later effects, we must not forget their praying brethren who stood
side by side with them, lording it over the English lands and reaching
out willing hands for part of the spoils. We must thank them for their
piety and their scholarship, and for the great churches they founded,
even while we [Pg320] laugh at the greed and wordliness under their
monkish cloaks. Lanfranc was made bishop of Canterbury, and wherever
the Conqueror's standard was planted, wherever he gained foothold, as
the tide of his military rule ebbed and flowed, he planted churches
and monasteries. Especially he watched over his high-towered Battle
Abbey, which marked the spot where the banner of the Fighting Man was
defeated and the banner of the Three Lions of Normandy was set up in
its place.
Before we go further we must follow the king back to his duchy in
the spring after that first winter in England. Three Englishmen
were chosen to attend his royal highness, and although they might
easily guess that there was something more than mere compliment in
this flattering invitation, these northern earls, Eadwine, Morkere,
and Waltheof (the Bear's great-grandson), were not anxious to hurry
forward the open quarrel which William himself was anxious to avoid.
Nothing could have been more unsafe in the unsettled condition of
England than to have left these unruly leaders to plot and connive
during his absence; besides, it would be a good thing to show such
rough islanders the splendours of the Norman court.
The Norman chroniclers are not often willing to admit that England
was in any respect equal to their own duchy, but when they have to
describe William's triumphant return, they forget their prudence and
give glowing accounts of the treasure of gold and silver that he
brings with him, and even the magnificent embroideries, tapestries
and [Pg321] hangings, and clerical vestments,—though they have so
lately tried to impress upon their readers that heathen squalor of
social life across the Channel which the Christian had sought to
remedy. Church after church was richly endowed with these spoils,
and the Conqueror's own Church of St. Stephen at Caen fared best of
all. Beside the English wealth we must not forget the goods of Harold
Hardrada, which had been brought with such mistaken confidence for
the plenishing of his desired kingdom. There is a tradition of a
mighty ingot of gold won in his Eastern adventures, so great that
twelve strong youths could scarcely carry it. Eadwine and Morkere of
Northumberland must have looked at that with regretful eyes.
Whatever the English prejudice might have been, the Normans had every
reason to be proud of their seventh duke. He had advanced their
fortunes in most amazing fashion, and they were proud of him indeed
on the day when he again set his foot on Norman ground. The time of
year was Lent. Spring was not yet come, but it might have been a
summer festival, if one judged by the way that the people crowded from
the farthest boundaries of the country to the towns through which
William was to pass. It was like the glorious holidays of the Roman
Empire. The grateful peasants fought and pushed for a sight of their
leader. The world is never slow to do honor to its great soldiers and
conquerors. The duke met his wife at Rouen, and that was the best
moment of all; Matilda had ruled Normandy wisely and ably during his
five or six [Pg322] months' absence, with old Roger de Beaumont for
her chief counsellor.
The royal procession trailed its gorgeous length from church to
church and from city to city about the duchy; the spoils of England
seemed inexhaustible to the wondering spectators, and those who had
made excuse to lag behind when their bows and lances were needed,
were ready enough now to clutch their hands greedily in their empty
pockets and follow their valiant countrymen. William himself was not
slow in letting the value of his new domain be known; the more men the
better in that England which might be a slippery prize to hold. He had
many a secret conference with Lanfranc, who had been chief adviser
and upholder of the invasion. The priest-statesman seems almost a
greater man than the soldier-statesman; many a famous deed of that
age was Lanfranc's suggestion, but nobody knew better than these two
that the conquest of England was hardly more than begun, and long and
deep their councils must have been when the noise of shouting in the
streets had ended, and the stars were shining above Caen.
