THE NORMAN CONQUEST.
William pitched his tents among the dead and dying where the English
standards had stood. Next day he could judge of the greatness of his
success, and see that the English army had been well-nigh annihilated.
He vowed to build a great church on the spot, in memory of his victory,
and kept his resolve, as Battle Abbey shows to this day. At first he
wished to cast out his fallen rival's body on the sea-shore, as that of
a perjurer and an enemy of the Church; but better counsels prevailed,
and he finally permitted the canons of Waltham to bury Harold's corpse
in holy ground. It is said that no one was able to identify the king
among the heaps of stripped and mutilated slain except Edith with the
Swan's Neck, a lady whom he had loved and left in earlier days.
[Sidenote: =William elected and crowned in London.=]
William expected to encounter further resistance, and marched slowly
and cautiously on London by a somewhat circuitous route, crossing the
Thames as high up as Wallingford. But he met with no enemy. Dover,
Canterbury, Winchester, and the other cities of the south yielded
themselves up to him. In fact, Wessex had been so hard hit by the
slaughter at Hastings, that scarce a thegn of note survived to organize
resistance. Every grown-up man of Godwine's house had fallen, and of
the whole race there remained but two young children of Harold's.
Meanwhile the Witan met at London to elect a new king. The two sons of
Aelfgar, whose treacherous sloth had ruined England, had hoped that
one of them might be chosen to receive the crown; but their conduct
had been observed and noted, and rather than take Eadwine or Morcar as
lord, the Witan chose the last heir of the house of Aelfred, the boy
Eadgar, great-nephew to St. Edward. This choice was hopelessly bad when
a victorious enemy was thundering at the gates. Eadwine and Morcar
disbanded their levies, and went home in wrath to their earldoms. The
south could raise no second army to replace that which had fallen at
Hastings, and when William pressed on toward London the followers
of Eadgar gave up the contest. As he lay at Berkhamstead, the chief
men of London and Ealdred, the Archbishop of York, came out to him,
and offered to take him as lord and master. So he entered the city,
and there was crowned on Christmas Day 1066, after he had been duly
elected in the old English fashion. A strange accident attended the
coronation: when the Archbishop Ealdred proposed William's name to the
assembly, and the loud shout of assent was given, the Norman soldiery
without thought that a riot was beginning, and cut down some of the
spectators and fired some houses before they discovered their mistake.
So William's reign began, as it was to continue, in blood and fire.
[Sidenote: =Confiscations in south-east England.=]
Eadwine and Morcar and the rest of the English nobles soon did homage
to William; but the realm was only half subdued, for, save in the
south-east, where the whole manhood of the land had been cut off at
Hastings, the English had submitted more for want of leaders and union
than because they regarded themselves as conquered. It remained to be
seen how the new king would deal with his realm, whether he would make
himself well loved by his subjects, as Cnut had done, or whether he
would become a tyrant and oppressor. William, though stern and cruel,
was a man politic and just according to his lights. He wished to govern
England in law and order, and not to maltreat the natives. But he was
in an unfortunate position. He knew nothing of the customs and manners
of the English, and could not understand a word of their language.
Moreover, he could not, like Cnut, send away his foreign army, and rely
on the loyalty of the people of the land. For his army was a rabble of
mercenaries drawn from many realms outside his own duchy, and he had
promised them land and sustenance in England when they enlisted beneath
his banner. Accordingly, he had to begin by declaring the estates
of all who had fought at Hastings, from Harold the king down to the
smallest freeholder, as forfeited to the crown. This put five-sixths of
the countryside in Wessex, Essex, Kent, and East Anglia into the king's
hands. These vast tracts of land were distributed among the Norman,
French, Flemish, and Breton soldiery, in greater and smaller shares, to
be held by feudal tenure of knight-service from the king's hands.
