CHAPTER VIII.

THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.[497]

A.D. 1028–1051.

§ 1. _Birth, Character, and Accession of William._ A.D. 1028–1035.

[Sidenote: Character and greatness of WILLIAM.]

William, King of the English and Duke of the Normans, bears a name which

must for ever stand forth among the foremost of mankind. No man that

ever trod this earth was ever endowed with greater natural gifts; to no

man was it ever granted to accomplish greater things. If we look only to

the scale of a man’s acts, without regard to their moral character, we

must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac,

the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly

claim his place in the first rank of the world’s [Sidenote: Lasting

results of his career.] greatest men. No man ever did his work more

effectually at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as

[Sidenote: A good side to his character.] more truly an abiding

possession for all time. And, when we consider all the circumstances of

his life, when we judge him by the standard of his own age, above all,

when we compare him with those who came after him in his own house, we

shall perhaps be inclined to dwell on his great qualities, on his many

undoubted virtues, rather than to put his no less undoubted crimes in

their darkest light. As we cannot refuse to place him among the greatest

of men, neither will a candid judgement incline us to place him among

the worst of men. If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and

heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and

destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure

glory of Timoleôn, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even claim the more

mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut; but he has even less in

common with the mere enemies of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors,

the Swends, and the Buonapartes, whom God has from time to time sent as

simple scourges of a guilty world. Happily there are few men in history

of whom we have [Sidenote: English and Norman portraits of him.] better

materials for drawing the portrait. We see him as he appeared to

admiring followers of his own race; we see him also as he appeared to

men of the conquered nation who had looked on him and had lived in his

household.[498] We have to make allowance for flattery on the one side;

we have not to make allowance for calumny on the other. The feeling with

which the Normans looked on their conquering leader was undoubtedly one

of awe rather than of love; and the feeling with which the vanquished

English looked on their Conqueror was undoubtedly one of awe rather than

of simple hatred. Assuredly William’s English subjects did not love him;

but they felt a sort of sullen reverence for the King who was richer and

mightier than all the Kings that were before him. In speaking of him,

the Chronicler writes as it were with downcast eyes and bated breath, as

if he were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself, but

was rather drawing the portrait [Sidenote: Justice done to him by the

English Chronicler.] of a being of another nature. Yet he holds the

balance fairly between the dark and the bright qualities of one so far

raised above the common lot of man. He does not conceal his crimes and

his oppressions; but he sets before us the merits of his government and

the good peace that he made in this land; he judicially sums up what was

good and what was evil in him; he warns men to follow the good and to

avoid the evil, and he sends him out of the world with a charitable

prayer for the repose of his soul. And, at the moment when he wrote, it

was no marvel if the Chronicler was inclined to dwell on the good rather

than on the evil. The Crown of William passed to one who shared largely

in his mere intellectual gifts, but who had no fellowship with the

greater and nobler elements of his character. To appreciate William the

Conqueror we have but to cast our glance onwards to William the Red. We

shall then well understand how men writhing under the scorpions of the

son might look back with regret to the whips of the father. We can

understand how, under his godless rule, men might feel kindly towards

the memory of one who never wholly cast away the thoughts of justice and

mercy, and who, in his darkest hours, had still somewhat of the fear of

God before his eyes.

[Sidenote: Strength of will in William.]

In estimating the character of William, one feature stands out

preeminently above all others. Throughout his career, we admire in him

the embodiment, in the highest degree that human nature will allow, of

the fixed purpose and the unbending will. From time to time there have

been men who seem to have come into the world to sway the course of

events at their good pleasure, men who have made destiny itself their

vassal, and whose decrees it seems in vain for lesser men to seek to

withstand. Such was the man who, with the blood of thousands reeking on

his hands, could lay down despotic power, could walk unattended to his

house, and calmly offer to give an account for any of his actions;[499]

and such in might, though assuredly not such in crime, was our first

Norman King. Whatever the will of William decreed, he found a means to

bring it about. Whatever his hand found to do, he did [Sidenote: His

military genius.] it with all his might. As a warrior, as a general, it

is needless to sound his praises. His warlike exploits set him among the

foremost captains of history, but his warlike exploits are but the

smallest part of his fame. Others beside him could have led the charge

at Val-ès-dunes; others beside him could have chosen the happy moment

for the ambush at Varaville; others beside him could have endured the

weariness of the long blockade beneath the donjon of Brionne. Others, it

may even be, beside him could have cut their way through palisade and

shield-wall and battle-axe to the royal Standard of England. [Sidenote:

His statesmanship.] But none in his own age, and few in any age, have

shown themselves like him masters of every branch of the consummate

craft of the statesman. Calm and clear-sighted, he saw his object before

him; he knew when to tarry and when to hasten; he knew when to strike

and how to strike, and how to use alike the noblest and the vilest of

[Sidenote: His unscrupulousness as to means.] men as his instruments.

Utterly unscrupulous, though far from unprincipled, taking no pleasure

in wrong or oppression for its own sake, always keeping back his hands

from needless bloodshed, he yet never shrank from force or fraud, from

wrong or bloodshed or oppression, when they seemed to him the

straightest paths to accomplish his purpose. His crimes admit of no

denial; but, with one single exception, they never were wanton crimes.

And when we come to see the school in which he was brought up, when we

see the men whom he had to deal with from his childhood, our wonder

really ought to [Sidenote: His personal virtues.] be that his crimes

were not infinitely blacker. His personal virtues were throughout life

many and great. We hear much of his piety, and we see reason to believe

that his piety was something more than the mere conventional [Sidenote:

His religious zeal.] piety of lavish gifts to monasteries. Punctual in

every exercise of devotion, paying respect and honour of every kind to

religion and its ministers, William showed, in two ways most unusual

among the princes of that age, that his zeal for holy things was neither

hypocrisy, nor fanaticism, nor superstition. Like his illustrious

contemporary on the Imperial throne, he appeared as a real

ecclesiastical reformer, and he allowed the precepts of his religion to

have a distinct influence on his private life. He was one of the few

princes of that age whose hands [Sidenote: General excellence of his

ecclesiastical appointments.] were perfectly clean from the guilt of

simony. His ecclesiastical appointments for the most part do him honour;

the patron of Lanfranc and Anselm can never be spoken of without

respect. In his personal conduct he practised at least one most unusual

virtue; in a profligate age he was a model of conjugal fidelity. He was

a good and faithful friend, an affectionate brother—we must perhaps add,

too indulgent a father. And strong as was his sense of religion, deep as

was his reverence for the Church, open-handed as was his bounty to her

ministers, no prince that ever reigned was less disposed to yield to

ecclesiastical usurpations. No prince ever knew better how to control

the priesthood within his own dominions; none knew better both how to

win the voice of Rome to abet his purposes, and how to bid defiance to

her demands when they infringed on the rights of his Crown and the laws

of his Kingdom. While all Europe rang with the great strife of Pope and

Cæsar, England and Normandy remained at peace under the rule of one who

knew how, firmly and calmly, to hold his own against Hildebrand himself.

[Sidenote: Effects of his reign in Normandy, France, and England.]

But to know what William was, no way is so clear as to see what William

did in both the countries over which he was so strangely called to rule.

We are too apt to look on him simply as the Conqueror of England. But so

to do is to look at him only in his most splendid, but at the same time

his least honourable, aspect. William learned to become the Conqueror of

England only by first becoming the Conqueror of Normandy and the

Conqueror of France. He found means to conquer Normandy by the help of

France and to conquer France by the help of Normandy. He turned a

jealous overlord into an effective ally against his rebellious subjects,

and he turned those rebellious subjects into faithful supporters against

[Sidenote: His early struggles.] that jealous overlord. He came to his

Duchy under every disadvantage. At once bastard and minor, with

competitors for his coronet arising at every moment, with turbulent

barons to hold in check and envious neighbours to guard against, he was,

throughout the whole of his early life, beset by troubles, none of which

were of his own making, and he came honourably out of all. The

[Sidenote: Excellence of his rule in Normandy.] change which William

wrought in Normandy was nothing less than a change from anarchy to good

order. Instead of a state, torn by internal feuds and open to the

attacks of every enemy, his Duchy became, under his youthful rule, a

loyal and well-governed land, respected by all its neighbours, and

putting most of them to shame by its prosperity. In the face of every

obstacle, the mighty genius of the once despised Bastard raised himself

and his principality to a place in the eyes of Europe such as Normandy

and its prince had never held before. And these great successes were

gained with far less of cruelty or harshness than might have been looked

for in so [Sidenote: His general forbearance and occasional cruelty.]

ruthless an age. He shared indeed in the fierce passions of his race,

and in one or two cases his wrath hurried him, or his policy beguiled

him, into acts at which humanity shudders. At all stages of his life, if

he was debonair to those who would do his will, he was beyond measure

stern to all who withstood it.[500] Yet, when we think of all that he

went through, of the treachery and ingratitude which he met with on

every side, how his most faithful friends were murdered beside him, how

he himself had to flee for his life or to lurk in mean disguises, we

shall see that it is not without reason that his panegyrist praises his

general forbearance and clemency. In short, the reign of William as Duke

of the Normans was alike prosperous and honourable in the highest

degree. Had he never stretched forth his hand to grasp the diadem which

was another’s, his fame would not have filled the world as now it does,

but he would have gone down to his grave as one of the best, as well as

one of the greatest, rulers of his time.

[Sidenote: His reign in England.]

If we turn from William Duke of the Normans to William King of the

English, we may indeed mourn that, in a moral sense, the fine gold has

become dim, but our admiration for mere greatness, for the highest craft

of the statesman and the soldier, will rise higher than ever. No doubt

he was highly favoured by fortune; nothing but an extraordinary

combination of events could have made the Conquest of England possible.

But then [Sidenote: Difficulties of his undertaking.] it is the true art

of statesmanship, the art by which men like William carry the world

before them, to know how to grasp every fortunate moment and to take

advantage of every auspicious turn of events. Doubtless William could

never have conquered England except under peculiarly favourable

circumstances; but then none but such a man as William could have

conquered England under any circumstances at all. He conquered and

retained a land far greater than his paternal Duchy, and a land in

[Sidenote: Skill displayed in his claim on the English Crown;] which he

had not a single native partisan. Yet he contrived to put himself

forward in the eyes of the world as a legal claimant, and not as an

unprovoked invader. We must condemn the fraud, but we cannot help

admiring the skill, by which he made men believe that he was the true

heir of England, shut out from his inheritance by a perjured usurper.