No city of Normandy seems more closely connected with those days than
Caen. As one walks along its streets, beneath the high church towers
and gabled roofs of the houses, it is easy to fancy that more famous
elder generation of Normans alive again, to people Caen with knights
and priests and minstrels of that earlier day. The Duchess Matilda
might be alive yet and busy with her abbey church of Holy Trinity and
her favorite household of nuns; [Pg323] the people shout her praises
admiringly, and gaze at her lovingly as she passes through the street
with her troop of attendants. Caen is prosperous and gay. "Large,
strong, full of draperies and all sorts of merchandise; rich citizens,
noble dames, damsels, and fine churches," says Froissart years
afterwards. Even this very year one is tempted to believe that one
sees the same fields and gardens, the same houses, and hears the same
bells that William the Conqueror saw and heard in that summer after he
had become king of England.
And in Bayeux, too, great portions of the ancient city still remain.
There where the Northmen made their chief habitation, or in Rouen
or Falaise, we can almost make history come to life. Perhaps the
great tapestry was begun that very summer in Bayeux; perhaps the
company of English guests, some of those noble dames well-skilled in
"English work" of crewel and canvas, were enticed by Bishop Odo into
beginning that "document in worsted" which more than any thing else
has preserved the true history of the Conquest of England. Odo meant
to adorn his new church with it, and to preserve the account of his
own part in the great battle and its preliminaries, with the story
of Harold's oath and disloyalty, and William's right to the crown.
There is an Italian fashion of drawing in it—the figures are hardly
like Englishmen or Normans in the way they stand or make gestures to
each other in the rude pictures. Later history has associated the
working of these more than fifteen hundred figures with Matilda and
her maidens, as a tribute to the [Pg324] Conqueror's valor, but there
are many evidences to the contrary. The old idea that the duchess
and her women worked at the tapestry, and said their prayers while
the army had gone to England, seems improbable the more one studies
the work itself. Yet tradition sometimes keeps the grain of truth in
its accumulation of chaff. There is no early record of it, and its
historical value was rediscovered only in 1724 by a French antiquary.
The bright worsteds of it still keep their colors on the twenty-inches
wide strip of linen, more than two hundred feet in length. Odo is
said to have given it to his chapter at Bayeux, and it has suffered
astonishingly little from the ravages of time.
But we must return to Norman affairs in England. Odo himself and
William Fitz-Osbern had been made earls of the Counties Palatine of
Kent and Hereford, and were put in command in William's absence. The
rapacity of these Norman gentlemen was more than their new subjects
could bear. The bishop at least is pretty certain to have covered his
own greedy injustice by a plea that he was following out the king's
orders. Revolt after revolt troubled the peace of England. Harold's
two sons were ready to make war from their vantage-ground in Ireland;
the Danes and Scots were also conspiring against the new lord of the
English. At last some of the Normans themselves were traitorous and
troublesome, but William was fully equal to such minor emergencies as
these. He went back to England late in 1067, after spending the summer
and autumn in Normandy, and soon found himself busy [Pg325] enough
in the snarl of revolt and disagreement. One trouble followed another
as the winter wore away. The siege of Exeter was the most conspicuous
event, but here too William was conqueror, and Southwestern England
was forced to submit to his rule. At Easter-tide a stately embassy
was sent to bring over the Duchess Matilda from Normandy, and when it
returned she was hallowed as Queen by Ealdred the archbishop. Let us
hope that, surrounded by her own kindred and people, she did not see
the sorrowful English faces of those women who had lost husband and
home together, and who had been bereft of all their treasures that
strangers might be enriched.
[Illustration: DEATH OF HAROLD. BAYEUX TAPESTRY.]
There is a curious tradition that a little while after this, much woe
was wrought because those other Norman ladies, whose lords had come
over to England to [Pg326] fight and remained to plunder, refused to
join them, because they were not fond of the sea, and thought that
they were not likely to find better fare and lodging. Very likely
the queen's residence in her new possessions had a good effect, but
some of the Norman men were obliged to return altogether, their
wives having threatened to find new partners if they were left alone
any longer. It may have been an excuse or a jest, because so many
naturally desired to see their own country again.
[Illustration: NORMAN LADY. COTTON MSS.]
