abbot of Dunkeld; and on Duncan’s displacement by Macbeth, leader of the
Picts beyond the Forth, the position of the new king was too unstable to
allow him to interfere effectively on the side of Northumbria. Relying
as he did on Highland support, Macbeth seems to have left Cumberland in
virtual independence, and it has recently been proved that during some
part of the first fifteen years of his reign Cumberland was largely
settled by English thegns who seem to have regarded themselves as
subject to Earl Siward of Northumbria.[243] On his part, Siward
supported the party of Malcolm, Duncan’s son; but when, three years
after Siward’s death, Malcolm had become king of Scots, the tide began
to turn, and Cumberland became once more a menace to the peace of
northern England.
The restoration of the son of Duncan to the throne of Scotland brought
into importance the marriage relationship which existed between his line
and the family which for a century had held hereditary possession of the
Bernician earldom. The complicated relationships which united the local
earls of Bernicia will best be illustrated in tabular form,[244] but the
outline of the Northumbrian succession is fairly clear. Siward, although
a Dane by birth, was connected by marriage with the great Bernician
house, but on his death in 1055 the ancient family was dispossessed of
the earldom in favour first of Tostig and then of Morcar. Their
earldoms, however, were mere incidents in the general rivalry between
the houses of Godwine and Leofric, and the attachment of the
Northumbrians to their local dynasty is shown by the fact that, at the
crisis of 1065, Morcar is found appointing Oswulf, son of Earl Eadwulf
II., subordinate earl of Bernicia beyond the Tyne. Upon Oswulf’s murder
his cousin Gospatric, as we have seen, bought a recognition of the
family claims from the Conqueror; and it is not improbable that the
latter, when making Gospatric his lieutenant in Northumbria, may have
had in mind some idea of securing peace from the side of Scotland and
conciliating the local sentiment of the north through an earl who
inherited the blood of the ancient lords of Bamburgh and was near of kin
to the king of Scots. The plan in the first instance failed through the
defection of Gospatric in the summer of 1068, but the rapidity with
which his restoration followed the submission which he tendered by proxy
to William on the bank of the Tees at the close of 1069 is itself
significant. In the interval created by Gospatric’s deposition there had
occurred the disastrous experiment of the appointment of Robert de
Comines. It was as important now as two years previously to prevent the
men of Northumberland and Durham from making common cause with Malcolm
of Scotland against the Norman government; and now as formerly Gospatric
was the one man who could, if he chose, perform this work. But before
another year had passed the precarious tranquillity of the north was
again broken, and the Scotch danger reasserted itself in the acutest of
forms.
We might gather from the table above referred to, alone, that Malcolm,
by his English connections, would be the natural protector of any
dispossessed natives who might choose to seek refuge at his court, and
we have seen that Edgar the Etheling had twice been driven to escape
beyond the Tweed. We possess no information as to the motives which
induced Malcolm in the course of 1070 to break peace with King William.
In his barbarian mind Malcolm may have conceived of himself as avenging
the wrongs of his English friends by harrying the land from which they
had been driven, or, more probably, the withdrawal of the Conqueror from
the north may have seemed to him to open a safe opportunity for an
extended plunder raid. Possibly he regarded his cousin Gospatric as
having betrayed the cause of his people by doing homage to the Norman
Conqueror, but whatever the immediate cause, he suddenly fell upon
Northumbria by way of Cumberland and Teesdale, harried Cleveland and
Holderness, and then turned back again upon the modern shire of
Durham.[245] And it was while he was in the act of burning the town of
Wearmouth that Edgar the Etheling, with his mother and sisters,
accompanied by Marleswegn, Harold’s former lieutenant in the north, and
other battered relics of the national party, landed from their ships in
the harbour.[246] So long as the Danes under Earl Asbiorn had kept to
the Humber, it would seem that the etheling had been content to drift
about aimlessly with them, but their departure for Ely had driven him to
seek refuge for a third time within two years at the Scottish court.
Malcolm went down to the fugitives and assured them of a welcome in
Scotland, whither they sailed off without delay, while he betook himself
with renewed energy to his work of devastation.
For in the meantime Gospatric had been doing what he would consider to
be his duty as the lawful earl of Bernicia: while Malcolm was harrying
Durham, Gospatric was harrying Cumberland. The action taken by King
Malcolm had for the time being destroyed all possibility of a coalition
between Scot and Bernician, and, on the present occasion, Gospatric’s
fidelity was unimpeachable, if his generalship was bad. He was
successful in carrying off much booty to his fortress of Bamburgh, but
he did nothing to check the Scot king’s depredations, and the news of
what had been happening in Cumberland excited Malcolm to a state of
fury, in which he committed the most appalling atrocities on the country
folk of the region through which his northward march lay. Red-handed as
he was, Malcolm on his return to Scotland found the English exiles in
the enjoyment of his peace, and forthwith insisted that Margaret, the
etheling’s sister, should be given to him in marriage. Some project of
the kind had undoubtedly been mooted during the etheling’s earlier
visits to Scotland, but Margaret felt a desire to enter the religious
life; and nothing but the fact that the very existence of the fugitives
lay at Malcolm’s mercy induced the etheling to give his consent to the
union. The exact date of the ceremony is uncertain, but it may not
unreasonably be placed in the course of 1071, and with the alliance of
the royal houses of Scotland and Wessex the northern kingdom begins to
emerge from its barbaric isolation, and to fill a permanent place in the
political scheme of English statesmen.
To William the marriage was no matter of congratulation. It meant that
the Scottish court would become definitely interested in the restoration
of the old English dynasty; so long as such an event were possible, it
was likely to make Scotland both a refuge and a recruiting ground for
any political exile who might choose to attempt his return by force and
arms. To minimise these evils, and to avenge the harrying of 1070, the
Conqueror in the summer of 1072 set out for Scotland in person. The
expedition was planned on a great scale; the fyrd was called out, and
the naval force which was at William’s command co-operated with the
native host. Malcolm seems to have felt himself unequal to meeting a
force of this size in the open field; he allowed William to pass through
Lothian and to cross the Forth without any serious obstruction, and the
two kings met at Abernethy on the Tay. There Malcolm renewed his homage
to William, made peace, and gave hostages for its observance, among them
Donald, his son by his first wife, Ingibiorg. The expedition could not
have been intended to accomplish more than this, and William at once
turned southwards, retracing his steps along the great east coast
road.[247]
Nothing appears to have been done at this time to improve the defences
of the northern border. Carlisle remained in Scotch hands, and the site
of the future Newcastle on the Tyne is only mentioned in the record of
this march through the fact of the river being flooded at the moment
when the army sought to cross it, thereby causing an inconvenient delay.
The importance of the Teesdale gap had been sufficiently proved by the
events of 1070, but no attempt was made to guard the course of the river
in any special manner. On the other hand we should do well not to ignore
the possibility that the first creation of the earldom of Richmond
immediately to the south of the Tees may not have been unconnected with
the advisability of keeping a permanent military force in this quarter.
The earldom in question had been conferred upon Brian of Penthievre in
or before 1068, and had passed from him to his brother Alan by the date
of the events with which we are dealing.[248] So far as we know King
William never created an earldom save for purposes of border defence,
and the geographical facts which we have just noted make it distinctly
improbable that Richmond was an exception to this rule.
* * * * *
Two important changes in the government of Northumbria would seem to
have been carried out at this time. The first was the installation of
Walcher of Lorraine as bishop of Durham, and his establishment in a
castle especially built for him, so that he might be secure against any
spasmodic rising on the part of the men of his great diocese. The second
event was the deposition of Earl Gospatric. He was held guilty, we are
told, of complicity in the murder of Robert de Comines, and the Danish
storm of York in 1069, although his offences in both these matters had
been committed previous to his reconciliation with William in 1070.
Whatever may have been the true cause of his downfall, it was followed
immediately by the restoration of the house of Siward to its former
position in the north, for the earldom of Northumbria was now given to
Waltheof of Huntingdon, Siward’s son, and remained in his hands until
the catastrophe which overtook him three years later. Gospatric in the
meantime betook himself to his cousin’s court and received from him a
large estate in Lothian, centring round the town of Dunbar, until he
might be restored to King William’s favour. With this act his political
importance ceases; Domesday proves that the whole or part of his
Yorkshire estates had been restored to him by the time of the taking of
the Survey, but he never recovered his former rank and influence.
It has been conjectured with much probability that one of the conditions
of the peace of Abernethy was the expulsion of Edgar the Etheling from
Scotland.[249] Shortly after this time he appears as beginning a series
of journeys, which before long brought him once more into England as the
honoured guest of King William. His first visit was paid to Flanders,
where he would be sure of a kindly reception from Robert the Frisian, by
this time William’s mortal enemy. After a stay of uncertain length in
Flanders he returned to Scotland, where he landed early in July 1074,
and was hospitably entertained by his sister and her husband. Before
long, however, he received an invitation from King Philip of France,
offering to put him in possession of the castle of Montreuil, which he
might use as a base from which to attack his enemies.[250] The offer
shows considerable strategical sense in the young king of France.
Montreuil was the first piece of territory which the Capetian house had
gained on the Channel coast, but it was separated by the possessions of
the house of Vermandois from the body of the royal demesne, and it lay
between the counties of Ponthieu and Boulogne. Once established in
Montreuil Edgar could have received constant support from Robert the
Frisian; and if the counts of Ponthieu or Boulogne wished to revolt from
the Norman connection Edgar’s territory would have made it possible to
form a compact and powerful league against the most vulnerable part of
the Norman frontier.
Edgar complied with King Philip’s request, and set out by sea to take
possession of his castle; the good-will of his Scottish protectors being
expressed in a multitude of costly gifts. Unfortunately for the success
of his enterprise he was speedily driven on to the English coast by a
storm and some of his men were taken prisoner, but he succeeded in
reaching Scotland again, although in very miserable condition. Curiously
enough this slight check to his plans seems to have caused him to
abandon outright the idea of occupying Montreuil, and we are told that
his brother-in-law advised him to make terms with King William. The
Conqueror was at the time in Normandy, but he gave a ready hearing to
the overtures from Edgar and directed that an escort should be sent to
accompany him through England and across the Channel. Of the meeting
between the king and the etheling in Normandy we possess no details, but
the English writers were struck with the honours which the Conqueror
showed to his former rival,[251] and Domesday reveals the latter in
peaceable possession of upwards of a thousand acres of land in the
north-east of Hertfordshire. For the rest of William’s reign Edgar
remained a political cipher.
We have now reached the central event of William’s rule in England, the
revolt of the earls in 1075. The rising in question is sufficiently
characterised by the name which is generally assigned to it; it was a
movement headed by two of the seven earls who held office in England,
incited by the motives proper to men of their rank, and finding little
support outside the body of their personal dependants. It had no popular
or provincial feeling behind it; it cannot even be described as a purely
Norman revolt, for the mass of the English baronage held true to King
William, and its most striking result was the execution of the last
English earl, for complicity in the designs of his Norman confederates.
On the death of William Fitz Osbern in 1071 his earldom of Hereford had
passed to his son, a stupid and vicious young man, in every way a
degenerate successor to the tried and faithful friend of the Conqueror.
From the moment of his succession to his earldom Roger seems to have
kept himself in sullen isolation in his palatinate across the Severn;
his name has not yet been found among the visitors to William’s court
who witnessed the charters which the king granted during these years,
and we should know nothing about the man or his character if it were not
for the preservation of three letters addressed to him by his father’s
old friend Archbishop Lanfranc. At the time when these letters were
written, William was in Normandy, and Lanfranc had been left in a sort
of unofficial regency, in which position he had clearly been rendered
uneasy by rumours of Roger’s growing disaffection. Lanfranc, in his
correspondence, was tactfully indefinite on the latter point, but he was
very outspoken in regard to Roger’s personal acts of oppression and
injustice. By the example of William Fitz Osbern, “whom,” says Lanfranc,
“I loved more than anyone else in the world,” the archbishop pleaded
with his friend’s son to amend his conduct, and promised to see him and
give him counsel on whatever occasion he might choose. But Roger
remained obdurate, and in the last letter of the three which we possess
Lanfranc declares Roger excommunicate until he has compensated those
whom he has injured, and has made his peace with the king for his
arbitrary acts in his earldom.
