carried a wonderful influence for many years. In the general scarcity
of books in those days before printing, the best way of learning was
to listen to what each great scholar had to say, and the students
went about from school to school, and lingered longest at places
like Bec, where the best was to be found. The men here were not only
the patrons of learning and the guarders of their own copies of the
ancient classics, but they taught the children of the neighborhood,
and sheltered the rich and poor, the old people and the travellers,
who wandered to their gates. They copied missals, they cast bells for
churches, they were the best of farmers, of musicians, of artists.
While Lanfranc waged his great battle with Berengarius about the
doctrine of the Eucharist, and came out a victorious champion for
the church, and won William's cause with the Pope with most skilful
pleading of the value of Norman loyalty to the See of Rome, his
humbler brethren [Pg231] tended their bees and ploughed straight
furrows and taught the country children their letters. Such a centre
of learning and of useful industry as Bec was the best flower of
civilization. Lanfranc himself was true to his vow of humility.
We catch some delightful glimpses of his simple life, and one in
particular of his being met on a journey by some reverential pilgrims
to his school. He was carefully carrying a cat behind him on the
saddle, comfortably restrained from using her claws, and Lanfranc
explained that he had sometimes been grievously annoyed by mice at his
destination, and had provided this practical ally. One can almost see
the twinkle in the good man's eyes, and the faces of the surprised
scholars who had been looking forward with awe and dread to their
first encounter with so renowned a man.
[Illustration]
[Pg232]
[Illustration]
XII.
MATILDA OF FLANDERS.
"It had been easy fighting in some plain,
Where victory might hang in equal choice;
But all resistance against her is vain."
—MARVELL.
We have occasionally had a glimpse of Flanders and its leading men
in the course of our Norman story; but now the two dukedoms were to
be linked together by a closer tie than either neighborhood, or a
brotherhood, or antagonism in military affairs. While Normandy had
been gaining new territory and making itself more and more feared by
the power of its armies, and had been growing richer and richer with
its farms and the various industries of the towns, Flanders was always
keeping pace, if not leading, in worldly prosperity.
Flanders had gained the dignity and opulence of a kingdom. Her people
were busy, strong, intelligent craftsmen and artists, and while her
bell-towers lifted themselves high in the air, and made their chimes
heard far and wide across the level country, the weavers' looms and
the women's clever fingers were sending tapestries to the walls of the
Vatican, and frost-like laces to the ladies of Spain. [Pg233]
The heavy ships of Flanders went and came with the richest of freights
from her crowded ports; her picture-painters were at work, her gardens
were green, and her noblemen's houses were filled with whatever
a luxurious life could demand or invent. As the country became
overcrowded, many of the inhabitants crossed over to Scotland, and
gained a foothold, sometimes by the sword, and oftener by the plough
and spade and weaver's shuttle. The Douglases and the Leslies, Robert
Bruce and all the families of Flemings, took root then, and, whether
by art or trade, established a right to be called Scotsmen, and to
march in the front rank when the story is told of many a brave day in
Scottish history.
The Count of Flanders was nominally vassal of both Rome and France,
but he was practically his own man. Baldwin de Lisle, of the
Conqueror's time, was too great a man to need anybody's help, or
to be bought or sold at will by an over-lord. He stood well as the
representative of his country's wealth and dignity. A firm alliance
with such a neighbor was naturally coveted by such a far-seeing man as
the young duke; and besides any political reasons, there was a closer
reason still, in the love that had sprung up in his heart for Matilda,
the count's daughter. In 1049, he had been already making suit for
her hand, for it was in that year when the Council of Rheims forbade
the banns, on some plea of relationship that was within the limit set
by the Church. William's whole existence was a fight for his life,
for his dukedom, for his kingdom of England, and he was not wanting
in courage in this long siege of [Pg234] church and state, when the
woman he truly loved was the desired prize. If history can be trusted,
she was a prize worth winning; if William had not loved her, he would
not have schemed and persisted for years in trying to win her in spite
of countless hindrances which might well have ended his quest if he
had been guided only by political reasons for the alliance.