Both Saxons and Normans paid great deference to the instinctive
opinions of women. When such serious matters as going to war were
before them, a woman's unreasoning prejudice or favor of the
enterprise was often taken into account. They seem to have almost
taken the place of the ancient auguries! However, it is not pleasant
to feminine conceit to be told directly that great respect was also
paid to the neighing of horses! [Pg327]
Henry, the king's youngest son, was born not long after the queen's
arrival, and born too in Northern England the latest and hardest won
at that time of the out-lying provinces. The very name that was given
to the child shows a desire for some degree of identification with
new interests. William and Matilda certainly had England's welfare at
heart, for England's welfare was directly or indirectly their own,
and this name was a sign of recognition of the hereditary alliance
with Germany; with the reigning king and his more famous father.
There is nothing more striking than the traditional slander and
prejudice which history preserves from age to age. Seen by clearer
light, many reported injustices are explained away. If there was in
England then, anything like the present difficulty of influencing
public opinion to quick foresight and new decisions, the Conqueror
and Baldwin of Flanders' daughter had any thing but an easy path
to tread. Selfish they both may have been, and bigoted and even
cruel, but they represented a better degree of social refinement and
education and enlightenment. Progress was really what the English of
that day bewailed and set their faces against, though they did not
know it. William and Matilda had to insist upon the putting aside
of worn-out opinions, and on coming to England had made the strange
discovery that they must either take a long step backward or force
their subjects forward. They were not conscious reformers; they were
not infallibly wise missionaries of new truth, who tried actually to
give these belated souls a wider outlook upon life, but let us stop to
recognize the fact that no [Pg328] task is more thankless than his
who is trying to go in advance of his time. Men have been burnt and
hanged and disgraced and sneered at for no greater crime; in fact,
there is nothing that average humanity so much resents as the power
to look ahead and to warn others of pitfalls into which ignorant
shortsightedness is likely to tumble. Nothing has been so resented
and assailed as the thorough survey of England, and the record of
its lands and resources in the Domesday Book. Yet nothing was so
necessary for any sort of good government and steady oversight of the
nation's affairs. We only wonder now that it was not made sooner. The
machinery of government was of necessity much ruder then. No doubt
William's tyranny swept its course to and fro like some Juggernaut car
regardless of its victims, yet for England a unified and concentrated
force of government was the one thing to be insisted upon; Harold and
his rival earls might have been hindering, ineffectual rulers of the
country's divided strength and jealous partisanship.
Yet the future right direction and prosperity of England was poor
consolation to the aching hearts of the women of that time, or the
landless lords who had to stand by and see new masters of the soil
take their places. What was won by William's sword must be held by
his sword, and the more sullen and rebellious the English grew, the
more heavily they were taxed and the faster the land was rid of them.
They were chased into the fens, and pursued with fire and bloodshed.
"England was made a great grave," says Dickens, "and men and beasts
lay dead [Pg329] together." The immediate result of the Conqueror's
rule was like fire and plough and harrow in a piece of new land.
[Illustration: BATTLE AXES. BAYEUX TAPESTRY.]
It was a sad and tiresome lifetime, that of the Conqueror; just
or unjust toward his new subjects, they hated him bitterly; his
far-sighted plans for the country's growth and development gave
as much displeasure as the smallest of his personal prejudices or
selfish whims. Every man's hand was against him, and hardly an eye
but flashed angrily at the sight of the king. Eadward the Confessor,
pious ascetic, and relic-worshipper, had loved the chase as well
as this warlike successor of his ever loved it, and had been very
careful of his royal hunting-grounds, [Pg330] but nobody raised an
outcry against his unsaintly love of slaughtering defenceless wild
creatures, or thought him the less a meek and gentle soul, beloved by
angels and taught by them in visions. But ever since, the Conqueror's
love of hunting has been an accusation against him as if he were the
only man guilty of it, and his confiscation of the Hampshire lands
to make new forest seemed the last stroke that could be borne. The
peasants' cottages were swept away and the land laid waste. Norman
was master and Englishman was servant. The royal train of horses and
dogs and merry huntsmen in gay apparel clattered through the wood,
and from hiding-places under the fern men watched them and muttered
curses upon their cruel heads. There were already sixty-eight royal
forests in different parts of the kingdom before New Forest was begun.
