CHAPTER II.
THE EARLY DAYS OF WILLIAM RUFUS.[4]
1087–1090.
THE Character of the accession of Rufus.way by which the second William became fully established on the throne of his father has some peculiarities of its own, which distinguish it from the accessions of most English kings, earlier and later. The only claim of William Rufus to the crown was a nomination by his father which we are told that his father hardly ventured to make.No formal election. Of election by any assembly, great or small, we see no trace. Yet the new king is crowned, and he receives the nationalHis general acceptance. submission at his crowning, with the fullest outward national consent, with no visible opposition from any quarter, and, as events proved, with the hearty good will of the native English part of his subjects. Yet the King is hardly established in his kingdom before he has to fight for his crown. William Rufus had, like his father, to win the kingdom of England by war after he was already its crowned king. But, as regards those against whom he fought and those at whose head he fought, his position was the exact reverse of that of his father. Nominated by his father, elected, one might say, by Lanfranc, crowned with no man gainsaying him, William Rufus was at last really established in the royal power by the act of the conquered English. It was they who won the crown for the son of their Conqueror in fight against his father’s nearest kinsmen and most cherished comrades.
§ 1. The Coronation and Acknowledgement of William Rufus.
September, 1087.
One prominent aspect of the reign of William Rufus sets him before us as the enemy, almost the persecutor, of the Church in his realm, as the special adversary of the ecclesiastical power when the ecclesiastical power was represented by one of the truest of saints. And yet there have been few kings whose accession to the throne was in so special a way the act of the ecclesiastical power. William Rufus was made king by Lanfranc in a somewhat fuller sense than that in which every king of those times might be said to be made king by the prelate who poured the consecrating oil upon his head. Nomination by the last king, in the form of recommendation to the electors, had always been taken into account when the people of England came together to set a new king over them. The nomination of Eadward had formed a part, though the smallest part, of the right of Harold to become the chief of his own people.[5] An alleged nomination by Eadward formed the only plausible part of the claim by which William asserted his right to thrust himself upon a people of strangers. And now a nomination by William himself was the only right by which his second surviving son claimed to succeed to the crown which he had won. Modern notions of hereditary right would have handed over England as well as Normandy to the eldest son of the last king. English feeling at the time would doubtless, if a formal choice had to be made among the sons of the Conqueror of England, have spoken for his youngest son. Of all the three Henry alone was a true Ætheling; he alone had any right to the name of Englishman; he alone was the son of a crowned king and a man born in the land.[6] But the last wish of William the Great was that his island crown should pass to William the Red. He had not, as our fullest narrative tells us, dared to make any formal nomination to a kingdom which he had in his last days found out to be his only by wrong. He had not dared to name William as his successor; he left the kingdom in the hands of God; he only hoped that the will of God might be that William should reign, and should reign well and happily.[7] And as the best means of finding out whether the will of God were so, he left the actual decision to the highest and wisest of God’s ministers in his kingdom. He gave no orders for the coronation of Rufus; he simply prayed Lanfranc to crown him, if the Primate deemed such an act a rightful one.[8] As far as the will of the dying king went, one alone of the Witan of England, the first certainly among them alike in rank and in renown, was bidden to make the choice of the next sovereign on behalf of the whole kingdom.
The special agency of Lanfranc in the promotion of William Rufus is noticed by all the writers who give any detailed account of his accession.[9] Nor was it likely that, when the Archbishop was to be the one elector, the claims of the candidate should be refused. It would seem indeed as if Lanfranc doubted for a moment whether he ought to take upon himself the responsibility of the choice.[10] But everything must have helped to make him ready to carry out the wishes of his late master. That they were the Conqueror’s last wishes was no small matter, and Lanfranc had every personal reason to incline him the same way. To make William Rufus king was to promote the man who stood in a special relation to himself, who had been in some sort his pupil, and whom he had himself girded with the belt of knighthood.[11] And it really seems as if there was no other elector besides Lanfranc himself. For once in our history we read of a king succeeding without any formal election, without any meeting of the Witan before the coronation. Within three weeks of the death of the first William, the second William was full king over the land. As soon as he had heard the last wishes of his father, as soon as the dying king had dictated the all-important letter which was to express those wishes to the Primate, William Rufus left the bedside of his father while the breath was still in him. He started for the haven of Touques, a spot of which we shall get a vivid picture later in our story. With him set forth the bearer of the letter, one of the great King’s chaplains, and, as some say, his Chancellor. This was Robert Bloet, he who was presently to succeed Remigius of Fécamp in his newly-placed throne on the hill of Lincoln.[12] Before they had left Norman ground, the news came that all was over, that England had no longer a king.[13] William crossed with all speed, seemingly to Southampton, and found in England no rival, English or Norman. He indeed brought with him two men, either of whom, if Englishmen had still heart enough to dream of a king of their own blood, might have been his rival. Among the captives whom the Conqueror set free on his death-bed were two men who represented the mightiest of the fallen houses of conquered England. These were Morkere the son of Ælfgar, once the chosen Earl of the Northumbrians, and Wulfnoth, the youngest son of Godwine and brother[14] of Harold.Wulf and Duncan set free by Robert. Two other captives of royal blood, Duncan the son of Malcolm and Ingebiorg, so long a hostage for his father’s doubtful faith to his over-lord,[15] and Wulf the son of Harold and Ealdgyth, the babe who had been taken when Chester fell,[16] were set free at the same time. Duncan and Wulf were in the power of Robert. They in no way threatened his possession of Normandy, and Robert, with all his faults, did not lack generous feeling. They were knighted and set free.[17] Of Wulf we hear no more; Duncan lived to sit for a moment on the throne of his father. The fate of their fellow-sufferers was harsher. Morkere and Wulfnoth had come, by what means we know not, into the power of William. As Morkere had once crossed the sea with the father,[18] he now came back with the son. But their day of freedom was short. The son of Godwine and the grandson of Leofric might either of them be dangerous to the son of William. They therefore tasted the air of freedom only for a few days. William, acting as already king, went to his capital at Winchester, and there thrust the delivered captives once more into the house of bondage.[19] Of Morkere we hear no more; we must suppose that the rest of his days, few or many, were spent in this renewed imprisonment. Wulfnoth seems to have been released at some later time, to enter religion, and to be made the subject of the praises of a Norman poet.[20]
Such was the first act of authority done by the new ruler. Having thus disposed of the men whom he seems to have dreaded, William found no opposition made to his succession. But it was important for him to take possession without delay. The time, September, was not one of the usual seasons for a general assembly of the kingdom, and William could not afford to wait for the next great festival of Christmas. No native English competitor was likely to appear; but he must at least make himself safe against any possible attempts on the part of his brothers beyond the sea. From Winchester he hastened to the presence of Lanfranc—seemingly at Canterbury; as the story is told us, it seems to be taken for granted that it rested with the Primate to give or to refuse the crown.[21] Whether the younger William himself brought the news of the death of the elder is not quite clear; but we are not surprised to hear from an eye-witness that the first feeling of Lanfranc was one of overwhelming grief at the loss of the king who was dead, a king who, if he had been to him a master, had also been in so many things a friend and a fellow-worker.[22] Rufus is crowned at Westminster, September 26, 1087. The formal consecration of his successor was not long delayed; the new king was solemnly crowned and anointed by the hands of Lanfranc in the minster of Saint Peter, on Sunday the feast of the saints Cosmas and Damian. So the day is marked by a scholar who had specially explored the antiquities of Rome; Englishmen, who knew less of saints whose holy place was by the Roman forum, were content to mark it by its relation to the great festival three days later, or even by the mere day of the month.[23] On that day, before the altar of King Eadward’s rearing, the second Norman lord of England took the oaths which bound an English king to the English people. And, besides the prescribed oaths to do justice and mercy and to defend the rights of the Church, Lanfranc is said to have bound the new king by a special engagement to follow his own counsel in all things.[24] William Rufus was thus king, and, if anything had been lacking in the way of regular election before his crowning, it was fully made up by the universal and seemingly zealous acceptance of him at his crowning. “All the men on England to him bowed and to him oaths swore.”[25] The crown which had passed to Eadward from a long line of kingly forefathers, the crown which Harold had worn by the free gift of the English people, the crown which the first William had won by his sword and had kept by his wisdom, now passed to the second of his name and house. And it passed, to all appearance, with the perfect good will of all the dwellers in the land, conquerors and conquered alike. William the Second, William the Younger, William the Red, took his place on the seat of the great Conqueror without a blow being struck or a dog moving his tongue against him.
The first act of the uncrowned candidate for the kingly office had been one of harshness—harshness which was perhaps politic in the son, but which trod under foot the last wishes of a repentant father. The first act of the crowned King was one which might give good hopes for the reign which was beginning, and which certainly carried out his father’s wishes to the letter. From Westminster William Rufus went again to Winchester, this time not to make fast the bars of his father’s prison-house, but to throw open the stores of his father’s treasury.Wealth of the treasury at Winchester. Our native Chronicler waxes eloquent on the boundless wealth of all kinds, far beyond the powers of any man to tell of, which had been gathered together in the Conqueror’s hoard during his one and twenty years of kingship. The Chronicler had, as we must remember, himself lived in William’s court, and we may believe that his own eyes had looked on the store of gold and silver, of vessels and robes and gems and other costly things, which it was beyond the skill of man to set forth.[26] These were the spoils of England, and from them were made the gifts which, in the belief of those days, were to win repose in the other world for the soul of her despoiler.Gifts to churches. Every minster in England received, some six marks of gold, some ten, besides gifts of every kind of ecclesiastical ornament and utensil, rich with precious metals and precious stones, among which books for the use of divine service was not forgotten.[27] Gifts to Battle Abbey. And, above all, the special foundation of his father, the Abbey of the Battle, received choicer gifts than any, the royal mantle of the departed King among them.[28] Every upland church, every one at all events on the royal lordships, received sixty pennies.[29] Gifts to the poor. Moreover a hundred pounds in money was sent into each shire to be given away in alms to the poor for William’s soul.[30] Such a gift might be bountiful in a small shire like Bedford, where many Englishmen still kept their own; but it would go but a little way, even after eighteen years, to undo the work of the great harrying of Yorkshire. Meanwhile Robert, already received as Duke of the Normans, was doing the same pious work among the poor and the churches of his duchy.[31] The dutiful son and the rebel were both doing their best for the welfare of their father in the other world.