Never was a more subtle web of fallacy woven by the craft of man; never

did diplomatic ingenuity more triumphantly obtain its end. He contrived

to make an utterly unjust aggression bear the aspect, not only of

righteous, but almost of holy, warfare. The wholesale spoiler of a

Christian people contrived to win for himself something very like the

position of a Crusader. And, landed on English ground, with no rights

but those of his own sword, with no supporters but his own foreign

[Sidenote: in his acquisition of it;] army, he yet contrived to win the

English Crown with every circumstance of formal legality. He was

elected, crowned, and anointed like his native predecessors, and he

swore at the hands of an English Primate to observe the ancient laws of

England. By force and by craft, but with the outward pretext of law

always put prominently forward, he gradually obtained full possession of

the whole land; he deprived the nation one by one of its native

[Sidenote: and in his subsequent government.] leaders, and put in their

places men of foreign birth and wholly dependent on himself. No prince

ever more richly rewarded those to whom he owed his Crown, but no prince

ever took more jealous care that they should never be able to bring his

Crown into jeopardy. None but a man like him could have held down both

conquerors and conquered, and have made his will the only law for Norman

and Englishman alike. His consummate policy guarded against the dangers

which he saw rife in every other country; he put the finishing stroke to

the work of Ecgberht, and made England the most united Kingdom in

Western Christendom. Normans and Englishmen conspired against him, and

called the fleets and hosts of Denmark to their help. But William held

his own alike against revolters at home and against invaders from

abroad. Norman and English rebels were alike crushed; sometimes the Dane

was bought off, sometimes he shrank from the firm array with which the

land was guarded. All opposition was [Sidenote: Severity of his police.]

quelled by fire and sword; but when it was quelled, whenever and

wherever William’s rule was quietly accepted, his hand was heavy upon

all smaller disturbers of the peace of the world. Life, property, female

honour, stood indeed but a small chance while the process of Conquest

was going on, but, when William’s work was fully accomplished, they were

safer under him than they had ever been under England’s native Kings. As

the stern avenger of crime, even the conquered learned to bless him, and

to crown his good deeds with a tribute of praise hardly inferior to that

which waits on the name of his illustrious rival.[501]

[Sidenote: The worst features of his character brought out in England.]

Here then was a career through which none but one of the greatest of

mankind could have passed successfully. But it was a career which

brought out into full play all those darker features of his character

which found but little room for their developement during his earlier

reign in his native Duchy. There is no reason to believe that William

came into England with any fixed determination to rule otherwise in

England than he had already ruled in Normandy. Cnut can hardly fail to

have been his model, and William’s earliest days in England were far

more promising than the earliest days of Cnut. At no time of his life

does William appear as one of those tyrants who actually delight in

oppression, to whom the infliction of human suffering is really a source

of morbid pleasure. [Sidenote: His false position gradually developed

itself, and led him to oppression.] But, if he took no pleasure in the

infliction of suffering, it was at least a matter about which he was

utterly reckless; he stuck at no injustice which was needed to carry out

his purpose. His will was fixed, to win and to keep the Crown of England

at all hazards. We may well believe that he would have been well pleased

could he have won that Crown without bloodshed. But, rather than not win

it, he did not shrink from the guilt of carrying on a desolating war

against a people who had never wronged him. We may well believe that,

when he swore to govern his new subjects as well as they had been

governed by their own Kings, it was his full purpose to keep his oath.

That he acted on any settled scheme of uprooting the nationality, the

laws, or the language of England is an exploded fable.[502] But he could

not govern England as he had governed Normandy; he could not govern

England as Cnut had governed England; he could not himself be as Cnut,

neither could his Normans be as Cnut’s Danes. He gradually found that

there was no way for him to govern England save by oppressions,

exactions, and confiscations, by the bondage or the death of the noblest

of the land. He made the discovery, and he shrank not from its practical

consequences. A reign which had begun with as good hopes as the reign of

a foreign conqueror could begin with gradually changed into one of the

most tremendous tyrannies on record. Northumberland was hard to be kept

in order, and Northumberland was made a desert. [Sidenote: General

change for the worse in his character.] This was the dictate of a

relentless policy; but when William had once set forth on the downward

course of evil, he soon showed that he could do wrong when no policy

commanded it, merely to supply means for his [Sidenote: Formation of the

New Forest.] personal gratification. To lay waste Hampshire merely to

make a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to lay waste

Northumberland to rid himself of a political danger. He could still be

merciful when mercy was not dangerous, but he had now learned to shed

innocent blood without remorse, if its shedding seemed to add safety to

his throne. The repeated revolts of Eadgar were forgiven as often as

they occurred; but Waltheof, caressed, [Sidenote: Death of Waltheof.]

flattered, promoted, was sent to the scaffold on the first convenient

pretext. It is hardly superstitious to point out, alike with ancient and

with modern authorities,[503] that the New Forest became a spot fatal to

William’s house, and that, after the death of Waltheof, his old

prosperity [Sidenote: Crimes and misfortunes of his last years.] forsook

him. Nothing indeed occurred to loosen his hold on England; but his last

years were spent in bickerings with his unworthy son, and in a petty

border warfare, in which the Conqueror had, for the first time, to

undergo defeat. At last he found his death-wound in an inglorious

quarrel, in the personal commission of cruelties which aroused the

indignation of his own age; and the mighty King and Conqueror, forsaken

by his servants and children, had to owe his funeral rites to the

voluntary charity of a loyal vassal, and within the walls of his own

minster he could not find an undisputed grave.

[Sidenote: William’s surnames: the _Great_, the _Conqueror_, the

_Bastard_.]

Such was William the Great, a title which, in the mouths of his

contemporaries, he shared with Alexander and with Charles, but which in

later times has been displaced by the misunderstood description of

Conqueror.[504] But, before he had won any right to either of those

lofty titles, William was already known by another surname [Sidenote:

Laxity of the Norman Dukes as to marriage and legitimacy.] drawn from

the circumstances of his birth. Of all princely lines the ducal house of

Normandy was that which paid least regard to the canonical laws of

marriage or to the special claims of legitimate birth.[505] The Duchy

had been ruled by a whole succession of princes who either were sprung

from that irregular kind of union which was known as the Danish

marriage,[506] or else were the sons of concubines raised to the rank of

wives after the birth of their children. But, among all this brood of

spurious or irregular heirs, the greatest of the whole line was the one

to whom the reproach, if reproach it was deemed, [Sidenote: Special

illegitimacy of William.] of illegitimate birth clave the most

abidingly. William the son of Robert was emphatically William the

Bastard, and the name clave to him through life, on the Imperial throne

of Britain no less than on the ducal chair of Normandy. For, of all the

whole line, William was the one whose bastardy was the most undoubted,

the least capable of being veiled under ambiguous and euphemistic

phrases. The position of Popa and Sprota was a doubtful one;[507] it

may, according to Danish ideas, have been perfectly honourable. The

children of Richard and Gunnor were, according to the law recognized

everywhere but in our own country, legitimated by the subsequent

marriage of their parents. But we may doubt whether the notion of the

Danish marriage survived as late as the days of Robert, and it is

certain that no ecclesiastical sacrament ever gave William a right,

according to the law of the Church, to rank as the lawful son of his

father. The mother of William is never spoken of in the respectful terms

which we find applied to the mother of Richard the Fearless. Throughout

the whole of Duke Robert’s life, she remained in the position of an

acknowledged mistress, and her illustrious son came forth before the

world with no other description than the Bastard.

[Sidenote: Story of William’s birth.]

The irregular birth of one so renowned naturally became the subject of

romance and legend. And the spot on which William first saw the light is

one which seems to call for the tribute of the legend-maker as its

natural due. [Sidenote: Position of Falaise.] The town of Falaise, in

the Diocese of Seez, is one of the most famous spots both in the earlier

and in the later history of Normandy, and none assuredly surpasses it in

the striking character of its natural position. Lying on the edge of the

great forest of Gouffer, the spot had its natural attractions for a line

of princes renowned, even above others of their time, for their devotion

to the sports of the field. The town itself lies in a sort of valley

between two eminences. The great Abbey, a foundation of a later date

than the times which we are concerned with, has utterly vanished; but

two stately parish churches, one of them dating from the days of Norman

independence, bear witness to the ecclesiastical splendour of the place.

Passing [Sidenote: Historical associations of the Castle.] by them, the

traveller gradually ascends to the gate of the Castle, renowned alike in

the wars of the twelfth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth centuries. A

tall round tower still bears the name of the great Talbot, the guardian

of [Sidenote: 1417–1450.] the castle in the great English war, and who

afterwards won a still higher fame as the last champion of the ancient

[Sidenote: 1453.] freedom of Aquitaine against the encroachments of the

Kings of Paris.[508] But this witness of comparatively recent strife is

but an excrescence on the original structure. It is the addition made by

an English King to one of the noblest works of his Norman forefathers.

The Castle where legend fixes the birth of William of Normandy, and

where [Sidenote: 1175.] history fixes the famous homage of William of

Scotland, is a vast donjon of the eleventh or twelfth century.[509] One

of the grandest of those massive square keeps which I have already

spoken of as distinguishing the earliest military architecture of

Normandy, crowns the summit of a precipitous rock, fronted by another

mass of rock wilder still, on which the cannon of England were planted

during [Sidenote: The rocks give its name to the town.] Henry’s siege.

To these rocks, these _felsen_, the spot owes its name of Falaise,[510]

one of the many spots in Normandy where the good old Teutonic speech

still lingers in local nomenclature, though in this case the Teutonic

name has also preserved its permanent being in the general vocabulary of

the Romance speech. Between these two rugged heights lies a narrow dell,

through which runs a small beck, a tributary of the neighbouring river

Ante. The dell is crowded with mills and tanneries, but the mills and

tanneries of Falaise have their share in the historic interest of the

place. The mills play no inconsiderable part in the [Sidenote: The

Tanneries of Falaise.] records of the Norman Exchequer,[511] and the

tanneries at once suggest the name of the greatest son of Normandy. In

every form which the story has taken in history or legend, the mother of

the Conqueror appears as the [Sidenote: William the son of a Tanner’s

daughter.] daughter of a tanner of Falaise, plying his unsavoury craft

on the spot where it has continued to be plied through so many ages. The

conquered English indeed strove to claim the Norman Duke as their own,

by representing his mother as a descendant of their own royal

house.[512] But, even in this version, the traditional trade of her

father [Sidenote: English legend of the birth of William.] is not

forgotten. The daughter of the hero Eadmund disgraced herself by a

marriage or an intrigue with her father’s tanner, to whom in process of

time she bore three daughters. The pair were banished from England, and

took refuge on the opposite coast. In the course of their wanderings

they came to beg alms at the gate of Duke Richard the Good. The Prince

discovered the lofty birth of the mother, and took the whole family into

his favour. The youngest daughter became the mistress of his son Robert,

and of them sprang the mighty William, great-grandson of Eadmund

Ironside no less than of Richard the Fearless.