His nobles had eagerly urged him to marry. Perhaps they would have
turned their eyes toward England first if there had been a royal
princess of Eadward's house, but failing this, Flanders was the best
prize. The Norman dukedom must not be left without an heir, and this
time there must be no question of the honesty of the heir's claim and
right to succession. Normandy had seen enough division and dissension,
and angry partisanship during the duke's own youth, and now that he
had reached the age of twenty-four, and had made himself master of
his possessions, and could take his stand among his royal neighbors,
everybody clamored for his marriage, and for a Lady of Normandy.
He was a pure man in that time of folly and licentiousness. He was
already recognized as a great man, and even the daughter of Baldwin of
Flanders might be proud to marry him.
Matilda was near the duke's own age, but she had already been married
to a Flemish official, and had two children. She was a beautiful,
graceful woman, and it is impossible to believe some well-known old
stories of William's rude courtship of her, since her father evidently
was ready to favor the marriage, and [Pg235] she seems to have
been a most loyal and devoted wife to her husband, and to have been
ready enough to marry him hastily at the end of a most troublesome
courtship. The great Council of Rheims had forbidden their marriage,
as we have already seen, and the pious Pope Leo had struck blows right
and left among high offenders of the Church's laws; a whole troop
of princes were excommunicated or put under heavy penances, and the
Church's own officials were dealt justly with according to their sins.
When most of these lesser contemporaries were properly sentenced, a
decree followed, which touched two more illustrious men: the Count
of Flanders was forbidden to give his daughter to the Norman duke
for a wife, and William, in his turn, was forbidden to take her. For
four long years the lovers—if we may believe them to be lovers—were
kept apart on the Pope's plea of consanguinity. There is no evidence
remaining that this was just, yet there truly may have been some
relationship. It is much easier to believe it, at any rate, than that
the count's wife Adela's former child-marriage to William's uncle
could have been put forward as any sort of objection.
We must leave for another chapter the affairs of Normandy and
William's own deeds during the four years, and go forward with this
story of his marriage to a later time, when in the course of Italian
affairs, a chance was given to bring the long courtship to a happy
end. Strangely enough this came by means of the De Hautevilles and
that Norman colony whose fortunes we have already briefly traced. In
the [Pg236] conflict with Pope Leo, when he was forced to yield to
the Normans' power and to recognize them as a loyal state, William
either won a consent to his wedding or else dared to brave the
Pope's disapproval. While Leo was still in subjection the eager duke
hurried to his city of Eu, near the Flemish border, and met there
Count Baldwin and his daughter. There was no time spent in splendid
processions and triumphal pageants of the Flemish craftsmen; some
minor priest gave the blessing, and as the duke and his hardly-won
wife came back to the Norman capital there was a great cheering and
rejoicing all the way; and the journey was made as stately and pompous
as heart could wish. There was a magnificent welcome at Rolf's old
city of Rouen; it was many years since there had been a noble lady, a
true duchess, on the ducal throne of Normandy.
But the spirit of ecclesiasticism held its head too high in the
pirates' land to brook such disregard of its canons, even on the part
of its chief ruler. There was an uncle of William's, named Mauger, who
was primate of the Norman church. He is called on every hand a very
bad man—at any rate, his faults were just the opposite of William's,
and of a sensual and worldly stamp. He was not a fit man for the
leader of the clergy, in William's opinion. Yet Mauger was zealous
in doing at least some of the duties of his office—he did not flinch
from rebuking his nephew! All the stories of his life are of the
worst sort, unless we give him the credit of trying to do right in
this case, but we can too easily remember the hatred that he and all
his family bore toward the [Pg237] bastard duke in his boyhood, and
suspect at least that jealousy may have taken the place of scorn and
despising. One learns to fear making point-blank decisions about the
character of a man so long dead, even of one whom everybody blamed
like Mauger. His biographers may have been his personal enemies, and
later writers have ignorantly perpetuated an unjust hue and cry.