The Christmas Assembly. 1087–1088. From Winchester the new King went back to Westminster, and there he held the Christmas feast and assembly. It was attended by the two archbishops and by several other bishops, among whom the saint of Worcester is specially mentioned. Odo restored to his earldom. At this meeting too appeared Odo of Bayeux, who received again from his nephew his earldom of Kent.[32] Released from his bonds by the pardon which had been so hardly wrung from the dying Conqueror,[33] he already filled the first place in the councils of the new Duke of the Normans,[34] and he hoped to win the like power over the mind of his other nephew in England. But before long events came about which showed how true had been the foresight of William the Great, when he had said that mighty evils would follow if his brother should be set free from his prison.
Unusual character of William’s accession. It is certainly something unusual in those times for a king thus to make his way to his crown by virtue, as it were, of an agreement between a dead king and a living bishop, without either the nobles or the nation at large either actively supporting or actively opposing his claim. It is clear that men of both races had very decided views about the matter; but they gave no open expression to them at the time. The discussion of the succession came after the coronation, among men who had already acknowledged the new King. It may be that all parties were taken by surprise. The accession of William Rufus had not indeed followed the death of his father with anything like the same speed with which the accession of Harold had followed the death of his brother-in-law. But then the death of Eadward had long been looked for; the succession of Harold had long been practically agreed on; above all, the Witan were actually in session when the vacancy took place. Everything therefore could be done at a moment’s notice with perfect formal regularity. Now everything, if much less sudden, was much more unlooked for. The kingdom found itself called on to acknowledge a king whom no party had chosen, but whom no party had at the moment the means, perhaps not the will, to oppose. The Normans, we may believe, would, if they had been formally asked, have preferred Robert. The English, we may be sure, would, if they had been formally asked, have, at least among Norman candidates, preferred Henry. William the only available king at the moment. And practically the choice lay among Norman candidates only, and among them Henry was the one who was practically shut out. All hopes, we may be sure, had passed away of seeking for a king either in the house of Cerdic, in the house of Godwine, or in the house which, if not the house of Cnut, was, at least by female succession, the house of his father Swegen. Of the sons of the Conqueror, Henry, the one who was at once Norman and Englishman, was young and beyond the sea. William was in England, with at least his father’s recommendation to support him. The practical question lay between William and Robert. Was William to be withstood on behalf of Robert? Comparison between William and Robert. Between William and Robert there could at the moment be little doubt in the minds of Englishmen. Their father’s policy had kept both back from any great opportunity of doing either good or evil to the conquered kingdom. But, as far as their personal characters went, Robert had as yet shown his worst side and William his best. There could be little room for doubt between the man who had fought against his father and the man who had risked his life to save his father.Political bearing of William’s accession. And, besides this, the accession of William would separate England and Normandy. England would again have, if not a king of her own blood, yet at least a king of her own. The island world would again be the island world, no longer dependent on, or mixed up with, the affairs of the world beyond the sea. The harshness which had again thrust back Morkere and Wulfnoth into prison might be passed by, as an act of necessary precaution. Morkere too might by this time be well nigh forgotten, and Wulfnoth had never been known. If a native king was not to be had, William Rufus was at the moment by no means the most unpromising among possible foreign kings.
No real choice. But in truth neither Normans nor Englishmen were in this case called on to make any real choice. Both were called on, somewhat after the manner of the sham plebiscita of modern France, to acknowledge a sovereign who was already in possession. Whatever might have been the abstract preference of the Normans for Robert or of the English for Henry, neither party felt at the moment that degree of zeal which would lead them to brave the dangers of opposition. At any rate, William Rufus was a new king, and a new king is commonly welcome. Men of both races might reasonably expect that the rule of one who had come peacefully to his crown would be less harsh than that of one who had made his entry by the sword. Employment of the treasure. It is further hinted that William partly owed his recognicitaition to his early possession of his father’s hoard, perhaps to his careful discharge of his father’s will, perhaps, even thus early in his reign, to some other discreet application of his father’s treasures.[35] Certain it is that, from whatever cause, all men accepted Rufus with all outward cheerfulness, though perhaps without any very fervent loyalty towards him on any side. It needed the events of the next few months, it needed strong influences and strong opposing influences, to turn the Normans in England into the fierce opponents of the new King, and the native English into his zealous supporters. It needed the further course of his own actions to teach both sides how much they had lost when they passed from the rule of William the Great to that of William the Red.
§ 2. The Rebellion against William Rufus.
March-November, 1088.
The winter of the year which beheld the Conqueror’s death passed without any disturbance in the realm of his son.[36] Beginning of the rebellion. But in the spring of the next year it became plain that the general acceptance which Rufus had met with in England was sincere on the part of his English subjects only. As the native Chronicler puts it, “the land was mightily stirred and was filled with mickle treason, for all the richest Frenchmen that were in this land would betray their lord the King, and would have his brother to King, Robert that was Earl in Normandy.”[37] The leaders in this revolt were the bishops whom the Conqueror had clothed with temporal power. Discontent of Odo. And foremost among them was his brother, the new King’s uncle, Odo Bishop of Bayeux, now again Earl of Kent; and, according to one account, already Justiciar and chief ruler in England.[38] But whatever might be his formal position, Odo soon began to be dissatisfied with the amount of authority which he practically enjoyed. He seems to have hoped to be able to rule both his nephews and all their dominions, and, in England at least, to keep the whole administration in his own hands at least as fully as he had held it before his imprisonment. In this hope he was disappointed. The Earl of Kent was not so great a man under the younger William as he had been under the elder. The chief place in the confidence of the new King was held by another man of his own order. Influence of William of Saint-Calais. This was William of Saint Carilef or Saint Calais, once Prior of the house from which he took his name, and afterwards Abbot of Saint Vincent’s without the walls of Le Mans.[39] He had succeeded the murdered Walcher in the see of Durham, and he had reformed his church according to the fashion of the time, by putting in monks instead of secular canons.[40] His place in the King’s counsel was now high indeed. “So well did the King to the Bishop that all England went after his rede and so as he would.”[41] Besides this newly born jealousy of the Kings newly chosen counsellor, Odo had a long standing hatred against the other prelate who had so long watched over the King, and whose advice the King was bound by oath to follow.[42] He bore the bitterest grudge against the Primate Lanfranc, as the inventor of that subtle distinction between the Bishop of Bayeux and the Earl of Kent which had cost the Earl five years of imprisonment.[43]
Action of Odo. Of the two personages who might thus be joined or separated at pleasure, it is the temporal chief with whom we have now to deal. March 1, 1088. Lent was now come. Of the spiritual exercises of the Bishop of Bayeux during the holy season we have no record; the Earl of Kent spent the time plotting with the chief Normans in England how the King might be killed or handed over alive to his brother.[44] Gatherings of the rebels.We have more than one vigorous report of the oratory used in these seditious gatherings. According to some accounts, they went on on both sides of the sea, and we are admitted to hear the arguments which were used both in Normandy and in England.[45] Arguments on behalf of Robert. Both agree in maintaining the claims of Robert, as at once the true successor, and the prince best fitted for their purpose. But it is on Norman ground that the necessity for an union between Normandy and England is set forth most clearly. The main object is to hinder a separation between the two kingdoms, as they are somewhat daringly called.[46] It is clear that to men who held lands in both countries it would be a gain to have only one lord instead of two; but, if we rightly understand the arguments which are put into the mouths of the speakers, it was held that, if England had again a king of her own, though it were a king of the Conqueror’s house, the work of the Conquest would be undone. The men who had won England with their blood would be brought down from their dominion in the conquered island.[47] If they have two lords, there will be no hope of pleasing both; faithfulness to the one will only lead to vengeance on the part of the other.[48] William was young and insolent, and they owed him no duty. Robert was the eldest son; his ways were more tractable, and they had sworn to him during the life-time of his father. Let them then make a firm agreement to stand by one another, to kill or dethrone William, and to make Robert ruler of both lands.[49] Robert, we are told, approved of the scheme, and promised that he would give them vigorous help to carry it out.[50]
These arguments of Norman speakers are given us without the names of any ringleaders. We may suspect that the real speaker, in the idea of the reporter, was no other than the Bishop of Bayeux.[51] Speech of Odo. We hear of him more distinctly on English ground, haranguing his accomplices somewhat to the same effect; only the union of the two states is not so distinctly spoken of. It may be that such a way of putting the case would not sound well in the ears of men who, if not Englishmen, were at least the chief men of England, and who might not be specially attracted by the prospect of another conquest of England, now that England was theirs. Reasons for preferring Robert to William. The chief business of the Bishop’s speech is to compare the characters of the two brothers between whom they had to choose, and further to compare the new King with the King who was gone. The speaker seems to start from the assumption that, in the interests of those to whom he spoke, it was to be wished that the ruler whom they were formally to acknowledge should be practically no ruler at all. William the Great had not been a prince to their minds; William the Red was not likely to be a prince to their minds either. Robert was just the man for their purpose. Under Robert, mild and careless, they would be able to do as they pleased; under the stern and active William they would soon find that they had a master. Comparison of the elder and younger William. The argument that follows is really the noblest tribute that could be paid to the memory of the Conqueror. It sets him before us, in a portrait drawn by one who, if a brother, was also an enemy, as a king who did justice and made peace, and who did his work without shedding of blood. It is taken for granted that the death of the great king, at whose death we are told that peaceable men wept and that robbers and fiends rejoiced,[52] was something from which Odo and men like Odo might expect to gain. But nothing would be gained, if the rod of the elder William were to pass into the hands of the younger. The little finger of the son would be found to be thicker than the loins of the father. Their release from the rule of the King who was gone would profit them nothing, if they remained subjects of one who was likely to slay where his father had merely put in bonds.[53] In this last contrast, though we may doubt whether there could have been any ground for drawing it so early in the reign of Rufus, we see that the men of the time were struck by the difference between the King whose laws forbade the judicial taking of human life and the King under whom the hangman began his work again. To pleadings like these we are told that the great mass of the Norman nobility in England hearkened; a small number only remained faithful to the King to whom they had so lately sworn their oaths. Thus, as the national Chronicler puts it, “the unrede was read.”[54]
Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances joins the rebels. As the chief devisers of the unrede we have the names of two bishops besides Odo. One name we do not wonder to find along with his. Geoffrey Bishop of Coutances was a prelate of Odo’s own stamp, one of whose doings as a wielder of the temporal sword we have heard in northern, in western, and in eastern England.[55] But we should not have expected to find as partner of their doings the very man whose high promotion had filled the heart of Odo with envy. Treason of the Bishop of Durham. It was indeed the most unkindest cut of all when the Bishop of Durham, the man in whose counsel the King most trusted, turned against the benefactor who had raised him so that all England went at his rede. What higher greatness he could have hoped to gain by treason it is hard to see. Different statements of his conduct. And it is only fair to add that in the records of his own bishopric he appears as a persecuted victim,[56] while all the writers of southern England join in special reprobation of his faithlessness. The one who speaks in our own tongue scruples not to make use of the most emphatic of all comparisons. “He would do by him”—that is, Bishop William would do by King William—“as Judas Iscariot did by our Lord.”[57] We should certainly not learn from these writers that, after all, it was the King, and not the Bishop, who struck, or tried to strike, the first blow.
