his valour and his knighthood and practise the art of war.”[222]

The man in question was no other than the famous Hereward, and Thorold

was not long before he saw traces of his handiwork.

The amount of authentic fact which we know about Hereward is in very

small proportion to the great mass of legend which has gathered round

his name. His parentage is quite unknown, but there are several

incidental entries in Domesday which connect him with the western edge

of the Fenland and which all occur in the Lincolnshire portion of the

survey. From these entries we learn that Hereward had been a tenant of

two of the great Fenland abbeys, namely Crowland and Peterborough, and

we also gather that the former house had found him an unsatisfactory

person with whom to have dealings. The jurors of Aveland Wapentake in

Lincolnshire told the Domesday commissioners that Abbot Ulfketil of

Crowland had let the abbey’s estate in the vill of Rippingale to

Hereward on terms to be arranged mutually year by year, but they add

that the abbot took possession of the land again before Hereward fled

from the country because he did not keep to his agreement.[223] On the

other hand, Hereward was seemingly still in the possession of the lands

which he held of Peterborough abbey at the moment when his name first

appears in the national history.

At some time in the course of May, but before Abbot Thorold had taken

possession of his abbey, the Danish fleet, of which we have heard

nothing since the previous year, sailed up the Ouse to Ely. Thus far its

leaders would seem to have kept the agreement which they had made with

King William after his capture of York, and the fact that they now

appear as taking the offensive once more is probably explained by a

statement in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ that King Swegn of Denmark had

come in person to the Humber.[224] The men of the Fenland were clearly

expecting a Danish reconquest of England, and on the appearance of Earl

Asbiorn at Ely they joined him in great numbers. Among them, and

probably at their head, was Hereward, and the first fruit of the

alliance was a successful raid on the wealthy and unprotected monastery

of Peterborough. The monks received just sufficient warning of

approaching danger to enable them to send an urgent message to Abbot

Thorold, asking for help, and also to hide some of the more precious

treasures of their house, and then at mid-day Hereward and his gang were

on them. They came by boat, for even at this date there were canals

which connected the Ouse at Ely with the Nene at Peterborough, and began

to clamour for admission to the abbey.[225] But the monks had closed

their doors and defended them stoutly, so that Hereward was driven to

burn the houses which clustered round the abbey gate in order to force

an entrance. Incidentally the whole of Peterborough was burned down,

with the exception of the church and a single house, but the outlaws had

got inside the monastery. The monks begged them to do no harm, but,

without heeding, they burst into the church, seized all the movable

articles of value on which they could lay their hands, and tried to tear

down the great rood cross. To the clamours of the monks around them they

shouted that they did it all for the good of the church, and as Hereward

was a tenant of the abbey the monks believed him. Indeed, Hereward

himself in after years declared that he had been guided in this matter

by the best intentions, for he believed that the Danes would beat King

William and he thought that it would be better that the treasures of the

church should remain in the hands of his friends for a little while,

than that they should fall for ever into the possession of the

Frenchmen.

So the monks were scattered and the wealth of the Golden Borough was

carried off to Ely and handed over to the Danes, who do not seem to have

shared Hereward’s sentiments with regard to its ultimate destination.

Among the captives who were carried off from Peterborough was Ethelwold,

the prior, who, in hope of better days, devoted himself secretly to the

recovery of the relics contained in the jewelled shrines which formed

the most valuable part of the plunder that had just been taken. With

this object in view, he deliberately set himself to win the favour of

the despoilers of his home, and succeeded so well, that the Danes

committed their treasure to his custody, and promised him a bishopric in

Denmark if he chose to return with them. Being a discreet man, he

pretended to comply with their wishes, and in the meantime possessed

himself of the tools which were necessary for the abstraction of the

relics. And on a certain day, while the Danes were holding a great

feast, to celebrate the winning of so great a treasure at so small a

cost, Ethelwold took his tools and set to work, beginning his operations

on the reliquary which he knew to contain the arm of St. Oswald. To

prevent interruption he placed two servants on guard, one in the house

where the Danes were feasting, and the other midway between the latter

place and the scene of his own labours. The task progressed without

greater difficulty than was to be expected, although one of the chests

was so tightly clamped with iron that Ethelwold would have abandoned it

had he not trusted in God and St. Oswald. At last the relics were all

secured and hidden temporarily in the straw of the prior’s bed, he being

careful to replace the gold and silver fittings of the shrines as they

were before. But at the critical moment the Danes broke up to go to

vespers and Ethelwold was in imminent danger of being taken, in which

event it is probable that his pious zeal would have been rewarded with

the crown of martyrdom. But, without leaving his room, the prior, who

was covered with sweat and very red from his labour in the heat of a

June afternoon, washed his face in cold water and went out to his

captors as if nothing had happened, and they, who we are told reverenced

him as a father, flocked round him but asked no inconvenient questions.

And on the following day he sent his two servants to Hereward—because

his comrades were infesting all the water-ways—under the pretence that

they wished to fetch something from Peterborough, but in reality they

went to the nearer monastery of Ramsey and gave the relics into the

charge of the abbot of that place.

At this point the adventures of Prior Ethelwold touch the current of the

general history. King William, in order, presumably, to divide the

insurgent Englishmen from their Danish allies, made a treaty with Swegn

of Denmark, by which his subjects were to be allowed to sail for their

fatherland without hindrance and in possession of all the spoil they had

gained in the course of the past months. They took advantage of the

offer, but gained little by it in the event, for a great storm arose

which scattered their ships, and the last we hear of the treasures of

Peterborough is their destruction, in a nameless Danish town, in a great

fire which arose through the drunkenness of their guardians. In the

meantime, Ethelwold, his troubles over, collected his fellow-monks and

came back to Peterborough, where they found Abbot Thorold, and restored

the services which had been suspended during the recent disturbances.