[Sidenote: =Other freeholders become tenants of the crown.=]
In the rest of England, those of the native landowners who had not
fought at Hastings were allowed to "buy back their lands." That is,
they paid William a fine, made him a formal surrender of their estates,
and then received them back from him under the new feudal obligations,
becoming _tenants-in-chief_ of the crown; agreeing to hold their manors
directly from the king as his personal dependents and vassals. So there
was no longer any land in England held by the old German freehold
tenure, where every man was the sole proprietor of his own soil.
[Sidenote: =Risings in the west and north.=]
If things had stopped here, northern England would have remained in the
hands of the old landholders, while southern England passed away to
Norman lords. But the rapacious followers of the Conqueror were soon
to get foot in the north also. William went back to Normandy in 1067,
leaving his brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, regent in his stead. The
moment that he was gone, the new settlers began to treat the English
with a contempt and cruelty which they had not dared to show in their
master's presence, and Odo rather encouraged than rebuked them. There
followed the natural result, a widespread rising in those parts of
England which had not yet felt the Norman sword. Unfortunately for
themselves, the English rose with no general plan, and with no unity
of purpose, every district fighting for its own hand. The western
counties sent for the two sons of Harold, who came to Exeter, and
were there saluted as hereditary chiefs of Wessex. But in Northumbria
the insurgents proclaimed the Etheling Eadgar as king; and in Mercia
there arose a thegn, Eadric the Wild, who was descended from the
wicked Eadric Streona, and wished to reassert hereditary claims to his
ancestor's earldom.
[Sidenote: =The rebels subdued.--Further confiscations.=]
William immediately returned to England, and attacked the rebels. They
gave each other no aid; each district was subdued without receiving
any succour from its neighbour. William first marched against Exeter,
took it after a long siege, and drove the young sons of Harold over
sea to Ireland. Then he moved into Mercia, and chased Eadric the Wild
into Wales, clearing Gloucestershire and Worcestershire of insurgents.
The North made a perfunctory submission, and a Norman earl, Robert de
Comines, was set over it. These abortive insurrections led to much
confiscation of landed property in the west and north, which was at
once portioned out among William's military retainers (1068).
[Sidenote: =Second rising in Northumbria.--Yorkshire desolated.=]
But there was hard fighting to follow. In the spring of 1069 a second
and more serious rising broke out in Northumbria. The insurgents took
Durham, slew Earl Robert, and sent to ask the aid of the Kings of
Scotland and Denmark. They were headed by Waltheof, Earl of Northampton
and Huntingdon, the son of that Siward who had vanquished Macbeth. Both
the monarchs who had been asked for aid consented to join the rebels.
Malcolm Canmore of Scotland had married Margaret, the sister of the
Etheling Eadgar, and thought himself bound to aid his brother-in-law.
Swegen of Denmark, on the other hand, had hopes of the English crown,
to which, as Cnut's successor, he thought he might lay some claim.
Waltheof and his army ere long took York, and killed or captured the
whole Norman garrison. But after this success the allies drifted apart;
Swegen did not care to make Eadgar King of England, and Eadgar's party
were angry with the Danes for ravaging and plundering on their own
account. When William came up against York with a great host, the Danes
took to their ships and left the English unaided. William was too
strong for the Northumbrians; he routed them, retook York, and then
set to work to punish the country for its twice repeated rebellion.
He harried the whole of the fertile Yorkshire plain, from the Humber
to the Tees, with fire and sword. The entire population was slain,
starved, or driven away. Many fled to Scotland and settled there;
others took to the woods and lived like savages. Several years passed
before any one ventured forth again to till the wasted lands, and when
the great _Domesday Book_ was compiled--nearly twenty years after--it
recorded that Yorkshire was still an almost unpeopled wilderness. While
William was venting his wrath on the unfortunate Northumbrians, the
Danish king, instead of aiding the insurgents, sailed up the Nen to
Peterborough, and sacked its great abbey, the pride of the Fenland;
this act completely ruined the already failing cause of the English,
who would not trust the Danes any longer.
[Sidenote: =Final subjugation of the west--Hereward the Wake.=]
Meanwhile William marched at mid-winter through the snow-covered
heights of the Peakland, from York to Chester, to crush out the last
smouldering fires of the insurrection on the North-Welsh border.