The position of Waltheof at this time has already been described. His
Bernician earldom was less important on this occasion than were the
group of shires in the eastern midlands over which he also possessed
comital rights. The four counties of Northampton, Bedford, Huntingdon,
and Cambridge, together with Waltheof’s extensive estates in
Leicestershire and Warwickshire, went far towards connecting the
palatinate of Hereford with the distant earldom of East Anglia, the most
dangerous quarter of the present rebellion.
The earl of East Anglia, Ralf of Wader, might, like Waltheof, claim to
be considered an Englishman; for, although his mother was a Breton and
his father also bore the Norman name of Ralf, the latter was an
Englishman of Norfolk birth, and had been earl of East Anglia under
Edward the Confessor and during the earliest years of the Conqueror.
Ralf the younger, despite his succession to his father’s earldom, is
identified with his mother’s land of Brittany, where he held the estates
of Wader and Montfort, rather than with England.[252] Like Roger of
Hereford, and judging from the same evidence, Earl Ralf would seem to
have been a consistent absentee from William’s court, and his one
appearance in the history of the latter’s reign, previous to his own
revolt in 1075, took place in 1069, when he beat off the Danes from the
estuary of the Yare.
The immediate cause of the present outbreak was the Conqueror’s
objection to a marriage which had been projected between Earl Ralf and
Emma, daughter of William Fitz Osbern and sister of Roger of Hereford.
The reasons for the Conqueror’s action are intelligible enough; nothing
could be further from his interest than the creation of a series of
marriage ties among the greater vassals of his crown, especially when
the parties to be connected in this way held the wide military and
territorial powers which at this early date were inherent in the dignity
of an earl. There is no reason to suppose that Earl Ralf’s loyalty had
been suspected at any earlier time or that there was anything deeper
than the royal prohibition of his marriage which now drove him into
revolt. Without the king’s consent, the marriage was celebrated and the
wedding feast held at Exning in Cambridgeshire, a vill within Waltheof’s
earldom. Earls Roger and Ralf had already made preparations for their
rising, their friends had been acquainted with their intention, and
their castles were prepared to stand a siege; and at Exning a determined
attempt was made to seduce Waltheof from his temporary fidelity to King
William. His accession to their cause might very possibly bring with it
some measure of English support, he had a great popular reputation as a
warrior, and the plans and motives of the conspirators were unfolded to
him at the wedding feast with startling frankness. The occasion was
hardly such as to produce sobriety of counsel, and in the one extended
narrative which we possess of the original plot, the terms of the offer
now made to Waltheof were involved in a long harangue, in which the
deposition of the Conqueror was declared to be a matter pleasing to God
and man, and every event in William’s life which could be turned to his
discredit was brought forward, heightened according to the taste of the
conspirators or the literary skill of our informant. More important than
the grotesque crimes attributed to the Conqueror are the plans formed by
the earls for the event of his expulsion. Their object, we are told, was
to restore England to the condition in which it had existed in the days
of Edward the Confessor. With this object, one of the three chief
plotters was to be king, the other two earls; Waltheof in particular was
to receive a third part of England. William was declared to be fully
occupied beyond the sea, his Normans in England were assumed to be
discontented with the reward they had received for their services, and
it was suggested that the native English might be willing to rise once
more if a chance of revenge were offered them. Waltheof was assured that
the chances of a successful rising could never be higher than at the
moment in question.[253]
The narrative of Ordericus Vitalis, which we have hitherto been
following, makes Waltheof indignantly refuse to be a party to any scheme
of the kind. By the examples of Ahitophel and Judas Iscariot he
demonstrated the sinister fate that was the portion of a traitor, and
declared that he would never violate the confidence that King William
had placed in him. On his refusal to join the plot, he was compelled to
take a terrible oath not to betray the scheme and the rising was
accomplished without his assistance; but after its suppression the tale
makes Waltheof accused of treason by Judith his wife before the king,
and describes his behaviour in prison and the manner of his end with
great wealth of detail and a not improbable approximation to the facts
of the case. It seems fairly certain that Waltheof took no effective
part in the military operations which followed the bridal of Exning, and
we may consider the difficult question connected with his trial and
execution apart from the details of the war.
The plan of campaign followed by both sides was extremely simple.
Neither the earldom of East Anglia or of Hereford acting by itself could
obtain any permanent success against the loyal portions of the country;
the object of the rebel leaders was to join their forces, and the object
of King William’s lieutenants was to prevent the combination. The line
of the Severn was guarded against Earl Roger of Hereford by the local
magnates of Worcestershire, Wulfstan the bishop, and Urse d’Abetot the
sheriff of the shire, Agelwig, abbot of Evesham, and Walter de Lacy, at
the head of a force composed of the local fyrd in conjunction with the
knightly tenants from their own estates.[254]
The Herefordshire revolt had soon run its course; Earl Roger never got
across the Severn and within a short time had been taken prisoner, but
the earl of East Anglia was a person of greater ability. Before engaging
in the rebellion the earls had sought for external help; application had
been made to the King of Denmark for a fleet, and reinforcements had
been drawn from Brittany, recruited in great part, no doubt, from the
Breton estates of Ralf de Wader. From the latter’s head-quarters at
Norwich a highroad of Roman origin stretched invitingly across the
Norfolk plain towards the royal castle of Cambridge, and Earl Ralf moved
westward in the hope of effecting a junction with Roger of Hereford; but
at an unknown place in the neighbourhood of this line, designated by
Ordericus Vitalis as “Fagadun,” the rebel army was broken and scattered,
and from a letter which Lanfranc wrote to the king immediately after
this event, the archbishop was evidently in expectation of a speedy
suppression of the whole rising. That this hope was frustrated was due
to the heroism of Earl Ralf’s bride, who undertook the defence of
Norwich castle in person, while her lord went off to Denmark, and held
out for three months against all that the Norman commanders could do. At
last she was compelled to surrender upon conditions. The Breton tenants
of Earl Ralf in England were required to abandon their lands and to
withdraw to Brittany within forty days; the mercenaries of the same race
were allowed a month to get away from the country. Emma herself, to whom
belonged all the honours of the war, went to Brittany, where she met her
husband, and Norwich castle was once more occupied in the king’s name.
Earl Ralf’s journey to Denmark had not been fruitless, for a fleet of
two hundred Danish ships appeared in the Humber shortly after the fall
of Norwich, under the command of Cnut, son of King Swegn Estrithson, and
a certain earl called Hakon.[255] Their coming reopened an endless
possibility of further trouble; the Conqueror, through Archbishop
Lanfranc, enjoined Bishop Walcher of Durham to look well to the defences
of his castle.[256] But the first object of the ordinary Danish
commander of those times was always plunder, and Cnut after successfully
evading the royal troops contented himself with the sack of York
cathedral, and quickly sailed away to Flanders. In the very year of this
expedition (1075), Swegn Estrithson died, and Harold, his eldest son,
who succeeded him, kept peace towards England throughout his reign. In
the autumn of 1075 William had returned to England, and at Christmas he
proceeded to deal with the persons and property of the revolted earls.
Waltheof and Roger were in his power; Ralf was safe beyond the sea, but
his English lands remained for confiscation, and such of his Breton
associates as were in the king’s hands were punished according to the
fashion of the times. Earl Roger was sent to prison, but his captivity
at first was not over severe, and had it not been for his contumelious
conduct towards the king he might have obtained his release in due
course. Unfortunately for himself, he mortally offended William by
throwing into the fire a rich present of silks and furs which the king
sent to him one Easter, and perpetual captivity was the return for the
insult. The relative leniency of the Conqueror’s treatment of Roger
contrasts very strikingly with his attitude to the third earl implicated
in the revolt, and no incident in King William’s career has won more
reprobation from medieval and modern historians than the sentence which
he allowed to be passed on Earl Waltheof.
We have already sketched in outline the narrative of Waltheof’s action
as given by Ordericus Vitalis, and it will be well now to consider
briefly the independent story told by the native English
chronicles.[257] On all accounts it is certain that Waltheof had been
implicated in the treason proposed at Exning, and it is no less clear,
though the fact is suppressed by Orderic, that he had speedily repented
and under the advice of Lanfranc had revealed the whole scheme to King
William in Normandy.[258] The part played by Lanfranc is explicable, not
only by the species of regency he held in the kingdom at the time, but
also by his position as metropolitan of the English church, and his
reputation as a famous doctor of the canon law. No man was better
qualified to give a sound opinion as to the circumstances under which an
indiscreet oath might be broken without the guilt of perjury; and the
penances which he imposed on Waltheof for his intended breach of the
engagement which he had taken at Exning seem to have been accepted by
all parties as a satisfactory solution of the matter. On his part,
William bided his time; he appears to have accepted the gifts which
Waltheof offered as the price of his peace, and he contented himself
with keeping the earl under his own supervision until his return to
England. Not till then was Waltheof placed under actual arrest, and it
has been conjectured that the reason for this action was the fear that
he might make his escape to the Danes in the Humber.[259] At the
midwinter council of 1075 he was brought to trial, whether or not upon
information laid against him by his wife, the countess Judith, and
although no definite sentence was passed against him at this time he was
sent into closer imprisonment at Winchester.
For the first five months of 1076 Waltheof’s cause remained undecided.
It is clear that there was considerable uncertainty in high quarters as
to what should be done with him. Lanfranc interceded on his behalf,
apparently going so far as to declare him innocent of all complicity in
the revolt. We are told nothing of the Conqueror’s own sentiments in the
matter, but the strange delay in the promulgation of definite sentence
suggests that throughout these months he had been halting between two
opinions. At last the sterner view prevailed, and under the influence of
Waltheof’s Norman rivals at the royal court, according to Ordericus
Vitalis, the king gave orders for the execution of the last English
earl.
Early on the morning of the 31st of May, Waltheof was taken from his
prison in Winchester to die on the hill of St. Giles outside the city.
Accustomed hitherto to the active life of his northern ancestors, the
monotony of his imprisonment would seem to have destroyed his courage,
and the fatal morning found him in bitter agony of soul. The
executioners, who feared a rescue, and were anxious to get through with
the work, had little patience with his prayers and weeping, and bade him
rise that they might carry out their orders. Waltheof begged that he
might be allowed to say a _pater noster_ for himself and them, and they
granted his request, but at the clause “_et ne nos inducas in
tentationem_” his voice failed him, and he burst into a storm of tears.
Before he could recover his strength, his head had been struck from him
at a single blow, but the monks of Crowland abbey, where his body lay in
after years, told their Norman visitor Ordericus Vitalis that the
severed head was heard duly to finish the prayer with “_sed libera nos a
malo, Amen_.”
The case of Earl Waltheof involves two separate questions which it is
well to keep distinct in estimating the justice of King William’s
conduct in the matter. The first is how far Waltheof had really
implicated himself in the designs of the earls of East Anglia and
Hereford; the second is what, on the assumption of his serious guilt,
would have been the lawful punishment for it. It does not seem likely
that the first question will ever be finally answered, for by a singular
chance none of our authorities are quite disinterested when they relate
the circumstances of Waltheof’s fall. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler and
Florence of Worcester, compatriots of the dead earl, lie under some
antecedent suspicion of minimising the extent to which he had
compromised himself; and Ordericus Vitalis, to whom we should naturally
turn for a statement of the Norman side of the case, based his account
of Waltheof upon information received from the monks of Crowland at a
time when the earl was, in popular sentiment, rapidly becoming
transformed into a national martyr. Orderic’s narrative, written under
such influences, has just as much historical value as any professed
piece of martyrology; that is, it probably presents the authentic
tradition of the details of its hero’s death, but it is not concerned to
pay a scrupulous regard to facts which might be inconvenient for his
reputation. And so King William for once has no apologist; but sixty
years after the event it was recognised by an impartial writer like
William of Malmesbury[260] that the Norman story about Waltheof was very
different from that which the English put forward. With such
untrustworthy authorities as our only guides, we should scarcely attempt
to settle a matter which in the days of King Stephen was already a
burning question, but our hesitancy should make us pause before we
accuse King William of judicial murder.