One unexpected difficulty indeed manifested itself: the Ramsey people

refused to give up the relics which had been entrusted to their care in

the moment of peril. But the abbot of Ramsey was soon brought into a

better mind; the sacristan of the monastery received a supernatural

intimation that his house was acting unjustly, and Thorold of

Peterborough threatened to burn Ramsey abbey to the ground unless the

relics were given back. And so the heroic efforts of Ethelwold were not

frustrated of their purpose.

So quickly had events moved that only one week had elapsed between the

coming of Hereward to Peterborough and the departure of the Danish

fleet. But an entire year had yet to pass before the Isle of Ely was

finally cleared of its rebel garrison. It does not seem that the

withdrawal of the Danes made any difference to the occupation of Ely by

the English, and during the winter of 1070 the Isle became a gathering

point for the last adherents of the broken national party. Very few of

them were left now. Edgar, their nominal head, was living in peace with

King Malcolm of Scotland; Waltheof, the last representative of the

Danish earls of Northumbria, was at this moment in enjoyment of an

earldom in the midlands which there is every reason to believe included

the Isle of Ely itself. On the other hand, Edwin and Morcar now finally

took their departure from William’s court, and raised the last of their

futile protests against the Norman rule.

Hitherto inseparable, on this occasion the brother earls took different

courses, and the result was disastrous to both of them. Morcar joined

the outlaws in Ely; Edwin struck out for the Scotch kingdom, and from

our meagre information about his last months it would seem that he had

in view some great scheme of reviving once more the old friendship

between his house and the Welsh princes and of supporting the

combination with Scotch aid. But fate overtook him before he had time to

give another exhibition of his political worthlessness, and the

circumstances of his end were tragic and mysterious. Three brothers, who

were on terms of intimacy with him and were attending him in his

wanderings, betrayed him to the Normans, and in attempting to escape,

his retreat was blocked by a river swollen at the moment by a high tide.

On its bank the last earl of Mercia turned at bay, and with twenty

horsemen at his side made a desperate defence until the whole band was

cut down; Edwin himself, it would appear, falling by the hands of the

three traitors of his household. His head was cut off and the same three

brothers brought it to King William in the expectancy of a great reward.

But the Conqueror on the spot outlawed them for their treason to their

lord, and shed tears of grief over Edwin’s head; for the handsome,

fickle young earl, with all his faults, had really won the love of the

grim sovereign from whom he had thrice revolted.[226]

Edwin fell through treachery, but he met his death in the sight of the

sun; another fate remained for his brother and for those of his

associates whose end is known to us. The cause of the defenders of Ely

was hopeless from the outset. Their revolt was a hindrance to the

orderly conduct of the Anglo-Norman government, but a band of outlaws in

the fenland could do little to affect the course of events elsewhere;

Ely commanded no great road or river, and its Isle was too small an area

to support an independent existence apart from the rest of the land. Its

reduction was only a question of time, complicated by the geographical

difficulties of the district. It was necessary that all the waterways

leading from the fens to the open sea should be blocked, and this

implied the concentration of a considerable number of ships and

men-at-arms along the Great and Little Ouse. The siege of a quarter of

Cambridgeshire demanded a greater expenditure of men and money than that

of a single town or castle; but Hereward and his friends in due time

were driven back on Ely itself, from which their raiding parties would

make occasional descents upon the neighbouring villages. The Conqueror

fixed his headquarters at Cambridge, some fifteen miles from Ely, and

his main attack was directed at the point where the Ouse is crossed by

an ancient causeway near the village of Aldreth. But even from the

latter place there remained some six miles of fen to be crossed before

Ely itself could be reached, and we are told on good authority that

William caused a bridge, two miles long, to be built on the western side

of the Isle.[227]

The legendary accounts of the exploits of Hereward tell many tales of

the struggle which raged before the Norman army had pierced the natural

defences of Ely, but we cannot be sure of the exact means by which the

place was finally reduced. One stream of tradition assigned the fall of

the Isle to the treachery of the abbot and monks of Ely, and, although

the authority for such a statement is not first-rate, it has commonly

been accepted as representing the truth of the matter.[228] It is at

least certain that the position in which the monks of Ely found

themselves was undesirable at the best. The conduct of Hereward and his

men at Peterborough proves them to have been no respecters of holy

places, and if the abbey bought immediate safety by conniving at the

deeds of the outlaws in its neighbourhood, it ran the risk of the

ultimate confiscation of its lands when King William had restored order.

Small blame should rest upon the abbot if he broke through the dilemma

in which he was placed by assisting the Conqueror in the reduction of

the Isle. But whatever the immediate cause of the fall of Ely, a large

number of its defenders fell into William’s hands and many of them

received from him such measure as twenty years before he had dealt to

the men of Alençon. Some were blinded or otherwise mutilated and allowed

to go free, others were thrown into prison. Earl Morcar himself was sent

into Normandy a prisoner and committed to the charge of Roger de

Beaumont[229]; the other captives of note were scattered over the

country in different fortresses. But Hereward, who in all our

authorities stands out as the leader of the resistance, escaped through

the marshes and a small part of his band got clear of the Isle in his

company.[230]

Whatever the recent behaviour of the monks of Ely may have been, the

abbey was constrained to buy the king’s peace at a heavy price. Seven

hundred marks of silver were originally demanded by the Conqueror, but

the money was found to be of light weight, and three hundred marks more

were exacted before the abbot and monks were reckoned quit by the king’s

officer. Moreover, the very precincts of the abbey were invaded to find

the site for a castle to command the southern fenland: King William

himself having chosen the ground during a flying visit which he had paid

to Ely one day while the monks were seated at dinner. The building of

the castle, by a Norman interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon duty of