Such a tale is of course valuable only as illustrating the universal

tendency of conquered nations to try to alleviate the shame and grief of

conquest by striving to believe that their tyrants are at least their

countrymen. The story of William’s English origin clearly comes from the

same mint as the story in which Egyptian vanity gave out that Kambysês

was Egyptian by his maternal origin,[513] as the story which saw in

Alexander himself a scion of the royal house of Persia.[514] It seems

however to preserve one grain of truth in the midst of so much that is

mythical. It represents the connexion between Robert and his mistress as

having begun before he ascended the ducal throne. There can be little

doubt that this was the case, though the story is generally told as if

Robert had been already Duke [Sidenote: Story of Herleva.] of the

Normans. But it is more likely that Robert was as yet only Count of the

Hiesmois, and, as such, Lord of Falaise, when his eye was first caught

by the beauty of Arlette, or rather Herleva, the daughter of Fulbert the

Tanner. Some say he first saw her engaged in the dance,[515] others when

she was busied in the more homely work of washing linen in the beck

which flows by her father’s tannery at the foot of the castle.[516] The

prince himself, a mere stripling, saw and loved her. He sought her of

her father, who, after some reluctance, gave up his child to his lord,

by the advice, according to one account, of a holy hermit his

brother.[517] She was led the same evening to the castle; the poetical

chroniclers are rich in details of her behaviour.[518] She became the

cherished mistress of Robert, and her empire over his heart was, we are

told, not disturbed by another connexion, lawful or unlawful.[519]

[Sidenote: Advancement of her family.] After the example of former

princes, Robert in after times raised the kinsfolk of his mistress to

high honours. Half the nobility of Normandy had sprung from the brothers

and sisters of Gunnor, so now Fulbert the Tanner, the father of Herleva,

was raised to the post of ducal chamberlain,[520] and her brother Walter

was placed in some office which, in after times, gave him close access

to the person of his princely nephew.[521] After Robert’s death,

[Sidenote: Her marriage with Herlwin of Conteville.] Herleva obtained an

honourable marriage, and became, by her husband Herlwin of

Conteville,[522] the mother of two sons who will fill no small space in

our history. But her union with the Duke produced but one son, perhaps

but [Sidenote: Legends of omens.] one child.[523] That child however was

one whose future greatness was, so we are told, prefigured by omens and

prodigies from the moment of his birth, and even from the moment of his

conception. On the night of her first visit to the castle, Herleva

dreamed that a tree arose from her body which overshadowed all Normandy

and all England.[524] At the moment of his birth, the babe seized the

straw on the chamber floor with so vigorous a grasp that all who saw the

sight knew that he would become a mighty conqueror, who would never let

go anything that he had once laid [Sidenote: Birth of William.

1027–1028.] his hand upon.[525] Leaving tales like these apart, it is

certain that William, the bastard son of Robert and Herleva, was born at

Falaise, perhaps in the year in which the great Cnut made his famous

pilgrimage to the threshold of the Apostles.[526]

[Sidenote: Question of the succession: state of the Ducal family.]

Before Robert undertook so perilous an enterprise, it was clearly

needful for him to regulate the succession to the Duchy. The reigning

prince had neither brother nor legitimate child. The heir, according to

modern notions of heirship, was a churchman, Robert, Archbishop of

[Sidenote: Robert Archbishop of Rouen. 989–1037.] Rouen. This Prelate we

have already seen in rebellion against his namesake the Duke,[527]

probably on account of this very claim to the succession. He was one of

the children of Richard the Fearless, legitimated and made capable of

ecclesiastical honours by the late marriage of his parents. Indeed,

according to one account, the marriage of Richard and Gunnor was

contracted expressly to take away the canonical objections which were

raised against the appointment of a bastard to the metropolitan

see.[528] Archbishop Robert was thus an uncle of Duke Robert and a

great-uncle of the child William. Besides his Archbishoprick, he held

the County of Evreux as a lay fee. Like the more famous Odo of Bayeux,

he drew a marked distinction between his ecclesiastical and his temporal

character. As Count of Evreux, he had a wife, Herleva by name,[529] and

was the father of children of whom we shall hear again in our history.

In his latter days, his spiritual character became more prominent; he

repented of his misdeeds, gave great alms to the poor, and began the

rebuilding of the metropolitan church.[530] There were also two princes

whose connexion with the ducal house was by legitimate, though only

female, descent. One was [Sidenote: Guy of Burgundy;] Guy of Burgundy, a

nephew of Duke Robert, being grandson of Richard the Good through his

daughter [Sidenote: Alan of Britanny;] Adeliza.[531] The other was

Robert’s cousin, Count Alan of Britanny, the son of Hadwisa daughter of

Richard the Fearless.[532] Nearer in blood, but of more doubtful

legitimacy, were Robert’s own half-brothers, the sons of Richard

[Sidenote: Malger;] the Good by Papia. These were the churchman Malger,

who afterwards succeeded Archbishop Robert in the [Sidenote: William of

Arques;] see of Rouen,[533] and William, who held the County and

[Sidenote: Nicholas.] castle of Arques near Dieppe.[534] There was also

the monk Nicholas, the young, and no doubt illegitimate, son of

[Sidenote: No candidate free from objection.] Richard the Third.[535]

None of these were promising candidates for the ducal crown. Robert, the

lineal heir, might be looked on as disqualified by his profession; Alan

and Guy were strangers, and could claim only through females; the nearer

kinsmen were of spurious or doubtful birth, and some of them were liable

also to the same objection as Robert. Had any strong opposition existed,

William of Arques would probably have been found the best card to play;

but there was no candidate whose claims were absolutely without cavil;

there was none round whom national feeling could instinctively centre;

there was none who was clearly marked out, either by birth or by merit,

as the natural leader of the Norman people. This state of things must be

borne in mind, in order to understand the fact, otherwise so

extraordinary, that Robert was able to secure the succession to a son

who was at once bastard and minor. There were strong objections against

young William; but there were objections equally strong against

[Sidenote: Unpopularity of William’s succession.] every other possible

candidate. Under these circumstances it was possible for William to

succeed; but it followed, almost as a matter of course, that the early

years of his reign were disturbed by constant rebellions. William’s

succession was deeply offensive to many of his subjects, especially to

that large portion of the Norman nobility who had any kind of connexion

with the ducal house. From the time of the child’s birth, there can be

little doubt that his father’s intentions in his favour were at least

suspected, and the suspicion may well have given rise to some of the

rebellions by which Robert’s reign was disturbed.[536]

[Sidenote: The great Norman houses; their connexion with English

history.]

At this stage of our narrative it becomes necessary to form some clear

conception of the personality and the ancestry of some of the great

Norman nobles. Most of them belonged to houses whose fame has not been

confined to Normandy. We are now dealing with the fathers of the men, in

some cases with the men themselves, who fought round William at Senlac,

and among whom he divided the honours and the lands of England. These

men became the ancestors of the new nobility of England, and, as their

forefathers had changed in Gaul from Northmen into Normans, so now, by a

happier application of the same law, they gradually changed from Normans

into Englishmen. Many a name famous in English history, many a name

whose sound is as familiar to us as any word of our own Teutonic speech,

many a name which has long ceased to suggest any thought of foreign

origin, is but the name of some Norman village, whose lord, or perhaps

some lowlier inhabitant, followed his Duke to the Conquest of England

and shared in the plunder of the conquered. But the names which are most

familiar to us as names of English lords and gentlemen of Norman descent

belong, for the most part, to a sort of second crop, which first grew up

to importance on English soil. The great Norman houses whose acts—for

the most part whose crimes—become of paramount importance at the time

with which we are now dealing, were mostly worn out in a few

generations, and they have left but few direct representatives on either

side of the sea.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the House of Belesme.]

High among these great houses, the third in rank among the original

Norman nobility,[537] stood the house of Belesme, whose present head was

William, surnamed Talvas.[538] The domains held by his family, partly of

the Crown of France, partly of the Duchy of Normandy, might almost put

him on a level with princes rather than with ordinary nobles. The

possession from which the family took its name lay within the French

territory, and was a fief of the French Crown. But, within the Norman

Duchy, the Lords of Belesme were masters of the valley bounded by the

hills from which the Orne flows in one direction and the Sarthe in

another. Close on the French frontier, they held the strong fortress of

Alençon, the key of Normandy on that side. They are called Lords of the

city of Seez,[539] and, at the time of which we are speaking, a member

of their house filled its episcopal throne.[540] Their domains stretched

to Vinoz, a few miles south-east of Falaise, and separated from the town

by the forest of Gouffer. Ivo, the first founder of this mighty house,

had been one of the faithful guardians of the childhood of Richard the

Fearless, and had been enriched by him as the reward of his true service

in evil days.[541] But with Ivo the virtue of his race seems to have

died out, and his descendants appear in Norman and English history as

[Sidenote: Their supposed hereditary wickedness.] monsters of cruelty

and perfidy, whose deeds aroused the horror even of that not over

scrupulous age. Open robbery and treacherous assassination seem to have

been their daily occupations. The second of the line, William of

Belesme, had rebelled against Duke Robert, and had defended his fortress

of Alençon against him.[542] His eldest son Warren murdered a harmless

and unsuspecting friend, and was for this crime, so the men of his age

said, openly seized and strangled by the fiend. Of his other sons, Fulk,

presuming to ravage the ducal territory, was killed in battle, Robert

was taken prisoner by the men of Le Mans and beheaded by way of

reprisals for a murder committed by his followers. The surviving heir of

the possessions and of the wickedness of his race was his one remaining

son William Talvas.[543] This man, we are told, [Sidenote: William

Talvas; his crimes.] being displeased by the piety and good manners of

his first wife Hildeburgis, hired ruffians to murder her on her way to

church.[544] At his second wedding-feast he put out the eyes, and cut

off the nose and ears, of an unsuspecting guest.[545] This was William

the son of Geroy, one of a house whose name we shall often meet again in

connexion with the famous Abbeys of Bec and Saint Evroul. A local war

ensued, in which William Talvas suffered an inadequate punishment for

his crimes in the constant devastation of his lands. At last a more

appropriate avenger arose from his own house. The hereditary wickedness

of his line passed on to his daughter Mabel and his son Arnulf. Mabel,

the wife of Roger of Montgomery, will be a prominent character in our

story for many years. Arnulf rebelled against his father, and left him

to die wretchedly in exile. An act of wanton rapacity was presently

punished by a supernatural avenger; Arnulf, like his uncle Warren, was

strangled by a dæmon in his bed.[546] Such was the character of the

family whose chief, first in power and in crime among the nobility of

Normandy, stood forth, as the story goes, as the mouthpiece of that

nobility, to express the feelings with which the descendants of the

comrades of Rolf, the descendants of Richard the Fearless, even the

descendants of the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, looked on the

possible promotion of the Tanner’s grandson to be their lord.

