Lord Frederic Hamilton - "The Days Before Yesterday"

Hugo DeVries - "Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation"

Honore de Balzac - "REPERTORY OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE, PART II, L Z"

George Gissing - "The Nether World"

William the Conqueror

E >> E. A. Freeman >> William the Conqueror



Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




William the Conqueror




Contents

Introduction
The Early Years of William
William's First Visit to England
The Reign of William in Normandy
Harold's Oat to William
The Negotiations of Duke William
William's Invasion of England
The Conquest of England
The Settlement of England
The Revolts against William
The Last Years of William



CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION



The history of England, like the land and its people, has been
specially insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences
from without. No land has owed more than England to the personal
action of men not of native birth. Britain was truly called
another world, in opposition to the world of the European mainland,
the world of Rome. In every age the history of Britain is the
history of an island, of an island great enough to form a world of
itself. In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain, we are
speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and Teutons
parted from their kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under the
common influences of an island world. The land has seen several
settlements from outside, but the settlers have always been brought
under the spell of their insular position. Whenever settlement has
not meant displacement, the new comers have been assimilated by the
existing people of the land. When it has meant displacement, they
have still become islanders, marked off from those whom they left
behind by characteristics which were the direct result of
settlement in an island world.

The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England,
has been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated
from without. But each of those elements has done somewhat to
modify the mass into which it was absorbed. The English land and
nation are not as they might have been if they had never in later
times absorbed the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the German
Palatine. Still less are they as they might have been, if they had
not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements of the Dane and
the Norman. Both were assimilated; but both modified the character
and destiny of the people into whose substance they were absorbed.
The conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully lost in
the greater mass of the English people; still we can never be as if
the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the
signs of his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with
them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and
Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a
conqueror. But that those signs of his presence hold the place
which they do hold in our mixed political being, that, badges of
conquest as they are, no one feels them to be badges of conquest--
all this comes of the fact that, if the Norman came as a conqueror,
he came as a conqueror of a special, perhaps almost of an unique
kind. The Norman Conquest of England has, in its nature and in its
results, no exact parallel in history. And that it has no exact
parallel in history is largely owing to the character and position
of the man who wrought it. That the history of England for the
last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come
of the personal character of a single man. That we are what we are
to this day largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when
our national destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single
man, and that that man was William, surnamed at different stages of
his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great.

With perfect fitness then does William the Norman, William the
Norman Conqueror of England, take his place in a series of English
statesmen. That so it should be is characteristic of English
history. Our history has been largely wrought for us by men who
have come in from without, sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as
the opposite of conquerors; but in whatever character they came,
they had to put on the character of Englishmen, and to make their
work an English work. From whatever land they came, on whatever
mission they came, as statesmen they were English. William, the
greatest of his class, is still but a member of a class. Along
with him we must reckon a crowd of kings, bishops, and high
officials in many ages of our history. Theodore of Tarsus and Cnut
of Denmark, Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta, Randolf Flambard
and Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Anjou and Simon of Montfort, are
all written on a list of which William is but the foremost. The
largest number come in William's own generation and in the
generations just before and after it. But the breed of England's
adopted children and rulers never died out. The name of William
the Deliverer stands, if not beside that of his namesake the
Conqueror, yet surely alongside of the lawgiver from Anjou. And we
count among the later worthies of England not a few men sprung from
other lands, who did and are doing their work among us, and who, as
statesmen at least, must count as English. As we look along the
whole line, even among the conquering kings and their immediate
instruments, their work never takes the shape of the rooting up of
the earlier institutions of the land. Those institutions are
modified, sometimes silently by the mere growth of events,
sometimes formally and of set purpose. Old institutions get new
names; new institutions are set up alongside of them. But the old
ones are never swept away; they sometimes die out; they are never
abolished. This comes largely of the absorbing and assimilating
power of the island world. But it comes no less of personal
character and personal circumstances, and pre-eminently of the
personal character of the Norman Conqueror and of the circumstances
in which he found himself.