_burhbot_, was laid upon the men of the three adjacent counties of

Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Bedford, and it was garrisoned when built by

a body of picked knights. Another castle at Aldreth commanded the

eastern approaches to the Isle.[231] On the other hand, it would be some

compensation for these disturbances that within four years from the fall

of Ely, and in the lifetime of Abbot Thurstan, King William decreed a

formal restitution to the abbey of all the lands of which it had

unjustly been despoiled in recent years.[232] Now that no further danger

was to be apprehended from the nationalist proclivities of the monks of

Ely, there was no reason why the abbey should not be suffered to enjoy

its ancient possessions in peace; but the record of the plea which

followed the Conqueror’s writ directing restitution proves that many of

the greater people of the land, including the archbishop Stigand and

Count Eustace of Boulogne, had been committing wholesale depredations on

the estates of St. Ethelthryth.

The subsequent fate of Hereward is a matter of utter uncertainty; with

his flight across the marshes of Ely he vanishes into the night which

has engulfed the entire class to which he belonged, the smaller native

land-owners of King Edward’s day. Two lines of tradition were current in

later years about the manner of his end. According to the more dramatic

narrative, Hereward became reconciled to the Conqueror, accompanied him

in the Mancel campaign of 1074, married a noble and wealthy

Englishwoman, and fell at last, before overwhelming odds, at the hands

of a number of Normans, whose feud he would seem to have provoked in the

wild days of his outlawry.[233] In the other story, Hereward still

receives King William’s favour and marries the same English lady as in

the former legend, but he dies at last in peace after many years in the

quiet possession of his father’s lands.[234] The choice which we may

make between these divergent traditions will largely be guided by

inference from more truly historical sources of information. It is very

probable that Hereward made his peace with King William—both traditions

agree upon this point; and that casual expression in the narrative of

the sack of Peterborough, that Hereward “in after time often told the

monks that he had done all for the best,” proves at least that there had

been a period after the troubles of 1071 in which Hereward had been on

terms of peaceful intercourse with his monkish neighbours. So too the

coincidence of both lines of tradition with regard to his marriage is in

favour of its probability, but the negative evidence of Domesday Book

compels us to put a period to his life before the winter of 1085. In no

part of England did a more numerous body of native thegns hold land at

the latter date than in Hereward’s own county of Lincoln, but Hereward’s

name is not written among them, and the lands which he had held of

Peterborough abbey had been let to a stranger. But if the Hereward

legend is not consistent with itself, there is a more significant

discrepancy between the part which its subject plays in recorded history

and his position as a hero of romance. It is at least certain that the

man must have been something more than the vulgar freebooter who appears

in the story of the ruin of Peterborough. To him we may safely credit

the long defence of the Isle of Ely, and we may feel confident that that

defence was accompanied by deeds of gallantry round which minstrel and

gleeman might weave their fabric of legend and marvel. Hereward, after

all, in literature, if not in fact, is the English hero of the Norman

Conquest. A native annalist might express his bitter regret for the

tragedy of King Harold, the common folk of England might turn Earl

Waltheof into an uncanonised saint, but Hereward was removed by no great

chasm of rank from the humble people who made his deeds their story. And

it is not a small thing that the tale of the resistance to the Norman

Conqueror, inglorious as much of it had been, should end with the name

of a man in whom the succeeding generations might see a true champion of

the independence of the beaten race.

[Illustration: Penny of Swegn Estuthson]

-----

Footnote 118:

Round, _Calendar of Documents preserved in France_, No. 1713.

Footnote 119:

William of Poitiers, 122.

Footnote 120:

W. P., 123. “Turmas militum cernens, non exhorrescens.”

Footnote 121:

Guy of Amiens, ed. Giles, 58.

Footnote 122:

William of Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum_, ii., 300.

Footnote 123:

William of Poitiers, 125.

Footnote 124:

William of Poitiers, 126.

Footnote 125:

_Abingdon Chronicle_, 1066.

Footnote 126:

Guy of Amiens: “Diruta quae fuerant dudum castella reformas; Ponis

custodes ut tueantur ea.”

Footnote 127:

W. P.: “Normanni previa munitione Penevesellum, altera Hastingas

occupavere.”

Footnote 128:

See on this point Round, _Feudal England_, 150–152.

Footnote 129:

William of Poitiers, 128.

Footnote 130:

William’s real numbers probably lay between six and seven thousand.

Footnote 131:

See the paraphrase of this passage in the _Roman de Rou_, Freeman, N.

C., iii., 417.

Footnote 132:

Guy of Amiens, p. 31: “Ex Anglis unus, latitans sub rupe marina Cemit

ut effusas innumeras acies. Scandere currit equum; festinat dicere

regi.”

Footnote 133:

Gaimar, _l’Estoire des Engles_, R. S., i., p. 222. Gaimar wrote in the

twelfth century, but he followed a lost copy of the A.-S. chronicle.

Footnote 134:

For the chronology of the campaigns of Stamfordbridge and Hastings the

dates given by Freeman are followed here.

Footnote 135:

_Worcester Chronicle_, 1066: “He com him togenes at thœre haran

apuldran.”

Footnote 136:

The statement that Harold further strengthened his position by

building a palisade in front of it rests solely on an obscure and

probably corrupt passage in the _Roman de Rou_ (lines 7815 _et seqq_).

Apart altogether from the textual difficulty, the assertion of Wace is

of no authority in view of the silence both of contemporary writers

and of those of the next generation. In regard to none of the many

earlier English fights of this century have we any hint that the

position of the army was strengthened in this manner; nor in practice

would it have been easy for Harold to collect sufficient timber to

protect a front of 800 yards on the barren down where he made his

stand. The negative evidence of the Bayeux tapestry is of particular

importance here; for its designer could represent defences of the kind

suggested when he so desired, as in the case of the fight at Dinan.