[Sidenote: William Talvas curses young William.]

William Talvas, says the tale, in the days of his prosperity, was one

day in the streets of Falaise, a town where the close neighbourhood of

his possessions doubtless made him well known. The babe William, the son

of the Duke and Herleva, was being nursed in the house of his maternal

grandfather. A burgher, meeting the baron, bade him step in and see the

son of his lord. William Talvas entered the house and looked on the

babe. He then cursed him, saying that, by that child and his

descendants, himself and his descendants would be brought to shame.[547]

A curse from the mouth of William Talvas might almost be looked on as a

blessing, and the form of the prediction was such as to come very near

to the nature of a panegyric. It is indeed the highest praise of the

babe who then lay in his cradle, that he did something to bring to

shame, something to bring under the restraints of law and justice, men

like the hoary sinner who instinctively saw in him the destined enemy of

his kind. But the words, when uttered, would be meant and understood

simply as a protest against the insult which was preparing for the

aristocratic pride of the great Norman houses. Possibly indeed the tale,

like other tales of the kind, may have been devised after the event;

still it would mark none the less truly the feelings with which a man

like William Talvas, boasting of a descent from the original conquerors

of the land, looked on the unworthy sovereign whom destiny seemed to be

providing for them.

[Sidenote: Robert announces his intention of pilgrimage. 1034–5.]

Duke Robert however was bent on his purpose. He gathered an assembly of

the great men of his Duchy, among whom the presence of Archbishop

Robert, perhaps as being a possible competitor for the succession, is

specially mentioned.[548] The Duke set forth his intention of visiting

the Holy Sepulchre, and told his hearers, that, aware of the dangers of

such a journey, he wished to settle the succession to the Duchy before

he set out. The voice of the Assembly bade him stay at home and continue

to discharge the duties of government in person, especially at a time

when there was no one successor or representative to whom they could be

entrusted with any chance of the general good will. It was of course

desirable to stave off the question. Robert might yet have legitimate

heirs; or, in the failure of that hope, the Norman chiefs might

gradually come to an agreement in favour of some other candidate. Let

the Duke stay at home and guard his Duchy against the pretensions of the

Breton and the Burgundian.[549] But Robert would brook no delay in the

accomplishment of his pious purpose; he would go at [Sidenote: He

proposes William as his successor.] once to the Holy Land; he would

settle the succession before he went. He brought forward the young

William, and acknowledged him as his son. He was little, he told them,

but he would grow; he was one of their own stock, brought up among

them.[550] His overlord the King of the French had engaged to

acknowledge and protect him.[551] He called on them to accept, to

choose—the never-ceasing mixture of elective and hereditary claims

appears here as everywhere—the child as their future Lord, as his

successor in the Duchy, should he never return from the distant land to

which he was bound.[552] The Normans were in a manner entrapped. There

can be no doubt that nothing could be further from the wishes of the

majority of the Assembly than to agree to the Duke’s proposal; but there

was nothing else to be done. If Robert could not be prevailed on to stay

at home, some settlement must be made; and, little as any of them liked

the prospect of the rule of the young Bastard, there was no other

candidate in whose favour all parties could come to an agreement

[Sidenote: William’s succession accepted.] on the spot. Unwillingly then

the Norman nobility consented; they accepted the only proposal which was

before them; they swore the usual oaths, and did homage to the son of

Herleva as their future sovereign.[553] The kinsmen of Gunnor, the

descendants of the comrades of Rolf, became the men of the Tanner’s

grandson, and he himself was received as the man of King Henry at

Paris.[554] As far as forms went, no form was wanting which could make

William’s succession indisputably lawful. Duke Robert then set forth on

the pilgrimage from which he never returned. Within a few months, his

short life and [Sidenote: William succeeds his father in the Duchy.

1035.] reign came to an end at Nikaia.[555] Thus, in the same year which

beheld the great Empire of Cnut parted among his sons, did William, the

seven years old grandson of the Tanner Fulbert, find himself on the seat

of Rolf and Richard the Fearless, charged with the mission to keep down,

as his infant hands best might, the turbulent spirits who had been

unwillingly beguiled into acknowledging him as their sovereign.

[Sidenote: Necessary evils of a minority.]

Anarchy at once broke forth; all the evils which attend a minority in a

rude age were at once poured forth upon the unhappy Duchy. We see the

wisdom with which the custom of our own and of most contemporary lands

provided that the government of men should be entrusted to those only

who had themselves at least reached man’s estate. In England the

exceptional minorities of the sons of Eadmund and of Eadgar had been

calamitous, but they were nothing to compare to the minority of William

of Normandy. In England the custom of regular national assemblies, the

habit of submitting all matters to a fair vote, the recognition of the

Law as supreme over every man, hindered the state from falling into

utter dissolution, even in those perilous times. The personal reign of

Æthelred proved far weaker than the administration which Dunstan carried

on in his name in his early years. But in Normandy, where constitutional

ideas had found so imperfect a developement as compared with England,

there was nothing of this kind to fall back upon. Nothing but the

personal genius of a determined and vigorous Prince could keep that

fierce nobility in any measure of order. With the accession of an infant

there at once ceased to be any power to protect or to punish. “Woe

[Sidenote: Childhood of William.] to the land whose King is a child” is

the apt quotation of an historian of the next age.[556] The developement

of the young Duke both in mind and body was undoubtedly precocious; but

his early maturity was mainly owing to the stern discipline of that

terrible childhood. It was in those years that he learned the arts which

made Normandy, France, and England bow before him; but, at the age of

seven years, William himself was no more capable than Æthelred of

personally wielding the rod of rule. The child had good and faithful

guardians, guardians perhaps no less well disposed to fulfil their trust

towards him than Dunstan had been towards the children of Eadgar. But

there was no one man in Normandy to whom every Norman could look up as

every Englishman had looked up to the mighty Primate, and the bowl and

the dagger soon deprived the young Prince of the support of his wisest

and truest counsellors. The minority of William was truly a time when

every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And what seemed

right in the eyes of the nobles of Normandy was commonly [Sidenote:

Utter anarchy of the time.] rebellion against their sovereign, ruthless

oppression of those beneath them, and endless deadly feuds with one

another. We have already seen some specimens of their crimes in the

doings of the house of Belesme. That house is indeed always spoken of as

exceptionally wicked; but a state of things in which such deeds could be

done, and could go unpunished, must have come very nearly to a complete

break-up of society. The general pictures which we find given us of the

time are fearful beyond expression. Through the withdrawal of all

controlling power, every landowner became a petty sovereign, and began

to exercise all the sovereign rights of slaughter and devastation.

[Sidenote: Building of castles.] The land soon bristled with castles.

The mound crowned with the square donjon rose as the defence or the

terror of every lordship.[557] This castle-building [Sidenote: Building

of castles.] is now spoken of in Normandy with a condemnation nearly as

strong as that with which it was spoken of in England, when, a few years

after this time, the practice was introduced into England by the Norman

favourites of Eadward.[558] But there is a characteristic difference in

the tone of the two complaints. The English complaint always is that the

Frenchmen built castles and oppressed the poor folk,[559] or that they

did all possible evil and shame to their English neighbours.[560] The

Norman complaint, though not wholly silent as to the oppression of the

humbler ranks,[561] yet dwells mainly on the castle-building as a sign

of rebellion against the authority of the Prince, and as an occasion of

warfare between baron and baron. And it would have been well for the

reputation of the Norman nobles of that age if they had confined

themselves to open warfare with one another and open rebellion against

their sovereign. [Sidenote: Frequency of assassinations.] But they sank

below the common morality of their own age; private murder was as

familiar to them as open war. The house of Belesme had a bad preeminence

in this as in other crimes; but, if they had a preeminence, they were

far from having a monopoly. Probably no period of the same length in the

history of Christendom contains the record of so many foul deeds of

slaughter and mutilation as the early years of the reign of William. And

they were constantly practised, not only against avowed and armed

enemies, but against unarmed and unsuspecting guests. Some of the tales

may be inventions or exaggerations; but the days in which such tales

could even be invented must have been full of deeds of horror. Isolated

cases of similar crimes may doubtless be found in any age; but this

period is remarkable alike for the abundance of crimes, for the rank of

the criminals, and for the impunity which they enjoyed. To control these

men was the duty laid upon the almost infant years of William, a duty

with which nothing short of his own full and matured powers might seem

fit to grapple. Yet over all these difficulties the genius of the

[Sidenote: Effects of William’s government in Normandy.] great Duke was

at last triumphant. His hand brought order out of the chaos, and changed

a land wasted by rebellion and intestine warfare into one of the most

prosperous regions of Europe, a land flourishing as no Norman ruler had

seen it flourish before. When we think of the days in which William

spent his youth, of the men against whom his early years were destined

to be one continued struggle, we shall be less inclined to lift up our

hands in horror at his later crimes than to dwell with admiration on the

large share of higher and better qualities which, among all his evil

deeds, clave to him to his dying day.

§ 2. _From the Accession of William to the Battle of Val-ès-dunes._

1035–1047.

[Sidenote: Guardians of William.]

We have seen among what kind of men the young Duke of the Normans had to

pass the first years of his life and sovereignty. But his father, in

leaving his one lamb among so many wolves, had at least provided him

with trustworthy [Sidenote: Alan of Britanny.] guardians. Alan of

Britanny, a possible competitor for the Duchy, a neighbouring prince

with whom Duke Robert had so lately been at war,[562] was disarmed when

his overlord committed his son to his faith as kinsman and vassal, and

even invested him with some measure of authority in Normandy

itself.[563] The immediate care of the young Duke’s person was given to

one Thurcytel or Thorold, names which point to a genuine Scandinavian

descent in their bearer, and which would make us look to the Bessin as

the probable place of his birth.[564] Other [Sidenote: Osbern.]

guardians of high rank were the Seneschal Osbern, and Count Gilbert,

both of them connected in the usual way with the ducal family. Osbern

was the son of Herfast, a brother of the Duchess Gunnor; he was also

married to a daughter of Rudolf of Ivry, the son of Asperleng and

Sprota, the savage suppressor of the great [Sidenote: Gilbert.] peasant

revolt.[565] Gilbert’s connexion was still closer. He was illustrious

alike in his forefathers and in his descendants. He sprang of the ducal

blood of Normandy, and of his blood sprang the great houses of Clare and

Pembroke in England. His father Godfrey was one of those natural

children of Richard the Fearless who did not share the promotion of the

offspring of Gunnor.[566] He was lord of the border fortress of Eu,

renowned in Norman history as early as the days of Rolf;[567] he was

lord too of the pleasant valley of the Risle, separated only by one

wooded hill from the more memorable valley which is hallowed by the

names of Herlwin, Lanfranc, and Anselm. [Sidenote: Alan poisoned.