Perhaps Lanfranc may be trusted better, for he too blamed the duke for
breaking a holy law,—Lanfranc the merry, wise Italian, who loved his
fellow-men, and who was a teacher by choice and by gift of God. All
Normandy was laid under a ban at this time for the wrong its master
had done. Lanfranc rebuked the assumed sinner bravely, and William's
fierce stern temper blazed out against him, and ordered a vicious
revenge of the insult to him and to his wife. The just William, who
kept Normandy in such good order, who stood like a bulwark of hewn
stone between his country and her enemies, was the same William who
could toss severed hands and feet over the Alençon wall, and give
orders to burn the grain stacks and household goods of the abbey
of Bec. We have seen how the duke and the abbot met, and how they
became friends again, and Lanfranc made peace with Pope Leo and won
him the loyalty of Normandy in return. Very likely Lanfranc was glad
to explain the truth and to be relieved from upholding such a flimsy
structure as the church's honor demanded. At any rate, William gladly
paid his Peter's pence and set about building his great abbey of
St. Etienne, in Caen, for a penance, and made [Pg238] Lanfranc its
prelate, and Matilda built her abbey of the Holy Trinity, while in
four of the chief towns of Normandy hospitals were built for the old
and sick people of the duchy. We shall see more of these churches
presently, but there they still stand, facing each other across the
high-peaked roofs of Caen; high and stately churches, the woman's
tower and the man's showing characteristics of boldness and of
ornament that mark the builders' fancy and carry us in imagination
quickly back across the eight hundred years since they were planned
and founded. Anselm, Maurilius, and Lanfranc, these were the teachers
and householders of the great churches, and one must have a new
respect for the young duke and duchess who could gather and hold three
such scholars and saintly men to be leaders of the church in Normandy.
There were four sons and three daughters born to William and Matilda,
and there is no hint of any difference or trouble between the duke
and his wife until they were unable to agree about the misconduct of
their eldest son. Matilda's influence for good may often be traced
or guessed at in her husband's history, and there are pathetic
certainties of her resignation and gentleness when she was often
cruelly hurt and tried by the course of events.
Later research has done away with the old idea of her working the
famous Bayeux tapestry with the ladies of her court to celebrate the
Conqueror's great deeds; but he needed no tribute of needle-work, nor
she either, to make them remembered. They have both left pictures
of themselves done in fadeless [Pg239] colors and living text of
lettering that will stand while English words are spoken, and Norman
trees bloom in the spring, and Norman rivers run to the sea, and the
towers of Caen spring boldly toward the sky.
We cannot be too thankful that so much of these historic churches
has been left untouched. When it is considered that at five separate
times the very fiends of destruction and iconoclasm seem to have been
let loose in Normandy, it is a great surprise that there should be so
many old buildings still in existence. From the early depredations of
the Northmen themselves, down to the religious wars of the sixteenth
century and the French revolution of the eighteenth, there have
been other and almost worse destroying agencies than even the wars
themselves. Besides the natural decay of masonry and timber, there was
the very pride and growing wealth of the rich monastic orders and the
large towns, who liked nothing better than to pull down their barns
to build greater and often less interesting ones. The most prosperous
cities naturally build the best churches, as they themselves increase,
and naturally replace them oftenest, and so retain fewest that are of
much historical interest in the end. The most popular weapon in the
tenth and eleventh centuries was fire; and the first thing that Norman
assailants were likely to do, was to throw burning torches over the
walls into the besieged towns. Again and again they were burnt—houses,
churches, and all.
The Normans were constantly improving, however, in their fashions of
building, and had made a great advance upon the Roman architecture
which [Pg240] they had found when they came to Neustria. Their work
has a distinct character of its own, and perhaps their very ignorance
of the more ornate and less effective work which had begun to prevail
in Italy, gave them freedom to work out their own simple ideas.