Footnote 137:

Spatz, p. 30, will only allow to William a total force of six to seven

thousand men.

Footnote 138:

W. P., 133. “Cuncti pedites consistere densius conglobati.” For the

arrangement of the English army on the hill see Baring, E. H. R., xx.,

65.

Footnote 139:

It is probable that the expressions in certain later authorities

(_e.g._ W. M., ii., 302, “pedites omnes cum bipennibus conserta ante

se testudine”) from which the formation by the English of a definite

shield or wall has been inferred mean no more than this. The “bord

weal” of earlier Anglo-Saxon warfare may also be explained as a

poetical phrase for a line of troops in close order.

See Round, _Feudal England_, 360–366.

Footnote 140:

This fact, which must condition any account to be given of the battle

of Hastings, was first stated by Dr. W. Spatz, “Die Schlacht von

Hastings,” section v., “Taktik beider Heere,” p. 34.

Footnote 141:

This point is brought out strongly by Oman, _History of the Art of

War_.

Footnote 142:

Spatz, p. 29, uses this fact to limit the numbers of the Norman army.

Footnote 143:

W. P., 132.

Footnote 144:

Guy of Amiens: “Lævam Galli, dextram petiere Britanni. Dux cum

Normannis dimicat in medio.”

Footnote 145:

W. P., 132.

Footnote 146:

Florence of Worcester, 1066: “Ab hora tamen diei tertia usque ad

noctis crepusculum.”

Footnote 147:

Guy of Amiens. W. P., 133: “Cedit fere cuncta Ducis acies.”

Footnote 148:

“Fugientibus occurrit et obstitit, verberans aut minans hasta.”—W. P.,

134.

Footnote 149:

Bayeux tapestry scene: “Hic Odo episcopus, baculum tenens, confortat

pueros.”

Footnote 150:

W. P., 134.

Footnote 151:

“Animadvertentes Normanni ... non absque nimio sui incommodo hostem

tantum simul resistentem superari posse.”—W. P., 135.

Footnote 152:

“Normanni repente regirati equis interceptos et inclusos undique

mactaverunt.”—W. P., 135.

Footnote 153:

“Bis eo dolo simili eventu usi.”—William of Poitiers, 135.

Footnote 154:

“Languent Angli, et quasi reatum ipso defectu confitentes, vindictum

patiuntur.”—W. P., 135.

Footnote 155:

Baring, E. H. R., xxii., 71.

Footnote 156:

“Jam inclinato die.”—W. P., 137. Crepusculi tempore.—Florence of

Worcester, 1066.

Footnote 157:

Baring, E. H. R., xxii., 69.

Footnote 158:

Guy of Amiens.

Footnote 159:

See the Waltham tract, _De Inventione Sancti Crucis_, ed. Stubbs.

William of Malmesbury was evidently acquainted with this legend.

Footnote 160:

It is probable that Wulfnoth had been taken together with Harold by

Guy of Ponthieu, and had been left behind in Normandy as a surety for

the observance of his brother’s oath to William.

Footnote 161:

_Gesta Regum_, R. S., 307.

Footnote 162:

Thomas Stubbs, ed. Raine; _Historians of the Church of York_, R. S.,

ii., 100.

Footnote 163:

William of Poitiers, 139.

Footnote 164:

William of Poitiers, 139.

Footnote 165:

Guy of Amiens, 607.

Footnote 166:

William of Poitiers, 140.

Footnote 167:

Guy of Amiens, 617.

Footnote 168:

The embassy to Winchester is only mentioned by Guy of Amiens, who

omits all reference to William’s illness, which is derived from

William of Poitiers. Guy, however, places the message at this point of

the campaign.

Footnote 169:

Round, _Geoffrey de Mandeville_, 4.

Footnote 170:

This is clearly meant by the statement of William of Poitiers that

William’s troops burned “quicquid ædificiorum citra flumen invenere.”

Footnote 171:

William of Poitiers, 141.

Footnote 172:

The _Worcester Chronicle_, followed by Florence of Worcester, 1066,

asserts that Edwin and Morcar submitted at “Beorcham,” but William of

Poitiers, whose authority is preferable on a point of this kind,

implies that they did not give in their allegiance until after the

coronation. On the geography relating to these events see Baring,

E.H.R. xiii., 17.

Footnote 173:

William of Poitiers, 142.

Footnote 174:

Guy of Amiens, 687 _et seqq._

Footnote 175:

William of Poitiers, 143.

Footnote 176:

“Vehementer trementem,” Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 157.

Footnote 177:

Florence of Worcester, 1066.

Footnote 178:

William of Poitiers, 147–8.

Footnote 179:

This writ was issued in favour of one Regenbald, who had been King

Edward’s chancellor. It was printed by Round in _Feudal England_, 422,

with remarks on its historical importance.

Footnote 180:

_Monasticon_, i., 383. _See_ also Round, _Commune of London_, 29.

Footnote 181:

_Monasticon_, i., 301. The date assigned here to these documents, of

which the text in the _Monasticon_ edition is very faulty, is a matter

of inference; but the personal names which occur in them suggest that

they should be assigned to the very beginning of William’s reign.

Footnote 182:

Round, _Calendar of Documents Preserved in France_, No. 1423. _See_

also _Commune of London_, 30.

Footnote 183:

William of Poitiers, 148; Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 165.

Footnote 184:

_Peterborough Chronicle_, 1066. “And menn guldon him gyld ... and

sithan heora land bohtan.”—D. B., ii., 360. “Hanc Terram habet abbas

... quando redimebant Anglici terras suas.” The combination of these

statements led Freeman to make the suggestion referred to in the text.