1039–1040.] All these worthy men paid the penalty of their fidelity.

Count Alan died of poison, while he was besieging the castle of

Montgomery, the stronghold of a house which we shall often have again to

mention. He died at Vinmoutier, and was buried in the abbey of Fécamp.

Breton slander afterwards threw the guilt of this crime upon the Duke

himself,[568] the person who had least to gain by it. Norman slander

threw it on Alan’s own subjects;[569] but one can hardly doubt that, if

the poisoned bowl was administered at all, it was administered by some

one or [Sidenote: Murder of Gilbert.] other of the rebellious Norman

nobles.[570] Count Gilbert was murdered by assassins employed by Ralph

of Wacey, son of Archbishop Robert.[571] The sons of the murdered man

fled to Flanders, and took refuge with the common protector of banished

men, Count Baldwin. The lands of Gilbert were divided among various

claimants; the County of Eu seems to have passed into the hands of his

uncle William;[572] but his famous castle of Brionne fell to the lot of

Guy of Burgundy, of whom, and of whose possession of the fortress, we

shall hear much as we go on.[573]

[Sidenote: Castle and house of Montgomery.]

Another still more criminal attempt directly introduces us for the first

time to another of the great Norman houses, and one whose name has been

more abiding than any other. I have just before mentioned Count Alan’s

siege of the castle of Montgomery. The name of that castle, a hill

fortress in the diocese of Lisieux, enjoys a peculiar privilege above

all others in Norman geography. Other spots in Normandy have given their

names to Norman houses, and those Norman houses have transferred those

names to English castles and English towns and villages. But there is

only one shire in Great Britain which has had the name of a Norman house

impressed [Sidenote: Roger of Montgomery and his five sons.] upon it for

ever. Roger, the present Lord of Montgomery, was, at the time of Duke

Robert’s death, in banishment at Paris.[574] His five sons remained in

Normandy, and were among the foremost disturbers of the peace of the

country.[575] But one of the five, Hugh, had a son, named, like his

[Sidenote: The younger Roger.] grandfather, Roger, who bore a better

character and was destined to a higher fate. He had, through his mother,

a connexion of the usual kind with the ducal house. Weva, a sister of

Gunnor, was the wife of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, the son of Torf,[576]

and her daughter Joscelina was the wife of Hugh of Montgomery, and the

mother of the younger Roger.[577] On this Roger, William Talvas, in his

old age, [Sidenote: His wife Mabel, daughter of William Talvas.]

bestowed the hand of his daughter Mabel, who transferred the name, the

honours, and the hereditary wickedness of the house of Belesme to her

sons of the house of Montgomery.[578] Mabel, small in stature,

talkative, and cruel, guilty of fearful crimes and destined to a fearful

doom,[579] fills a place in history fully equal to that filled by her

husband. Of him we shall hear again as literally the foremost among the

conquerors of England; we shall see him enriched with English estates

and honours, bearing the lofty titles of Earl of Arundel and Shrewsbury,

and, once at least, adorned with the loftier title which had been borne

by Æthelred and [Sidenote: 1087.] Leofric. Once, and that while engaged

in rebellion against his prince, he flits before us for a moment as

Roger Earl of the Mercians.[580] A munificent friend of monks both in

England and in Normandy, he has left behind him a different reputation

from that of either his father, his wife, or his sons. In one of those

sons we shall see the name of his maternal ancestors revive, and, with

their name, a double portion of their wickedness.

But we have as yet to deal with the house of Montgomery [Sidenote:

Attempt of William of Montgomery on Duke William at Vaudreuil.] only in

its least honourable aspect. William, son of the elder, and uncle of the

younger, Roger, stands charged with an attempt, aimed no longer at

guardians or tutors, but at the person of the young Duke himself.

William was staying with his guardian Osbern at Vaudreuil, a castle on

an island in the Eure, said to have been the place of captivity of the

famous Fredegunda in Merowingian times.[581] Thorold, it would seem, had

been already murdered, but his assassins are spoken of only in general

terms.[582] But Osbern still watched over his young lord day [Sidenote:

Murder of Osbern; escape of the Duke.] and night. While at Vaudreuil he

was butchered by William of Montgomery in the very bedchamber of the

Duke, and the young prince owed his own safety on this, and on many

other occasions, to the zealous care of his maternal uncle Walter. Many

a time did this faithful kinsman carry him from palace and castle to

find a lurking-place from those who sought his life in the cottages of

the poor.[583] The blood of Osbern was soon avenged; a faithful servant

of the murdered Seneschal presently did to William of Montgomery as

William of Montgomery had done to Osbern.[584] In the state of things in

Normandy at that moment crime could be punished only by crime. The

remembrance of the faithful Osbern lived also in the memory of the

Prince whose childhood he had so well [Sidenote: Friendship of the Duke

with William Fitz-Osbern.] guarded. His son William grew up from his

youth as the familiar friend and counsellor of his namesake the Duke.

This is that famous William Fitz-Osbern who lived to be, next to the

Duke himself, the prime agent in the Conquest of England, who won, far

more than the Duke himself, the hatred of the conquered people, and who

at last perished in a mad enterprise after a crown and a wife in

Flanders.

The next enemy was Roger of Toesny, whom we have already heard of as a

premature Crusader, the savage foe [Sidenote: Rebellion and death of

Roger of Toesny.] of the Infidels of Spain.[585] Disappointed in his

dream of a Kingdom in the Iberian peninsula, he returned to his native

land to find it under the sway of the son of the Tanner’s daughter. The

proud soul of the descendant of Malahulc scorned submission to such a

lord; “A bastard is not fit to rule over me and the other Normans.”[586]

He refused all allegiance, and began to ravage the lands of his

neighbours. The one who suffered most was Humfrey de Vetulis, a son of

Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, and of Weva the sister of Gunnor. He sent his

son Roger of Beaumont against the aggressor. A battle followed, in which

Roger of Toesny and his two sons were killed, and Robert of Grantmesnil

received a mortal wound.[587] This fight was fought rather in defence of

private property than in the assertion of any public principle. But the

country gained by the destruction of so inveterate an enemy of peace as

Roger of Toesny. And here, as at every step of this stage of our

narrative, we become acquainted with men whose names are to figure in

the later portion of [Sidenote: Houses of Grantmesnil and Beaumont.] our

history. Robert of Grantmesnil was the father of Hugh of Grantmesnil,

who had no small share in the conquest of England and the division of

its spoil. Roger of Beaumont became the patriarch of the first house of

the Earls of Leicester. One of his descendants played an honourable part

in the great struggle between King and Primate in the latter half of the

twelfth century;[588] and his honours passed by female succession to

that great deliverer who made the title of Earl of Leicester the most

glorious in the whole peerage of England.[589]

[Sidenote: Ralph of Wacey chosen as the Duke’s guardian.]

By this time William was getting beyond the years of childhood, and he

was beginning to display those extraordinary powers of mind and body

with which nature had endowed him. He could now in some measure exercise

a will of his own. He still needed a guardian, but, according to the

principles of Roman Law, he had a right to a voice in determining who

that guardian should be. He summoned the chief men of his Duchy, and, by

their advice, he chose as his own tutor and as Captain-General of the

armies of Normandy,[590] Ralph the son of Archbishop Robert. The choice

seems a strange one, as Ralph was no other than the murderer of

William’s former guardian Count Gilbert.[591] But it may have been

thought politic for the young Duke to strengthen his hands by an

alliance with a former enemy, and to make, as in the case of Count Alan

of Britanny, a practical appeal to the honour of a possible rival. The

appointment of Ralph seems in fact to have had that effect. A time of

comparative internal quiet now followed. But there still were traitors

in the land. Many, we are told, of the Norman nobles, even of those who

professed the firmest fidelity to the Duke, and were loaded by him with

the highest honours, still continued to plot against him in secret.[592]

For a while they no longer revolted openly on their own account; but

there was a potentate hard by whose ear was ever open to their

suggestions, and who was ever ready to help them in any plots against

their sovereign and their country.

[Sidenote: Relations between Normandy and France hitherto friendly.]

From this point a new chapter opens in the relations between Normandy

and France. We have seen that, ever since the Commendation made by

Richard the Fearless to Hugh the Great,[593] the relations between the

Norman Princes and the Dukes and Kings of Paris had been invariably

[Sidenote: 945.] [Sidenote: 987.] friendly.[594] It was to Norman help

that the Parisian dynasty in a great measure owed its rise to

royalty;[595] it [Sidenote: 1031.] was to Norman help that the reigning

King of the French owed his restoration to his throne.[596] Henry of

Paris, made King by the help of Robert, had received Robert’s son as his

vassal,[597] and had promised to afford him the protection due from a

righteous overlord to a faithful vassal. But we [Sidenote: Return to

ill-feeling from the accession of William.] now, from the accession of

William, begin to see signs of something like a return on the French

side to the old state of feeling in the days when the Normans were still

looked on as heathen intruders, and their Duke was held to be Duke only

of the Pirates.[598] We find the French applying contemptuous epithets

to the Norman people,[599] and we find the King of the French ready to

seize every opportunity for enriching himself at the expense of the

Norman Duke.

[Sidenote: Causes of this change of feeling.]

It is not easy at first sight to explain this return to a state of

things which seemed to have passed away for more than a generation.

Still we must not forget that any prince reigning at Paris could hardly

fail to look with a grudging eye on the practically independent power

which cut him off from the mouth of his own river. The great feudatory

at Rouen seemed, in a way in which no other feudatory seemed, to shut up

his overlord in a kind of prison. The wealth and greatness and

prosperity of Normandy might seem, both historically and geographically,

to be something actually taken away from the possessions of France. This

feeling would apply to Normandy in a way in which it did not apply to

the other great fiefs of Flanders and Aquitaine. And the feeling would

on every ground be stronger in the mind of a King reigning at Paris than

in that of a King reigning at Laôn. To a French King at Paris the

Normans were the nearest and the most powerful of all neighbours, those

whose presence must have made itself far more constantly felt than that

of any other power in Gaul. Hitherto this inherent feeling of jealousy

had been kept in check by the close hereditary connexion between the two

states. The league established between Richard and Hugh had hitherto

been kept unbroken by their descendants. But the main original object of

that league, mutual support against the Carolingian King at Laôn, had

ceased to exist when the Parisian Duke assumed the royal dignity. Since

that time, the league could have rested on little more than an

hereditary sentiment between the Norman and French princes, which

probably was never very deeply shared by their subjects on either side.