It is certainly far from easy to reconcile the different accounts of this affair. At a time a little later the southern account sets Bishop William before us as one who “did all harm that he might all over the North.”[58] But at Durham it was believed that at all events a good deal of harm had been already done by the King to the Bishop; and the Bishop claims to have at an earlier time done the best of good service to the King.[59] That service must have been rendered while the Lenten conspiracy was still going on; for at no later time does the Bishop of Durham seem to have been anywhere in the south of England. His alleged services to the King. Lent, 1088. Then, according to his own story, the Bishop secured to the King the possession of Hastings, of Dover, and of London itself. We have only William of Saint-Calais’ own statement for this display of loyal vigour on his part; but, as it is a statement made in the hearing of the King and of the barons and prelates of England, though exaggeration is likely enough, the whole story can hardly be sheer invention. Bishop William claims to have kept the two southern havens in their allegiance when the King had almost lost them. His action towards London. He claims further to have quieted disturbances in London, after the city had actually revolted, by taking twelve of the chief citizens to the King’s presence.[60] Our notes of time show that the events of which the Bishop thus speaks must have happened at the latest in the very first days of March. Early movements in Kent and Sussex. March, 1088. It follows that there must have been at the least seditious movements in south-eastern England, before the time of the open revolt in the west. In short, the rebellion in Kent and Sussex must have begun very early indeed in the penitential season.
We gather from the Durham narrative that, even at this early stage, both Bishop Odo and Earl Roger were already known to the King as traitors. Bishop William’s advice to the King. We gather further that it was by the advice of the Bishop of Durham that the King was making ready for military operations against them, and that, when the Bishop was himself summoned to the array, he made answer that he would at once join with the seven knights whom he had with him—seven chief barons of the bishopric, as it would seem—and would send to Durham for more. He forsakes the King. But, instead of so doing, he left the King’s court without his leave; he took with him some of the King’s men, and so forsook the King in his need.[61] Such was afterwards the statement on the King’s side. Certain it is that, whatever the Bishop’s fault was, the royal vengeance followed speedily on it. His temporalities seized. March, 1088. Early in March, whether with or without the advice of any assembly,[62] Rufus ordered the temporalities of the bishopric to be seized, and the Bishop himself to be arrested. The Bishop escaped to his castle at Durham, whence it would not be easy to dislodge him without a siege. Meanwhile the King’s men in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, though they failed to seize the Bishop’s own person, took possession in the King’s name of his lands, his money, and his men. He writes to the King. From Durham the Bishop wrote to the King, setting forth his wrongs, protesting his innocence, and demanding restitution of all that had been taken from him. He goes on to use words which remind us in a strange way at once of Godwine negotiating with his royal son-in-law and of Odo in the grasp of his royal brother. He offers the services of himself and his men. He offers to make answer to any charge in the King’s court. But, like Godwine, he asks for a safe-conduct before he will come;[63] like Odo, he declares that it is not for every one to judge a bishop, and that he will make answer only according to his order.[64] On the receipt of this letter, the King at once, in the sight of the Bishop’s messenger, made grants of the episcopal lands to certain of his barons;[65] those lands were therefore looked on as property which had undergone at least a temporary forfeiture. He is summoned to the King’s Court. He however sent an answer to the Bishop, bidding him come to his presence, and adding the condition that, if he would not stay with the King as the King wished, he should be allowed to go back safe to Durham. It must however be supposed that this promise was not accompanied by any formal safe-conduct; otherwise, though it is not uncommon to find the officers of a king or other lord acting far more harshly than the lord himself, it is hard to understand the treatment which Bishop William met with at the hands of the zealous Sheriff of Yorkshire. Action of Ralph Paganel. That office was now held by Ralph Paganel, a man who appears in Domesday as holder of lands in various parts, from Devonshire to the lands of his present sheriffdom,[66] and who next year became the founder of the priory of the Holy Trinity at York.[67] The Bishop, on receiving the King’s answer, sent to York to ask for peace of the Sheriff. But all peace was refused to the Bishop, to his messengers, and to all his men. A monk who was coming back from the King’s presence to the Bishop was stopped; his horse was killed, though he was allowed to go on on foot. The lands of the bishopric laid waste. March-May, 1088. Lastly, the Sheriff ordered all men in the King’s name to do all the harm that they could to the Bishop everywhere and in every way. The Bishop was thus cut off from telling his grievances; and for seven weeks, we are told, the lands of the bishopric were laid waste.[68] This date brings us into the month of May, by which time important events had happened in other parts of England.
We have seen that, in south-eastern England at least, the unrede of this year’s Lent must have gone beyond mere words, and must have already taken the form of action. General rebellion. But it seems not to have been till after Easter that the general revolt of the disaffected nobles broke forth throughout the whole land. By this time they had all thoroughly made up their minds to act. And we may add that it is quite possible that the King’s treatment of the Bishop of Durham may have had some share in helping them to make up their minds. They may have been led to think that open rebellion was the safest course. The Easter Gemót. April 16, 1088. The first general sign was given at the Easter Gemót of the year, which, according to rule, would be held at Winchester. The rebel nobles, instead of appearing to do their duty when the King wore his crown, kept aloof from his court.The rebels refuse to come. They gat them each man to his castle, and made them ready for war.[69] Soon after the festival the flame burst forth. The great body of the Norman lords of England were in open revolt against the son of the man who had made England theirs.
The rebel nobles. The list of the rebel nobles reads like a roll of the Norman leaders at Senlac or a choice of the names which fill the foremost places in Domesday. With a few marked exceptions, all the great men of the land are there. Robert of Mortain Along with Odo, Bishop and Earl, the other brother of the Conqueror, Robert of Mortain and of Cornwall, the lord of Pevensey and of Montacute, joined in the revolt against his nephew.[70] and William of Eu. So did another kinsman, a member of the ducal house of Normandy and gorged with the spoils of England, William son of Robert Count of Eu, grandson of the elder William and his famous wife Lescelina.[71] Earl Roger and the border lords. Of greater personal fame, and of higher formal rank on English soil, was the father of one of the men who had crossed the sea to trouble England, Roger of Montgomery, whose earldom of Shrewsbury swells, in the statelier language of one of our authorities, into an earldom of the Mercians.[72] He brought with him a great following from his own border-land. Among these was Roger of Lacy, great in the shires from Berkshire to Shropshire;[73] Osbern. and with him came the old enemy Osbern of Richard’s Castle, whose name carries us back to times that now seem far away.[74] With Osbern came his son-in-law Bernard of Neufmarché or Newmarch, sister’s son to the noble Gulbert of Hugleville, the man who was soon to stamp his memory on the mountain land of Brecheiniog.[75] From the same border too came the lord of Wigmore, Ralph of Mortemer.[76] But the treason of the great Earl of the central march was not followed by his northern neighbour. Loyalty of Earl Hugh. Hugh of Chester clave to the King, while the mightiest of his tenants joined the rebels. For the old Hugh of Grantmesnil raised the standard of revolt in Northhamptonshire, and in Leicestershire, the land of his sheriffdom.[77] Rebellion of Robert of Rhuddlan; And his rebellion seems to have carried with it that of his nephew the Marquess Robert of Rhuddlan, the terror of the northern Cymry.[78] Robert thus found himself in arms, not only against his king, but against his immediate and powerful neighbour and lord Earl Hugh. But the tie which bound a man to his mother’s brother was perhaps felt to be stronger than duty towards either king or earl. of Roger the Bigod; Along with the lords of the British marches stood the guardian of the eastern coast of England against the Dane, Roger the Bigod, father of earls, whose name, fated to be so renowned in later times, appears in the records of these days with a special brand of evil.[79] of Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances; And with Odo and William of Durham a third prelate joined in the unrede, a prelate the worthy compeer of Odo, the warrior Geoffrey of Coutances, the bishop who knew better how to marshal mailed knights for the battle than to teach surpliced clerks to chant their psalms in the choir.[80] He brought with him the last of the elder succession of Northumbrian earls, his nephew Robert of Mowbray, of Robert of Mowbray. tall of stature, swarthy of countenance, fierce, bold, and proud, who looked down on his peers and scorned to obey his betters, who loved better to think than to speak, and who, when he opened his lips, seldom let a smile soften his stern words.[81] With these leaders were joined a crowd of others, “mickle folk, all Frenchmen,” as the Chronicler significantly marks.[82] The sons of the soil, we are to believe, had no part in the counsels of that traitorous Lent, in the deeds of that wasting Easter.
Ravages of the rebels. The war now began, a war in which, after the example of the chief combatants, fathers fought against sons, brothers against brothers, friends against their former friends.[83] The rebel leaders, each from the point where his main strength lay, began to lay waste the land, specially the lordships of the King and the Archbishop. Evidence against the Bishop of Durham. And among these evil-doers the loyal monk of Peterborough distinctly sets down William of Saint-Calais, meek victim as he seems in the records of his own house. The Bishop may have argued that he was only returning what the King had done to him; but the witness is such as cannot be got over; “The Bishop of Durham did to harm all that he might over all the north” Some others of the confederates and their doings are sketched in a few words by the same sarcastic pen; Ravages of Roger Bigod; “Roger hight one of them that leapt into the castle at Norwich, and did yet the worst of all over all the land.”[84] So does the English writer speak of the first Bigod who held the fortress which had arisen on the mound of the East-Anglian kings.[85] Roger had succeeded to the place, though not to the rank, of Ralph of Wader, and, as Ralph had made Norwich a centre of rebellion against the father, so Roger now made it a centre of rebellion against the son. of Hugh of Grantmesnil. Then we read how “Hugo eke did nothing better neither within Leicestershire nor within Northampton.”[86] This was the way in which the lord of Grantmesnil, so honoured at Saint Evroul, was looked on in the scriptorium of the house which had once been the Golden Borough. In some other parts of the country we get fuller accounts than these of the doers and of what was done. Three districts in the west and in the south-east of England became the scene of events which are set down by the writers of the age in considerable detail.