Footnote 185:

It may be noted that there exist a few proved cases in which a Norman

baron had married the daughter of his English predecessor, so that

here the king’s grant to the stranger would only confirm the latter in

possession of his wife’s inheritance.

Footnote 186:

D. B., i., 285 b. (Normanton on Trent).

Footnote 187:

_Victoria History of Northamptonshire_, i., 324.

Footnote 188:

Frequently printed, _e.g._, by Stubbs, _Select Charters_, 82.

Footnote 189:

Suggested by Round, _Geoffrey de Mandeville_, 439.

Footnote 190:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 167. The mercenaries were paid off at Pevensey

before William sailed for Normandy.

Footnote 191:

_Peterborough Chronicle_, 1087.

Footnote 192:

William of Poitiers (149) states that William Fitz Osbern was left in

charge of the city “Guenta,” which is described as being situated

fourteen miles from the sea which divides the English from the Danes,

and as a point where a Danish army might be likely to land. These

indications imply that Norwich (_Venta Icenorum_) was Fitz Osbern’s

headquarters, although the name Guenta alone would naturally refer to

Winchester (_Venta Belgarum_). The joint regency of Odo and William is

asserted by Florence of Worcester, 1067, and the phrase in William of

Poitiers, that Fitz Osbern “toto regno Aquilionem versus præesset,”

suggests that the Thames was the boundary between his province and

that of Odo. The priority of Fitz Osbern in the regency is suggested

by the fact that in a writ relating to land in Somerset, he joins his

name with that of the king in addressing the magnates of the shire.

Somersetshire certainly formed no part of his direct sphere of

administration at the time. For further references to this writ see

below, Chapter XI.

Footnote 193:

The fullest list of names is given by Orderic, ii., 167.

Footnote 194:

William of Poitiers, 155.

Footnote 195:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 170.

Footnote 196:

Simeon of Durham, under the year 1072. He asserts that Oswulf himself

slew Copsige in the door of the church.

Footnote 197:

Simeon of Durham, under 1070.

Footnote 198:

Florence of Worcester, 1067.

Footnote 199:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 173.

Footnote 200:

The fullest account of the affair at Dover is given by Orderic (ii.,

172–5), who expands the slighter narrative of William of Poitiers.

Footnote 201:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 178.

Footnote 202:

Ordericus Vitalis., ii., 179.

Footnote 203:

“Ad Danos, vel alio, unde auxilium aliquod speratur, legatos

missitant.”—William of Poitiers, 157.

Footnote 204:

The story of the revolt of Exeter is critically discussed by Round,

_Feudal England_, 431–455.

Footnote 205:

_Worcester Chronicle_, 1067; Florence of Worcester, 1068; William of

Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum_, ii., 312.

Footnote 206:

The source of our information is an original charter granted by

William to the church of St. Martin’s le Grand on May 11th.—E. H. R.

xii., 109.

Footnote 207:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 183.

Footnote 208:

The rising of Edwin and Morcar is not mentioned by the English

authorities, which are only concerned with the movements of Edgar and

his companions. Florence of Worcester says that the latter fled the

court through the fear of imprisonment. They had given no known cause

of offence since their original submission, but it is probable that

they would have been kept in close restraint if they had been in the

king’s power when the northern revolt broke out and that they fled to

avoid this.

Footnote 209:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 184.

Footnote 210:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 185.

Footnote 211:

Simeon of Durham, 1069.

Footnote 212:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 188. From his statement that Earl William beat

the rebels “in a certain valley,” it is evident that the military

operations were not confined to the city of York.

Footnote 213:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 189.

Footnote 214:

For the events of 1069 Orderic is almost the sole authority, and his

narrative is not always easy to follow. On the other hand he is

doubtless in great part following the contemporary William of

Poitiers, and his tale is quite consistent with itself if due

allowance is made for its geographical confusion.

Footnote 215:

The exact scene of Waltheof’s exploit is uncertain. Orderic implies

that the entire Norman garrison in York perished in the unsuccessful

sally. Florence of Worcester states that the castles were taken by

storm. The latter is certainly the more probable, and agrees better

with the tradition, preserved by William of Malmesbury, of the

slaughter at the gate. The gate in question, on this reading of the

story, will belong to one of the castles; it cannot well be taken to

be one of the gates of the town.

Footnote 216:

The mutilation is only recorded by a late authority, the Winchester

_Annals_.

Footnote 217:

Ordericus’ narrative at this point is not very clear, but this is

probably his meaning.

Footnote 218:

By Ordericus William is made to return to York through Hexham

(“Hangustaldam revertabatur a Tesca”). This being impossible it is

generally assumed that Helmsley (Hamilac in D. B.) should be read for

Hexham, in which case William would probably cross the Cleveland hills

by way of Bilsdale.

Footnote 219:

“Desertores, vero, velut inertes, pavidosque et invalidos, si

discedant, parvi pendit.”

Footnote 220:

Chester castle was planted within arrow shot of the landing stage on

the right bank of the Dee, and also commanded the bridge which carried

the road from the Cheshire plain to the North Wales coast.

Footnote 221:

_Peterborough Chronicle_, 1069.

Footnote 222:

William of Malmesbury, _Gesta Pontificum_, § 420.

Footnote 223:

Domesday Book, i., 346.

Footnote 224:

_Peterborough Chronicle_, 1070.