Our special business now is with the personal acts and character of
William, and above all with his acts and character as an English
statesman. But the English reign of William followed on his
earlier Norman reign, and its character was largely the result of
his earlier Norman reign. A man of the highest natural gifts, he
had gone through such a schooling from his childhood upwards as
falls to the lot of few princes. Before he undertook the conquest
of England, he had in some sort to work the conquest of Normandy.
Of the ordinary work of a sovereign in a warlike age, the defence
of his own land, the annexation of other lands, William had his
full share. With the land of his overlord he had dealings of the
most opposite kinds. He had to call in the help of the French king
to put down rebellion in the Norman duchy, and he had to drive back
more than one invasion of the French king at the head of an united
Norman people. He added Domfront and Maine to his dominions, and
the conquest of Maine, the work as much of statesmanship as of
warfare, was the rehearsal of the conquest of England. There,
under circumstances strangely like those of England, he learned his
trade as conqueror, he learned to practise on a narrower field the
same arts which he afterwards practised on a wider. But after all,
William's own duchy was his special school; it was his life in his
own duchy which specially helped to make him what he was.
Surrounded by trials and difficulties almost from his cradle, he
early learned the art of enduring trials and overcoming
difficulties; he learned how to deal with men; he learned when to
smite and when to spare; and it is not a little to his honour that,
in the long course of such a reign as his, he almost always showed
himself far more ready to spare than to smite.

Before then we can look at William as an English statesman, we must
first look on him in the land in which he learned the art of
statesmanship. We must see how one who started with all the
disadvantages which are implied in his earlier surname of the
Bastard came to win and to deserve his later surnames of the
Conqueror and the Great.



CHAPTER II--THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM--A.D. 1028-1051



If William's early reign in Normandy was his time of schooling for
his later reign in England, his school was a stern one, and his
schooling began early. His nominal reign began at the age of seven
years, and his personal influence on events began long before he
had reached the usual years of discretion. And the events of his
minority might well harden him, while they could not corrupt him in
the way in which so many princes have been corrupted. His whole
position, political and personal, could not fail to have its effect
in forming the man. He was Duke of the Normans, sixth in
succession from Rolf, the founder of the Norman state. At the time
of his accession, rather more than a hundred and ten years had
passed since plunderers, occasionally settlers, from Scandinavia,
had changed into acknowledged members of the Western or Karolingian
kingdom. The Northmen, changed, name and thing, into NORMANS, were
now in all things members of the Christian and French-speaking
world. But French as the Normans of William's day had become,
their relation to the kings and people of France was not a friendly
one. At the time of the settlement of Rolf, the western kingdom of
the Franks had not yet finally passed to the Duces Francorum at
Paris; Rolf became the man of the Karolingian king at Laon. France
and Normandy were two great duchies, each owning a precarious
supremacy in the king of the West-Franks. On the one hand,
Normandy had been called into being by a frightful dismemberment of
the French duchy, from which the original Norman settlement had
been cut off. France had lost in Rouen one of her greatest cities,
and she was cut off from the sea and from the lower course of her
own river. On the other hand, the French and the Norman dukes had
found their interest in a close alliance; Norman support had done
much to transfer the crown from Laon to Paris, and to make the Dux
Francorum and the Rex Francorum the same person. It was the
adoption of the French speech and manners by the Normans, and their
steady alliance with the French dukes, which finally determined
that the ruling element in Gaul should be Romance and not Teutonic,
and that, of its Romance elements, it should be French and not
Aquitanian. If the creation of Normandy had done much to weaken
France as a duchy, it had done not a little towards the making of
France as a kingdom. Laon and its crown, the undefined influence
that went with the crown, the prospect of future advance to the
south, had been bought by the loss of Rouen and of the mouth of the
Seine.

There was much therefore at the time of William's accession to keep
the French kings and the Norman dukes on friendly terms. The old
alliance had been strengthened by recent good offices. The
reigning king, Henry the First, owed his crown to the help of
William's father Robert. On the other hand, the original ground of
the alliance, mutual support against the Karolingian king, had
passed away. A King of the French reigning at Paris was more
likely to remember what the Normans had cost him as duke than what
they had done for him as king. And the alliance was only an
alliance of princes. The mutual dislike between the people of the
two countries was strong. The Normans had learned French ways, but
French and Normans had not become countrymen. And, as the fame of
Normandy grew, jealousy was doubtless mingled with dislike.
William, in short, inherited a very doubtful and dangerous state of
relations towards the king who was at once his chief neighbour and
his overlord.