Bristol and its castle. Of Bristol, the great merchant-haven on the West-Saxon and Mercian border, we last heard when the sons of Harold failed to make their way within its walls,[87] and when its greedy slave-traders cast aside, for a while at least, their darling sin at the preaching of Saint Wulfstan.[88] The borough was now beginning to put on a new character, one which, in the disturbances half a century later, won for it the name of the stepmother of all England.[89] Bristol in the eleventh century.A fortress, the forerunner of the great work of Robert Earl of Gloucester,[90] had now arisen, and its presence made Bristol one of the chief military centres of England down to the warfare of the seventeenth century. The Bristol of those days had not yet occupied the ground which is now covered by its two chief ecclesiastical ornaments. The abbey of Saint The chief churches not yet built. Augustine, the creation of Robert Fitz-Harding, had not yet arisen on the lowest slope of the hills to the west, nor the priory of Saint James, the creation of Earl Robert, on the ground to the north of the borough. These foundations arose in the next age on the Mercian ground without the walls. And any forerunner which may then have been of the church of Saint Mary on the Red cliff, for ages past the stateliest among the parish churches of England, stood beyond the walls, beyond the river, on undisputed West-Saxon ground. Peninsular site of the borough. The older Bristol lay wholly on the Mercian side of the Avon, at the point where the Frome of Gloucestershire still poured its waters into the greater stream in the sight of the sun.[91] But nowhere, unless at Palermo, have the relations of land and water been more strangely turned about than they have been at Bristol. The two rivers. The course of the greater river, though not actually turned aside, is disguised by cuts and artificial harbours which puzzle the visitor till the key is found. The lesser stream of the Changes in later times. Frome has had its course changed and shortened, and the remnant is, like the Fleet of London, condemned by art to the fate which nature has laid on so many of the rivers of Greece and Dalmatia;[92] it runs, as in a katabothra, under modern streets and houses. The marshy ground lying at the meeting of the streams has been reclaimed and covered with the modern buildings of the city. In the twelfth century, still more therefore in the eleventh, this space was covered at every high tide, when the waters rushing up the channels of both rivers made Bristol seem to float on their bosom like Venice or Ravenna.[93] The castle. Of the castle again the more part of its site is covered by modern buildings; a great part of its moat is filled up; the donjon has vanished; the green is no longer a green; it is only by searching that we can find out some parts of the outer walls of the fortress, and some still smaller parts of the buildings which they fenced in.[94] But, when the key is once found, it is not hard to follow the line both of the borough and of the fortress. Bristol belongs to the same general class of peninsular towns as Châlons, Shrewsbury, Bern, and Besançon; but, as at Châlons, the height above the rivers is not great; and it is at Bristol made quite insignificant by comparison with the hills to the west and north. Yet on the narrow neck of the isthmus itself, the actual slope towards the streams on either side is not to be despised. To the west of that isthmus, within the peninsula, stood the original town, girded to the north by the original course of the Frome, to the south-west by the marshy ground at the junction of the rivers.[95] To the west of the isthmus, outside the peninsula, stood the castle. Standing on the exposed side, open to an attack from the east, it was fenced in on three sides by a moat joining the two rivers at either end. Works of Earl Robert. A writer of the next age gives us a picture of Bristol Castle as it then stood, strengthened by all the more advanced art of that time.[96] But the great keep of Earl Robert, slighted in the days of the Commonwealth, was not yet. We can only guess at the state of borough and fortress, as they had stood when the sons of Harold were driven back from the walls of Bristol, or as they stood now at the opening of the civil war which we have now reached. But there are few towns whose general look must have been more thoroughly unlike what it is now. The central and busy streets which occupy the area of the older Bristol must, allowing for the difference between the eleventh century and the nineteenth, still keep the general character of the old merchant-borough. Growth of the town. But few changes can be greater than those which have affected Bristol both in earlier and in later times. One period of change first surrounded the elder town with a fringe of ecclesiastical buildings, and then took them within a more extended line of wall. Another in later days has swept away well nigh every trace of the fortress which was so famous both in the twelfth century and in the seventeenth, and has covered the whole range of the neighbouring hills with a new and airy city of modern days.
Edwᵈ. Weller
For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.
Map illustrating the
SOMERSET AND
GLOUCESTERSHIRE CAMPAIGN. 1088.
Bristol occupied by Bishop Geoffrey. The castle of Bristol then, though not perched, like so many of its fellows, on any lofty height, was placed on a strong and important site. That site, commanding the lower course of the Avon and the great borough upon it, and guarding the meeting-place, still of two shires, as once of two kingdoms, supplied an admirable centre for the work of those whose object was, not to guard those shires, but to lay them waste.[97] To that end Bristol was occupied and garrisoned by the warrior Bishop of Coutances, Geoffrey of Mowbray. It is not unlikely that he was already in command of the castle. He was not only a land-owner in the two neighbouring shires, a very great land-owner in that of Somerset;[98] but the meagre notice of Bristol in the Great Survey His relation to the town. also shows that he stood in some special relation to the borough as the receiver of the King’s dues within it.[99] He doubtless added anything that the castle needed in His works. the way of further defences, and conjecture has attributed to him one of the several lines which the city walls have taken, that which brought the line of defence most closely to the banks of the Frome.[100] But whatever were his works, we have no record of them; we know only that the fierce prelate, at the head of his partisans, turned Bristol Castle into a den of robbers. Ravages of William of Eu and Robert of Mowbray. His chief confederates were William of Eu, of whom we have already spoken[101] , and his own nephew Robert of Mowbray. Among them they harried the land, and brought in the fruits of their harrying to the castle.[102] The central position of Bristol made a division of labour easy. Of Bishop Geoffrey’s two younger confederates, Robert undertook the work in Somerset and William in Gloucestershire. Robert marched up the valley of the Robert burns Bath. Avon to the Roman town of Bath, emphatically the “old borough.”[103] At the foot of the hills on either side, lying, as wicked wits put it, amid sulphureous vapours, at the gates of hell,[104] the square, small indeed, of the Roman walls sheltered the abbey of Offa’s rearing, now widowed by the death of its English abbot Ælfsige.[105] The city had been overthrown by the arms of Ceawlin; it had lain waste like the City of the Legions;[106] it had risen again as an English town to share with the City of the Legions in the two chief glories of the days of the peaceful Eadgar. If Chester saw his triumph,[107] Bath had seen his crowning. And now the hand of the Norman, not the Norman Conqueror but the Norman rebel, fell as heavily on the English borough as the hand of the West-Saxon invader had fallen five hundred years before. Bath was a king’s town; as such it drew on itself the special wrath of the rebels; the whole town was destroyed by fire, to rise again presently in another character.[108] From He marches through Wiltshire to Ilchester. Bath, the greatest town of Somerset, but which, as placed in a corner of the land, has never claimed to be one of its administrative centres, the destroyer passed on to another town of Roman origin, which once did aspire to be the head of the Sumorsætan, but from which all traces of greatness have passed away. From Bath Robert first marched into Wiltshire, most likely following the line of the Avon; he there wrought much slaughter and took great spoil. He then turned to the south-west along the high ground of Wiltshire; he made his way into the mid parts of Somerset, and laid siege to the King’s town of Givelceaster, Ivelchester, Ilchester, Position of Ilchester. the Ischalis of a by-gone day.[109] The town lay at the foot of the most central range of the hills of Somerset, on the edge of one of the inlets of the great marshland of Sedgemoor. The site was marked by the junction of the great line of the Fossway with a number of roads in all directions. The spot was defended by the river, the Ivel, which gives the town its English name. Here, at the foot of the high ground, the stream widens to surround an island, a convenient outpost in the defences of the town which arose on its southern bank. The siege. Ilchester, like Bath, drew on itself the special enmity of the rebels as being a king’s town, an enmity likely to be the sharper because Ilchester stands within sight of Count Robert’s castle of Montacute, and is divided only by the river from lands which were held by his fellow-rebel William of Eu.[110] The Ilchester of our day seems a strange place for a siege; but in the days of the Red King the town was still surrounded by strong walls, and those walls were defended by valiant burghers. The walls and gates have perished; the ditches have been filled up; yet the lasting impress of the four-sided shape of the Roman chester may still be traced in the direction of the roads and buildings of the modern town.[111] The importance of Ilchester had passed away even in the sixteenth century, when of its five or six churches all but one were in ruins; but, in the times with which we are dealing, its hundred and seven burgesses, with their market held in the old forum at the meeting-place of the roads, held no inconsiderable place among the smaller boroughs of Western England.[112] What Robert of Mowbray driven back from Ilchester. the men of Ilchester had they knew how to defend; the attack and the defence were vigorously carried on on either side. Our one historian of the leaguer—he becomes almost its minstrel—tells us how the besiegers fought for greed of booty and love of victory, while the besieged fought with a good heart for their own safety and that of their friends and kinsfolk. The stronger and worthier motive had the better luck. The dark and gloomy Robert of Mowbray, darker and gloomier than ever, turned away, a defeated man, from the unconquered walls of Ilchester.[113]
This utter failure of a man who stands forth in a marked way as one of the skilful captains of the age was a good omen for success at points which were still William of Eu plunders in Gloucestershire. more important in the struggle. Meanwhile the work of destruction was going steadily on in the lands on the other side of Bristol, among the flock of the holy Wulfstan. Gloucestershire was assigned as the province of William of Eu, and he did his work with a will along the rich valley of the Severn, still the land of pasture, then also the land of vines.[114] The district called Berkeley He harries Berkeley. Harness was laid waste with fire and sword, and the town of Berkeley itself was plundered.[115] Berkeley, once the abode of Earl Godwine and the scene of the pious scruples of Gytha,[116] is now simply marked as a king’s town;[117] the abbey had vanished in a past generation; the famous castle belongs to a later generation; but the Position of Berkeley. place was not defenceless. Berkeley is indeed one of those places which have become strongholds almost by accident. It looks up at a crowd of points on the bold outlying promontories of the Cotswolds, points some of them marked by the earthworks of unrecorded times, which in Normandy or Maine could hardly fail to have been seized on for the site of fortresses far sooner than itself. Nor is it near enough to the wide estuary of the Severn to have been of any military importance in the way of commanding the stream. It is rather one of those places where the English lord fixed his dwelling on a spot which was chosen more as a convenient centre for his lands than with any regard to purposes of warfare. The mound, the church, the town, rose side by side on ground but slightly higher than the rich meadows around them. But the mound on which the great Earl of the West-Saxons had once dwelled had been, as usual, turned to Norman military uses. The castle. Earl William of Hereford, whose watchful care stretched on both sides of the river, had crowned it with what Domesday marks as “a little castle.”[118] One would be well pleased to know in what such a defence was an advance on the palisades or other defences which may have surrounded the hall of Godwine. In after days the “little castle” was to grow into the historic home of that historic house in whom, whether they themselves acknowledge it or not, history must see the lineal offspring, not of a Danish king, but of an English staller.[119] At present however the savage William of Eu had not to assault the stronghold of Robert, son of Harding and grandson of Eadnoth, but merely to overcome whatever resistance could be offered by the castellulum of William Fitz-Osbern. Its defences were most likely much less strong than the Roman walls of Ilchester. Berkeley and the coasts thereof were thoroughly ravaged. On the whole, notwithstanding the defeat of Robert of Mowbray, the Bishop of Coutances and his lieutenants had done their work to their own good liking. No small spoil from each of the three nearest shires had been brought in to the robbers’ hold at Bristol.