Footnote 225:

The passages which follow are founded on the narrative of Hugh

“Candidus,” a monk of Peterborough, who in the reign of Henry II.

wrote an account of the possessions of the abbey, and inserts a long

passage descriptive of the events of 1070. The beginning of his

narrative agrees closely with the contemporary account in the

_Peterborough Chronicle_, but his tale of the doings of the Danes in

Ely after the sack of Peterborough is independent, and bears every

mark of truth. Wherever it is possible to test Hugh’s work, in regard

to other matters, its accuracy is confirmed. See _Feudal England_,

163, V.C.H. Notts, i., 222. Hugh’s _Chronicle_ has not been printed

since its edition by Sparke in the seventeenth century.

Footnote 226:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 216. The death of Edwin formed the conclusion

of the narrative of William of Poitiers as Orderic possessed it.

Footnote 227:

Florence of Worcester, 1070.

Footnote 228:

_Historia Eliensis_, 240.

Footnote 229:

Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 216.

Footnote 230:

Florence of Worcester, 1071.

Footnote 231:

_Historia Eliensis_, 245.

Footnote 232:

See “Ely and her Despoilers,” in _Feudal England_, 459.

Footnote 233:

Gaimar, _L’estoire des Engles_, R. S.

Footnote 234:

_Gesta Herewardi_, R. S.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CENTRAL YEARS OF THE ENGLISH REIGN

The conquest of England had exalted William of Normandy to a position of

dignity and influence far above all his fellow-vassals of the French

crown, it had renewed the lustre of the fame which the Norman race had

won in its earlier conquest of southern Italy, but it did not mean an

unqualified gain to the Norman state, considered merely as a feudal

power. The process which had turned the duke of the Normans into the

king of the English had meant the withdrawal of Normandy from the feudal

politics of France for four years, and in that interval certain changes

of considerable importance had taken place within the limits of the

French kingdom. The Angevin succession war was now over; Fulk le Rechin

had his brother safely bestowed in prison and could begin to prove

himself the true heir of Geoffrey Martel by renewing the latter’s

schemes of territorial aggrandisement. King Philip of France had reached

an age at which he was competent to rule in person, and it was

inevitable that the enmity between Normandy and France should become

deeper and more persistent now that William had attained to a rank which

placed him on an equality with his suzerain, and could employ the

resources of his new kingdom for the furtherance of any designs which he

might form upon the integrity of the royal demesne. More important than

all, Count Baldwin of Flanders had died in 1067, and events were in

progress which for twenty years placed the wealthy county in steady

opposition to the interests of the Anglo-Norman state.

Between 1067 and 1070 Flanders was under the rule of Count Baldwin VI.,

the eldest son of Baldwin of Lille, who had greatly increased his

borders by a marriage with Richildis, the heiress of the neighbouring

imperial fief of Hainault. The counts of Flanders made it a matter of

policy to transmit their inheritance undivided to the chosen heir, and

Robert, the younger son of the old Count Baldwin, before his father’s

death had secured himself against his ultimate disinherison by marrying

Gertrude, widow of Florent I., count of Holland, and assuming the

guardianship of her son Theodoric. On the death of Baldwin VI., the

ancestral domain of Flanders descended to his eldest son, Arnulf, who

was placed under the wardship of his uncle Robert, while Hainault passed

to Baldwin, the second son, under the regency of his mother Richildis.

The two regents were on bad terms from the start, but Robert at the time

was hard pressed to maintain his position in Holland, and Richildis soon

got possession of Arnulf, the heir of Flanders, and ruled there in his

name. But her overbearing conduct rapidly made her unpopular in the

county, and Robert was soon invited to invade Flanders and reign there

in his own right. He accepted the invitation, and Richildis thereupon

hired King Philip of France to support her with an army, and offered her

hand and her dominions to William Fitz Osbern, Earl of Hereford. The

earl, like a good knight-errant, accepted the adventure and hastened to

the succour of the lady with the full assent of his lord King William,

but fell into an ambush laid by his enemy Robert, at Bavinkhove, near

Cassel, and perished there together with Arnulf his ward. Richildis

maintained the struggle for a short time longer with the aid of troops

supplied by the prince-bishop of Liège; but on their defeat near Mons,

followed a little later by the surrender of Terouenne, the

ecclesiastical capital of Flanders, she retired into the monastery of

Maxines, and Robert, who is generally described in history as the

“Frisian” from the name of his earlier principality on the shores of the

Zuyder Zee, had the permanent possession of Flanders thenceforward.

The enterprise of William Fitz Osbern meant the dissolution of the

alliance between Normandy and Flanders, which had been founded by the

Conqueror’s marriage in 1053. It was true that French as well as Norman

troops had been involved in the disaster at Bavinkhove, but William

deliberately refused to make peace with Robert by recognising his right

to Flanders, and threw him into the arms of the king of France by

maintaining the claims of Baldwin, the brother of the dead Arnulf. The

close friendship which this policy produced between France and Flanders

for a time may suggest that William for once subordinated questions of

state to personal feeling, but his own relations with a former king of

France may have taught him that the alliances which a French monarch

founded with one feudatory on a common hostility towards another were

not likely to be very strong or permanent. It was not long after these

events that King Philip threw away his Flemish connections by the

unprovoked capture of Corbie, preferring, perhaps wisely, a definite

territorial gain to a hazardous diplomatic understanding; and when

Robert the Frisian, in 1085, at last tried to take the offensive against

William, he found support, not in the French monarchy, but in the

distant powers of Norway and Denmark.[235]