Cheshire and Shropshire bowed before him, and there was then nothing
left of the English hosts, save a few scattered bands of fugitives.
Waltheof, the leader of the rebellion, submitted to the king, and, to
the surprise of all men, was pardoned and restored to his earldom.
The Danes returned to Denmark, bribed by William to depart (1070).
But the last remnants of the English gathered themselves together in
the Fenland under Hereward the Wake, a Lincolnshire man, the most
active and undaunted warrior of his day, Hereward fortified himself
in an entrenched camp on the Isle of Ely, in the heart of the Fens,
and defied the king to reduce him. For more than a year he held his
own, and beat off every attack, though William brought up thousands of
men and built vast causeways across the marshes in order to approach
Hereward's camp of refuge.
[Sidenote: =End of Eadwine and Morcar.--Hereward pardoned.=]
It was at this moment, when the Isle of Ely was the only spot in
England that was not in William's hands, that the foolish and selfish
earls Eadwine and Morcar thought proper to rebel and take arms against
the Normans. They had long lost all influence, even among their own
followers, and were crushed with ease. Eadwine fell in a skirmish;
Morcar escaped almost alone to Hereward's camp. Soon afterwards that
stronghold fell, betrayed to William by the monks of Ely (1071).
Hereward escaped, but most of his followers were captured. The king
blinded or mutilated many of them, and put Morcar in close prison for
the rest of his life. But he offered pardon to Hereward, as he had to
Waltheof, for he loved an open foe. The "Last of the English" accepted
his terms, was given some estates in Warwickshire, and is found serving
with William's army in France a year later.
The English never rose again; their spirit was crushed; ruined by their
own disunion and by the selfishness of their leaders, they felt unable
to cope any longer with the stern King William. Any trouble that he
met in his later years was not due to native rebellions, but to the
turbulence and disloyalty of his own Norman followers. Those of the
English who could not bear the yoke patiently, fled to foreign lands,
many to the court of Scotland, where Queen Margaret, the sister of the
Etheling Eadgar, made them welcome; some even as far as Constantinople,
to enlist in the "Varangian guard" of the Eastern emperor.
[Sidenote: =The monarchy feudalized.--Villeinage.=]
In the fifteen years that followed, William recast the whole fabric
of the English society and constitution, changing the realm into a
feudal monarchy of the continental type. Even before the Conquest the
tendency of the day had been towards feudalism, as is shown by the
excessive predominance of the great earls in the days of Aethelred
the Ill-counselled and Edward the Confessor, and by the decreasing
importance of the smaller freeholders. As early as Eadgar's time a law
bade all men below the rank of thegn to "find themselves a lord, who
should be responsible for them;" that is, to commend themselves to
one of their greater neighbours by a tie of personal homage. But the
old-English tie of vassalage, though it placed the small freeholders in
personal dependence on the thegns, left them their land as their own,
and allowed a man to transfer his allegiance from one lord to another.
When, however, the English thegnhood had fallen on Senlac Hill, or had
lost their manors for joining in the rebellion of 1069, the condition
of their former dependents was much changed for the worse. The Norman
knights, who replaced the thegns, knew only the continental form of
feudal tenure, where the land, as well as the personal obedience of
the vassal, was deemed to belong to the lord. So the English _ceorls_,
who had been the owners of their own land, though they did homage to
some thegn for their persons, were reduced to the lower condition of
_villeinage_--that is, they were regarded as tilling the lord's land as
tenants, and receiving it from him, in return for a rent in service or
in money due to him. And instead of the land being considered to belong
to the farmer, the farmer was now considered to belong to the land;
that is, he was bound to remain on it and till it, unless his lord gave
him permission to depart, being _glebae ascriptus_, bound to the soil,
though he could not, on the other hand, be dispossessed of his farm,
or sold away like a slave. The condition of the _villein_ was at its
very worst in William's reign, because the burden was newly imposed,
and because the Norman masters, who had just taken possession of the
English manors, were foreigners who did not comprehend a word of their
tenants' speech, or understand their customs and habits. They felt
nothing but contempt for the conquered race, whom they regarded as mere
barbarians; and hard as was the letter of the feudal law, they made it
worse by adding insult to mere oppression. They crushed their vassals
by incessant _tallages_, or demands for money over and above the rent
in money or service that was due, and allowed their Norman stewards and
underlings to maltreat the peasantry as much as they chose. It should
be remembered also that, evil though the plight of the villein might
be, there were others even more unhappy than he, since there were many
among the peasantry who were actually slaves, and could be bought and
sold like cattle. These were the class who represented the original
_theows_ or slaves of the old English social system.