Meanwhile the same work was going on busily to the north and north-west of Bishop Geoffrey’s field of action. Rebel centre at Hereford. Of the movements in Herefordshire and Worcestershire we have fuller accounts, accounts which, before we have done, land us from the region of military history into that of hagiography. The centre of mischief in this region was at Hereford. The city which Harold had called back into being, and where William Fitz-Osbern had ruled so sternly, had now no longer an earl; the rebel Roger was paying the penalty of his treason at some point far away alike from Hereford, from Flanders, and from Breteuil.[120] The city had now the King for its immediate lord. It was presently seized by Roger of Lacy,[121] and was turned into a meeting-place for the disaffected. The host that came together is marked as made up of “the men that eldest were of Hereford, and the whole shire forthwith, and the men of Shropshire with mickle folk of Bretland.”[122] Some of their names, besides that of Roger of Lacy, we have heard already.[123] Action of Earl Roger. And we are significantly told that the men of Earl Roger—the men of Shropshire—were with them, a formula which seems specially meant to shut out the presence of the Earl himself.[124] And though the leaders were “all Frenchmen,”[125] yet among their followers were men of all the races of the land. Not only Normans and Britons, but Englishmen also, were seen in the rebel ranks. So it seemed, if not in the general prospect as it was looked at from distant Peterborough, yet at least in the clearer view which men took from the watch-towers of more nearly threatened Worcester.[126]
The rebels march on Worcester. For it was the “faithful city” of after days on which the full storm of the Western revolt was meant to burst. The Norman lords of the border, with their British allies, now marched on Worcester, as, thirty-three years before, 1055.an English earl of the border, with his British allies, had marched on Hereford.[127] They came of their own will to deal by Worcester, shire and city, as, forty-seven years 1041. before, English earls had been driven against their will to deal with them at the bidding of a Danish king.[128] “They harried and burned on Worcestershire forth, and they came to the port itself, and would then the port burn and the minster reave, and the King’s castle win to their hands.”[129] But Worcester was not doomed to see in the days of the second William such a day as Hereford had seen in the days of Eadward, as Worcester itself had seen in the days of Harthacnut. Deliverance of Worcester. The port was not burned, the minster was not reaved, nor was the King’s castle won into the hands of his enemies. And the deliverance of Worcester is, with one accord, assigned by the writers of the time to the presence within its walls of its bishop, the one remaining bishop of English blood, whose unshaken loyalty had most likely brought the special wrath of the rebels upon his city and flock. Action of Wulfstan. The holy Wulfstan was grieved at heart for the woes which seemed coming upon his people; but he bade them be of good courage and trust in the Lord who saveth not by sword or spear.[130] The man who had won the heart of Northumberland for Harold,[131] who had saved his own city for the first William,[132] was now to save it again for the second. Position of Worcester. At Worcester, castle, minster, and episcopal palace rose side by side immediately above the Severn. But Worcester is no hill city like Durham or Le Mans. The height above the stream is slight; the subordinate buildings of the monastery went down almost to its banks. The mound, traditionally connected with the name of Eadgar the Giver-of-peace, has now utterly vanished; it then stood to the south of the monastery, and had become, as elsewhere, the kernel of the Norman castle. It will be remembered that it was the sacrilegious extension of its precincts at the hands of Urse of Abetot which had brought down on him the curse of Ealdred.[133] But by this time the new minster of Wulfstan’s own building, whose site, we may suppose, was further from the castle, that is, more to the north, than that of the church of Oswald,[134] was, if not yet finished, at least in making. It may be that at this moment the two minsters—the elder one which has wholly passed away, the newer, where Wulfstan’s crypt and some other portions of his work still remain among the recastings of later times,—both stood between the mound of Eadgar and its Norman surroundings, and the bishop’s dwelling, whatever may have been its form in Wulfstan’s day. Still along the line of the river, lay the buildings of the city further to the north, with the bridge leading to the meadows and low hills beyond the stream, backed by the varied outline of the heights of Malvern, the home of the newly-founded brotherhood of Ealdwine.[135] At the moment when the rebels drew near to Worcester, all the inhabitants of the city, of whatever race or order, were of one heart and of one soul under the inspiration of their holy Bishop. Wulfstan called to the command. Like the prophets and judges of old, Wulfstan suddenly stands forth as first, if not in military action, at least in military command. We know not whether the fierce Sheriff or some captain of a milder spirit formally bore rule in the castle. But we read that the Norman garrison, by whom the mild virtues of the English bishop were known and loved, practically put him at their head. They prayed him to leave his episcopal home beyond the church, and to take up his abode with them in the fortress. If danger should be pressing, they would feel themselves all the safer, if such an one as he were among them.[136] Wulfstan enters the castle. Wulfstan agreed to their proposal, and set out on the short journey which he was asked to make, a journey which the encroachments of the Sheriff had made shorter than it should have been.[137] On his way he was surrounded by the inhabitants of Worcester of all classes, all alike ready for battle. He himself had, after the new fashion of Norman prelates, a military following,[138] and the soldiers of the King and of the Bishop, with all the citizens of Worcester, now came together in arms. From the height of the castle mound, Wulfstan and his people looked forth beyond the river. Advance of the rebels. The foes were now advancing; they could be seen marching towards the city, and burning and laying waste the lands of the bishopric.[139] Sally of the royal forces. Soldiers and citizens now craved the Bishop’s leave to cross the river and meet the enemy. Wulfstan gave them leave, encouraging them by his blessing, and by the assurance that God would allow no harm to befall those who went forth to fight for their King and for the deliverance of their city and people.[140] Grieved further by the sight of the harrying of the church-lands, and pressed by the urgent prayer of all around him, Wulfstan curses the rebels. Wulfstan pronounced a solemn anathema against the rebellious and sacrilegious invaders.[141] The loyal troops, strengthened by the exhortations and promises of their Bishop, set forth. Victory of the king’s men. The bridge was made firm; the defenders of Worcester marched across it;[142] and the working of Wulfstan’s curse, so the tradition of Worcester ran, smote down their enemies before them with a more than human power. The invaders, scattered over the fields for plunder, were at once overtaken and overthrown. Their limbs became weak and their eyes dim; they could hardly lift their weapons or know friend from foe.[143] The footmen were slaughtered; the horsemen, Norman, English, and Welsh, were taken prisoners; of the whole host only a few escaped by flight. The men of the King and of the Bishop marched back to Worcester—so Worcester dutifully believed—without the loss of a single man from their ranks. They came back rejoicing in the great salvation which had been wrought by their hands, and giving all thanks to God and his servant Wulfstan.[144]
Among the sorrows which rent the breast of the holy Bishop of Worcester, one may have been to see a man of his own order, one whom he had, somewhat strangely perhaps, honoured with his friendship, acting as a temporal leader in the rebellion against which he had to wield his spiritual arms. It was, it may be remembered, Geoffrey of Mowbray, the lord of the robbers’ hold at Bristol, who had rebuked the lamb-like simplicity of Wulfstan’s garb.[145] The lamb of Severnside had now overthrown alike the wolves of Normandy and the wild cats of the British hills. But, if Wulfstan mourned over the evil deeds of the warlike Bishop of Coutances, he had no such personal cause for grief over either the sins or the sorrows of another bishop who was meanwhile, like himself, besieged in an episcopal city. That bishop however was not, like Wulfstan, defending his own flock with either spiritual or temporal arms; he was doing all the wrong in his power to the flock of another. Movements of Odo in Kent. The source and leader of the whole mischief,[146] Odo, Bishop and Earl, chose his own earldom of Kent for the scene of his ravages. Our notes of time are very imperfect, and we have seen that there were movements in Kent, movements in which Odo seems to have had a share, much earlier in the year.[147] But it would seem that the great outbreak of rebellion in south-eastern England happened about the same time as the great outbreaks more to the west and north. As the Bishop of Coutances had fixed his head-quarters in the castle of Bristol, so the Bishop of Bayeux now fixed his head-quarters in the castle of Rochester, and thence ravaged the lands of the King and the Archbishop.[148] Another great Kentish fortress, that of Tunbridge, was also in rebellion. Tunbridge and Pevensey. So in Sussex was Pevensey, the very firstfruits of the Conquest, where Odo’s brother Count Robert also held out against the King. These three fortresses now become the busy scene of our immediate story; but the centre of all is the post occupied by the Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent. This part of the war is emphatically the war of Rochester.
Edwᵈ. Weller
For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.
Map illustrating the
KENT AND SUSSEX
CAMPAIGN. A.D. 1088.