More dangerous than the open hostility of Flanders were the symptoms of

disaffection which at this time were beginning to show themselves in the

Norman dependency of Maine. Fortunately for William, the county had kept

quiet during his occupation with the affairs of England, and the revolt

which we have now to consider occurred at a time when he could give his

full attention to the work of its reduction. The nationalist party in

Maine had only been suppressed, not crushed, by the conquest of 1063,

and after some five years of Norman rule their hopes began to revive,

fomented probably by external suggestion on the part of Count Fulk of

Anjou. There were in the field two possible claimants, both connected by

marriage with the line of native counts: Azo, marquis of Liguria,

husband of Gersendis, the eldest sister of the Herbert whose death in

1063 had led to the Norman occupation, and John de la Flèche, who had

married Paula, the youngest of Herbert’s three sisters. The seigneur of

La Flèche was an Angevin lord, but he took the Norman side in the war

which followed, and the nationalists made their application to the

marquis of Liguria, who appeared in Maine with Gersendis his wife and

Hugh their son, the latter being received as the heir of the

county.[236] Azo had brought with him great store of treasure from his

Italian lordship, with which he secured a recognition of his son’s

claims from great part of the Mancel baronage, but upon the failure of

his supplies his supporters began to fall away, and he soon retired in

disgust beyond the Alps, leaving behind his wife and son to maintain the

family cause under the guardianship of Geoffrey of Mayenne.

Thus far the Mancel revolt had run the normal course of its kind, but a

more interesting development followed.[237] Shortly after the departure

of Azo the citizens of Le Mans, rejecting the leadership of their

baronial confederates, broke away on a line of their own which gives

them the distinction of anticipating by some twenty years the movement

of municipal independence which in the next generation was to

revolutionise the status of the great cities of Flanders and northern

France. The men of Le Mans formed themselves into a “commune”[238]; that

is, a civic republic administered by elective officers and occupying a

recognised legal position in the feudal hierarchy to which it belonged.

Had this association persisted, the citizens in their collective

capacity might have held their city of the duke of Normandy or the count

of Anjou, but they would have enjoyed complete independence in their

local government and no principle of feudal law would have prevented

them from appearing, still collectively, as the lord of vassals of their

own. We do not know whether they may have been prompted to take this

step by news of Italian precedents in the same direction, but the

formation of a commune raised the revolt at a bound to the dignity of a

revolution. The citizens, as was usual in such cases, united themselves

in an oath to maintain their constitution and they compelled Geoffrey of

Mayenne and the other barons of the neighbourhood to associate

themselves in the same. Herein lay the seeds of future trouble, for

Geoffrey of Mayenne, a typical feudal noble, had no liking for municipal

autonomy, and it was largely his oppression as the representative of Azo

and his heir which had stung the citizens into this assertion of their

independence.

At the outset all went well with the young republic. We hear rumours of

various violations of accepted custom, of the death penalty inflicted

for small offences, and of a certain disregard for the holy seasons of

the church; but the citizens were able to enter without immediate mishap

upon the work of reducing the castles which commanded the country

around. The commune of Le Mans did not live long enough to face the

problem of welding a powerful rural feudality into a coherent city

state, and its overthrow, when it came, came suddenly and disgracefully.

Some twenty miles from Le Mans, the castle of Sillé was being held by

Hugh its lord against the commune, and the men of the capital called out

a general levy of their supporters within the county to undertake the

siege of the fortress. A considerable body of men obeyed the summons,

and the communal army set out for Sillé with Arnold, bishop of Le Mans,

marching at its head. Hard by the castle the army from Le Mans was

joined by Geoffrey of Mayenne with his tenants; but Geoffrey felt the

incongruity of joining with a host of rebellious burghers in an attack

on the castle of a fellow-noble, and he secretly entered into

communications with Hugh of Sillé. Whether the rout of the civic host

which occurred on the following day was the result of Geoffrey’s treason

cannot now be decided, but a sudden sally on the part of the garrison

threw the besiegers into confusion, and, although they recovered

themselves sufficiently to maintain the fight, they were finally

scattered by a report that Le Mans itself had fallen into the enemy’s

hand. Great numbers of them perished in the panic which followed, more

by the precipitancy of their flight than by the efforts of the men of

Sillé, and Bishop Arnold was among the prisoners.

Within the capital all was confusion. The cause of the commune had been

hopelessly discredited, and there was treachery within the city as well

as in the camp by Sillé. The castle of Le Mans was occupied in the

nationalist interest by Gersendis of Liguria, who, immediately upon the

retreat of her elderly husband to Italy, had become the mistress of

Geoffrey of Mayenne. But Geoffrey, after his conduct at Sillé, did not

venture to return to the capital, and Gersendis, unable to endure her

lover’s absence, began to plot the surrender of the castle to him. Her

object was soon gained, and a fierce struggle raged for many days

between the citizens and Geoffrey of Mayenne, now in the possession of

their fortress. Betrayed and desperate, the men of Le Mans appealed for

help to Fulk of Anjou, and pressed on the siege with such fury that

Geoffrey was driven to make his escape by night. On Fulk’s arrival the

castle surrendered to him, and was dismantled, with the exception of

such of its fortifications as could be turned to the general defence of

the city against the greater enemy who was already on the way.

Quickly as events seem to have moved, there had yet been time for news

of the revolt to be brought to King William in England, and the

messenger of evil had been no less a person than Arnold bishop of Le

Mans himself. Long before William’s army had been set in motion Arnold

had returned to Le Mans to play, as we have seen, a somewhat ignominious

part in the catastrophe at Sillé. Meanwhile William had gathered a

force, which is especially interesting from the fact that in it for the

first time Englishmen were combined with Normans in the service of the

lord of both races beyond the sea. Englishmen in the next generation

believed that it was their compatriots who did the best service in this

campaign, and William of Malmesbury thought that though the English had

been conquered with ease in their own land yet that they always appeared

invincible in foreign parts.[239] On the present occasion, however,

there was little call for feats of arms. William entered Maine by the

Sarthe Valley and besieged Fresnay, whose lord, Hubert, was soon driven

by the harrying of his lands to surrender Fresnay itself and the lesser

castle of Beaumont lower down the river. Sillé was the next point of

attack, but Hugh of Sillé made his submission before the investment of

his castle had begun, and William moved on southward towards Le Mans.