More doubtful and dangerous still were the relations which the
young duke inherited towards the people of his own duchy and the
kinsfolk of his own house. William was not as yet the Great or the
Conqueror, but he was the Bastard from the beginning. There was
then no generally received doctrine as to the succession to
kingdoms and duchies. Everywhere a single kingly or princely house
supplied, as a rule, candidates for the succession. Everywhere,
even where the elective doctrine was strong, a full-grown son was
always likely to succeed his father. The growth of feudal notions
too had greatly strengthened the hereditary principle. Still no
rule had anywhere been laid down for cases where the late prince
had not left a full-grown son. The question as to legitimate birth
was equally unsettled. Irregular unions of all kinds, though
condemned by the Church, were tolerated in practice, and were
nowhere more common than among the Norman dukes. In truth the
feeling of the kingliness of the stock, the doctrine that the king
should be the son of a king, is better satisfied by the succession
of the late king's bastard son than by sending for some distant
kinsman, claiming perhaps only through females. Still bastardy, if
it was often convenient to forget it, could always be turned
against a man. The succession of a bastard was never likely to be
quite undisputed or his reign to be quite undisturbed.

Now William succeeded to his duchy under the double disadvantage of
being at once bastard and minor. He was born at Falaise in 1027 or
1028, being the son of Robert, afterwards duke, but then only Count
of Hiesmois, by Herleva, commonly called Arletta, the daughter of
Fulbert the tanner. There was no pretence of marriage between his
parents; yet his father, when he designed William to succeed him,
might have made him legitimate, as some of his predecessors had
been made, by a marriage with his mother. In 1028 Robert succeeded
his brother Richard in the duchy. In 1034 or 1035 he determined to
go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He called on his barons to swear
allegiance to his bastard of seven years old as his successor in
case he never came back. Their wise counsel to stay at home, to
look after his dominions and to raise up lawful heirs, was
unheeded. Robert carried his point. The succession of young
William was accepted by the Norman nobles, and was confirmed by the
overlord Henry King of the French. The arrangement soon took
effect. Robert died on his way back before the year 1035 was out,
and his son began, in name at least, his reign of fifty-two years
over the Norman duchy.

The succession of one who was at once bastard and minor could
happen only when no one else had a distinctly better claim William
could never have held his ground for a moment against a brother of
his father of full age and undoubted legitimacy. But among the
living descendants of former dukes some were themselves of doubtful
legitimacy, some were shut out by their profession as churchmen,
some claimed only through females. Robert had indeed two half-
brothers, but they were young and their legitimacy was disputed; he
had an uncle, Robert Archbishop of Rouen, who had been legitimated
by the later marriage of his parents. The rival who in the end
gave William most trouble was his cousin Guy of Burgundy, son of a
daughter of his grandfather Richard the Good. Though William's
succession was not liked, no one of these candidates was generally
preferred to him. He therefore succeeded; but the first twelve
years of his reign were spent in the revolts and conspiracies of
unruly nobles, who hated the young duke as the one representative
of law and order, and who were not eager to set any one in his
place who might be better able to enforce them.