[Sidenote: =Predominance of the crown.=]
Feudalism, then, so far as it meant the complete subjection of the
peasant, both in body and in land, to the lord of his manor, was
perfected in England by the Norman conquest. But there was another
aspect of the feudal system, as it existed on the continent, which
England was fortunate enough to escape. The crowning misery of the
other lands of Western Europe was that the king's power in them had
grown so weak, that he could not protect his subjects against the earls
and barons who were their immediate lords. In France, for example, the
king could not exercise the simplest royal rights in the land of his
greater vassals, such as the Duke of Normandy or the Count of Anjou.
All regal functions, from the coining of money to the holding of
courts of justice, had passed to the great vassals. Even when a count
or duke rebelled and declared war against the king, his liegemen were
considered bound to follow their master and take part in his treason.
Now William was determined that this abuse should never take root in
England. He was careful not to allow any of his subjects to grow too
strong; in distributing the lands of England he invariably scattered
the possessions of each of his followers, so that no one man had any
great district entirely in his hands. He gave his favourites land in
eight or ten different counties, but in each they only possessed a
fraction of the whole. There were only three exceptions to this rule.
He created "palatine earls" in Cheshire, Shropshire, and Durham, who
had the whole shire in their hands, and were allowed to hold their own
courts of justice and raise the taxation of the district, like the
counts of the continent. These exceptional grants were made because
they were frontier shires, and the earls were intended to be bulwarks
against the king's enemies--Chester and Shropshire against the Welsh,
and Durham against the Scots.
[Sidenote: =The sheriffs.=]
In the rest of England the king kept the local government entirely
in his own hands, using the sheriffs (shire-reeves), who had existed
since the early days of the kings of Wessex, as his deputies. It was
the sheriff who raised the taxes, led the military levy of the shire
to war, and presided in the law courts of the district. The sheriffs,
whom the king nominated as men whom he could completely trust, were the
chief check on the earls and barons. Their office was not hereditary;
they were purely dependent on the king, and he displaced them at his
pleasure. By their means, William kept the government of England
entirely in his own hands, and never allowed his greater vassals to
trench upon his royal rights.
[Sidenote: =Doctrine of direct allegiance to the crown.=]
William also enunciated a most important doctrine, which clashed with
the continental theory of feudalism. He insisted that every man's duty
to the king outweighed that to his immediate feudal suzerain. If any
lord opposed the king and bade his vassals follow him, the vassals
would be committing high treason if they consented to do so. Their
allegiance to the crown was more binding than that which they owed to
their local baron or earl.
Although, then, the Norman conquest turned England into a feudal
hierarchy, where the villein did homage to the knight, the knight to
the earl, the earl to the king, yet the strength of the royal power
gained rather than lost by the change. William was far more the master
of his barons than was St. Edward of his great earls like Godwine or
Siward. And this was not merely owing to the fact that William was
a strong and Edward a weak man, but much more to the new political
arrangements of the realm. William never allowed an earl to rule more
than one shire, while Godwine or Leofric had ruled six or seven.
William's sheriffs were a firm check on the local magnates, while
Edward's had been no more than the king's local bailiffs. Moreover,
there were many counties where William made no earl at all, and where
his sheriff was therefore the sole representative of authority.