Early history of Rochester. The city by the Medway had been a fortress from the earliest times. We have seen that it had already played a part both in foreign and in civil wars. In the days of Æthelred it still kept the Roman walls parts of which still remain, walls which were then able to withstand two sieges, one at the hands of the King himself, and one at those of the Danish invaders.[149] Importance of its position. In truth the position of Rochester, lying on the road from London to Canterbury, near to the sea on a navigable river, made it at all times a great military post.[150] The chief ornament of the city did not yet exist in the days of Odo. The later castle. The noble tower raised in the next age by Archbishop Walter of Corbeuil, the tower which in one struggle held out against John[151] and in the next held out for his son,[152] and still remains one of the glories of Norman military architecture, had perhaps not even a forerunner of its own class.[153] The cathedral church. And the minster of Saint Andrew, which the enlargements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have still left one of the least among the episcopal churches of England, had then only the lowly forerunner which had risen, which perhaps was still only rising, under the hands of Gundulf.[154] The castle site fortified by the Conqueror. But the steep scarped cliff rising above the broad tidal stream was a stronghold in the Conqueror’s days, as it had doubtless been in days long before his. Whether a stone castle had yet been built is uncertain; the fact that such an one was built for William Rufus by Gundulf later in his reign might almost lead us to think that as yet the site, strong in itself, was defended only by earthworks and defences of timber.[155] The city. Below the castle to the south-east lay the city, doubtless fenced by the Roman wall; and a large part of its space had now begun to form the monastic precinct of Saint Andrew. The town is said to have been parted from the castle by a ditch which, as at Le Mans and at Lincoln, was overleaped by the enlarged church of the twelfth century;[156] in any case the castle, in all its stages, formed a sheltering citadel to the town at its feet. Nature of the site. Neither town nor castle by itself occupies a peninsular site; but a great bend of the river to the south makes the whole ground on which they stand peninsular, with an extent of marshy ground between the town and the river to the north and east. The stronghold of Rochester, no lofty natural peak, no mound of ancient English kings, perhaps as yet gathering round no square keep of the new Norman fashion, but in any case a well-defended circuit with its scarped sides strengthened by all the art of the time, was the chief fortress of the ancient kingdom over which the Bishop of Bayeux now ruled as Earl. The castle occupied by Odo. It now became, under him, the great centre of the rebellion. Gundulf, renowned as he was for his skill in military architecture, must have been sore let and hindered in the peaceful work of building his church and settling the discipline of his monks,[157] when his brother bishop filled the castle with his men of war, five hundred of his own knights among them.[158] But Odo was not satisfied with his garrison. Odo asks Robert to come. He sent beyond sea to Duke Robert for further help. The prince in whose name Rochester was now held was earnestly prayed to come at once at the head of the full power of his duchy, to take possession of the crown and kingdom which were waiting for his coming.[159]
E. Weller
For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.
ROCHESTER
The news brought to Robert. According to the narrative which we are now following, it would seem that Robert now heard for the first time of the movement which was going on in his behalf in England. His heart is lifted up at the unlooked for news; he tells the tidings to his friends; certain of victory, he sends some of them over to share in the spoil; he promises to come himself with all speed, as soon as he should have gathered a greater force.[160] He sends over Eustace of Boulogne and Robert of Bellême. At the head of the party which was actually sent were two men whose names are familiar to us.[161] One of them, Count Eustace of Boulogne, united the characters of a land-owner in England and of a sovereign prince in Gaul. This was the younger Eustace, the son of the old enemy of England, the brother of the hero who was within a few years to win back the Holy City for Christendom.[162] With him came Robert of Bellême; his share in the rebellion is his first act on English ground that we have to record. Three sons of Earl Roger at Rochester. Himself the eldest son of Earl Roger of Shrewsbury, he had either brought with him two of his brothers, or else they had already embraced the cause of Odo in England. Three sons of Roger and Mabel were now within the walls of Rochester.[163] Hugh of Montgomery. The second was Hugh, who was for a moment to represent the line of Montgomery while Robert represented the line of Bellême, and who was to be as fierce a scourge to the Britons of the Northern border as Robert was to be to the valiant defenders of the land of Maine.[164] Roger of Poitou. And with them was the third brother, Roger of Poitou, the lord of the debateable land between Mersey and Ribble,[165] carrying as it were to the furthest point of the earldom of Leofric the claim of his father to the proud title which the elder Roger bears at this stage of our story. Action of Earl Roger. It is as Earl of the Mercians that one teller of our tale bids us look for a moment on the lord of Montgomery and Shrewsbury.[166] But the Earl of the Mercians was not with his sons at Rochester any more than he had been with his men before Worcester. He was in another seat of his scattered power. His presence was less needed at Shrewsbury, less needed at the continental or the insular Montgomery, than it was in the South-Saxon land where the lord of Arundel and Chichester held so high a place. He stays at Arundel. While his men were overthrown before Worcester, while his sons were strengthening themselves at Rochester, Earl Roger himself was watching events in his castle of Arundel.[167] The spot was well fitted for the purpose. Arundel lies in the same general region of England as the three great rebel strongholds of Rochester, Tunbridge, and Pevensey; it lies in the same shire and near the same coast as the last named of the three. Position of Arundel. But it lies apart from the immediate field of action of a campaign which should gather round those three centres. A gap in the Sussex downs, where the Arun makes its way to the sea through the flat land at its base, had been marked out, most likely from the earliest times, as a fitting spot for a stronghold. A castle at Arundel T. R. E. The last slope of this part of the downs towards the east was strengthened in days before King William came with a mound and a ditch, and Arundel is marked in the Great Survey as one of the castles few and far between which England contained before his coming.[168] Description of the castle. The shell-keep which crowns the mound, and the gateway which flanks it, have been recast at various later times from the twelfth century onward, but it would be rash to assert that the mere wall of the keep may not contain portions either of the days of King William or of the days of King Eadward. The traces of a vast hall, more immediately overlooking the river, reared as usual on a vaulted substructure, almost constrain us to see in them the work of no age earlier or later than that of Roger or his successor of his own house.[169] The site is a natural watchtower, whence the eye ranges far away to various points of the compass, over the flat land and over the more distant hills, and over the many windings of the tidal river which then made Arundel a place of trade as well as of defence.[170] Less threatening than his vulture’s nest at Tre Baldwin,[171] less tempting to an enemy than his fortresses on the peninsula of Shrewsbury and within the walls of Chichester,[172] the stronghold of Arundel seems exactly the place for an experienced observer of men and things like Earl Roger to look out from and bide his time. He had to watch the course of things in the three rebel fortresses; he had further to watch what might come from a nearer spot, another break in the hill ground, where, between his doubtful Arundel and rebellious William of Warren at Lewes. Pevensey, the twin mounds of loyal Lewes,[173] the home of William and Gundrada, looked up to what was one day to be the battle-ground of English freedom. Its lord, long familiar to us as William of Warren, stood firm in his allegiance, and it was now, according to some His earldom of Surrey. accounts, that he received his earldom of Surrey, an earldom to be borne in after times along with that which took its name from Roger’s own Arundel.[174] William became the King’s chief counsellor, and his position at Lewes must have thrown difficulties in the way of any communication between Arundel and Pevensey. His loyalty. And in truth, when Earl Roger found it safest to watch and be prudent, we are not surprised to find events presently shaping themselves in such a way as to make it his wisest course to play the part of the Curio of the tale.[175]
Action of the King. But meanwhile where was King William? Where was the king who had taken his place on his father’s seat with so much ease, but whose place upon it had been so soon and so rudely shaken? We have been called on more than once in earlier studies to mark how the two characters of fox and lion were mingled in the tempers of the Conqueror and his countrymen, and assuredly the Conqueror’s second surviving son was fully able to don either garb when need called for it.[176] At this moment we are told in a marked way that William Rufus showed himself in the character of that which is conventionally looked on as the nobler beast. He had no mind to seek for murky holes, like the timid fox, but, like the bold and fearless lion, he gave himself mightily to put down the devices of his enemies.[177] Yet the first time when He wins over Earl Roger. we distinctly get a personal sight of him, the Red King is seen playing the part of the fox with no small effect. Earl Roger was assuredly no mean master of Norman craft; but King William, in his first essay, showed himself fully his equal. By a personal appeal he won the Earl over from at least taking any further personal share in the rebellion. At some place not mentioned, perhaps at Arundel itself, the Earl, disguising, we are told, his treason, was riding in the King’s company.[178] The King took him aside, and argued the case with him. He would, he said, give up the kingdom, if such was really the wish of the old companions of his father. He knew not wherefore they were so bitter against him; he was ready, if they wished it, to make them further grants of lands or money. Only let them remember one thing; his cause and theirs were really the same; it was safer not to dispute the will of the man who had made both him and them what they were. “You may,” wound up Rufus, “despise and overthrow me; but take care lest such an example should prove dangerous to yourselves. My father has made me a king, and it was he alone who made you an earl.”[179] Roger felt or affected conviction, and followed the King, in his bodily presence at least, during the rest of the campaign.[180] Count Robert at Pevensey. But Robert, Count of Mortain and lord of Cornwall, still made Pevensey one of the strongholds of the revolt. Of the third great neighbour of these two lords, Count Robert of Eu, father of the ravager of Berkeley, we hear nothing on this side of the water.
Loyal Normans. But, amid the general falling away, the throne of William Rufus was still defended by some men of Norman birth on whom he could better rely than on the Earl Hugh.doubtful loyalty of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Earl Hugh of Chester remained faithful; so, as we have seen, did Earl Roger’s neighbour, now or afterwards Earl William.[181] William of Warren. And to these already famous names we must add one which was now only beginning to be heard of, but which was presently to equal, if not to surpass, the renown of either. Robert Fitz-hamon. This was Robert Fitz-hamon, the son or grandson of Hamon Dentatus, the rebel of Val-ès-dunes.[182] But it was not on the swords of the Norman followers of his father that the son of the Conqueror rested his hopes of keeping the crown which the Conqueror had left him. Forces on the side of Rufus, William Rufus had at his side two forces, either of which, when it could put forth its full power, was stronger by far than the Norman nobles. All that in any way represented the higher feelings and instincts of man was along with him. All that in any shape was an embodiment of law or right was arrayed against the men whose one avowed principle was the desire to shake off the restraints of law in any shape. the Church, and the people. Against the openly proclaimed reign of lawlessness the King could rely on the strength of the Church and the strength of the people. With the single exception of him of Durham, the marauding bishops of Bayeux and Coutances found no followers among the men of their order in England. Loyalty of the Bishops. Lanfranc stood firmly by the King to whom he had given the crown; and the other bishops, of whatever origin, sought, we are told, with all faithfulness of purpose, the things which were for peace.[183] The King appeals to the English. Either by their advice or by his own discernment, the King saw that his only course was to throw himself on the true folk of the land, to declare himself King of the English in fact as well as in name. His proclamation. A written proclamation went forth in the name of King William, addressed, doubtless in their own ancient tongue, to the sons of the soil, the men of English kin. The King of the English called on the people of the English, on the valiant men who were left of the old stock; he set forth his need to them and craved for their loyal help.[184] At such a moment he was lavish of promises. His promises. All the wrongs of the days of William the Elder were to be put an end to in the days of William the Younger. The English folk should have again the best laws that ever before were in this land. King William would reign over his people like Eadward or Cnut or Ælfred. The two great grievances of his father’s days were to cease; the King’s coffers were no longer to be filled by money wrung from his people; the King’s hunting-grounds were no longer to be fenced in by the savage code which had guarded the Conqueror’s pleasures. All unrighteous geld he forbade, and he granted to them their woods and right of hunting.[185] The English take up the King’s cause. At the sound of such promises men’s hearts were stirred. At such moments, men commonly listen to their hopes rather than to their reason; the prospects and promises of a new reign are always made the best of; and there was no special reason as yet why the word of William the Red should be distrusted. He had not conquered England; he had not as yet had the means of oppressing England; he had shown at least one virtue in dutiful attachment to his father; his counsellor was the venerated Primate; chief in loyalty to him was one yet more venerated, the one native chief left to the English Church, the holy Bishop of Worcester. If the English dealt with William as an English king, he might deal with them as an English king should deal with his people. Motives for supporting William. In fighting for William against the men who had risen up against him, they would be fighting for one who had not himself wronged them against the men who had done them the bitterest of wrongs. If the Bishop of Bayeux and the Bishop of Coutances, if Robert of Mortain and Robert of Mowbray, if Eustace of Boulogne and the fierce lord of Bellême, could all be smitten down by English axes or driven into banishment from the English shores, if their estates on English soil could be again parted out as the reward of English valour, the work of the Norman Conquest would indeed seem to be undone. And it would be undone none the less, although the king whose crown was made sure by English hands was himself the son of the Conqueror of England.