To the second of the problems arising out of the case—the sentence which
followed Waltheof’s condemnation—it is possible to find a more
satisfactory answer. Nothing is more probable than that the Conqueror,
in sending Roger of Hereford into prison and beheading Waltheof, was
simply applying to criminals of high rank the great principle that men
of Norman or of English race should be judged respectively according to
Norman or English law.[261] Earl Roger as a Norman, according to a
practice on which we have already had occasion to remark, was condemned
to imprisonment, but English law regarded treason as a capital offence,
and Waltheof suffered the strict legal penalty of his crime. Indeed,
Waltheof himself, in Orderic’s version of his reply to the conspirators
at Exning, is made to declare that the English law condemned a traitor
to lose his head, and it is probable that he was better informed on this
point than have been some of the later historians who have undertaken
his defence. During the next century, members of the Norman baronage
established in England who had raised an unsuccessful revolt uniformly
received sentence according to the rule which applied to men of their
race; and the execution of a traitor against the king will scarcely
occur between 1100 and 1200, and but rarely in the course of the
thirteenth century. But Waltheof had no privilege of the kind, and,
stern as was his sentence, he might not complain that formal justice had
been denied him.
The revolt of 1075 produced a sequel in a small continental war. Earl
Ralf, as we have seen, had fled to his estates in Brittany, and his
appearance coincided in point of time with the outbreak of a general
revolt among the Breton baronage. Count Hoel, who possessed in his own
right five-sixths of Brittany, was the first of his line to exercise
effective rule over the whole peninsula, and the fact was little to the
liking of his greater subjects. The malcontents found a leader in
Geoffrey “Grenonat,” count of Rennes, an illegitimate son of Alan III.;
and the dispossessed earl of East Anglia brought the resources of his
barony of Wader to their side. Ralf and Geoffrey seized the castle of
Dol; and the rising assumed such serious proportions that Hoel sent to
England, and requested King William’s assistance. William, ever desirous
of asserting Norman influence in Brittany, took the present opportunity,
and in 1076 he crossed the Channel with a force which to the chroniclers
of Worcester and Peterborough represented an English fyrd, and laid
siege to Dol. The result was a serious loss of prestige, for the
garrison had answered Hoel’s application to William by making a
counter-appeal to Philip of France, and held out valiantly in the
expectation of relief. Philip took the field with a large army, advanced
to Dol, and took a measure of revenge for his father’s discomfitures at
Mortemer and Varaville, by compelling William to beat a hasty retreat
with the loss of his baggage and stores. William engaged no further in
the war which dragged on for three years longer, but ended in 1079 with
the final success of Hoel.[262]
In the meantime, certain important changes had taken place in the
administrative geography of England. The earldoms of Hereford and East
Anglia, vacant through the treason of Earls Roger and Ralf, were allowed
to fall into abeyance. Waltheof’s earldom of Northampton likewise became
extinct, although his widow, the countess Judith, was possessed in 1086
of large estates scattered over the shires which had lain within her
husband’s government. There was no particular reason why
Northamptonshire should possess an earl, but it was still abundantly
necessary that William should be represented by a permanent lieutenant
on the Scotch border. An earl for Bernicia was now found in the person
of Walcher of Lorraine, whose appointment anticipated by more than sixty
years the beginning of the long series of bishops of Durham, whose
secular powers within their diocese produced the “county palatine” which
lasted until 1836.[263] The experiment made in Walcher’s appointment was
destined to end in tragic failure, but for four years Northumbrian
affairs relapse into unwonted obscurity, and the Conqueror was never
again called upon to lead an army into the north.
[Illustration: Denier of Robert le Frison]
-----
Footnote 235:
See Varenbergh, _Relations Diplomatiques entre le comté de Flandre et
l’Angleterre_. Luchaire, _Les Premiers Capetiens_, 169.
Footnote 236:
Halphen, _Comté d’Anjou_, 180, has shown that Azo had appeared in
Maine by the spring of 1069.
Footnote 237:
The authorities for the present war are the history of Ordericus
Vitalis and the life of Bishop Arnold of Le Mans, ed. Mabillon;
_Vetera Analecta_.
Footnote 238:
“Facta conspiratione quam communionem vocabant.”—_Vet. An._, 215.
Footnote 239:
_Gesta Regum_, ii., 316.
Footnote 240:
_Vetera Analecta_, 286.
Footnote 241:
Hoel, unlike his predecessors, followed a policy of friendship towards
Anjou, and restored to Fulk le Rechin the conquests made by Count
Conan on the Angevin march. De la Borderie, iii., 26.
Footnote 242:
The terms of the peace of Blanchelande are given by Orderic.
Footnote 243:
E. H. R., xx., 61.
Footnote 244:
See table H.
Footnote 245:
Simeon of Durham, 1072.
Footnote 246:
This third flight of Edgar to Scotland rests solely upon the authority
of Simeon of Durham, and it is quite possible that the latter may have
been confused about the course of events at this point.
Footnote 247:
_Worcester Chronicle_, 1073.
Footnote 248:
Brian’s tenure of the earldom of Richmond is proved by a charter to
the priory of St. Martin de Lamballe, in which lands are granted by
“Brientius, comes Anglica terra.” (De la Borderie, iii., 25.) As
Brian’s father, Count Éon of Penthievre, did not die before 1079 the
title “comes” cannot refer to any French county possessed by Brian. As
in the eleventh century every “earldom” consisted of a shire or group
of shires, it would seem to follow that Richmondshire at this date was
regarded as a territorial unit distinct from Yorkshire.
Footnote 249:
_Norman Conquest_, iv., 517.
Footnote 250:
_Worcester Chronicle_, 1075.
Footnote 251:
_Worcester Chronicle_, 1075.
Footnote 252:
According to Wace Ralf had served among the Breton auxiliaries at the
battle of Hastings.
Footnote 253:
Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 258 _et seq._
Footnote 254:
Florence of Worcester, 1074.
Footnote 255:
_Worcester Chronicle_, 1076.
Footnote 256:
_Epistolæ Lanfranci._
Footnote 257:
Florence of Worcester, 1074.
Footnote 258:
It does not appear that any medieval historian regarded this as an act
of treachery on Waltheof’s part.
Footnote 259:
F. N. C., iv., 585.
Footnote 260:
_Gesta Regum_, ii., 312.
Footnote 261:
This point is made by Pollock and Maitland. H. E. L., i., 291.
Footnote 262:
For the rest of the Conqueror’s reign, there was peace between
Normandy and Brittany, except that in 1086 William, to whom the new
count Alan Fergant, the son of Hoel, had refused homage, crossed the
border once more and laid siege to Dol. In this siege also he was
unsuccessful, and speedily came to terms with Alan, who received
Constance, the Conqueror’s daughter, in marriage.
Footnote 263:
Simeon of Durham, 1075.
CHAPTER IX
THE LAST YEARS OF THE CONQUEROR
With the peace of Blanchelande we enter upon the last phase in the life
of William the Conqueror, and this although more than the half of his
English reign still lay in the future. It must be owned that no unity of
purpose or achievement can be traced underlying this final stage; the
history of these last years is little more than a series of disconnected
episodes, of which the details themselves are very imperfectly known to
us. It has, in fact, been customary for historians to regard this period
as marking somewhat of a decline in the character and fortunes of the
Conqueror; a decline which the men of the next generation were inclined
to attribute to supernatural vengeance pursuing the king for his
execution of Earl Waltheof in 1076. “Such was his resolution,” says
Orderic, “that he still maintained a brave fight against his enemies,
but success did not crown his enterprises now as formerly, nor were his
battles often crowned with victory.”[264] This idea of retributive fate,
characteristic of the medieval mind, has received from historians
various adaptations and exemplifications, but perhaps a more reasonable
explanation of the tameness of the last years of the Conqueror would be
that the achievements of the decade between 1060 and 1070 inevitably
make the succeeding history something of an anticlimax. The Conqueror’s
last wars are indeed inconsiderable enough when compared with the
campaigns of Le Mans and Hastings, but the most unique undertaking of
his life falls within two years of its close; and with the Domesday
Survey before us we need no further proof that the far-sightedness of
the king’s policy and the strength of his executive power were still
unimpaired at the very close of his career.
The main cause of the difficulties which beset the King in these latter
years was the undutiful eagerness of Robert of Normandy to anticipate
his inheritance. It was natural enough that Robert should wish to enjoy
the reality of power; for a dozen years at least he had been the
recognised heir of Normandy, and the peace of Blanchelande had recently
assigned him the county of Maine. But so early as 1074 the earls of
Hereford and Norfolk, in planning their revolt, are understood to have
reckoned the disagreement between the King and his eldest son among the
chances in their favour,[265] and it is certain that Robert had been
bitterly discontented with his position for some time before he broke
out into open revolt. The chronology of his movements is far from clear;
but at some time or other he made a wild attempt to seize the castle of
Rouen, and when this failed he found an immediate refuge and base of
operations in the land of Hugh de Châteauneuf, a powerful lord on the
border between Normandy and the royal demesne, who allowed him to occupy
his castles of Raimalast, Sorel, and Châteauneuf. King William, on his
part, confiscated the lands of the rebels; he also took into his pay
Count Rotrou of Mortagne, the overlord of Hugh of Châteauneuf for
Raimalast; and Robert was soon driven to seek a more distant exile in
foreign parts. He first visited Flanders, but Robert the Frisian,
notwithstanding his enmity towards his formidable brother-in-law, did
not think it worth while to spend his resources upon his irresponsible
nephew, for the latter is represented as wandering vaguely over
Touraine, Germany, Aquitaine, and Gascony in great destitution. To such
straits was he reduced, that his mother provoked the one dispute which
varied the domestic peace of the Conqueror’s married life by sending
supplies to her son in exile. The king, on discovering this, became
convulsed with rage, poured reproaches on his queen for her support of a
rebel, and ordered one of her messengers, who happened to be within his
power, to be seized and blinded. The latter, however, a Breton named
Samson, received a timely hint of his danger from persons in the
confidence of the queen, and took refuge in the monastery of St. Evroul,
“for the safety alike of his soul and body,” says Ordericus Vitalis, who
for some forty years was his fellow-inmate in the abbey.
At last King Philip took pity upon the fugitive Robert and allowed him
to establish himself in the castle of Gerberoi in the Beauvaisis. The
king’s patronage of Robert ranks, as a matter of policy, with his gift
of Montreuil to Edgar the Etheling in 1074; Philip was always ready to
take an inexpensive opportunity of harassing his over-mighty vassal.
Around Robert, in this cave of Adullam, there gathered a force of
adventurers from Normandy and the French kingdom, including many men who
had hitherto been good subjects to King William, but now thought it
expedient to follow the rising fortunes of his heir. William retaliated
by garrisoning the Norman castles which lay nearest to Gerberoi, so as
to prevent the rebels from harrying the border; and in some way he must
have brought the king of France over to his side; for when, in the last
days of 1078, he laid formal siege to his son’s castle, we know on good
authority that King Philip was present in his camp.[266] The siege
lasted for three weeks, and in one of the frequent encounters between
the loyalists and the rebels there occurred the famous passage of arms
between the Conqueror and his son. William was wounded in the hand by
Robert, his horse was killed under him, and had not a Berkshire thegn,
Tokig, son of Wigod of Wallingford, gallantly brought another mount to
the king,[267] it is probable that his life would have come to an
ignominious close beneath the walls of Gerberoi. It was very possibly
the scandal caused by this episode which led certain prominent members
of the Norman baronage to offer their mediation between the king and his
heir. The siege seems to have been broken up by mutual consent; William
retired to Rouen, Robert made his way once more into Flanders, and a
reconciliation was effected by the efforts of Roger de Montgomery, Roger
de Beaumont, Hugh de Grentemaisnil, and other personal friends of the
king. Robert was restored to favour, his confederates were pardoned, and
he once more received a formal confirmation of his title to the duchy of
Normandy. For a short time, as charters show, he continued to fill his
rightful place at his father’s court, but his vagabond instincts soon
became too strong for him and he left the duchy again, not to return to
it during his father’s lifetime.