Everybody thought that England had never seen such dark days, but so
everybody thought when the Angles and Saxons and Jutes came, and even
so vigorous a pruning and digging at the roots as this made England
grow the better.
Large tracts of the hunting-grounds had been unfit for human
habitation, and it was better to leave them to the hares and deer.
Wide regions of the country, too, were occupied by the lowest class
of humanity, who lived almost in beastly fashion, without chance
of enlightenment or uplifting. They were outlaws of the worst sort
who could not be brought into decent order or relationship with
respectable society, and it was better for these to be chased
from their lairs and forced to accept the [Pg331] companionship
of townsfolk. With these, however, there were many who suffered
undeserved. Among the rank weeds of England there were plucked many
blooming things and useful growths of simple, long-established
home-life and domestic affection. When fire was leaping high at the
city gates it is impossible not to regret its enmity against dear
and noble structures of the past, even though it cleared the way
for loftier minsters and fairer dwelling-places. In criticising and
resenting such a reign as William the Norman's over England, we must
avoid a danger of not seeing the hand of God in it, and the evidences
of an overruling Providence, which works in and through the works
of men and sees the end of things from the beginning as men cannot.
There may be overstatement in William of Malmesbury's account of
the bad condition of the country at the time of the Conquest, but
the outlines of it cannot be far from right. "In process of time,"
he says, "the desire after literature and religion had decayed for
several years before the arrival of the Normans. The clergy, contented
with a very slight degree of learning, could scarcely stammer out
the words of the sacraments, and a person who understood grammar was
an object of wonder and astonishment. The nobility were given up to
luxury and wantonness. The commonalty, left unprotected, became a
prey to the most powerful, who amassed fortunes by either seizing
on their property or selling their persons into foreign countries;
although it be an innate quality of this people to be more inclined to
revelling than to the accumulation of wealth. Drinking was a [Pg332]
universal practice, in which they passed whole nights, as well as
days. They consumed their whole substance in mean, despicable houses,
unlike Normans and French, who, in noble and splendid mansions, lived
with frugality." "There cannot be a doubt," says Mr. Bruce in his
interesting book about the Bayeux tapestry, "that by the introduction
of the refinements of life the condition of the people was improved,
and that a check was given to the grosser sensualities of our nature.
Certain it is that learning received a powerful stimulus by the
Conquest. At the period of the Norman invasion a great intellectual
movement had commenced in the schools on the Continent. Normandy had
beyond most other parts profited by it. William brought with him to
England some of the most distinguished ornaments of the school of his
native duchy; the consequence of this was that England henceforward
took a higher walk in literature than she had ever done before." One
great step was the freeing of the lower classes; there was one rank of
serfs, the churls, who were attached to the land, and were transferred
with it, without any power of choosing their employer or taking any
steps to improve their condition. Another large class, the thews, were
the absolute property of their owners. William's law that every slave
who had lived unchallenged a year and a day in any city or walled
town in the kingdom should be free forever, was, indeed, "a door of
hope to many," besides the actual good effects of town life, the
natural rivalry and promotion of knowledge, the stimulus given to the
cultivation and refinements of social [Pg333] life. He protected the
early growth of a public sentiment, which was finally strong enough to
venture to assert its rights and to claim recognition. He relentlessly
overthrew the flourishing slave-trade of the town of Bristol and no
doubt made many enemies by such an act.
Whatever may have been the king's better nature and earlier purposes
in regard to his kingdom and duchy, as he grew older one finds his
reputation growing steadily worse. He must have found the ruling of
men a thankless task, and he apparently cared less and less to soften
or control the harshness of his underrulers and officers. His domestic
relations had always been a bright spot in his stern, hard life, but
at length even his beloved wife Matilda no longer held him first, and
grieved him by favoring their troublesome son Robert, who was her
darling of all their children. Robert and his mother had been the
nominal governors of Normandy when he was still a child and his father
was away in England. They seem to have been in league ever afterward,
for when Robert grew up he demanded Normandy outright, which made
his father angry, and the instant refusal provoked Master Curt-hose
to such an extent that he went about from court to court in Europe
bewailing the injustice that had been shown him. He was very fond of
music and dancing, and spent a great deal of money, which the queen
appears to have been always ready to send him. He was gifted with a
power of making people fond of him, though he was not good for very
much else.