Loyalty of the English. With such feelings as these the sons of the soil gathered with glee around the standard of King William. Not a name is handed down to us. We know not from what shires they came or under what leaders they marched. They meet in London. We see only that, as was natural when the stress of the war lay in Kent and Sussex, the trysting-place was London.[186] How did that great city stand at this moment with regard to the rebellion? It will be remembered by what vigorous means Bishop William of Durham claimed to have secured the allegiance of the citizens some time earlier.[187] At all events, whether by the help of William of Saint-Calais or not, London was now in the King’s hands. William’s English army. There the royal host met, a motley host, a host of horse and foot, of Normans and English, but a host in which the English element was by far the greatest, and in which English feeling gave its character to the whole movement. Thirty thousand of the true natives of the land came together of their own free will to the defence of their lord the King.[188] The figures are of much the same value as other figures; it is enough if we take them as marking a general and zealous movement. Their zeal in his cause. The men who were thus brought together promised the King their most zealous service; they exhorted him to press on valiantly, to smite the rebels, and to win for himself the Empire of the whole island.[189] This last phrase is worth noting, even if it be a mere flourish of the historian. William accepted as the English king. It marks that the change of dynasty was fully accepted, that the son of the Conqueror was fully acknowledged as the heir of all the rights of Æthelstan the Glorious and of Eadmund the Doer-of-great-deeds. A daughter of their race still sat on the Scottish throne; but for Malcolm, the savage devastator of Northern England, Englishmen could not be expected to feel any love. William was now their king, their king crowned and anointed, the lord to whom their duty was owing as his men.[190] Him they would make fast on the throne of England; for him they were ready to win the Empire of all Britain. The English followers of Rufus loudly proclaimed their hatred of rebellion. They even, we are told, called on their leader to study the history of past times, where he would see how faithful Englishmen had ever been to their kings.[191]
William’s march. At the head of this great and zealous host William the Red set forth from London. He set forth at the head of an English host, to fight against Norman enemies in the Kentish and South-Saxon lands. And in that host there may well have been men who had marched forth from London on the like errand only two-and-twenty years before. Great as were the changes which had swept over the land, men must have been still living, still able to bear arms, who had dealt their blows in the Malfosse of Senlac amidst the last glimmerings of light on the day of Saint Calixtus. The enemy was nationally and even personally the same. English hatred of Odo. The work before all others at the present moment was to seize the man whose spiritual exhortations had stirred up Norman valour on that unforgotten day, and whose temporal arm had wielded, if not the sword, at least the war-club, in the first rank of the invaders. Odo, the invader of old, the oppressor of later days, the head and front of the evil rede of the present moment, was the foremost object of the loyal and patriotic hatred of every Englishman in the Red King’s army. Could he be seized, it would be easier to seize his accomplices.[192] The great object of the campaign was therefore to recover the castle of Rochester, the stronghold where the rebel Bishop, with his allies from Boulogne and from Bellême, bade their defiance to the King and people of England.
It was not however deemed good to march at once upon the immediate centre of the rebellion. A glance at the map will show that it was better policy not to make the attack on Rochester while both the other rebel strongholds, Tunbridge and Pevensey, remained unsubdued. Tunbridge castle. The former of these, a border-post of Kent and Sussex, guarding the upper course of the stream that flows by Rochester, would, if won for the King, put a strong barrier between Rochester and Pevensey. Attack on the castle. The march on Rochester therefore took a roundabout course, and this part of the war opened by an attack on Tunbridge which was the first exploit of the Red King’s English army. Position of Tunbridge. At a point on the Medway about four miles within the Kentish border, at the foot of the high ground reaching northward from the actual frontier of the two ancient kingdoms, the winding river receives the waters of several smaller streams, and forms a group of low islands and peninsulas. On the slightly rising ground to the north, commanding the stream and its bridge, a mound had risen, fenced by a ditch on the exposed side to the north. This ancient fortress had grown into the castle of Gilbert the son of Richard, called of Clare and of Tunbridge, the son of the famous Count Gilbert of the early days of the Conqueror.[193] As Tunbridge now stands, the outer defences of the castle stand between the mound and the river, and the mound, bearing the shell-keep, is yoked together in a striking way with one of the noblest gateways of the later form of mediæval military art.[194] The general arrangements of the latter days of the eleventh century cannot have been widely different. The mound, doubtless a work of English hands turned to the uses of the stranger, was the main stronghold to be won. It was held by a body of Bishop Odo’s knights, under the command of its own lord Gilbert; to win it for the King and his people was an object only second to that of seizing the traitor prelate himself. The rebel band bade defiance to the King and his army. The castle held out for two days; but the zeal of the English was not to be withstood; no work could be more to their liking than that of attacking a Norman castle on their own soil, even with a Norman King as their leader. The castle stormed. The castle was stormed; the native Chronicler, specially recording the act of his countrymen, speaks of it, like the castles of York in the days of Waltheof, as “tobroken.”[195] Most likely the buildings on the mound were thus “tobroken;” but some part of the castle enclosure must have been left habitable and defensible. For the garrison, with their chief Gilbert, were admitted to terms; and Gilbert, who had been wounded in the struggle, was left there under the care of a loyal guard.
The first blow had thus gone well to the mark. Such an exploit as this, the capture by English valour of one of the hated strongholds of the stranger, was enough to raise the spirit of William’s English followers to the highest pitch. And presently they were summoned to a work which would call forth a yet fiercer glow of national feeling. They march towards Rochester. After Tunbridge had fallen, they set forth on their march towards Rochester, believing that the arch-enemy Odo was there. Their course would be to the north-east, keeping some way from the left side of the Medway; Bishop Gundulf’s tower at Malling,[196] if it was already built, would be the most marked point on the road. But they were not to reach Rochester by so easy a path. While they were on their way, news came to the King that his uncle was no longer at Rochester. Odo at Pevensey. While the King was before Tunbridge, the Bishop with a few followers had struck to the south-east, and had reached his brother’s castle of Pevensey.[197] Odo exhorts Robert of Mortain to hold out. The Count of Mortain and lord of Cornwall was perhaps wavering, like his neighbour at Arundel. The Bishop exhorted him to hold out. While the King besieged Rochester, they would be safe at Pevensey, and meanwhile Duke Robert and his host would cross the sea. The Duke would then win the crown, and would reward all their services.[198]
Interest of Duke Robert in the rebellion. It is well to be reminded by words like these what the professed object of the insurgents was. It would be easy to forget that all the plundering that had been done from Rochester to Ilchester had been done in the name of the lawful rights of Duke Robert. The men who harried Berkeley and who were overthrown at Worcester were but the forerunners of the Duke of His coming looked for. the Normans, who was to come, as spring went on, with the full force of his duchy.[199] It was not for nothing that King William had gathered his English army, when a new Norman Conquest was looked for. He fails to help the rebels. But as yet the blow was put off; Duke Robert came not; he seemed to think that the crown of England could be won with ease at any moment. When the first news of William’s accession came, when those around him urged him to active measures to support his rights, he had spoken of the matter with childish scorn. His childish boasting. Were he at the ends of the earth—the city of Alexandria is taken as the standard of distance—the English would not dare to make William king, William would not dare to accept the crown at their hands, without waiting for the coming of his elder brother.[200] Both the impossible things had happened, and Robert and his partisans had now before them the harder task of driving William from a throne which was already his, instead of merely hindering him from mounting it. Up to this time Robert had done nothing; His promises. but now, in answer to the urgent prayers of his uncles, he did get together a force for their help, and promised that he would himself follow it before long.[201]
William marches on Pevensey. The news of Odo’s presence at Pevensey at once changed the course of William’s march. Wherever the Bishop of Bayeux was, there was the point to be aimed at.[202] Instead of going on to Rochester, the King turned and marched straight upon Pevensey. The exact line of his march is not told us, but it could not fail to cross, perhaps it might for a while even coincide with, the line of march by which Harold had pressed to the South-Saxon coast on the eve of the great battle. The English besiege Odo in Pevensey. Things might seem to have strangely turned about, when an English army, led by a son of the Conqueror, marched to lay siege to the two brothers and chief fellow-workers of the Conqueror within the stronghold which was the very firstfruits of the Conquest. The Roman walls of Anderida were still there; but their whole circuit was no longer desolate, as it had been when the Conqueror landed, and as we see it now again. The castle of Pevensey. One part of the ancient city had again become a dwelling-place of man. As Pevensey now stands, the south-eastern corner of the Roman enclosure, now again as forsaken as the rest, is fenced in by the moat, the walls, the towers, of a castle of the later type, the type of the Edwards, but whose towers are built in evident imitation of the solid Roman bastions. Then, or at some earlier time, the Roman wall itself received a new line of parapet, and one at least of its bastions was raised to form a tower in the restored line of defence. When the house of Mortain passed away in the second generation, the honour of Pevensey became the possession of the house of Laigle, and from them, perhaps in popular speech, certainly in the dialect of local antiquaries, Anderida became the Honour of the Eagle.[203] Within the circuit of the later castle, close on the ancient wall, rises, covered with shapeless ruins, a small mound which doubtless marks the site of the elder keep of Count Robert. Within that keep the two sons of Herleva, Bishop and Count, looked down on the shore close at their feet where they had landed with their mightier brother two-and-twenty years before. Within that stern memorial of their victory, they had now to defend themselves against the sons and brothers of men who had fallen by their hands, and whose lands they had parted out among them for a prey.