One is naturally inclined to make some comparison between these events
and the rebellion which a hundred years later convulsed the dominions of
Henry II. Fundamentally, the cause of each disturbance was the same—the
anxiety of the reigning king to secure the succession, met by equal
anxiety on the part of the destined heir to enjoy the fruits of
lordship. And in each case the character of the respective heirs was
much the same. Robert Curthose and Henry Fitz Henry, both men of
chivalry, rather than of politics, showed themselves incapable of
appreciating the motives which made their fathers wish to maintain the
integrity of the family possessions; the fact that they themselves were
debarred from rewarding their private friends and punishing their
enemies, seemed to them a sufficient reason for imperilling the results
of the statesmanship which had created the very inheritance which they
hoped to enjoy. Robert of Normandy, a gross anticipation of the
chivalrous knight of later times, represents a type of character which
had hitherto been unknown among the sons of Rollo, a type for which
there was no use in the rough days when the feudal states of modern
Europe were in the making, and which could not attain any refined
development before the Crusades had lifted the art and the ideals of war
on to a higher plane. William the Conqueror, by no means devoid of
chivalrous instincts, never allowed them to obscure his sense of what
the policy of the moment demanded; Henry II. was much less affected by
the new spirit; both rulers alike were essentially out of sympathy with
sons to whom great place meant exceptional opportunities for the
excitement and glory of military adventure, rather than the stern
responsibilities of government.
We know little that is definite about the course of events which
followed upon the reconciliation of King William and his heir. The
next two years indeed form a practical blank in the personal history
of the Conqueror, and it does not seem probable that he ever visited
England during this interval. In his absence the king of Scots took
the opportunity of spreading destruction once again across the border,
and in the summer of 1079 he harried the country as far as the Tyne,
without hindrance, so far as our evidence goes, from the clerical earl
of Northumbria. The success of this raid was a sufficient proof of the
weakness of the Northern frontier of England, and in the next
year[268] Robert of Normandy was entrusted with the command of a
counter-expedition into Scotland, with orders to receive the
submission of the king of Scots, or, in case he proved obdurate, to
treat his land as an enemies’ country. The Norman army penetrated
Scotland as far as Falkirk, and, according to one account, received
hostages as a guarantee of King Malcolm’s obedience. Another and more
strictly contemporary narrative, however, states that this part of the
expedition was fruitless; but, in any case, Robert on his return
founded the great fortress of Newcastle-on-Tyne as a barrier against
future incursions from the side of Scotland.
[Illustration]
PITCHER, PHOTO. GLOUCESTER
TOMB OF ROBERT COURTHOSE
Some information as to William’s own movements in Normandy during 1080
may be gathered from charters and other legal documents. On the 7th of
January he was at Caen,[269] and on the 13th he appears at Boscherville
on the Seine[270]; at Easter he held a great court probably at
Rouen.[271] At Whitsuntide he presided over a council at
Lillebonne,[272] where a set of canons was promulgated which strikingly
illustrates his opinion as to the relations which should exist between
church and state.
Whitsunday in 1080 fell on the 31st of May, and serious disturbances had
been taking place in England earlier in the month. Bishop Walcher of
Durham had proved an unpopular as well as an inefficient earl of
Northumbria. Himself a foreigner and a churchman, he must from the
outset have been out of touch with the wild Englishmen placed under his
rule, and the situation was aggravated by the fact that the bishop’s
priestly office compelled him to transact the work of government in
great part by deputy. He entrusted the administration of his earldom to
a kinsman of his own called Gilbert,[273] and in all matters of business
he relied on the counsel of an ill-assorted pair of favourites, one of
them a noble Northumbrian thegn called Ligulf, who found his way to his
favour by the devotion which he professed to Saint Cuthbert, the other
being his own chaplain, Leobwine, a foreigner. Jealousy soon broke out
between the thegn and the chaplain, and at last the latter, being
worsted by his rival in a quarrel in the bishop’s presence, took the
above mentioned Gilbert into his confidence and prevailed on him to
destroy the Englishman secretly. On hearing the news the bishop was
struck with dismay, and, in his anxiety to prove his innocence, summoned
a general meeting of the men of his earldom to assemble at Gateshead.
The assembly came together, but the Bernicians were in a dangerous
humour; the bishop dared not risk a deliberation in the open air, and
took refuge in the neighbouring church. Instantly the gathering got out
of hand, the church was surrounded and set on fire, and the bishop and
his companions were cut to pieces by the mob.
For such an act as this there could be no mercy. The punishment of the
murderers was left to Walcher’s fellow-prelate Odo of Bayeux, and the
vengeance which he took was heavy. It must have been impossible to
determine with accuracy the names of those who had actually joined in
the crime, but it is evident that men from all parts of Bernicia had
taken part in the meeting at Gateshead, and the whole earldom was held
implicated in the murder. Accordingly the whole district was ravaged,
and the bishop of Bayeux administered death and mutilation on a scale
unusual even in the eleventh century.[274] To the thankless dignity of
the Northumbrian earldom, the Conqueror appointed Aubrey de Coucy, a
powerful Norman baron; but he soon abandoned the task of governing his
distressful province and retired to his continental estates. To him
there succeeded Robert de Mowbray, who was destined to be the last earl
of Bernicia, but who proved more successful than any of his predecessors
in the work of preserving order and watching the movements of the king
of Scots; and for the next ten years Northumbria under his stern rule
ceases to trouble the central administration.
The chief interest of the following year in the history of the Conqueror
lies in the singular expedition which he made at this time beyond the
limits of his immediate rule into the extreme parts of Wales. The
various but scanty accounts of this event which we possess are somewhat
conflicting. The Peterborough chronicler says that the king “in this
year led an army into Wales and there freed many hundred men.” The
_Annales Cambriæ_ tell us that “William, king of the English, came to
St. David’s that he might pray there.” Very possibly the Conqueror did
in reality pay his devotions at the shrine of the apostle of Wales, but
secular motives were not lacking for an armed demonstration in that
restless land. So long as the Normans in England itself were only a
ruling minority, holding down a disaffected population, the conquest of
Wales was an impossibility; and yet on all grounds it was expedient for
the king to show the Welshmen what reserves of power lay behind his
marcher earls of Shrewsbury and Chester. The expedition has a further
interest as one of the earliest occasions on which it is recorded that
the feudal host of England was called to take the field; the local
historian of Abingdon abbey remarked that nearly all the knights
belonging to that church were ordered to set out for Wales, although the
abbot remained at home.[275] It does not appear that any of the native
princes of South Wales suffered displacement at this time; the one
permanent result of the expedition would seem to have been the
foundation of Cardiff castle[276] as an outpost in the enemies’ land.
The strategical frontier of England in this quarter consisted of the
line of fortresses which guarded the lower course of the Wye, and the
settlement of the Welsh question, like the settlement of the Scotch
question, was a legacy which the Conqueror left to his successors.
After these events, but not before the end of the year, King William
withdrew into Normandy, and probably spent the greater part of 1082 in
his duchy. But his return to England was marked by one of the most
dramatic incidents in his whole career, the famous scene of the arrest
of Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent. Up to the very moment of the
bishop’s fall, the relations between the brothers appear to have been
outwardly friendly, and in an English charter of the present year, the
bishop appears at court in full enjoyment of his lay and spiritual
titles.[277] The cause of the final rupture is uncertain. Ordericus
Vitalis[278] assigned it to the unprecedented ambition of Bishop Odo,
who, not content with his position in England and Normandy, was supposed
to be laying his plans to secure his election to the papal chair at the
next vacancy. According to this tale, the bishop had bought himself a
palace in Rome, bribed the senators to join his side, and engaged a
large number of Norman knights, including no less a person than the earl
of Chester, to follow him into Italy when the time for action came.
Whatever Odo’s plans may have been, William received news of them in
Normandy, and he hurried across the Channel, intercepting Odo in the
Isle of Wight. Without being actually arrested, Odo was placed under
restraint, and a special sitting of the Commune Concilium was convened
to try his case. The subsequent proceedings were conducted in the Isle
of Wight, very possibly in the royal castle of Carisbrooke, and King
William himself seems to have undertaken his brother’s impeachment. The
articles laid against Odo fell into two parts, a specific charge of
seducing the king’s knights from their lawful duty, and a general
accusation of oppression and wrong-doing to the church and to the native
population of the land. The task of giving judgment on these points
belonged by customary law to the barons in council, but they failed to
give sentence through fear of the formidable defendant before them, and
the Conqueror himself was compelled to issue orders for Odo’s arrest.
Here another difficulty presented itself, for no one dared lay hands on
a bishop; and upon William seizing his brother with his own hands, Odo
cried out, “I am a bishop and the Lord’s minister; a bishop may not be
condemned without the judgment of the Pope.” To this claim of episcopal
privilege William replied that he arrested not the bishop of Bayeux, but
the earl of Kent, and Odo was sent off straightway in custody to the
Tower of Rouen. At a later date it was suggested that the distinction
between the bishop’s lay and spiritual functions was suggested to the
king by Lanfranc,[279] whose opinion as an expert in the canon law was
incontrovertible; and apart from the dramatic interest of the scene the
trial of Odo has special importance as one of the few recorded cases in
which a question of clerical immunity was raised before the promulgation
of the Constitutions of Clarendon.
The one extended narrative which we possess of these events was composed
some forty years after the date in question, and the scheme which is
attributed to Bishop Odo may well seem too visionary a project to have
been undertaken by that very hard-headed person, yet on the whole we
shall probably do well to pay respect to Orderic’s version of the
incident. For, although the militant lord of Bayeux might seem to us an
incongruous successor for the saintly Hildebrand, it must as yet have
been uncertain how far the church as a whole had really identified
itself with the ideals which found their greatest exponent in Gregory
VII., and the situation in Italy itself was such as to invite the
intervention of a prelate capable of wielding the secular arm. The
struggle between pope and emperor was at its height, and within three
years from the date of Odo’s arrest Hildebrand himself was to die in
exile from his city, while Norman influence was all-powerful in south
Italy. The tradition represented in Orderic’s narrative shows an
appreciation of the general situation, and if we regard the motive
assigned for Odo’s preparations as merely the monastery gossip of the
next generation, yet the bishop’s imprisonment is a certain fact, and
the unusual bitterness of King William towards his half-brother would
suggest that something more than political disloyalty gave point to the
latter’s schemes. Nevertheless the captivity in which Bishop Odo
expiated his ambition cannot have been enforced with very great
severity, for in the five years which intervened between his disgrace
and William’s death he appears at least occasionally in attendance at
his brother’s court.
The circle of the Conqueror’s immediate companions was rapidly breaking
up now. On November 3rd, 1083, Queen Matilda died, and was buried in the
convent of the Holy Trinity at Caen, which she had founded in return for
her lord’s safety amid the perils of his invasion of England. Archbishop
Lanfranc and Earl Roger of Montgomery almost alone represented the
friends of King William’s early manhood at the councils of his last four
years. Through all the hazards of her married life Matilda of Flanders
had played her part well; if William the Conqueror alone among all the
men of his house kept his sexual purity unstained to the last, something
at least of this may be set down to his love for the bride whom he had
won, thirty years before, in defiance of all ecclesiastical censure. Nor
should Matilda’s excellence be conceived of as lying wholly in the
domestic sphere; William could leave his duchy in her hands when he set
out to win a kingdom for himself and her, and William was no
contemptible judge of practical ability in others. We shall hardly find
in all English medieval history another queen consort who takes a place
at once more prominent and more honourable.
In the year following Queen Matilda’s death, the Conqueror’s attention
was for the last time concentrated on the affairs of Maine, and in a
manner which illustrates the uncertain tenure by which the Normans still
held their southern dependency. Twenty years of Norman rule had failed
to reconcile the Manceaux to the alien government. The rising of 1073
had proved the strength and extent of the disaffection, and from the
events of the present year it is plain that the Norman element in Maine
was no more than a garrison in hostile territory, although the
disturbance which called William into the field in 1084 was merely the
revolt of a great Mancel baron fighting for his own hand, which should
not be dignified with the name of a national movement. In the centre of
the county the castle of Sainte-Suzanne stands on a high rock
overlooking the river Arne, one of the lesser tributaries of the Sarthe.