And now that sentiment was giving way to the earlier and more

instinctive feeling which pointed out the Rouen Duchy as the natural

enemy of the Parisian Kingdom. It had once been convenient to forget, it

was now equally convenient to remember, that the original grant to Rolf

had been made at the immediate expense, not of the King of Laôn but of

the Duke of Paris.[600] Under these changed circumstances, the old

feeling, dormant for a time, seems to have again awakened in all its

strength. And now that Normandy held out temptations to every aggressor,

now that Norman nobles did not scruple to invite aid from any quarter

against a prince [Sidenote: Ingratitude of King Henry.] whose years were

the best witness of his innocence, every feeling of justice and

generosity seems to have vanished from the mind of King Henry. The King

who owed his Crown to the unbought fidelity of Duke Robert did not

scruple to despoil the helpless boy whom his benefactor had [Sidenote:

Dispute about Tillières.] entrusted to his protection. The border

fortress of Tillières formed the first pretext. That famous creation of

Richard the Good had been raised as a bulwark, not against the King, but

against the troublesome Count of Chartres.[601] But Odo had found it

convenient to surrender the disputed territory of Dreux to the

Crown;[602] the Arve therefore now became the boundary between Normandy

and the royal domain. Tillières was accordingly declared to be a

standing menace to Paris, whose retention was inconsistent with any

friendly relations between King and Duke.[603] The loyal party in

Normandy thought it better to yield than to expose their young Duke to

fresh jeopardy.[604] But the actual commander of the fortress was of

another mind. [Sidenote: Gilbert Crispin besieged in Tillières.]

Tillières had been entrusted by Duke Robert to Gilbert Crispin, the

ancestor of a race by whom, after its restoration to Normandy, the

border fortress was held for several generations.[605] He scorned to

agree to a surrender which he looked on as dangerous and

disgraceful;[606] he shut himself up in the castle with a strong force,

and there endured a siege at the hands of the King. Besides his own

subjects, Henry had a large body of Normans in the besieging host.[607]

It is not clear whether these were Normans of the disaffected party, or

whether the Duke’s own adherents, when they had once pledged themselves

to surrender the castle, deemed it expedient to display this excess of

zeal against a comrade who had carried his loyalty to the extreme of

[Sidenote: Tillières surrendered and burned.] disobedience. It is

certain that it was only in deference to orders given in the Duke’s

name, and which seem to imply the Duke’s personal presence,[608] that

the gallant Gilbert at last surrendered his trust. The fortress of which

Normandy had been so proud was handed over to the French King, and was

at once given to the flames, to the sorrow of every true Norman

heart.[609] The King pledged himself, as one of the conditions of the

surrender, not to restore the fortress for four years.[610] But, if the

Norman writers may be trusted, he grossly belied his faith. His somewhat

unreasonable demand had been granted, and no further provocation seems

to have been given on the Norman side. But, now that the protecting

fortress [Sidenote: Henry invades Normandy and restores Tillières.] was

dismantled, Henry ventured on an actual invasion. He retired for a

while; but he soon returned and crossed the border. He passed through

the County of Hiesmes, the old appanage of Duke Robert; from the valley

of the Dive he passed into the valley of the Orne, and burned the Duke’s

own town of Argentan. He then returned laden with booty, and, on his way

back, in defiance of his engagements, he restored and garrisoned the

dismantled fortress of Tillières.[611] The border fortress, so long the

cherished defence of Normandy, now became the sharpest thorn in her

side.

It is impossible to doubt that this devastation of the County of Hiesmes

was made by special agreement with the man who was most bound to defend

it. The commander of the district was Thurstan surnamed Goz, the son of

Ansfrid the Dane.[612] In this description, so long after the first

occupation of the country, we must recognize a son of a follower of

Harold Blaatand,[613] not a son of an original companion of Rolf. And a

son of a follower of Harold Blaatand must have been by this time a man

advanced in life. But neither his age and office, nor his Scandinavian

[Sidenote: Treason of Thurstan Goz.] descent and name, hindered Thurstan

from playing into the hands of the French invaders. Seeing that the Duke

had been thus compelled to yield to the King, Thurstan [Sidenote: He

garrisons Falaise Castle against the Duke.] looked upon the moment as

one propitious for revolt. He took some of the King’s soldiers into his

pay, and with their help he garrisoned the castle of Falaise against the

Duke.[614] Young William’s indignation was naturally great. To select

that particular spot as a centre of rebellion was not only a flagrant

act of disloyalty, but the grossest of personal insults. Acting under

the guidance of his guardian Ralph of Wacey, he summoned all loyal

Normans to his standard, and advanced to the siege of his [Sidenote: The

castle besieged and taken by the Duke and Ralph of Wacey.] birthplace.

The castle was attacked by storm, a fact which shows that the town was

loyal, proud as it well might be of numbering among its sons not only a

sovereign, but a sovereign who was beginning to be renowned even in his

boyhood. It was only on the side of the town that the castle could be

assaulted in this way. William himself could hardly have swarmed up the

steep cliffs which looked down upon the dwelling of his grandfather, nor

could he, like the English invader four centuries later, command the

fortress by artillery planted on the opposite heights. By dint of sheer

personal strength and courage, the gallant Normans assaulted the massive

walls of the Norman fortress, in the heart of the Norman land, which

French hirelings, in the pay of a Norman traitor, were defending against

the prince to whom that fortress owes a renown which can never pass

away. Their attacks made a breach, perhaps not in the donjon itself, but

at any rate in its external defences; night alone, we are told, put an

end to the combat, and saved Thurstan and his party from all the horrors

of a storm. But the rebel chief now saw that his hopes were vain; he

sought a parley with the Duke, and was allowed to go away unhurt on

condition of perpetual banishment from Normandy. [Sidenote: Thurstan’s

descendants, the Earls of Chester.] Thurstan’s son, Richard, Viscount of

Avranches, proved a loyal servant to William, and in the end procured

the pardon of his father.[615] The son of the loyal Richard, the

grandson of the rebel Thurstan, finds a place in English history by the

name of Hugh the Wolf, the first of the mighty but short-lived line of

the Counts Palatine of Chester.[616]

[Sidenote: Developement of Williams’s character.]

The young Duke’s great qualities were now fast displaying themselves. At

the earliest age which the rules of chivalry allowed, he received the

ensigns of knighthood from King Henry, and his subjects now began, not

without reason, to look forward to a season of peace and order under his

rule.[617] We hardly need the exaggerated talk of his extravagant

panegyrist to feel sure that William, at an unusually early age, taught

men to see in him the born ruler. We hear, not only of his grace and

skill in every warlike exercise, not only of his wisdom in the choice of

his counsellors, but of his personally practising every virtue that

becomes a man and a prince. William, we are told, was fervent in his

devotions, righteous in his judgements, and he dealt out a justice as

strict as that of Godwine or Harold upon all disturbers of the public

peace.[618] All this we can well believe. Of all these virtues he

retained many traces to the last. A long career of ambition, craft, and

despotic rule, never utterly seared his conscience, never brought him

down to the level of those tyrants who neither fear God nor regard man.

And in the fresh and generous days of youth, we can well believe that

one so highly gifted, and who as yet had so little temptation to abuse

his gifts, must have shone forth before all men as the very model of

every princely virtue. In one important point however, the public acts

of William, or of those who acted in his name, hardly bear out the

language of his [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical appointments abused by the

Norman Dukes.] panegyrists. His first ecclesiastical appointments were

quite unworthy of the prince who was, somewhat later in life, to learn

to appreciate and to reward the virtues of Lanfranc and Anselm. The two

greatest preferments of the Norman Church fell vacant during this

period, and the way in which they were filled illustrates a not uncommon

practice of the Norman princes which had few or no parallels in England.

There have been few instances in England in any age of great spiritual

preferments being perverted into means of maintenance for cadets or

bastards of the royal house. In Normandy, at least since the days of

Richard the Fearless, the practice had been shamefully common, and in

the early days of William the scandal still continued.

It must be remembered that the Prelates of Normandy, [Sidenote: Position

of the Norman Prelates.] like the Prelates of the other great fiefs of

the French Crown, were, in every sense, the subjects of the Princes

within whose immediate dominions they found themselves. Here was one

great point of difference between the condition of France and the

condition of Germany. In Germany all the great churchmen, in every part

of the country, held immediately of the Emperor. Every Bishop was

therefore reckoned as a Prince. The episcopal city also commonly became

a Free City of the Empire, and, as such, a commonwealth enjoying

practical independence. [Sidenote: Their subjection to the Ducal

authority.] No such oases of ecclesiastical or municipal privilege

interrupted the continuous dominion of a Norman or Aquitanian Duke. The

Metropolitan of Rouen or of Bourdeaux might be either the loyal subject

or the refractory vassal of his immediate Prince; but in no case was he

a coordinate sovereign, owning no superior except in the common

overlord. It is only among the Bishops within the Crown lands, those

who, in the extemporized jurisprudence of a later age, sat as Peers of

France, alongside of the great Dukes and Counts, that the slightest

signs of any such hierarchical independence can be discerned. At an

earlier age we have indeed seen the metropolitan see of Rheims holding a

position which faintly approached that of Mainz or Köln;[619] but even

Rheims had now considerably fallen from its ancient greatness, and no

such claims to princely authority were at any time put forward by the

proudest Prelate of Rouen or Bayeux. It was as Count of Evreux, rather

than as Primate of Normandy, that Archbishop Robert had been able to

make himself so troublesome to [Sidenote: Death of Archbishop Robert.

1037.] his nephew and sovereign. That turbulent Prelate, after an

episcopate of forty-eight years, had amended his ways, and had at last

vacated both County and Archbishoprick by death.[620] In his temporal

capacity he was succeeded by a son and a grandson, after whom the County

of Evreux passed by an heiress to the house of Montfort, giving the

Count-Primate the honour of being, through female descendants, a

forefather of the great Simon.[621] The vacancy of the Archbishoprick

placed the greatest spiritual preferment in the Duchy at the disposal of

the young Duke. The choice of the new Primate was as little directed by

considerations of ecclesiastical merit as that of his predecessor, and

it proved in every way unfortunate. At the [Sidenote: Malger, Archbishop

of Rouen. 1037–1055.] head of the Norman Church William’s counsellors

placed his uncle Malger, one of the sons of Richard the Good by

Papia.[622] We shall presently find him displaying no very priestly

qualities, and the only act of his life which could be attributed to

Christian or ecclesiastical zeal was one which wounded the Duke himself

in the tenderest point. [Sidenote: ODO, Bishop of Bayeux. 1048–1098.] So

too, when, some years later, the great see of Bayeux fell vacant,

William bestowed it on his half-brother Odo, the son of Herleva by her

husband Herlwin of Conteville.[623] Odo, like Hugh of Rheims in earlier

times,[624] must have been a mere boy at the time of his

appointment;[625] but he held the see of Bayeux for fifty years,[626]

and, during most part of that time, his name was famous and terrible on

both sides of the Channel. The character which he left [Sidenote: His

character in England,] behind him was a singularly contradictory

one.[627] In England he was remembered only as the foremost among the

conquerors and oppressors of the land, the man who gained for himself a

larger share of English hatred than William [Sidenote: 1086]. himself,

the man whose career of wrong was at last cut short by his royal

brother, who, stern and unscrupulous as he was, at least took no

pleasure in deeds of wanton oppression. Of Odo’s boundless ambition and

love of enterprise there is no doubt. The one quality led him to aspire

to the Papal throne;[628] the other led him first to forsake his diocese

to rule as an Earl in England, and then to forsake it again to follow

his nephew Duke Robert to the first Crusade. That he was no strict

observer of ecclesiastical rules in his own person is shown by the fact

that he left behind him a son, on whom however he at least bestowed the

ecclesiastical name of John.[629] Still Norman [Sidenote: and in

Normandy.] ecclesiastical history sets Odo before us in a somewhat

fairer light than that in which we see him in English secular history.