[Sidenote: =The Great Council.=]
The kingly power, too, was as much strengthened in the central as in
the local government. The Saxon Witan had represented the nation as
opposed to the king: it had an existence independent of him, and we
have even seen it depose kings. The Norman "Great Council," on the
other hand, which superseded the Witan,[8] was simply the assembly of
the king's vassals called up by him to give him advice. Though the
class of persons who were summoned to it was much the same as those
who had appeared at the Witan--bishops, earls, and so forth--yet they
now came, not as "the wise men of England," but as the king's personal
vassals, his "tenants-in-chief." All who held land directly from the
crown might appear if they chose, but as a matter of fact it was only
the greater men who came; the knights and other small freeholders would
not as a rule visit an assembly where their importance was small and
their advice was not asked.
[Sidenote: =William and the Church.--Ecclesiastical Courts.=]
William's hand was felt almost as much by the Church as by the State.
He began by clearing away, one after another, all the English bishops;
Wulfstan of Worcester, a simple old man of very holy life, was ere
long the sole survivor of the old hierarchy. Their places were filled
by Normans and other foreigners, the primatial seat of Canterbury
being placed in the hands of Lanfranc of Pavia, a learned Italian
monk who had long been a royal chaplain, and had afterwards been
made Abbot of Bec; he was always the best and most merciful of the
king's counsellors. William and Lanfranc brought England into closer
touch with the continental Church than had been known in earlier
days. This was but natural when we remember that it was with the
Pope's blessing and under his consecrated banner that the land had
been conquered. The new Norman bishops continued Dunstan's old policy
of favouring the monks at the expense of the secular clergy, and of
establishing everywhere strict rules of clerical discipline. Their
stern asceticism was not without its use, for the English clergy had
of late grown somewhat lax in life, and unspiritual and worldly in
their aims. It was with Lanfranc's aid that William took a step in the
organization of the Church that was destined to be a sore trouble to
his successors in later days. Hitherto offences against the law of the
Church had been tried in the secular courts, and this was not felt
to be a grievance by the clergy, because the bishops and abbots both
sat in the Witan and attended the meetings of the local shire courts,
where such offences--bigamy, for example, or perjury, or witchcraft,
or heresy--were tried. But William and Lanfranc now gave the bishops
separate Church courts of their own, and withdrew the inquiry into
all ecclesiastical cases from the king's court. Though William did
not grasp the fact, he was thus erecting an institution which might
easily turn against the royal power, as the ecclesiastical judges in
their new courts were not under the control of the crown, and had no
reason to consult the king's interests. But in William's own time the
Church-courts gave no trouble, for they had not yet learnt their power,
and the bishops dreaded the king's arm too much to offend him. For
William was no slave of the Church; when Pope Gregory VII. bade him do
homage to the papacy for his English crown, because he had won England
under the papal blessing, he sturdily refused. He announced also that
he would outlaw any cleric who carried appeals or complaints to Rome
without his permission, and he forbade the clergy to excommunicate any
one of his knights for any ecclesiastical offence, unless the royal
permission were first obtained.
[Sidenote: =Rebellion of Earls of Norfolk and Hereford.--Execution of
Waltheof.=]
We have already mentioned the fact that in the last fifteen years of
his reign William had little or no trouble with his English subjects.
But his life was far from being an easy one; he had both foreign
enemies to meet and a turbulent baronage to keep down. Many of the
new earls and barons were not born subjects of William, but Flemings,
French, or Bretons, who looked upon him as merely the chief partner
in their common enterprise of the conquest of England; even among
the Normans themselves many were turbulent and disloyal. Within ten
years of the Conquest, the king had to take arms against a rebellion
of some of his own followers. Ralf, Earl of Norfolk, and Roger, Earl
of Hereford, took counsel against him, and tried to enlist in their
plot Waltheof, the last surviving English Earl. "Let one of us be
king, and the two others great dukes, and so rule all England," was
their suggestion to him, when they had gathered all their friends
together under the pretence of Earl Ralf's marriage feast. Waltheof
refused to join the rebellion, but thought himself in honour bound not
to disclose the conspiracy to the king. When the two earls took arms
they soon found that William was too strong for them. Ralf fled over
sea; Roger was taken and imprisoned for life. Of their followers, some
were blinded and some banished. But the hardest measure was dealt out
to Earl Waltheof, whose only crime had been his silence. William was
anxious to get rid of the last great English territorial magnate; he
tried Waltheof for treason before the Great Council, and, when he was
condemned, had him at once executed at Winchester (1076). His earldoms
of Northampton and Huntingdon were, however, allowed to pass to his
daughter, who married a Norman, Simon of St. Liz.