This fortress, together with the castles of Beaumont and Fresnay on the
greater river, belonged to Hubert the viscount of Maine, who had been a
prominent leader of the Mancel nationalists in the war of 1063, and had
subsequently married a niece of Duke Robert of Burgundy. Formidable
alike from his position in Maine and his connection with the Capetian
house, Hubert proved himself an unruly subject of the Norman _princeps
Cenomannorum_ and after sundry acts of disaffection he broke into open
revolt, abandoned his castles of Fresnay and Beaumont, and concentrated
his forces on the height of Sainte-Suzanne. Like Robert of Normandy at
Gerberoi, five years before, Hubert made his castle a rendezvous for all
the restless adventurers of the French kingdom, who soon became
intolerable to the Norman garrisons in Le Mans and its neighbourhood.
The latter, it would seem, were not strong enough to divide their forces
for an attack on Sainte-Suzanne, and sent an appeal for help to King
William, who thereupon gathered an army in Normandy, and made ready for
his last invasion of Maine.
[Illustration:
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
(AS CONCEIVED BY A FRENCH PAINTER OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY)
THE ORIGINAL OF THIS PICTURE, NOW LOST, WAS PAINTED BY AN ARTIST WHEN
THE TOMB OF THE CONQUEROR WAS OPENED IN 1522. A COPY EXECUTED IN
1708, IS PRESERVED IN THE SACRISTY OF ST. ETIENNE’S CHURCH AT CAEN;
THE PRESENT ILLUSTRATION IS FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THAT COPY]
[Illustration: WESTERN NORMANDY]
But for once in his life the Conqueror found himself confronted by an
irreducible fortress. “He did not venture to lay siege to the castle of
Sainte-Suzanne,” says Orderic,
“it being rendered impregnable by its position on rocks and the dense
thickets of vineyards which surrounded it, nor could he confine the
enemy within the fortress as he wished, since the latter was strong
enough to control supplies and was in command of the communications.
The king therefore built a fortification in the valley of Bonjen, and
placed therein a strong body of troops to repress the raids of the
enemy, being himself compelled to return into Normandy on weighty
affairs.”[280]
As William had no prospect of reducing the castle, either by storm or
blockade, he was well advised to save his personal prestige by retreat,
but the garrison of his counterwork under his lieutenant Alan Earl of
Richmond proved themselves unequal to the task assigned them. For three
years, according to Orderic, the operations in the Arne valley dragged
on, and the fame of Hubert’s successful resistance attracted an
increasing stream of volunteers from remote parts of France. At last,
when many knights of fame had been killed or taken prisoner, the
disheartened Normans at Bonjen resolved to bring about a reconciliation
between the king and the viscount. William was in England at the time,
and on receiving details of the Norman losses before Sainte-Suzanne he
showed himself willing to come to terms with Hubert, who thereupon
crossed the Channel under a safe conduct and was restored to favour at
the royal court.[281]
With this failure closes the record of the Conquerors achievements in
Maine. The events of the next ten years proved that the triumph of
Hubert of Sainte-Suzanne was more than the accidental success of a
rebellious noble; a national force lay behind him and his crew of
adventurers, which came to the front when Helie de la Flèche struggled
for the county of Maine with William Rufus. In the process which during
the next half-century was consolidating the feudal world of France,
Maine could not persist in isolated independence, but its final
absorption into Anjou was less repugnant to local patriotism and the
facts of geography than its annexation by the lords of Rouen. Those who
have a taste for historical parallels may fairly draw one between
William’s wars in Maine and his descendant Edward I.’s attack on the
autonomy of Scotland, with reference to the manner in which an initial
success was reversed after the death of the great soldier who had won
it, by the irreconcilable determination of the conquered people. But
there lies a problem which cannot be wholly answered in the question why
King William’s work, so permanent in the case of England, was so soon
undone in the case of the kindred land of Maine.
It is possible that the Conqueror’s placability toward Hubert of
Sainte-Suzanne was not unconnected with a more formidable danger
threatening England from the north and east. Once more the Scandinavian
peril hung over the land. Harold of Denmark, the eldest son of Swegn
Estrithson, had died in 1080, and his brother and successor Cnut married
the daughter of William’s inveterate enemy, Count Robert of Flanders. In
this way a family alliance between the two strongest naval powers of the
north was called into being; and in 1085 the king and the count planned
a joint invasion of England. Cnut attempted to draw King Olaf of Norway
into the expedition, and received from him a contingent of sixty ships,
but Olaf would not join in person, giving as his reason that the kings
of Norway had always been less successful than the kings of Denmark in
enterprises against England, and that his kingdom had not yet recovered
from the disaster of 1066.[282] But now, as in the former year, England
had no fleet available for serious naval operations; and King William’s
subjects must have thought that his defensive measures were as ruinous
to the districts affected as the passage of an invading army itself. The
king was in Normandy when he became apprised of the danger, and he
hastened across the Channel, with a great force of French and Breton
mercenaries, “so that people wondered how the land could feed all that
army,” remarks the Peterborough chronicler. The king arranged for the
billeting of the host among his barons, and then proceeded deliberately
to lay waste the parts of the country exposed to attack; a precaution
which would have kept the enemy from advancing far from the coast, but
which must have cruelly afflicted the poorer folk of the eastern
shires.[283] Meanwhile a great armament from Flanders and Denmark had
been gathered in the Lijm fiord, and all was ready for the voyage when
on July 10, 1086, Cnut was murdered in the church of Odensee.[284] His
death meant the abandonment of the expedition, but is probable that his
abortive schemes contributed to one of the most notable events of
William’s reign—the oath of Salisbury of 1086.
The king had kept the feast of 1086 at Winchester and had knighted his
youngest son, Henry, in the Whitsuntide council at Westminster. Not long
afterwards he turned westward again, and by the first of August had come
to Salisbury, where he held an assembly of very exceptional character.
“There his Witan came to him,” says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, “and all
the landholding men in England, no matter whose men they might be, and
swore him fealty that they would be true to him against all men.”[285]
The native chronicler in his cell at Peterborough was evidently
impressed by the scale of all the Conqueror’s measures in these last
years, and his statement that all the land-holding men in England came
to the Salisbury meeting must not be construed too literally, but he has
seen clearly enough what was the real purpose of the famous oath. It was
no slight matter that King William was strong enough to exact from each
mesne tenant in his kingdom an absolute oath of allegiance to himself in
person, without explicit reference to the tie of homage which bound
individual tenants to their immediate lords. But, significant as is this
clear enunciation of the principle that the king’s claim to fealty
overrides the lord’s claim to service, it should not be taken to imply
any revolutionary change in the current doctrines of feudal law. It is
highly probable that this general oath was demanded with the single
purpose of providing against the defection of disloyal knights and
barons to Cnut of Denmark in the imminent event of his landing. News
travelled slowly in the eleventh century, and King William at Salisbury
on August 1st could not well have heard of the murder at Odensee on July
10th. But apart from this, any feudal monarch could have maintained in
theory that the facts of subinfeudation should not invalidate his
sovereign rights; the question was merely as to the possibility of
enforcing the latter. The exceptional power enjoyed by William and his
successors in this respect was due to the intimate relations established
between the king and his feudatories by the circumstances of the
Conquest; the Oath of Salisbury was a striking incident and little more.
It was probably not long after the famous scene at Salisbury that the
Conqueror crossed the Channel for the last time. No chronicler has
recorded the name of the port which witnessed King William’s last
embarkation, but we know that he called at the Isle of Wight on his way
to Normandy, and we may suppose that he had set sail from some Hampshire
or Sussex haven. His subjects probably rejoiced at his departure, for
England had fallen on evil times in these last years. The summer of 1086
had been disastrous for a population never living far from the margin of
subsistence. “This year was very grievous,” laments the native
chronicler, “and ruinous and sorrowful in England through the murrain;
corn and fruit could not be gathered and one cannot well think how
wretched was the weather, there was such dreadful thunder and lightning,
which killed many men, and always kept growing worse and worse. God
Almighty amend it when it please him.” But the bad harvest brought its
inevitable train of famine and pestilence, and 1087 was worse than 1086
had been. It was the agony of this year that called forth the famous
picture of the Conqueror’s fiscal exactions, how the miserly king leased
his lands at the highest rent that could be wrung out of the poor men by
right or wrong; how his servants exacted unlawful tolls. Medieval
finance was not elastic enough to adapt itself to the alternation of
good and bad seasons; and in a time of distress men were crushed to the
earth by rents and taxes, which, as Domesday Book shows, they could
afford to bear well enough in years of normal plenty. The monk of
Peterborough took no account of this, and yet he clearly felt that he
had reached the climax of disaster as he recorded the death of William
the Conqueror.
The question of the Vexin Française, which, by a singular chance, was to
cost the Conqueror his life, originated in the days of Duke Robert of
Normandy and Henry I. of France. We have seen that King Henry, in return
for help given by Robert to him in the difficult time of his accession,
ceded the Vexin Française to the Norman Duke. Drogo, the reigning count,
remained true to the Norman connection, and accompanied Duke Robert to
the Holy Land, where he died; but his son Walter wished to detach the
Vexin from association with Normandy and to replace himself under the
direct sovereignty of the king of France. He proved his hostility to
William of Normandy in the campaign of Mortemer, and by the claims which
he raised to the county of Maine in 1063, but he died without issue, and
his possessions passed to his first cousin, Ralf III., count of Valois.
The house of Valois was not unfriendly to Normandy, and from 1063 to
1077 its powerful possessions were a standing menace to the royal
demesne. But in the latter year the family estates were broken up by a
dramatic event. Simon de Crepy, the son of Count Ralf, who had
successfully maintained his position against Philip I., felt
nevertheless a desire to enter the religious life, and on his wedding
night he suddenly announced his determination, persuaded his young bride
to follow his example, and retired from the world. Philip I. thereupon
reunited the Vexin to the royal demesne without opposition from William
of Normandy, who was at the time much occupied with the affairs of
Maine.[286] For ten years William acquiesced in the state of affairs,
and his present action took the form of a reprisal for certain raids
which the Frenchmen in Mantes had lately been making across the Norman
border. It would clearly have been useless to expect King Philip to
intervene, and William accordingly raised the whole Vexin question once
more, and demanded possession of Pontoise, Chaumont, and Mantes, three
towns which command the whole province.
It does not seem that Philip made any attempt to defend his threatened
frontier, and he is reported to have treated William’s threats with
contempt. Thereupon, the Conqueror, stung by some insult which passed at
the time, suddenly threw himself with a Norman force across the Epte,
and harried the country until he came to Mantes itself. The garrison had
left their posts on the previous day, in order to inspect the
devastation which the Normans had wrought in the neighbourhood, and were
surprised by King William’s arrival. Garrison and invaders rushed in
together headlong through the gates of the city, but the Normans had the
victory, and Mantes was ruthlessly burned. And then King William, while
riding among the smouldering ruins of his last conquest, in some way not
quite clearly known, was thrown violently upon the pommel of his saddle,
and his injury lay beyond the resources of the rough surgery of the
eleventh century.
Stricken thus with a mortal blow, King William left the wasted Vexin for
his capital of Rouen, and for six weeks of a burning summer his great
strength struggled with the pain of his incurable hurt. At first he lay
within the city of Rouen itself, but as the days passed he became less
able to bear the noise of the busy port, and he bade his attendants
carry him to the priory of Saint-Gervase, which stands on a hill to the
west of the town. The progress of his sickness left his senses
unimpaired to the last, and in the quiet priory the Conqueror told the
story of his life to his sons William and Henry, his friend and
physician Gilbert Maminot, bishop of Lisieux, Guntard, abbot of
Jumièges, and a few others who had come to witness the end of their
lord. Two independent narratives of King William’s _apologia_ have
survived to our day, and, although monastic tradition may have framed
the tale somewhat to purposes of edification, yet we can see that it was
in no ignoble spirit that the Conqueror, under the shadow of imminent
death, reviewed the course of his history. He called to mind with
satisfaction his constant devotion and service to Holy Church, his
patronage of learned men, and the religious houses founded under his
rule. If he had been a man of war from his youth up he cast the blame in
part upon the disloyal kinsmen, the jealous overlord, the aggressive
rivals who had beset him from his childhood, but for the conquest of
England, in this his supreme moment, he attempted no justification. In
his pain and weariness, the fame he had shed upon the Norman race paled
before the remembrance of the slaughter at Hastings, and the harried
villages of Yorkshire. No prevision, indeed, of the mighty outcome of
his work could have answered the Conqueror’s anxiety for the welfare of
his soul, and under the spur of ambition he had taken a path which led
to results beyond his own intention and understanding. We need not
believe that the bishop of Lisieux or the abbot of Jumièges have
tampered with William’s words, when we read his repentance for the
events which have given him his place in history.