He at least possessed the episcopal virtue of munificence, and, whatever

were the defects of his own conduct, he seems to have been an encourager

of learning and good conversation in others. He was bountiful to all,

specially to those of his own spiritual household. He [Sidenote: His

works at Bayeux. Cathedral consecrated, 1077.] rebuilt his own church at

Bayeux, where parts of his work still remain. The lower part of the

lofty towers of the western front, the dim and solemn crypt beneath the

choir, of that stately and varied cathedral, are relics of the church

reared by its most famous Bishop. These precious fragments, severe but

far from rude in style, form a striking contrast to the gorgeous arcades

which in the next century supplanted Odo’s nave, and to the soaring

choir and apse raised by a still later age. Besides renewing the fabric,

he increased the number of the clergy of his church, and founded or

enriched a monastery in the outskirts of the city, in honour of Saint

Vigor, a canonized predecessor in the see of Bayeux.[630] The name of

Odo is one which will be constantly recurring in this history, from the

day when his Bishop’s staff and warrior’s mace were so successfully

wielded against the defenders of England, till the day when he went

forth to wield the same weapons against the misbelievers of the East,

and found on his road a tomb, far from the heavy pillars and massive

arches of his own Bayeux, among the light and gorgeous enrichments with

which the art of the conquered Saracen knew how to adorn the palaces and

churches of the Norman lords of Palermo.[631]

But, though the appointments of Malger and Odo might bode but little

good for the cause of ecclesiastical reformation, it is certain that a

great movement was at this time [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical movement in

Normandy; foundation of monasteries.] going on in the interior of the

Norman Church. The middle of the eleventh century was, in Normandy, the

most fruitful æra of the foundation of monasteries. The movement in that

direction, which had begun under Richard the Fearless, had continued

under Richard the Good, and it seems to have reached its height under

Robert and William. A Norman noble of that age thought that his estate

lacked its chief ornament, if he failed to plant a colony of monks in

some corner of his possessions.[632] No doubt the fashion of founding

monasteries became, in this case, as in other cases earlier and later,

little more than a mere fashion. Many a man must have founded a

religious house, not from any special devotion or any special

liberality, but simply because it was the regular thing for a man in his

position to do.[633] And, as an age of founding monasteries must also be

an age in which men are unusually eager to enter the monastic

profession, we may infer that many men took that profession on them out

of mere imitation or prevalent impulse, without any real [Sidenote:

Character of the monastic reformations in various ages.] personal call

to the monastic life. Still, though movements of this sort may end in

becoming a mere fashion, they never are a mere fashion at their

beginning. The Norman Benedictine movement in the eleventh century, the

English Cistercian movement in the twelfth century, the still greater

movement of the Friars in the thirteenth century—we may add the

revulsion in favour of the Seculars in the fourteenth century, and the

great Jesuit movement in the sixteenth—all alike point to times when all

classes of men were dissatisfied with the existing state of the Church,

and were filled with a general desire for its reformation. The evil in

every case was that the monastic reformations were never more than

temporary. Some new foundations were created, perhaps even some old ones

were reformed; the newly kindled fire burned with great fervour for a

generation or two; a crop of saints arose, with their due supply of

legends and miracles. But presently love again waxed cold; the new

foundations fell away like the elder ones, and the next age saw its new

order arise, to run the same course of primitive poverty and primitive

holiness, degenerating into wealth, indolence, and corruption. Still

there is a peculiar charm in contemplating the early years, the infant

struggles, the simple and fervent devotion, of one of these religious

brotherhoods [Sidenote: Two monasteries claiming special notice, Bec and

Saint Evroul.] in the days of its first purity. And, among the countless

monasteries which arose in Normandy at this time, there are two which

claim some special notice at the hands of an historian whose chief aim

is to connect the history of Normandy with that of England. The famous

Abbey [Sidenote: Three Archbishops of Canterbury from Bec;] of Bec

became the most renowned school of the learning of the time, and, among

the other famous men whom it sent forth, it gave three Primates to the

throne of Augustine. Thence came Lanfranc, the right hand man of the

[Sidenote: LANFRANC, 1070–1089.] Conqueror—the scholar whose learning

drew hearers from all Christendom, and before whose logic the heretic

stood abashed—the courtier who could win the favour of Kings without

stooping to any base compliance with their will—the ruler whose crozier

completed the conquest which the ducal sword only began, and who knew

how to win the love of the conquered, even while rivetting their

fetters. [Sidenote: ANSELM, 1093–1109.] Thence too came also the man of

simple faith and holiness, the man who, a stranger in a strange land,

could feel his heart beat for the poor and the oppressed, the man who

braved the wrath of the most terrible of Kings in the cause at once of

ecclesiastical discipline and of moral righteousness. Such are the

truest claims of Anselm to the reverence of later ages, but it must not

be forgotten that, if Bec sent forth in Lanfranc the great reformer of

ecclesiastical discipline, it sent forth also in his successor the

father of the whole dogmatic theology of later times. [Sidenote:

Theobald, 1139–1161.] The third Metropolitan who found his way from Bec

to Canterbury cannot compete with the fame of either of his great

predecessors; yet Theobald lives in history as the first to discern the

native powers of one whose renown presently came to outshine the renown

of Lanfranc and Anselm. The early patron of Thomas the burgher’s son of

London may fairly claim some reflected share of the glory which

surrounds the name of Thomas the Chancellor of England, the Primate and

the Martyr of Canterbury. [Sidenote: Ouche or Saint Evroul.] By the side

of the house which sent forth men like these the name of the other

Norman monastery of which I speak may seem comparatively obscure. Yet

the Abbey of Ouche or Saint Evroul has its own claim on our respect. It

was the spot which beheld the composition of the record from which we

draw our main knowledge of the times following [Sidenote: The home of

Orderic Vital.] those with which we have immediately to deal; it was the

home of the man in whom, perhaps more than in any other, the characters

of Norman and Englishman were inseparably mingled. There the historian

wrote, who, though the son of a French father, the denizen of a Norman

monastery, still clave to England as his country and gloried in his

English birth[634]—the historian who could at once admire the greatness

of the Conqueror and sympathize with the wrongs of his victims, who,

amid all the conventional reviling which Norman loyalty prescribed,

could still see and acknowledge with genuine admiration the virtues and

the greatness even of the perjured Harold.[635] To have merely produced

a chronicler may seem faint praise beside the fame of producing men

whose career has had a lasting influence on the human mind; yet, even

beside the long bead-roll of the worthies of Bec, some thought may well

be extended to the house where Orderic recorded the minutest details of

the lives alike of the saints and of the warriors of his time.

[Sidenote: Early history of Bec.]

The tale of the early days of Bec is one of the most captivating in the

whole range of monastic history or monastic legend. It has a character

of its own. The origin of Bec differs from that of those earlier

monasteries which gradually grew up around the dwelling-place or the

burial-place of some revered Bishop or saintly hermit. It differs again

from the origin of those monasteries of its own age which were the

creation of some one external founder. Or rather it united the two

characters in one. It gradually rose to greatness from very small

beginnings; but, gradual as the process was, it took place within the

lifetime of one man. And that man was at once its founder and its first

ruler. The part of Cuthberht at Lindisfarne, the parts of William and of

Lanfranc at Caen, [Sidenote: Herlwin, founder of Bec, born 994.] were

all united in Herlwin, Knight, Founder, and Abbot. This famous man

passed thirty-seven years of his life as a man of the world, a Norman

gentleman and soldier. His father Ansgod boasted of a descent from the

first [Sidenote: His descent] Danes who occupied Neustria,[636] that is

to say, from the original companions of Rolf as distinguished from the

later settlers under Harold Blaatand.[637] And this descent agrees with

the geographical position of his estates, which lay, though on the left

bank of the Seine, yet on the right bank of the Dive, within the limits

of the original grant of Charles the Simple.[638] On the spindle side he

boasted of a still higher ancestry; his mother Heloise is said, on what

authority it is not very clear, to have been a near [Sidenote: and early

life.] kinswoman of the reigning house of Flanders.[639] He was a vassal

of Count Gilbert of Brionne, the faithful guardian of William, in the

neighbourhood of whose castle his own estates lay. He had proved his

faithfulness to his immediate lord by many services of various kinds,

and he had won the favour, not only of Count Gilbert but of their common

sovereign Duke Robert. On one occasion, an injury received from the

Count had caused him to forsake [Sidenote: His virtues.] his service.

But presently the Count was engaged in a more dangerous warfare with

Ingelram, Count of Ponthieu. Herlwin with his followers came at a

critical moment to Gilbert’s help, and the Count restored all, and more

than all, that he had taken away from one who so well knew how to return

good for evil.[640] At another time Gilbert sent Herlwin to the ducal

court on an errand of which his conscience disapproved;[641] he failed

to execute the unjust commission; in revenge the Count ravaged the lands

of Herlwin and did great damage to their poor occupiers.[642] Herlwin

went to the Count, and made light of his own injury, but prayed that in

any case the losses of the poor might be made good to them. Such a man

was already a saint in practice, if not in profession; and we have no

right to assume that, in this carrying out of Christian principles into

daily life, Herlwin stood alone among the gallant gentlemen of Normandy.

But the misfortune always was that men like Herlwin, who were designed

to leaven the world by their virtues, were in that age open to so many

temptations to forsake the world [Sidenote: He contemplates monastic

retirement.] altogether. Herlwin began to feel himself out of place in

the secular world of Normandy, full, as it was in those days, of strife

and bloodshed, where every man sought to win justice for himself by his

own sword. But he was hardly more out of place in the Norman

ecclesiastical world, where priests not only married freely, but bore

arms and lived the life of heathen Danes,[643] and where even monks used

their fists in a way which would hardly have been becoming in

laymen.[644] The faith of Herlwin nearly failed him when he saw the

disorder of one famous monastery; but he was comforted by accidentally

beholding the devotions of one godly brother, who spent the whole night

in secret prayer. He was thus convinced that the salt of the earth had

not as yet wholly lost its savour.[645]

[Sidenote: Herlwin begins his foundation at Burneville. 1034.]