Nobility, so variously defined in different lands, in Normandy took
in two classes of men. All were noble who had any kindred or
affinity, legitimate or otherwise, with the ducal house. The
natural children of Richard the Fearless were legitimated by his
marriage with their mother Gunnor, and many of the great houses of
Normandy sprang from her brothers and sisters. The mother of
William received no such exaltation as this. Besides her son, she
had borne to Robert a daughter Adelaide, and, after Robert's death,
she married a Norman knight named Herlwin of Conteville. To him,
besides a daughter, she bore two sons, Ode and Robert. They rose
to high posts in Church and State, and played an important part in
their half-brother's history. Besides men whose nobility was of
this kind, there were also Norman houses whose privileges were
older than the amours or marriages of any duke, houses whose
greatness was as old as the settlement of Rolf, as old that is as
the ducal power itself. The great men of both these classes were
alike hard to control. A Norman baron of this age was well
employed when he was merely rebelling against his prince or waging
private war against a fellow baron. What specially marks the time
is the frequency of treacherous murders wrought by men of the
highest rank, often on harmless neighbours or unsuspecting guests.
But victims were also found among those guardians of the young duke
whose faithful discharge of their duties shows that the Norman
nobility was not wholly corrupt. One indeed was a foreign prince,
Alan Count of the Bretons, a grandson of Richard the Fearless
through a daughter. Two others, the seneschal Osbern and Gilbert
Count of Eu, were irregular kinsmen of the duke. All these were
murdered, the Breton count by poison. Such a childhood as this
made William play the man while he was still a child. The helpless
boy had to seek for support of some kind. He got together the
chief men of his duchy, and took a new guardian by their advice.
But it marks the state of things that the new guardian was one of
the murderers of those whom he succeeded. This was Ralph of Wacey,
son of William's great-uncle, Archbishop Robert. Murderer as he
was, he seems to have discharged his duty faithfully. There are
men who are careless of general moral obligations, but who will
strictly carry out any charge which appeals to personal honour.
Anyhow Ralph's guardianship brought with it a certain amount of
calm. But men, high in the young duke's favour, were still
plotting against him, and they presently began to plot, not only
against their prince but against their country. The disaffected
nobles of Normandy sought for a helper against young William in his
lord King Henry of Paris.

The art of diplomacy had never altogether slumbered since much
earlier times. The king who owed his crown to William's father,
and who could have no ground of offence against William himself,
easily found good pretexts for meddling in Norman affairs. It was
not unnatural in the King of the French to wish to win back a sea-
board which had been given up more than a hundred years before to
an alien power, even though that power had, for much more than half
of that time, acted more than a friendly part towards France. It
was not unnatural that the French people should cherish a strong
national dislike to the Normans and a strong wish that Rouen should
again be a French city. But such motives were not openly avowed
then any more than now. The alleged ground was quite different.
The counts of Chartres were troublesome neighbours to the duchy,
and the castle of Tillieres had been built as a defence against
them. An advance of the King's dominions had made Tillieres a
neighbour of France, and, as a neighbour, it was said to be a
standing menace. The King of the French, acting in concert with
the disaffected party in Normandy, was a dangerous enemy, and the
young Duke and his counsellors determined to give up Tillieres.
Now comes the first distinct exercise of William's personal will.
We are without exact dates, but the time can be hardly later than
1040, when William was from twelve to thirteen years old. At his
special request, the defender of Tillieres, Gilbert Crispin, who at
first held out against French and Normans alike, gave up the castle
to Henry. The castle was burned; the King promised not to repair
it for four years. Yet he is said to have entered Normandy, to
have laid waste William's native district of Hiesmois, to have
supplied a French garrison to a Norman rebel named Thurstan, who
held the castle of Falaise against the Duke, and to have ended by
restoring Tillieres as a menace against Normandy. And now the boy
whose destiny had made him so early a leader of men had to bear his
first arms against the fortress which looked down on his birth-
place. Thurstan surrendered and went into banishment. William
could set down his own Falaise as the first of a long list of towns
and castles which he knew how to win without shedding of blood.

When we next see William's distinct personal action, he is still
young, but no longer a child or even a boy. At nineteen or
thereabouts he is a wise and valiant man, and his valour and wisdom
are tried to the uttermost. A few years of comparative quiet were
chiefly occupied, as a quiet time in those days commonly was, with
ecclesiastical affairs. One of these specially illustrates the
state of things with which William had to deal. In 1042, when the
Duke was about fourteen, Normandy adopted the Truce of God in its
later shape. It no longer attempted to establish universal peace;
it satisfied itself with forbidding, under the strongest
ecclesiastical censures, all private war and violence of any kind
on certain days of the week. Legislation of this kind has two
sides. It was an immediate gain if peace was really enforced for
four days in the week; but that which was not forbidden on the
other three could no longer be denounced as in itself evil. We are
told that in no land was the Truce more strictly observed than in
Normandy. But we may be sure that, when William was in the fulness
of his power, the stern weight of the ducal arm was exerted to
enforce peace on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as on Thursdays and
Fridays.