Instead of busying themselves with petty ornamentation and tawdry
imagery, they trusted for effect to the principles of height and
size. Their churches are more beautiful than any in the world; their
very plainness and severity gives them a beautiful dignity, and their
slender pillars and high arches make one think of nothing so much as
the tall pine forests of the North. What the Normans did with the idea
of the Roman arch, they did too in many other ways. They had a gift of
good taste that was most exceptional in that time, and especially in
that part of Europe; and whatever had been the power and efficiency
of the last impulse of civilization from the South, this impulse from
the North did a noble work in its turn. Normandy herself, in the days
of William and Matilda, was fully alive and pervaded with dreams of
growth and expansion.
[Illustration: CRYPT OF MOUNT ST. MICHEL.]
Nobody can tell how early the idea of the conquest of England began
to be a favorite Norman dream. In those days there was always a
possibility of some day owning one's neighbor's land, and with weak
Eadward on the throne of England, only too ready to listen to the
suggestions and demands of his Norman barons and favorite counsellors,
it must have seemed always an easier, not to say more possible, thing
to take one step farther. There was an excellent antechamber across
the Channel for the crowded court [Pg242] and fields of Normandy,
and William and Eadward were old friends and companions. In 1051, when
Normandy was at peace, and England was at any rate quiet and sullen,
submissive to rule, but lying fast, bound like a rebellious slave that
has been sold to a new master, William and a fine company of lords and
gentlemen went a-visiting.
All those lords and gentlemen kept their eyes very wide open, and took
good notice of what they saw.
It was not a common thing by any means, for a great duke to go
pleasuring. He was apt to be too busy at home; but William's affairs
were in good order, and his cousin of England was a feeble man and
more than half a Norman; besides, he had no heir, and in course of
time the English throne would lack a proper king. The idea of such a
holiday might have pleased the anxious suitor of Matilda of Flanders,
too, and have beguiled the hard time of waiting. Nobody stopped
to remember that English law gave no right of succession to mere
inheritance or descent. Ralph the Timid was Æthelred's grandson; but
who would think of making him king instead of such a man as William?
The poor banished prince at the Hungarian court, half a world away,
was not so much as missed or wished for. Godwine was banished, Harold
was in Ireland; besides, it must be urged that there was something
fine in the notion of adding such a state as Normandy to England.
England was not robbed, but magnificently endowed by such a proposal.
Eadward was amiably glad to see this brave Duke of the Normans. There
was much to talk over [Pg243] together of the past; the present had
its questions, too, and it was good to have such a strong arm to lean
upon; what could have been more natural than that the future also
should have its veil drawn aside, not too rashly or irreverently? When
Eadward had been gathered to his fellow saints, pioneered by visions
that did not fade, and panoplied by authentic relics—nay, when the man
of prayers and cloistered quietness was kindly taken away from the
discordant painfulness of an earthly kingdom, what more easy than to
dream of this warlike William in his place; William, a man of war and
soldiery, for whom the government of two great kingdoms in one, would
only harden and employ the tense muscles and heavy brain; would only
provide his own rightful business? And, while Eadward thought of this
plan, William was Norman, too, and with the careful diplomacy of his
race, he joined the daring and outspokenness of old Rolf the Ganger;
he came back with his lords and gentlemen to Normandy, weighed down
with presents—every man of them who had not stayed behind for better
gain's sake. He came back to Normandy the acknowledged successor to
the English crown. Heaven send dampness now and bleak winds, and let
poor Eadward's sufferings be short! There was work for a man to do
in ruling England, and Eadward could not do it. The Englishmen were
stupid and dull; they ate too much and drank too much; they clung with
both hands to their old notions of state-craft and government. It was
the old story of the hare and the tortoise, but the hare was fleet of
foot and would win. [Pg244]
Win? Yes, this race and that race; and yet the tortoise was going to
be somehow made over new, and keep a steady course in the right path,
and learn speed, and get to be better than the old tortoise as the
years went on and on.