[Sidenote: =Rebellion of William's son Robert.=]
Some few years after the abortive rising of Ralf and Roger, the king
found worse enemies in his own household. His eldest son and heir,
Robert, began to importune him to grant him some of his lands to rule,
and begged for the duchy of Normandy. But William was wroth, and drove
him away with words of sarcastic reproof. The headstrong young man
fled from his father's court and took refuge with Philip, the French
king, William's nominal suzerain. Supported by money and men from
France, Robert made war upon his father, and defeated him at the fight
of Gerberoi (1079). Both father and son rode in the forefront of the
battle. They met without knowing each other, and William was unhorsed
and wounded by his son's lance. Only the courage of an English thegn,
Tokig of Wallingford, who gave his horse to his fallen master, and
received a mortal wound while helping him to make off, saved William
from death. It must be added that Robert was deeply moved when he
learnt how near he had been to slaying his own father, and then he
immediately after sought pardon, and received it. But he had lost the
first place in the king's heart, which was given to his second son
William, whose fidelity was always unshaken. Robert was not the only
kinsman of the Conqueror who justly incurred his wrath. His brother
Bishop Odo angered him sorely by his cruel and oppressive treatment
of Northumbria, and still more by raising a private army to make war
over-seas; William seized him and kept him shut up in prison as long as
he lived.
[Sidenote: =Threatened Danish invasion.=]
Disputes with foreign powers also arose to vex William's later years.
In 1084, Cnut, King of Denmark, threatened to invade the island, and
such a heavy _Danegelt_ was raised to pay the mercenary army which the
king levied against him, that it is said that no such grievous tax had
ever before been raised in England. Yet Cnut never came, being slain by
his own people ere he sailed. Less threatening, but more perpetually
troublesome than the danger of a Danish invasion, were William's
broils with Philip of France, who even in time of peace was always
stirring up strife. But Philip, though nominally ruler of all France,
was practically too weak to cope with William, since his authority was
quietly disregarded by most of the counts and dukes who owned him as
liege lord.
[Sidenote: =Domesday Book.=]
It was probably the difficulty that had been found in raising men and
money to resist the expected Danish invasion of 1084, that led William
to order the compilation of the celebrated _Domesday Book_ in 1085.
This great statistical account of the condition of England was drawn up
by commissioners sent down into every shire to make inquiry into its
resources, population, and ownership. Therein was set down the name
of every landholder, with the valuation of his manors, and an account
of the service and money due from him to the king. It did not give
merely a rent-roll of the estates, but a complete enumeration of the
population, divided up by status into tenants-in-chief of the crown,
sub-tenants who held under these greater landowners, burgesses of
towns, free "_sokmen_," villeins, and serfs of lower degrees. Under
each manor was given not only the name of its present holder and its
actual value, but also a notice of its proprietor in the time of King
Edward the Confessor, and of its value at Edward's death. This enables
us to form an exact estimate of the change in the ownership of the
lands of England brought about by the Conquest. We see that of the
great English earls and magnates not a single one survived; all their
lands had been confiscated and given away at one time or another. Of
the thegns of lower degree some still retained their land, and had
become the king's tenants-in-chief; many had sunk into sub-tenants of a
Norman baron, instead of holding their estate directly from the crown;
but still more had lost their heritage altogether. In some counties,
especially in the south-east, where the whole thegnhood had fallen at
Hastings, hardly a single English proprietor survived. In others, such
for example as Wiltshire or Nottingham, a large proportion of the old
owners remained; but, on the whole, we gather that three-quarters of
the acreage of England must have changed masters between 1066 and 1085.