It remained for the Conqueror to dispose of his inheritance, and here
for once political expediency had to yield to popular sentiment. We
cannot but believe that the Conqueror, had it been in his power, would
have made some effort to preserve the political union of England and
Normandy. But fate had struck him down without warning, and ruled that
his work should be undone for a while. With grim forebodings of evil
William acknowledged that the right of the first-born, and the homage
done by the Norman barons to Robert more than twenty years before, made
it impossible to disinherit the graceless exile, but England at least
should pass into stronger hands. William Rufus was destined to a brief
and stormy tenure of his island realm, but its bestowal now was the
reward of constant faithfulness and good service to his mighty father.
To the English-born Henry, who was to be left landless, the Conqueror
bequeathed five thousand pounds of silver from his treasury, and, in
answer to his complaint that wealth to him would be useless without
land, prophesied the future reunion of the Anglo-Norman states under his
rule. And then, while Henry busied himself to secure and weigh his
treasure, the Conqueror gave to William the regalia of the English
monarchy, and sealed a letter recommending him to Archbishop Lanfranc as
the future king, and kissing him gave him his blessing, and directed him
to hasten to England before men there knew that their lord was dead.
In his few remaining hours King William was inspired by the priests and
nobles who stood around his bed to make reparation to certain victims of
his policy, who still survived in Norman prisons. Among those who were
now released at his command were Wulfnoth, Earl Godwine’s son, and Wulf
the son of King Harold; the prisoners of Ely, Earl Morcar and Siward
Barn; Earl Roger of Hereford, and a certain Englishman named Algar. Like
ghosts from another world these men came out into the light for a little
time before they vanished finally into the dungeons of William Rufus;
but there was one state prisoner whose pardon, extorted reluctantly from
the Conqueror, was not reversed by his successor. It was only the
special intercession of Count Robert of Mortain which procured the
release of his brother, Bishop Odo. The bishop had outdone the Conqueror
in oppression and cruelty to the people of England, and regret for his
own sins of ambition and wrong had not disposed the king for leniency
towards his brother’s guilt in this regard. At length in sheer weariness
he yielded against his will, foretelling that the release of Odo would
bring ruin and death upon many.
It is in connection with Bishop Odo’s liberation that Orderic relates
the last recorded act of William’s life. A certain knight named Baudri
de Guitry, who had done good service in the war of Sainte-Suzanne, had
subsequently offended the king by leaving Normandy without his license
to fight against the Moors in Spain. His lands had been confiscated in
consequence, but were now restored to him, William remarking that he
thought no braver knight existed anywhere, only he was extravagant and
inconstant, and loved to wander in foreign countries. Baudri was a
neighbour and friend to the monks of St. Evroul, hence no doubt the
interest which his restoration possessed for Ordericus Vitalis.
In the final stage of King William’s sickness, the extremity of his pain
abated somewhat, and he slept peacefully through the night of Wednesday
the 8th of September. As dawn was breaking he woke, and at the same
moment the great bell of Rouen cathedral rang out from the valley below
Saint-Gervase’s priory. The king asked what it meant; those who were
watching by him replied, “My lord, the bell is tolling for primes at St.
Mary’s church.” Then the Conqueror, raising his hands, exclaimed: “To
Mary, the holy mother of God, I commend myself, that by her blessed
intercession I may be reconciled to her beloved Son, our Lord Jesus
Christ.” The next instant he was dead.
For close upon six weeks the king had lain helpless in his chamber in
the priory, but death had come upon him suddenly at last, and the
company which had surrounded him instantly scattered in dismay. Each man
knew that for many miles around Rouen there would be little security for
life or property that day, and the dead king was left at the mercy of
his own servants, while his friends rode hard to reach their homes
before the great news had spread from the city to the open country. By
the time that the clergy of Rouen had roused themselves to take order
how their lord might be worthily buried, his body had been stripped, his
chamber dismantled, and his attendants were dispersed, securing the
plunder which they had taken. The archbishop of Rouen directed that the
king should be carried to the church of his own foundation at Caen, but
no man of rank had been left in the city, and it was only an upland
knight, named Herlwin, who accompanied the Conqueror on his last
progress over his duchy. By river and road the body was brought to Caen,
and a procession of clergy and townsfolk was advancing to meet it, when
suddenly a burst of flame was seen arising from the town. The citizens,
who knew well what this meant among their narrow streets and wooden
houses, rushed back to crush the fire, while the monks of Saint
Stephen’s received the king’s body and brought it with such honour as
they might to their house outside the walls.
[Illustration:
ENGLAND
In 1087]
Shortly afterwards, the Conqueror was buried in the presence of nearly
all the prelates of the Norman church. The bishop of Evreux, who had
watched by the king’s death-bed, preached, praising him for the renown
which his victories had brought upon his race, and for the strictness of
his justice in the lands over which he ruled. But a strange scene then
interrupted the course of the ceremony. A certain Ascelin, the son of
Arthur, came forward and loudly declared that the place in which the
grave had been prepared had been the court-yard of his father’s house,
unjustly seized by the dead man for the foundation of his abbey. Ascelin
clamoured for restitution, and the bishops and other magnates drew him
apart, and, when satisfied that his claim was just, paid him sixty
shillings for the ground where the grave was. And then, with broken
rites, the Conqueror was laid between the choir and the altar of Saint
Stephen’s church.
[Illustration: Denier of Philip I. of France]
-----
Footnote 264:
Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 290.
Footnote 265:
Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 259.
Footnote 266:
Charter of King Philip to St. Quentin, Gallia Christ; X. Inst. 247.
Among the witnesses are Anselm of Bec, and Ives de Beaumont, the
father-in-law of Hugh de Grentemaisnil.
Footnote 267:
_Worcester Chronicle_, 1079.
Footnote 268:
S. D., _Gesta Regum_, 1080.
Footnote 269:
Round, _Calendar_, No. 1114.
Footnote 270:
_Ibid._, 1113.
Footnote 271:
_Ibid._, 78.
Footnote 272:
Orderic, ii., 315.
Footnote 273:
This fact is of importance, as giving an example, rare in England, of
a true “vicecomes,” an earl’s deputy as distinguished from a sheriff.
Footnote 274:
For all these events Simeon of Durham is the authority giving most
detail.
Footnote 275:
_Hist. Monast. de Abingdon_, ii., 10.
Footnote 276:
_Brut y Tywysogion_, 1080.
Footnote 277:
_Mon. Angl._, vii., 993, from an “inspeximus” of 31 Ed. I. The charter
in question is dated “apud villam Dontonam,” which in the index to the
volume of _Patent Rolls_ is identified with Downton, Wilts. William,
at Downton, may very well have been on his way to one of the Hampshire
or Dorset ports.
Footnote 278:
iii., 168. On the other hand, Giesbrecht (iii., 531) has suggested
that a political difference was the occasion of the quarrel between
Odo and William, the former wishing to take up arms for Gregory VII.,
while the latter was on friendly terms with the emperor. But Gregory
himself in a letter addressed to William (_Register_, viii., 60),
while reproving his correspondent for lack of respect towards his
brother’s orders, admits that Odo had committed some political offence
against the king. As to the nature of that offence, we have no
contemporary statement, nor do we know how far Gregory may have
possessed accurate information as to the motives which induced
William’s action.
Footnote 279:
William of Malmesbury.
Footnote 280:
Ordericus Vitalis, iii., 196.
Footnote 281:
An isolated reference to the siege of Saint-Suzanne occurs in the
Domesday of Oxfordshire, in which county the manor of Ledhall had been
granted to Robert d’Oilly, “apud obsidionem S. Suzanne.”
Footnote 282:
_Heimskringla_, iii., 198.
Footnote 283:
The severity of the devastation should not be exaggerated, for in 1086
Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk were the most prosperous parts of
England.
Footnote 284:
Cnut’s preparations and death are described at length in his life by
Ethelnoth, printed in the _Scriptores Rerum Danicarum_.
Footnote 285:
_Peterborough Chronicle_, 1086.
Footnote 286:
See Flach, _Les Origines de l’ancienne France_, 531–534.
CHAPTER X
WILLIAM AND THE CHURCH
Up to the present we have only dealt with the ecclesiastical relations
of William the Conqueror in so far as they have directly affected
political issues. But the subject has a unity of its own, quite apart
from its bearing upon the course of war or diplomacy, and no aspect of
the Conqueror’s work is known to us in greater detail. It may be added
that no aspect of the Conqueror’s work is more illustrative of the
general character of his government, nor of greater significance for the
future history. For four centuries and a half the development of the
church in England followed the lines which he had indicated.[287]
But the church in Normandy was William’s first concern, and some
appreciation of his work here is necessary to an understanding of the
tendencies which governed his ecclesiastical policy in England. Broadly
stated, William’s relations with the church in Normandy and England
alike were governed by two main ideas. He was beyond all doubt sincerely
anxious for the reform of the church, as he would have understood the
phrase—the extension and stricter observance of the monastic life, the
improvement of the learning and morals of the secular clergy, the
development of a specific ecclesiastical law. But he was no less
determined that, at all hazards, the church in his dominions should be
subordinate to the state, and his enforcement of this principle
ultimately threw him into opposition to the very party in the church
which was most sympathetic to his plans of ecclesiastical reform.
Between Hildebrand claiming in definite words that the head of the
church was the lord of the world, and William asserting in unmistakable
acts that the king of England was over all persons in all causes, as
well ecclesiastical as temporal, through his dominions supreme, there
were certain to be differences of opinion. But the two great men kept
the peace for a surprising length of time, and it was not until ten
years before William’s death that serious discord arose between him and
the Curia in regard to the question of church government.
In this matter, indeed, William was but maintaining prerogatives which
he had inherited from his predecessors, and which were simultaneously
being vindicated by the other princes of his time. We have already
remarked on the intimate connection of church and state which prevailed
in Normandy at the beginning of the eleventh century, in relation to its
bearing upon the general absolutism enjoyed by the duke. But the fact
has a wider significance as governing the whole character of
ecclesiastical life in the duchy. The rights of patronage which the duke
possessed, his intervention in the process of ecclesiastical
legislation, his power of deposing prelates who had fallen under his
displeasure, not only forbade the autonomy of the church, they made its
spiritual welfare as well as its professional efficiency essentially
dependent upon the personal character of its secular head. Under these
conditions, there was scanty room for the growth of ultramontane ideas
among the Norman clergy; and such influence as the papacy exercised in
Normandy before 1066 at least was due much more to traditional reverence
for the Holy See, and to occasional respect for the character of its
individual occupants, than to any recognition of the legal sovereignty
of the Pope in spiritual matters. William himself in the matter of his
marriage had defied the papacy, and the denunciations of the Curia found
but a faint response among the prelates of the Norman church.