Herlwin now, at the age of forty, retired from the world, and received

the habit of religion from Herbert, Bishop of Lisieux.[646] Count

Gilbert released him from his service, and seemingly released his lands

from all feudal dependence on himself.[647] Herlwin then began the

foundation of a monastery on his own estate of Burneville near

Brionne.[648] A few devotees soon gathered round him. They lived a hard

life, Herlwin himself joining them in tilling the ground, and in raising

with his own hands the church and the other buildings needed by the

infant brotherhood.[649] The [Sidenote: He becomes Priest and Abbot.

1037.] church, when finished, was consecrated by Bishop Herbert, who at

the same time ordained Herlwin a priest, and gave him the usual

benediction as Abbot of the new society.[650] About the same time he for

the first time learned to read, and that to such good purpose that he

gradually became mighty in the Scriptures, and that without ever

neglecting the daily toil which his austere discipline imposed upon

himself.[651] His mother Heloise also, struck by the example of her son,

gave up her dower-lands, and became a sort of serving sister to the

brotherhood, washing their clothes, and doing for them other menial

services.[652] But after a while it was found that the site of

Burneville was unsuited for a religious establishment; it seems not to

have been well supplied with the two great monastic necessities of wood

[Sidenote: He removes the monastery to Bec.] and water.[653] Herlwin

therefore determined to remove his infant colony to a spot better suited

to his purpose, a spot to which his own name has ever since been

inseparably attached. A wooded hill divides the valley of the Risle,

with the town and castle of Brionne, from another valley watered by a

small stream, or, in the old Teutonic speech of the Normans, a

_beck_.[654] That stream gave its name to the most famous of Norman

religious houses, and to this day the name of Bec is never uttered to

denote that spot without the distinguishing addition of the name of

Herlwin. [Sidenote: Present condition of the spot.] The hills are still

thickly wooded; the beck still flows, through rich meadows and under

trees planted by the water-side, by the walls of what once was the

renowned monastery to which it gave its name. But of the days of Herlwin

no trace remains besides these imperishable works of nature. A tall

tower, of rich and fanciful design, one of the latest works of mediæval

skill, still attracts the traveller from a distance; but of the mighty

minster itself all traces, save a few small fragments, have

perished.[655] The monastic buildings, like those of so many other

monasteries in Normandy and elsewhere in Gaul, had been rebuilt in the

worst days of art, and they are now applied to the degrading purposes of

a receptacle of French cavalry. The gateway also remains, but it is,

like the rest of the buildings, of a date far later than the days of

Herlwin. The truest memorial of that illustrious Abbey is now to be

found in the parish church of the neighbouring village. In that lowly

shelter is still preserved the effigy with which after times had marked

the resting-place of the Founder. Such are all the traces which now

remain of the house which once owned Lanfranc and Anselm as its inmates.

[Sidenote: Herlwin’s government as Abbot.]

In this valley it was that Herlwin finally fixed his infant settlement,

devoting to it his own small possessions in the valley itself, and

obtaining from Count Gilbert a grant of the adjoining wood, one of the

most precious possessions of the lordship of Brionne.[656] There Herlwin

built his first church, and added a wooden cloister, which he afterwards

exchanged for one of stone.[657] There he ruled his house in peace and

wisdom, his knowledge of the outer world, and especially his familiarity

with the laws of Normandy, standing him, we are told, in good

stead.[658] Bec seemed destined to the ordinary lot of a monastic

house—to a short succession of men of primitive zeal and primitive

virtue, followed by a period of worldly prosperity, leading to its usual

results of coldness and laxity. And such doubtless would have been its

fate, the glory of Bec would have been as transitory as that of other

monastic houses, but for the appearance of [Sidenote: Effects of the

admission of Lanfranc.] one illustrious man, who came to be enrolled as

a private member of the brotherhood, and who gave Bec for a while a

special and honourable character with which hardly any other monastery

in Christendom could compare. Abbot [Sidenote: Herlwin’s death. 1078.]

Herlwin survived his first conversion forty-four years;[659] his first

humble church was pulled down and rebuilt, and [Sidenote: The church

consecrated by Lanfranc. 1077.] the new fabric was hallowed in his

presence by one whom he had himself received to the monastic order, one

who had made Bec the light of the world, and who then returned to his

old home in all the greatness of the Patriarch of the nations beyond the

sea.[660] If the first origin of the house was owing to the simple

devotion of its founder and Abbot Herlwin, its lasting fame and

splendour were no less owing to the varied learning and soaring genius

of its renowned Prior Lanfranc.

[Sidenote: Origin and character of Lanfranc.]

The future Primate of England was one of the most illustrious witnesses

to that feature in the Norman character which made the men of that race

welcome strangers from every quarter, and which led to the settlement of

so many eminent men of various nations, both in Normandy itself and in

the conquered lands of Britain and Sicily.[661] In the days of Richard

the Good, monks and priests had flocked into Normandy, even from such

distant lands as Greece and Armenia, and the Norman Duke had kept up a

close intercourse even with the monks of Mount Sinai.[662] The first

great teacher of Bec came from a nearer, though [Sidenote: His birth at

Pavia. 1005.] still a distant, region. Lanfranc, Prior of Bec, Abbot of

Saint Stephen’s, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a native of the Lombard

city of Pavia, and was born of a family which, though perhaps not

technically noble, was at any rate [Sidenote: His learning;] eminent and

honourable.[663] He was full of all the secular learning of the time,

and his range of study seems to have taken in the unusual accomplishment

of a knowledge of Greek.[664] A knowledge of that tongue was then

probably less rare than it became somewhat later, and it is an

accomplishment which might be looked for in Italy, even in the northern

part of the peninsula, more naturally than [Sidenote: his knowledge of

Greek,] in any country north of the Alps. At the time of Lanfranc’s

birth and youth, a large part of Southern Italy was still subject to the

Eastern Emperors, and the use of the Greek language survived, both in

Sicily and on the main land, long after the establishment of the Norman

dynasty. A knowledge of that tongue must therefore have been highly

expedient for those who were likely to have any intercourse, diplomatic

or commercial, with the parts of Italy where it was spoken; still we

cannot suppose that its acquirement formed any part of the ordinary

course of study [Sidenote: and of Civil Law.] of a Lombard scholar. But

the great object of Lanfranc’s study was one specially adapted to the

Imperialist city where he was born, the study of the Civil Law. It was

an hereditary calling in his family; his father Hanbald had been a

lawyer of distinction,[665] and his son more than maintained the credit

of his house. As a pleader, he was eminently successful; the veterans of

the courts could not resist the eloquence and the learning with which he

spoke, and his legal opinions were accepted as decisive by the

magistrates of his native city.[666] His father died while Lanfranc was

still young, and his honours and offices were offered to his son.[667]

Why a man who had such fair prospects at home should have forsaken that

home for the distant and barbarous Normandy, it is not easy to

guess.[668] We are told only that he heard that Normandy was a land

which [Sidenote: He opens a school at Avranches. 1039.] lacked learning,

and that its young Duke was disposed to give encouragement to learned

men.[669] At all events, early in the period of anarchy which formed the

early years of the reign of William, Lanfranc came into Normandy with a

following of scholars, and opened a school in the episcopal city of

Avranches.[670] The cathedral church of that [Sidenote: 1172.] city

beheld in after times the penance by which the greatest successor of

William atoned for his share in the death of the most renowned among the

successors of Lanfranc. But the glory of Avranches has passed away. From

it, alone among the seven episcopal towns of Normandy, minster and

Bishoprick have wholly vanished.[671] But, for those few years of the

life of Lanfranc, Avranches must have been an intellectual centre

without a rival on this side of the Alps. The fame of the great teacher

was spread abroad, and scholars flocked to him from all quarters. But as

yet his learning was wholly secular; his pursuits were peaceful, but he

thought perhaps less of divine things than Herlwin had thought when he

rode after Count Gilbert to battle. At last divine grace touched his

heart; a sudden conversion made him resolve to embrace the monastic

[Sidenote: He becomes a monk at Bec. 1042.] profession. He left

Avranches suddenly, without giving any notice to his friends and

scholars, and set forth to seek for the poorest and most lowly monastery

that could be found, for one which his own fame had never reached.[672]

A happy accident led him to Bec, which then fully answered his

ideal.[673] Received as a monk by Abbot Herlwin, he strove to hide

himself from the world; he even at one time thought of leaving the

monastery, and leading a life of utter solitude in the wilderness.[674]

But the [Sidenote: He becomes Prior. 1045.] Abbot required him on his

obedience to remain, and he was advanced to the dignity of Prior.[675]

He had already proved his fitness to command by his readiness to obey.

His predecessor in the Priorship, an unlearned man, had bidden him, when

reading in the refectory, to shorten the second syllable of _docere_.

The great scholar did as he was bid, deeming holy obedience to be

something higher than the rules of Donatus.[676] But such necessity was

not long laid upon him; such a light as his could not long be hid under

a bushel; his fame was again spread abroad, and, with it, the fame of

the house in which he sojourned. Clerks and scholars, men of noble

birth, even sons of princes, flocked to profit by the instruction of the

learned Prior, and enriched the Abbey with costly gifts for his

sake.[677] The society increased so fast that the buildings were found

to be too small, and the site not healthy enough for so great a

multitude.[678] By the persuasion of Lanfranc, Herlwin was induced to

change his abode once more, and to raise a third house, larger and more

stately than either of its predecessors,[679] but still within the same

valley and [Sidenote: His favour with William.] upon the banks of the

same beck. At last the name of the Prior of Bec reached the ears of Duke

William himself. Lanfranc became his trusted counsellor,[680] and we

shall presently find him acting zealously and successfully on his

sovereign’s behalf, in pursuit of the object which, next to the Crown of

England, was nearest to William’s heart. [Sidenote: He appears at the

Synods of Rome and Vercelli. 1049, 1050.] The fame of Lanfranc soon

spread beyond the bounds of Normandy; he appeared, as we have already

seen, at a succession of synods, as the champion of the received

doctrine of the Church.[681] The theological position of Lanfranc I

leave to be discussed by others;[682] it is enough to say that, summoned

before Pope and Council as a suspected heretic, he came away from Rome

and Vercelli with the reputation of the most profound and most orthodox

doctor of his time.[683]

[Sidenote: The monastery of Ouche or Saint Evroul.]