Eadward had no right to will away the kingship of England; but this
must have been the time of the promise that the Normans claimed, and
that their chroniclers have recorded. All Normandy believed in this
promise, and were ready to fight for it in after years. It is most
likely that Eadward was only too glad, at this date, to make a private
arrangement with the duke. He was on the worst of terms just then with
Godwine and his family, and consequently with the displeased English
party, who were their ardent upholders. Indeed, a great many of these
men were in Ireland with Harold, having turned their backs upon a king
and court that were growing more friendly to Normandy and disloyal to
England day by day.
The very next year after William's triumphal visit the Confessor was
obliged to change his course in the still stormier sea of English
politics. The Normans had shown their policy too soon, and there was
a widespread disapproval, and an outcry for Godwine's return from
exile. Baldwin of Flanders, and King Henry of France, had already been
petitioning for his pardon, and suddenly Godwine himself came sailing
up the Thames, and London eagerly put itself under his control. Then
Eadward the Confessor consented to a reconciliation, there being
no apparent alternative, and a troop of disappointed and [Pg245]
displaced foreigners went back to Normandy. Robert of Jumièges,
was among them. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us gravely, that
at Walton-on-the-Naze, "they were lighted on a crazy ship, and the
archbishop betook himself at once over the sea, leaving behind him his
pall and all his christendom here in the land even as God willed it,
because he had taken upon him that worship as God willed it not." The
plea for taking away his place was "because he had done more than any
to cause strife between Godwine and the king"; and Godwine's power was
again the strongest in England.
The great earl lived only a few months longer, and when he died
his son Harold took his place. Already the eyes of many Englishmen
were ready to see in him their future king. Already he stands out a
bold figure, with a heart that was true to England, and though the
hopes that centred in him were broken centuries ago, we cannot help
catching something of the hope and spirit of the time. We are almost
ready to forget that this brave leader, the champion of that elder
English people, was doomed to fall before the on-rushing of a new
element of manhood, a tributary stream that came to swell the mighty
channel of the English race and history. William the Norman was busy
at home, meanwhile. The old hostility between Normandy and Flanders,
which dated from the time of William Longsword's murder, was now at
a certain end, by reason of the duke's marriage. Matilda, the noble
Flemish lady, the descendant of good King Ælfred of England, had
brought peace and friendliness as not the least of [Pg246] her dowry,
and all fear of any immediate antagonism from that quarter was at an
end.
By the alliance with the kings of France, the Norman dukes had been
greatly helped to gain their present eminence, and to the Norman dukes
the French kings, in their turn, owed their stability upon their own
thrones; they had fought for each other and stood by each other again
and again. Now, there was a rift between them that grew wider and
wider—a rift that came from jealousy and fear of the Normans' wealth
and enormous growth in strength. They were masters of the Breton
country, and had close ties of relationship, moreover, with not only
Brittany, but with Flanders and the smaller county of Ponthieu, which
lay between them and the Flemings. Normandy stretched her huge bulk
and strength between France and the sea; she commanded the French
rivers, the French borders; she was too much to be feared; if ever her
pride were to be brought down, and the old vassalage insisted upon, it
could not be too soon. Henry forgot all that he owed to the Normans'
protection, and provoked them by incessant hostilities—secret and open
treacheries,—and the fox waged war upon the lion, until a spirit of
enmity was roused that hardly slept again for five hundred years.
There were other princes ready enough to satisfy their fear and
jealousy. The lands of the conspirators stretched from Burgundy to
the Pyrenees. Burgundy, Blois, Ponthieu, Aquitaine, and Poictiers all
joined in the chase for this William the Bastard, the chief of the
hated pirates. All the old gibes and [Pg247] taunts, and contemptuous
animosity were revived; now was the time to put an end to the Norman's
outrageous greed of power and insolence of possession, and the great
allied army divided itself in two parts, and marched away to Normandy.
King Henry's brother, Odo, turned his forces toward Rouen, and the
king himself took a more southerly direction, by the way of Lisieux to
the sea. They meant, at any rate, to pen the duke into his old Danish
region of the Côtentin and Bessin districts; all his eastern lands,
the grant from Charles the Simple, with the rest, were to be seized
upon and taken back by their original owners.