From the ultramontane point of view this dependence of the church upon
the state was a gross evil, but it was at least an evil which produced
its own compensation in Normandy. The chaos which had attended the
settlement of the Northmen in the tenth century had involved the whole
ecclesiastical organisation of the land in utter ruin, and its
restoration was entirely due to the initiative taken by the secular
power. The successive dukes of Normandy, from Richard I. onward, showed
astonishing zeal in the work of ecclesiastical reform.[288] Their zeal,
however, must have spent itself in vain if their success had been
dependent upon the co-operation of the Norman clergy; the decay of the
church in Normandy had gone too far to permit of its being reformed from
within. The reforming energy which makes the eleventh century a
brilliant period in French ecclesiastical history was concentrated at
this time in the great abbeys of Flanders and Burgundy, whose inmates,
however, were fully competent, and for the most part willing, to
undertake the restoration of ecclesiastical order in Normandy. From this
quarter, and in particular from the abbey of Cluny, monks were imported
into the duchy by Dukes Richard I. and II., and under their guidance the
reform of the Norman church was undertaken according to the highest
monastic ideal of the time. Very gradually, but with ever increasing
strength, the influence of the foreign reformers gained more and more
control over every rank in the Norman hierarchy. The higher clergy, who
at first resisted the movement, became transformed into its champions as
the result of the judicious appointments made by successive dukes. Even
the upland clergy, whose invincible ignorance had aroused the anger of
the earliest reformers, were attracted within the scope of the reform,
partly by means of the affiliation of village churches to monasteries,
but above all through the educational work performed by the schools
which were among the first fruits of the monastic revival.
If the foundation of new monasteries may be taken as evidence, the
process of expansion and reform went on unchecked throughout the stormy
minority of William the Conqueror. A period of feudal anarchy was not
necessarily inimical to the ultimate interests of the church. Amid the
disorder and oppression of secular life the church might still display
the example of a society founded on law and discipline, it might in
numberless individual cases protect the weak from gratuitous injury, and
it certainly might hope to emerge from the chaos with wider influence
and augmented revenues. The average baron was very willing to atone for
his misdeeds by the foundation of a new religious house, or by
benefactions to an old one, and the immortal church had time on its
side. In Normandy, at least, the disorder of William’s minority
coincided with the foundation of new monasteries in almost every diocese
in the Norman church; and the promulgation of the Truce of God in 1042
gave a wide extension to the competence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction
in relation to secular affairs.
With William’s victory at Val-es-dunes, the crisis was over, and for the
next forty years the Norman church sailed in smooth waters. Autocratic
as was William by temperament, nothing contributed more greatly to his
success than his singular wisdom in the choice of his ministers in
church and state, and his power of attaching them to his service by ties
of personal friendship to himself. The relations between William and
Lanfranc form perhaps the greatest case in point, but there were other
and less famous members of the Norman hierarchy who stood on terms of
personal intimacy with their master. And William was cosmopolitan in his
sympathies. Men of learning and piety from every part of Christendom
were entrusted by him with responsible positions in the Norman church;
in 1066 nearly all the greater abbeys of Normandy were ruled by foreign
monks. Cosmopolitanism was the chief note of medieval culture, and under
these influences a real revival of learning may be traced in Normandy.
It is well for William’s memory that this was so; but for the work of
William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges, two typical representatives
of the new learning, posterity would have remained in blank ignorance of
the Conqueror’s rule in Normandy. But it is a matter of still greater
importance that in this way Normandy was gradually becoming prepared to
be the educator of England, as well as her conqueror. The surviving
relics of the literary activity at this time of Normandy—mass books,
theological treatises, and books of miracles, which it produced—have but
little interest for the general student of history, but the important
point is that they are symptoms of an intellectual life manifesting
itself with vigour in the only directions which were possible to it in
the early eleventh century. Not until it had been transplanted to the
conquered soil of England did this intellectual life produce its
greatest result, the philosophical history of William of Malmesbury, the
logical narrative of Eadmer, to name only two of its manifestations; but
in matters of culture, as well as in matters of policy and war, the
Norman race was unconsciously equipping itself in these years for its
later achievement across the Channel.
It cannot be denied that the English church stood in sore need of some
such external influence. The curious blight which seemed to have settled
on the secular government of England affected its religious organisation
also. The English church had never really recovered from the Danish wars
of Alfred’s time. It had been galvanised into fresh activity by the
efforts of Dunstan and his fellow-reformers of the tenth century, but
the energy they had infused scarcely outlasted their own lives, and in
1066 the church in England compares very unfavourably with the churches
of the continent in all respects. It had become provincial where they
were catholic; its culture was a feeble echo of the culture of the
eighth century, they were striking out new methods of inquiry into the
mysteries of the faith; it was becoming more and more closely
assimilated to the state, they were struggling to emancipate themselves
from secular control. There was ample scope in England for the work of a
great ecclesiastical reformer, but the increasing secularisation of the
leaders of the church rendered it unlikely that he would come from
within.
[Illustration: REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE CHARTER OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
TO HYDE ABBEY]
Even in 1066 the English church still retained distinct features of the
tribal organisation which it had inherited from the century of the
conversion. Its dioceses in general represented Heptarchic kingdoms, and
the uncertainty of their boundaries is here and there definitely
traceable to the uncertain limits of the primitive tribes of which, they
were the ecclesiastical equivalents. The residences of half the English
bishops of the eleventh century were still fixed, like those of their
seventh-century predecessors, in remote villages; “places of retirement
rather than centres of activity,” as they have well been called. The
number of dioceses was very small in proportion to the population and
area of the land, and it tended to decrease; Edward the Confessor had
recently united the sees of Cornwall and Devon, under the single bishop
of Exeter. Within his diocese each bishop enjoyed an independence of
archiepiscopal supervision, the like of which was unknown to his
continental fellows; the canonical authority of the archbishops was in
abeyance, and in 1070 it was still an open question whether the sees of
Dorchester, Lichfield, and Worcester, which represented nearly a third
of England, belonged to the province of Canterbury or of York. The
smaller territorial units of ecclesiastical government, the archdeaconry
and rural deanery, are hardly to be traced in England before the
Conquest, and the chapters in the several dioceses varied indefinitely
in point of organisation.
It was not necessarily an abuse that the right of making appointments to
the higher ecclesiastical offices belonged in England to the king and
the Witanagemot; it was another matter that the leaders of the church
were becoming more and more absorbed in secular business. A
representative bishop of King Edward’s day would be a vigorous
politician and man of affairs. Ealdred, archbishop of York, was sent by
the king into Germany to negotiate for the return of Edgar the Etheling;
Lyfing of Worcester earned the title of the “eloquent” through the part
he played in the debates of the Witanagemot; Leofgar of Hereford, a
militant person who caused grave scandal by continuing to wear his
moustaches after his ordination, conducted campaigns against the Welsh.
In Normandy, this type of prelate was rapidly becoming extinct; Odo of
Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances stand out glaringly among their
colleagues in 1066; but in England the circumstances of the time
demanded the increasing participation of the higher clergy in state
affairs. The rivalry of the great earls at Edward’s court produced, as
it were, a barbarous anticipation of party government, and during the
long ascendancy of the house of Godwine, ecclesiastical dignities were
naturally bestowed on men who could make themselves politically useful
to their patron. Curiously enough, the one force which operated to check
the secularisation of the English episcopate was the personal character
of King Edward. His foreign tendencies found full play here, and the
alien clerks of his chapel whom he appointed to bishoprics came to form
a distinct group, to which may be traced the beginnings of
ecclesiastical reform in England. For a short time the highest office in
the English church was held, in the person of the unlucky Robert of
Jumièges, by a Norman monk in close touch with the Cluniac school of
ecclesiastical reformers, who seems to have tried, during his brief
period of rule, to raise the standard of learning among the clergy of
his diocese. Robert fell before he could do much in this direction, but
the foreign influences which were beginning to play upon the English
church did not cease with his expulsion. Here and there, during Edward’s
later years, native prelates were to be found who recognised that much
was amiss with the church, and followed foreign models in their attempts
at reform; Ealdred of York tried to impose the strict rule of Chrodegang
of Metz upon his canons of York, Ripon, Beverley, and Southwell, the
four greatest churches of Northern England. But individual bishops could
not go far enough in the work of reform, and their efforts seem to have
met with little sympathy from the majority of their colleagues.
To a foreign observer, nothing in the English church would seem more
anomalous than the character of its ecclesiastical jurisdiction. There
existed, indeed, in the law books of successive kings, a vast mass of
ecclesiastical law; it was in the administration of this law that
England parted company with continental usage. In England the bishop
with the earl presided over the assembly of thegns, freemen, and priests
which constituted the shire court, and the local courts of shire and
hundred had a wide competence over matters which, on the continent,
would have been referred to a specifically ecclesiastical tribunal. The
bishop seems to have possessed an exclusive jurisdiction over the
professional misdoings of his clergy, and the degradation of a criminous
clerk, the necessary preliminary to his punishment by the lay authority,
was pronounced by clerical judges, but all other matters of
ecclesiastical interest fell within the province of the local
assemblies. Ecclesiastical and secular laws were promulgated by the same
authority and administered by the same courts, nor does the church as a
whole seem to have possessed any organ by means of which collective
opinion might be given upon matters of general importance. No great
councils of the church, such as those of which Bede tells us, can be
traced in the Confessor’s reign, nor, indeed, for nearly two centuries
before his accession. The church council had been absorbed by the
Witanagemot.
To all the greater movements which were agitating the religious life of
the continent in the eleventh century—the Cluniac revival, the
hierarchical claims of the papacy—the English church as a whole remained
serenely oblivious. Its relations with the papacy were naturally very
intermittent, and when a native prelate visited the Holy See, he might
expect to hear strong words about plurality and simony from the Pope.
With Stigand the papacy could hold no intercourse, but, despite all the
fulminations of successive Popes, Stigand continued for eighteen years
to draw the revenues of his sees of Canterbury and Winchester, and other
prelates rivalled him in his offences of plurality, whatever scruples
they might feel about his canonical position as archbishop. Ealdred of
York had once administered three bishoprics and an abbey at the same
time. The ecclesiastical misdemeanours of a party among the higher
clergy would have been a minor evil, had it not coincided with the
general abeyance of learning and efficiency among their subordinates. We
know very little about the parish priest of the Confessor’s day, but
what is known does not dispose us to regard him as an instrument of much
value for the civilisation of his neighbours. In the great majority of
cases, he seems to have been a rustic, married like his parishioners,
joining with them in the agricultural work of the village, and differing
from them only in the fact of his ordination, and in possessing such a
knowledge of the rudiments of Latin as would enable him to recite the
services of the church. The energy with which the bishops who followed
the Conquest laboured for the elevation of the lower clergy is
sufficiently significant of what their former condition must have been.
The measures which were taken to this end by the foreign reformers—the
general enforcement of celibacy, for example—may not commend themselves
to modern opinion, but Lanfranc and his colleagues knew where the root
of the matter lay. It was only by making the church distinct from the
state, by making the parish priest a being separated by the clearest
distinctions from his lay brother, that the church could begin to
exercise its rightful influence upon the secular life of the nation.
[Illustration:
GAMEL SON OF ORME’S SUNDIAL
FROM A SHORT ACCOUNT OF SAINT GREGORY’S MINSTER, KIRKDALE, BY REV. F.
W. POWELL, VICAR. THE TRANSLATION IS AS FOLLOWS:]
“ORM GAMAL’S SON BOUGHT S. GREGORY’S MINSTER WHEN IT WAS ALL BROKEN DOWN
AND FALLEN AND HE LET IT BE MADE ANEW FROM THE GROUND TO CHRIST AND S.
GREGORY, IN EDWARD’S DAYS, THE KING, AND IN TOSTI’S DAYS, THE EARL.”
THE CENTRAL PANEL HAS ON THE DIAL—
“THIS IS DAY’S SUN MARKER
AT EVERY TIME.”
AND AT THE FOOT—
“AND HAWARTH ME WROUGHT AND BRAND, PRIESTS”
Political circumstances delayed the beginnings of ecclesiastical reform
for more than three years after the battle of Hastings had placed the
destinies of the English church in Norman hands. While the Conqueror was
fighting at Stafford and York, he could not be presiding over synods at
Winchester and London. No steps, therefore, were taken in this question
before 1070, when the fall of Chester destroyed the last chance of a
successful English rising, and made it no longer expedient for William
to be complaisant to Stigand and the nationalist party in the English
episcopate. But in 1070 the work was begun in earnest under the
immediate sanction of the Pope, expressed in the legation of two
cardinal priests who visited England in that year. There could be little
doubt what their first step would be; and when Stigand was formally
arraigned for holding the sees of Winchester and Canterbury in
plurality, usurping the pallium of his predecessor, Robert, and
receiving his own pallium from the schismatic Benedict X., he had no
defence to offer beyond declamation against the good faith of the king.