After a while William discovered that there was a [Pg334] secret
messenger who carried forbidden supplies to the rebellious prince,
and the messenger happily had time to betake himself to a convenient
convent and put on the dress and give, let us hope, heart-felt vows of
monkhood. This is what Orderic Vitalis reports of a meeting between
the king and queen: "Who in the world," sighs the king, "can expect
to find a faithful and devoted wife? The woman whom I loved in my
soul, and to whom I entrusted my kingdom and my treasures, supports
my enemies; she enriches them with my property; she secretly arms
them against my honor—perhaps my life." And Matilda answered: "Do not
be surprised, I pray you, because I love my eldest born. Were Robert
dead and seven feet below the sod, and my blood could raise him to
life, it should surely flow. How can I take pleasure in luxury when
my son is in want? Far from my heart be such hardness! Your power
cannot deaden the love of a mother's heart." The king did not punish
the queen, we are assured gravely; and Robert quarrelled with his
brothers, and defied his father, and won his mother's sympathy and
forbearance to the end. He found the king of France ready to uphold
his cause by reason of the old jealousy of William's power, and while
he was ensconced in the castle of Gerberoi, and sallying out at his
convenience to harry the country, William marched to attack him, and
the father and son fought hand to hand without knowing each other
until the king was thrown from his horse. Whereupon Robert professed
great contrition, and some time afterward, the barons having [Pg335]
interceded and Matilda having prayed and wept, William consented to a
reconciliation, and even made his son his lieutenant over Normandy and
Brittany.
In 1083 the queen died, and there was nobody to lift a voice against
her prudence and rare virtue, or her simple piety. There was no better
woman in any convent cell of Normandy, than the woman who had borne
the heavy weight of the Norman crown, and who had finished the sorry
task as best she could, of reigning over an alien, conquered people.
The king's sorrow was piteous to behold, and not long afterward
their second son, Richard, was killed in the New Forest, a place of
misfortune to the royal household. Another trouble quickly followed,
which not only hurt the king's feelings, but made him desperately
angry.
[Illustration: ODO, BISHOP OF BAYEUX.]
William had been very kind to all his kinsfolk on his mother's side,
and especially to his half-brother, Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux. He
had loaded him with honors, and given him, long ago, vice-regal
authority in England. Even this was not enough for such an aspiring
ecclesiastic, and, under the pretence of gathering tax-money (no doubt
insisting that it was to serve [Pg336] the miserliness and greed of
the king), he carried on a flourishing system of plundering. After
a while it was discovered that he had an ambition to make himself
Pope of Rome, and was using his money for bribing cardinals and
ingratiating himself with the Italian nobles. He bought himself a
palace in Rome and furnished it magnificently, and began to fit out
a fleet of treasure-ships at the Isle of Wight. One day when they
were nearly ready to set sail, and the disloyal gentlemen who were
also bound on this adventure were collected into a comfortable group
on shore, who should appear among them but William himself. The king
sternly related what must have been a familiar series of circumstances
to his audience: Odo's disloyalty when he had been entirely trusted,
his oppression of England, his despoiling of the churches and the
confiscation of their lands and treasures, lastly that he had even
won away these knights to go to Rome with him; men who were sworn to
repulse the enemies of the kingdom.
After Odo's sins were related in detail, he was seized, but loudly
lamented thereat, declaring that he was a clerk and a minister of the
Most High, and that no bishop could be condemned without the judgment
of the Pope. The people who stood by murmured anxiously, for nobody
knew what might be going to happen to them also. Crafty William
answered that he was seizing neither clerk, nor prelate, nor Bishop
of Bayeux, only his Earl of Kent, his temporal lieutenant, who must
account to him for such bad vice-regal administration, and for four
[Pg337] years after that Odo was obliged to content himself with close
imprisonment in the old tower of Rouen.