We discover also that while some parts of England had suffered little
in material prosperity from the troublous times of the Conquest, others
had been completely ruined. Yorkshire shows the worst record, a result
of William's cruel harrying of the land in 1070; manor after manor is
recorded as "waste," and the whole county shows a population less by
far than that of the small shire of Berks.
[Sidenote: =The great Moot of Salisbury.=]
Having ascertained by the completion of Domesday Book the exact names,
status, and obligations of all the landholders of England, William
used his knowledge to bid them all come to the Great Moot of Salisbury
in 1086, where every landed proprietor, whether tenant-in-chief or
sub-tenant, did personal homage to the king, and swore to follow him in
all wars, even against his own feudal superior if need should so arise.
[Sidenote: =Death of William.=]
Two years after the compilation of the Domesday survey, and one year
after the Great Oath of Salisbury, the troubled and busy reign of
William came to an end. The king died, as he had lived, amid the alarms
of war. He was always at odds with his suzerain, the King of France,
since Philip had done him the evil turn of encouraging the rebellion
of his son Robert. In 1087, William was lying ill at Rouen, when
the report of a coarse jest that Philip had made on his increasing
corpulence raised him in wrath from his sick-bed. He headed in person a
raid into France, and sacked the town of Mantes, but while he watched
his men burn the place, the king came to deadly harm. His horse,
singed by a blazing beam, reared and plunged so that William received
severe internal injuries from being thrown against the high pommel of
his saddle. He was borne back to Rouen, and died there, deserted by
well-nigh all his knights and attendants, who had rushed off in haste
when they saw his death draw near. Even his burial was unseemly: when
his corpse was borne to the abbey at Caen, which he had founded, a
certain knight withstood the funeral procession, crying that the ground
where the abbey stood had been forcibly taken from him by the king. Nor
would he depart till the estimated value of the land had been paid over
to him.
Thus ended King William, a man prudent, untiring, and brave, and one
who was pious and just according to his own lights, for he governed
Church and State as one who deemed that he had an account to render
for his deeds. But he was so unscrupulous in his ambition, so ruthless
in sweeping away all who stood in his path, so much a stranger to pity
and mercy, that he was feared rather than loved by his subjects, Norman
as well as English. No man could pardon such acts as his harrying of
Yorkshire, or forget his cruel forest laws, which inflicted death or
mutilation on all who interfered with his royal pleasure of the chase.
"He loved the tall deer as if he was their father," it was said, and
ill did it fare with the unhappy subject who came between him and the
favoured beasts. England has had many kings who were worse men than
William the Bastard, but never one who brought her more sorrow, from
the moment that he set foot on the shore of Sussex down to the day of
his death.
THE HOUSE OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR,
1066-1087.
|
+------------+-----------+--+--------------------+
| | | |
Robert, WILLIAM II., HENRY I., = Matilda of Adela = Stephen of
Duke of 1087-1100. 1100-1135. | Scotland. | Blois.
Normandy. | |
| | |
William | |
Clito. | |
+--------+------------------+ +---+-----+
| | | |
William. Matilda = (1) Henry V., Emperor. STEPHEN, Henry,
| (2) Geoffrey of Anjou. 1135-1154. Bishop of
| | Winchester.
| +-----+----+
Eleanor of = HENRY II., | |
Aquitaine. | 1154-1189. Eustace. William.
|
+-------------+-----------+-------------------------+
| | | |
Henry the RICHARD I., Geoffrey = Constance of JOHN,
Younger. 1189-1199. | Brittany. 1199-1216.
| |
Arthur of Brittany. |
|
+--------------------+-------+
| |
HENRY III., Richard of Cornwall,
1216-1272. King of the Romans.
| |
EDWARD I. Henry of Cornwall.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] The native English writers, for some time after the Conquest,
continued to call it the Witan, merely because they had as yet found no
other name for it.