It was in the year 1047 that William's authority was most
dangerously threatened and that he was first called on to show in
all their fulness the powers that were in him. He who was to be
conqueror of Maine and conqueror of England was first to be
conqueror of his own duchy. The revolt of a large part of the
country, contrasted with the firm loyalty of another part, throws a
most instructive light on the internal state of the duchy. There
was, as there still is, a line of severance between the districts
which formed the first grant to Rolf and those which were
afterwards added. In these last a lingering remnant of old
Teutonic life had been called into fresh strength by new
settlements from Scandinavia. At the beginning of the reign of
Richard the Fearless, Rouen, the French-speaking city, is
emphatically contrasted with Bayeux, the once Saxon city and land,
now the headquarters of the Danish speech. At that stage the
Danish party was distinctly a heathen party. We are not told
whether Danish was still spoken so late as the time of William's
youth. We can hardly believe that the Scandinavian gods still kept
any avowed worshippers. But the geographical limits of the revolt
exactly fall in with the boundary which had once divided French and
Danish speech, Christian and heathen worship. There was a wide
difference in feeling on the two sides of the Dive. The older
Norman settlements, now thoroughly French in tongue and manners,
stuck faithfully to the Duke; the lands to the west rose against
him. Rouen and Evreux were firmly loyal to William; Saxon Bayeux
and Danish Coutances were the headquarters of his enemies.

When the geographical division took this shape, we are surprised at
the candidate for the duchy who was put forward by the rebels.
William was a Norman born and bred; his rival was in every sense a
Frenchman. This was William's cousin Guy of Burgundy, whose
connexion with the ducal house was only by the spindle-side. But
his descent was of uncontested legitimacy, which gave him an excuse
for claiming the duchy in opposition to the bastard grandson of the
tanner. By William he had been enriched with great possessions,
among which was the island fortress of Brionne in the Risle. The
real object of the revolt was the partition of the duchy. William
was to be dispossessed; Guy was to be duke in the lands east of
Dive; the great lords of Western Normandy were to be left
independent. To this end the lords of the Bessin and the Cotentin
revolted, their leader being Neal, Viscount of Saint-Sauveur in the
Cotentin. We are told that the mass of the people everywhere
wished well to their duke; in the common sovereign lay their only
chance of protection against their immediate lords. But the lords
had armed force of the land at their bidding. They first tried to
slay or seize the Duke himself, who chanced to be in the midst of
them at Valognes. He escaped; we hear a stirring tale of his
headlong ride from Valognes to Falaise. Safe among his own people,
he planned his course of action. He first sought help of the man
who could give him most help, but who had most wronged him. He
went into France; he saw King Henry at Poissy, and the King engaged
to bring a French force to William's help under his own command.

This time Henry kept his promise. The dismemberment of Normandy
might have been profitable to France by weakening the power which
had become so special an object of French jealousy; but with a king
the common interest of princes against rebellious barons came
first. Henry came with a French army, and fought well for his ally
on the field of Val-es-dunes. Now came the Conqueror's first
battle, a tourney of horsemen on an open table-land just within the
land of the rebels between Caen and Mezidon. The young duke fought
well and manfully; but the Norman writers allow that it was French
help that gained him the victory. Yet one of the many anecdotes of
the battle points to a source of strength which was always ready to
tell for any lord against rebellious vassals. One of the leaders
of the revolt, Ralph of Tesson, struck with remorse and stirred by
the prayers of his knights, joined the Duke just before the battle.
He had sworn to smite William wherever he found him, and he
fulfilled his oath by giving the Duke a harmless blow with his
glove. How far an oath to do an unlawful act is binding is a
question which came up again at another stage of William's life.

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.