Three other bishops fell at or about the same time; Ethelmer, brother of
Stigand, and bishop of East Anglia, Ethelwine, bishop of Durham, and
Ethelric, bishop of Selsey. In regard to none of these last bishops are
the grounds on which their deposition was based at all certain; and in
the case of Ethelric, an aged man who was famed for his vast knowledge
of Anglo-Saxon law, the Pope himself was uneasy about the point, and a
correspondence went on for some time between him and Lanfranc on the
subject. But it is a noteworthy fact that these four prelates are the
only bishops deposed during the whole of the Conqueror’s reign. Nothing
was further from William’s purpose than any wholesale clearance of the
native episcopate. He was King Edward’s heir, and he wished, therefore,
to retain King Edward’s bishops in office, so far as this was consistent
with the designs of his ally the Pope. On the other hand, William was no
less determined to fill all vacancies when they occurred in the course
of nature with continental priests. Herein he and the Pope were in
complete harmony. It was only by this means that continental culture and
ideas of church government could be introduced into England, and William
trusted in his own strength to repress any inconvenient tendencies which
might arise from the ultramontane ideals of his nominees.
The deposition of Stigand meant the elevation of Lanfranc to the
archbishopric of Canterbury. It is probable that the Pope would have
preferred to attach him to the College of Cardinals, but William was
determined to place his old friend at the head of the English church,
and Alexander II. gave way. York, vacant through the death of Ealdred in
1069, was given to Thomas, treasurer of Bayeux, _protégé_ of Odo, bishop
of that see, and a man of vast and cosmopolitan learning. Almost
immediately after his appointment a fierce dispute broke out between him
and Lanfranc. The dispute in question was twofold—partly referring to
the boundaries of the two provinces, but also raising the more important
question whether the two English archbishops should possess co-ordinate
rank or whether the archbishop of York should be compelled to take an
oath of obedience to the primate of Canterbury. In a council held at
Winchester in 1072 both questions were settled in favour of Canterbury.
The dioceses of Lichfield, Worcester, and Dorchester were assigned to
the latter provinces, and Lanfranc—partly by arousing William’s fears as
to the political inexpediency of an independent archbishop of York,
partly by the skilful forgery of relevant documents—brought it about
that the northern archbishopric was formally declared subordinate to
that of Canterbury. In ecclesiastical, as well as secular matters,
William had small respect for the particularism of Northumbria.
The council which decided this matter was only one of a series of
similar assemblies convened during the archiepiscopate of Lanfranc. The
first of the series had already been held in 1070, when Wulfstan, the
unlearned but saintly bishop of Worcester, was arraigned _pro defectu
scientiæ_. He was saved from imminent deposition partly by his piety,
partly by his frank and early acceptance of the Norman rule; and he
retained his see until his death in 1094. In 1075 the third council of
the series proceeded to deal with one of the greatest anomalies
presented by the English church, and raised the whole question of
episcopal residence. In accordance with its decrees, the see of
Lichfield was translated to Chester, that of Selsey to Chichester, and
that of Sherborne to Old Salisbury. Shortly afterwards, the seat of the
east midland diocese of Dorchester was transferred to Lincoln; and in
1078 Bishop Herbert of Elmham, after an abortive attempt to gain
possession of Bury St. Edmund’s, removed his residence to Thetford, the
second town in Norfolk. In all these changes the attempt was made to
follow the continental practice by which a bishop would normally reside
in the chief town of his diocese. But new episcopal seats implied new
cathedral churches, and the Conqueror’s reign witnessed a notable
augmentation of church revenues,[289] expressed in grants of land, the
extent of which can be ascertained from the evidence of Domesday Book.
Here and there are traces of a reorganisation of church property, and of
its appropriation to special purposes; all of which enabled the new
bishops to support the strain incurred by their great building
activities. By 1087 new cathedrals had been begun in seven out of
fifteen dioceses.
The church councils which supplied the means through which the king and
primate carried their ideas of ecclesiastical reform into effect were
bodies of a somewhat anomalous constitution. In the Confessor’s day the
Witanagemot had treated indifferently of sacred and secular law, but its
competence in religious matters did not descend unbroken to its feudal
representative, the Commune Concilium. In the Conqueror’s reign the
church council is becoming differentiated from the assembly of lay
barons, but the process is not yet complete. The session of the church
council would normally coincide in point of place and time with a
meeting of the Commune Concilium; no ecclesiastical decree was valid
until it had received the king’s sanction, and the king and his lay
barons joined the assembly, although they took no active part in its
deliberations. There was, indeed, small necessity for their presence,
and in two of the more important councils of William’s reign, at London
in 1075 and at Gloucester in 1085 the spiritualty held a session of
their own apart from the meeting of the Commune Concilium. In any case
the spiritual decrees were promulgated upon the authority of the
archbishop and prelates, although the royal word was necessary for their
reception as law.
No piece of ecclesiastical legislation passed during this time had wider
consequences than the famous decree which limited the competence of the
shire and hundred courts in regard to matters pertaining to
religion.[290] This law has only come down to us in the form of a royal
writ addressed to the officers and men of the shire court, so that its
exact date is uncertain. But intrinsically it is likely enough that the
question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction would be one of the first
matters to which William and Lanfranc would turn their hands, and the
principle implied in the writ had already been recognised by all the
states of the continent. According to this document no person of
ecclesiastical status might be tried before the hundred court, nor might
this assembly any longer possess jurisdiction over cases involving
questions of spiritual law, even when laymen were the parties concerned.
All these matters were reserved to the exclusive jurisdiction of the
bishops and their archdeacons, and in this way room was prepared in
England for the reception of the canon law of the church.[291] Important
as it was for the subsequent fortunes of the church, this decree was
perhaps of even greater importance for its influence upon the
development of secular law. The canons of the church, in the shape which
they assumed at the hands of Gratian in the next generation, were to set
before lay legislators the example of a codified body of law, aiming at
logical consistency and inherent reason; a body very different from the
collection of isolated enactments which the English church of the
eleventh century inherited from the Witanagemots of Alfred and Edgar. We
cannot here trace the way in which the efforts of the great doctors of
the canon law were to react upon the work of their secular
contemporaries; but the fact of such influence is certain, and the next
century witnessed its abundant manifestation.
The transference of ecclesiastical causes from the sphere of the folk
law to that of the canons of the church meant that the Pope would in
time acquire, in fact, what no doubt he would already claim in
theory—the legal sovereignty of the church in England. That William
recognised this is certain, and he was determined that the fact should
in no way invalidate the ecclesiastical prerogatives which he already
enjoyed in Normandy, and which in regard to England he claimed as King
Edward’s heir. Contemporary churchmen say this too, and the key to
William’s relations with the Pope is given in the three resolutions
which Eadmer in the next generation ascribes to him. No Pope should be
recognised in England, no papal letters should be received, and no
tenant-in-chief excommunicated without his consent. In short, William
was prepared to make concessions to the ecclesiastical ideas of his
clerical friends only in so far as they might tend to the more efficient
discharge by the church of its spiritual function. This was, of course,
a compromise, and no very satisfactory one; it led immediately to
strained relations between William himself and Hildebrand, it was the
direct cause of the quarrel between William Rufus and Anselm, and it was
indirectly responsible for the greater struggle which raged between
Henry of Anjou and Becket. On one point, however, king and papacy were
in perfect accord, and it was this fact which prevented their difference
of opinion upon higher matters of ecclesiastical policy from becoming
acute during the Conqueror’s lifetime. Both parties were agreed upon the
imperative necessity of reforming the mass of the English clergy in
morals and learning, and here at least the Conqueror’s work was
permanent and consonant with the strictest ecclesiastical ideas of the
time.
We have already remarked that to the men of the eleventh century,
ecclesiastical reform implied the general enforcement of clerical
celibacy. The Winchester Council of 1072 had issued a decree against
unchaste clerks, but the matter was not taken up in detail for four
years more, and the settlement which was then arrived at was much more
lenient to the adherents of the old order than might have been expected.
It made a distinction between the two classes of the secular clergy. All
clerks who were members of any religious establishment, whether a
cathedral chapter, or college of secular canons, were to live celibate
for the future. The treatment applied to the upland clergy was summary.
It would have been a hopeless task to force the celibate life upon the
whole parochial clergy of England, but steps could be taken to secure
that the married priest would become an extinct species in the course of
the next generation. Accordingly, parish priests who were married at the
time might continue to live with their wives, but all subsequent
clerical marriage was absolutely forbidden, and the bishops were
enjoined to ordain no man who had not previously made definite
profession of celibacy. In all this Lanfranc was evidently anxious to
pass no decree which could not be carried into immediate execution, even
if this policy involved inevitable delay before the English clergy in
this great respect were brought into line with their continental
brethren. The next century had well begun before the native clergy as a
whole had been reduced to acceptance of the celibate rule.
The monastic revival which followed the Conquest told in the same
direction. In the mere foundation of religious houses, the Conqueror’s
reign cannot claim a high place. Such monasteries as derive their origin
from this period were for the most part affiliated to some continental
establishment. The Conqueror’s own abbey of St. Martin of the Place of
Battle was founded as a colony from Marmoutier, though it soon won
complete autonomy from the jurisdiction of the parent house. It was a
noteworthy event when in 1076 William de Warenne founded at Lewes the
first Cluniac priory in England, although it does not appear that any
other house of this order had arisen in this country before 1087. In
monastic history the interest of the Conqueror’s reign centres round the
old independent Benedictine monasteries of England, and their reform
under the administration of abbots imported from the continent. Here
there was much work to be done; not only in regard to the tightening of
monastic discipline, but also in the accommodation of these ancient
houses, with their wide lands and large dependent populations, to the
new conditions of society which were the result of the Conquest. Knight
service had to be provided for; the property of the monastery had to be
organised to enable it to bear the secular burdens which the Conqueror’s
policy imposed; foreign abbots were at times glad to rely upon the legal
knowledge which native monks could bring to bear upon the intricacies of
the prevailing system of land tenure. The Conqueror’s abbots were often
men of affairs, rather than saints; their work was here and there
misunderstood by the monks over whom they ruled, yet it cannot be
doubted that a stricter discipline, a more efficient discharge of
monastic offices, a higher conception of monastic life, were the results
of their government.
The influence of their work was not confined within monastic walls. In
the more accurate differentiation of monastic duties which they
introduced, they were not unmindful of the claims of the monastery
school. Very gradually the schools of such houses as St. Albans and
Malmesbury came to affect the mass of the native clergy. And the process
was quickened by the control which the monasteries possessed over a
considerable proportion of the parish churches of the country. The grant
of a village to an abbey meant that its church would be served by a
priest appointed by the abbot, and in Norman times no baron would found
a religious house without granting to it a number of the churches
situate upon his fief. Already in 1066 the several monasteries of
England possessed a large amount of patronage; and the Norman abbots of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries were not slow to employ the influence
they possessed in this way for the elevation of the native clergy.
Of course, there is another side to this picture. In the little world of
the monastery, as in the wide world of the state, it was the character
of the ruling man which determined whether the ascendancy of continental
ideas should make for good or evil. The autocracy of the abbot might
upon occasion degenerate into sheer tyranny: there is the classical
instance of Thurstan of Glastonbury, who turned a body of men-at-arms
upon his monks because they resisted his introduction of the Ambrosian
method of chanting the services.[292] It was an easy matter for an abbot
to use the lands of his church as a means of providing for his needy
kinsmen in Normandy[293]; the pious founder in the next generation would
often explicitly guard against the unnecessary creation of knights’ fees
on the monastic estates. An abbot, careless of his responsibilities,
might neglect to provide for the service of the village churches
affiliated to his house; and it would be difficult to call him to
account for this. But, judging from the evidence which we possess, we
can only conclude that the church in England did actually escape most of
the evils which might have resulted from the superposition of a new
spiritual aristocracy. The bad cases of which we have information are
very clearly exceptions, thrown into especial prominence on this very
account.