After the strife and confusion of the past months men were everywhere

disposed to welcome the King as the restorer of peace, castles were

readily surrendered to him, and the way lay open to the distracted

capital. Here too, after a brief delay, he was received without

opposition, but the men of Le Mans, before they surrendered the keys of

the city, obtained from the king a sworn promise that he would pardon

them for their revolt, and would respect their ancient customs and the

independence of their local rights of jurisdiction.[240] The commune of

Le Mans ceased to exist, but in its last moments it had shown itself

strong enough to win an act of indemnity from its formidable conqueror,

and to guard itself against the possible consequences of a feudal

reaction.

The war now entered upon another phase. Count Fulk was little minded to

forego the position he had won in Le Mans as the protector of its

commune, and, but for the unwonted strength of the Anglo-Norman army, it

is likely enough that he would have made some effort to oppose William’s

march to the city. As it was, however, he contented himself with turning

upon John de la Flèche, William’s leading Angevin adherent, who

immediately appealed to his ally for help. William at once despatched a

force to his assistance under William de Moulins and Robert de Vieux

Pont, a move which had the effect of widening the area of hostilities

still further. Fulk proceeded to the siege of La Flèche, and called to

his assistance Count Hoel of Brittany.[241] The combined Breton and

Angevin host would be far superior to any force which William’s

lieutenants had in the field in that quarter; and at the head of a large

army, now as formerly composed of English as well as Norman troops, he

hastened to La Flèche in person and everything betokened a pitched

battle of the first class. But, at the supreme moment, an unnamed

cardinal of the Roman Church, together with some pious monks, intervened

in favour of peace, and within the circle of the Norman leaders Counts

William of Evreux and Roger of Montgomery were of the same mind. Various

conferences were held to discuss the conditions of a possible

settlement, and at last, at Blanchelande, just outside the walls of La

Flèche, a treaty was concluded.[242] Now, as ten years earlier, Robert

of Normandy was selected as count of Maine, and to him Fulk of Anjou

released the direct suzerainty which he claimed over the barons of the

county, together with all the fiefs which were Robert’s marriage portion

with Margaret, his affianced bride in 1061. Robert, in return,

recognised Fulk as the overlord of Maine, and did homage to him in that

capacity. William promised indemnity to those Mancel barons who had

taken the Angevin side in the late war, and Fulk was formally reconciled

to John de la Flèche, and the other Angevin nobles who had leagued

themselves with the king of England.

The treaty was in effect a compromise. All the immediate advantage, it

is true, lay on the Norman side: the heir of Normandy was now the lawful

count of Maine, and Robert’s countship meant the effective rule of

William the Conqueror, who even appropriated his son’s title and in

solemn documents would at times add to his Norman and English dignities

the style of “Prince of the men of Maine.” Yet, on the other hand, the

formal recognition of the Angevin overlordship was no small thing. It

gave to succeeding counts of Anjou a vantage ground which they did not

neglect. The line which separated suzerainty from immediate rule, clear

enough in law, would rapidly become indistinct when a strong prince like

Fulk the Rechin was the overlord, and a feckless creature like Robert

Curthose the tenant in possession. More than sixty years were to pass

before a count of Anjou became the immediate lord of Maine, but the

seeds of such a development were laid by the treaty of Blanchelande.

In the period which follows the suppression of the fenland rising of

1070, the bulk of our historical information relates to the affairs of

the Conqueror’s continental dominions. But in English history proper the

time was one of crucial importance. Its character was not such as to

invite the attention of a medieval chronicler, eager to fill his pages

with a succession of battlepieces: with the exception of the revolt of

the earls in 1075, England was outwardly at peace from the flight of

Hereward to the Conqueror’s death; but it is to this time that we must

assign the systematic introduction of Norman methods of government, and

the gradual reconciliation of the English people to the fact that they

had thrown their last try for independence, and that for good or ill

they must make the best of the permanent rule of their alien masters. A

process of this kind, in itself largely subconscious, lay beyond the

understanding of the best monastic annalist or chronicler, and we shall

never know exactly in what light the great change presented itself to

the peasantry of a single English village; but there are certain

matters, more on the surface of the history, with regard to which we

possess definite information, and which themselves are of some

considerable importance.

Prominent among these last stands the question of the relations between

the Conqueror and his unquiet neighbour, or, as William would probably

have described him, his unruly vassal, Malcolm Canmore, king of Scots.

The Scotch question had merely been shelved for a little time by the

submission of 1068, and up to the Conqueror’s death there remained

several matters in dispute between the kings, each of which might serve

as a decent pretext for war if such were needed. In particular the

English frontier on the north-west emphatically called for rectification

from King William’s standpoint. Ever since the commendation of Cumbria

to Malcolm I., in or about 954, the south-western border of Scotland had

cut the English frontier at a re-entrant angle at a particularly

dangerous point. From the hills which rise to 2000 feet along the

boundary between Cumberland and Durham, the valley of the Tees affords a

gradual descent to the fertile country which lies between the moors of

the North Riding of Yorkshire and the hills of Cleveland. So long as

Lothian remained part of the Bernician earldom, the strategical

significance of Teesdale was to a great extent masked; no king of Scots

could ravage the plain of north Yorkshire without facing the possibility

that his country might be harried and his own retreat cut off by a

counter raid from Bamburgh or Dunbar. But the cession of Lothian to

Malcolm II. after the battle of Carham in 1018 materially altered the

military situation, and but for the dissensions within the Scotch

kingdom which followed Malcolm’s death, it is probable that Yorkshire

during the Confessor’s reign would have received sharp proof of the

danger which impended from the north-west.