The siege of Pevensey. The siege of Pevensey proved a far harder work than the siege of Tunbridge. The Roman wall with its new Norman defences was less easy to storm than the ancient English mound. William the Red had to wait longer before Pevensey than William the Great had had to wait before Exeter. The fortress was strong; the spirit of its defenders was high; for Odo was among them. The King beset the castle with a great host; he brought the artillery of the time to bear upon its defences; but for six weeks his rebellious uncles bore up against the attacks of William and his Englishmen.[204] Duke Robert at last sends help. And, while the siege went on, another of the chances of war seemed yet more thoroughly to reverse what had happened on the same spot not a generation back. Again a Norman host landed, or strove to land, within the haven of Pevensey. But they came under other guidance than that which had led the men who came before them on the like errand. When William crossed the sea, his own Mora sailed foremost and swiftest in the whole fleet, and William himself was the first man in his army to set foot on English ground. William in short led his fleet; his son only sent his. Robert stays behind. Robert still tarried in Normandy; he was coming, but not yet; his men were to make their way into England how they could without him. They came, and they found the South-Saxon coast better guarded than it had been when Harold had to strive against two invaders at once. The English hinder the Normans from landing. When Robert’s ships drew nigh, they found the ships of King William watching the coast; they found the soldiers of King William lining the shore.[205] On such a spot, in such a cause, no Englishman’s heart or hand was likely to fail him. The attempt at a new Norman landing at Pevensey was driven back. Those who escaped the English sailors drew near to the shore, but only to fall into the hands of the English land-force. It must not be forgotten that, as the coast-line then stood, when the sea covered what is now the low ground between the castle and the beach, the struggle for the landing must have gone on close under the walls of the ancient city and of the new-built castle. The English who beat back the Normans of Duke Robert’s fleet as they strove to land must have been themselves exposed to the arrows of the Normans who guarded Count Robert’s donjon. But the work was done. Some of the invaders lived to be taken prisoners; but the more part, a greater number than any man could tell, were smitten down by the English axes or thrust back to meet their doom in the waves of the Channel. Some who deemed that they had still the means of escape tried to hoist the sails of their ships and get them back to their own land. But the elements fought against them. The winds which had so long refused to bring the fleet of William from Normandy to England now refused no less to take back the fleet of Robert from England to Normandy. And there were no means now, as there had been by the Dive and at Saint Valery, for waiting patiently by a friendly coast, or for winning the good will of the South-Saxon saints by prayers or offerings.[206] Even Saint Martin of the Place of Battle had no call to help the eldest son of his founder against his founder’s namesake and chosen heir. The ships could not be moved; the English were upon them; the Normans, a laughing-stock to their enemies, rather than fall into their enemies’ hands, leaped from their benches into the less hostile waters. Utter failure of the invasion. The attempt of the Conqueror’s eldest son to do by deputy what his father had done in person had utterly come to nought. The new invaders of England had been overthrown by English hands on the spot where the work of the former invaders had begun.
After the defeat of this attempt to bring help to the besieged at Pevensey, nothing more was heard of Duke Robert’s coming in person. Alleged death of William of Warren. If we may believe a single confused and doubtful narrative, the defenders of the castle had at least the satisfaction of slaying one of the chief men in the royal army. We are told that Earl William of Warren was mortally wounded in the leg by an arrow from the walls of Pevensey, and was carried to Lewes only to die there.[207] However this may be, the failure of the Norman expedition carried with it the failure of the hopes of the besieged. The castle surrenders. Food now began to fail them, and Odo and Robert found that there was nothing left for them but to surrender to their nephew on the best terms that they could get. Of the terms which were granted to the Count of Mortain and lord of Cornwall we hear nothing. The Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent was a more important person, and we have full details of everything that concerned him. Terms granted to Odo. The terms granted to the chief stirrer up of the whole rebellion were certainly favourable. He was called on to swear that he would leave England, and would never come back, unless the King sent for him, and that, before he Rochester to be surrendered. went, he would cause the castle of Rochester to be surrendered.[208] For the better carrying out of the last of his engagements, the Bishop was sent on towards Rochester in the keeping of a small body of the King’s troops, while the King himself slowly followed.[209] No further treachery was feared; it was taken for granted that those who held the castle for Odo would give it up at once when Odo came in person to bid them do so. These hopes were vain; the young nobles who were left in the castle, Count Eustace, Robert of Bellême, and the rest, were not scrupulous as to the faith of treaties, and they had no mind to give up their stronghold till they were made to do so by force of arms. Odo was brought before the walls of Rochester. The leaders of the party that brought him called on the defenders of the castle to surrender; such was the bidding alike of the King who was absent and of the Bishop who was there in person. But Odo’s friends could see from the wall that the voices of the King’s messengers told one story, while the looks of the Bishop told another. The garrison refuse to surrender; Odo taken prisoner by his own friends. They threw open the gates; they rushed forth on the King’s men, who were in no case to resist them, and carried both them and the Bishop prisoners into the castle.[210] Odo was doubtless a willing captive; once within the walls of Rochester, he again became the life and soul of the defence.
It perhaps did not tend to the moral improvement of William Rufus to find himself thus shamefully deceived by one so near of kin to himself, so high in ecclesiastical rank. At the moment the treachery of Odo stirred him up to greater efforts. Rochester should be won, though it might need the whole strength of the kingdom to win it. William’s Niðing Proclamation. But the King saw that it was only by English hands that it could be won. He gathered around him his English followers, and by their advice put out a proclamation in ancient form bidding all men, French and English, from port and from upland, to come with all speed to the royal muster, if they would not be branded with the shameful name of Nithing. That name, the name which had been fixed, as the lowest badge of infamy, on the murderer Swegen,[211] was a name under which no Englishman could live; and it seems to have been held that strangers settled on English ground would have put on enough of English feeling to be stirred in the like sort by the fear of having such a mark set upon them. What the Frenchmen did we are not told; The second English muster. but the fyrd of England answered loyally to the call of a King who thus knew how to appeal to the most deep-set feelings and traditions of Englishmen.[212] Men came in crowds to King William’s muster, and, in the course of May, a vast host beset the fortress of Rochester. The siege of Rochester. According to a practice of which we have often heard already, two temporary forts, no doubt of wood, were raised, so as to hem in the besieged and to cut off their communications from without.[213] The site of one at least of these may be looked for on the high ground to the south of the castle, said to be itself partly artificial, and known as Boley Hill.[214] The besieged soon found that all resistance was useless. They were absolutely alone. Pevensey and Tunbridge were now in the King’s hands; since the overthrow of Duke Robert’s fleet, they could look for no help from Normandy; they could look for none from yet more distant Bristol or Durham. Straits of the besieged. Till the siege began, they had lived at the cost of the loyal inhabitants of Kent and London. For not only the Archbishop, but most of the chief land-owners of Kent were on the King’s side.[215] This is a point to be noticed amid the general falling away of the Normans. For the land-owners of Kent, a land where no Englishman was a tenant-in-chief, were a class preeminently Norman. But we can well believe that the rule of Odo, who spared neither French nor English who stood in his way,[216] may have been little more to the liking of his own countrymen than it was to that of the men of the land. But all chance of plunder was now cut off; a crowd of men and horses were packed closely together within the circuit of the fortress, with little heed to health or cleanliness. Plague of flies. Sickness was rife among them, and a plague of flies, a plague which is likened to the ancient plague of Egypt, added to their distress.[217] There was no hope within their own defences, and beyond them a host lay spread which there was no chance of overcoming. At last the heart of Odo himself failed him. They agree to surrender. He and his fiercest comrades, Eustace of Boulogne, even Robert of Bellême, at last brought themselves to crave for peace at the hands of the offended and victorious King.
Lesson of the war: the King stronger than any one noble. It was a great and a hard lesson which Odo and his accomplices learned at Pevensey and Rochester. It was the great lesson of English history, the great result of the teaching of William the Great on the day of Salisbury, that no one noble, however great his power, however strong the force which he could gather round him, could strive with any hope of success against the King of the whole land. In the royal army itself Odo might see one who had risen as high as himself among the conquerors of England, the father of the fiercest of the warriors who stood beside him, following indeed the King’s bidding, but following it against his will. Odo and Roger of Montgomery. Roger of Montgomery was in the host before Rochester, an unwilling partner in a siege which was waged against his own sons. Both he and other Normans in the King’s army are charged with giving more of real help to the besieged than they gave to the King whom they no longer dared to withstand openly.[218] But it was in vain that even so great a lord as Earl Roger sought to strive or to plot against England and her King. The unity of England. The policy of the Conqueror, crowning the work of earlier kings, had made England a land in which no Earl of Kent or of Shrewsbury could gather a host able to withstand the King of the English at the head of the English people.[219] When the days came that kings were to be brought low, it was not by the might of this or that overgrown noble, but by the people of the land, with the barons of the land acting only as the first rank of the people. Those days were yet far away; but an earlier stage in the chain of progress had been reached. The Norman nobles had taken one step towards becoming the first rank of the English people, when they learned that King and people together were stronger than they.
Rufus refuses terms to the besieged. The defenders of Rochester had brought themselves to ask for peace; but they still thought that they could make terms with their sovereign. Let the King secure to them the lands and honours which they held in his kingdom, and they would give up the castle of Rochester to his will; they would hold all that they had as of his grant, and would serve him faithfully as their natural lord.[220] The wrath of the Red King burst forth, as well it might. Odo at least was asking at Rochester for more favourable terms than those to which he had already sworn at Pevensey. William answered that he would grant no terms; he had strength enough to take the castle, whether they chose to surrender it or not. The King’s threats.And the story runs that he added—not altogether in the spirit of his father—that all the traitors within the walls should be hanged on gibbets, or put to such other forms of death as might please him.[221] But those of his followers who had friends or kinsfolk within the castle came to the King to crave mercy for them. Pleadings for the besieged. A dialogue follows in our most detailed account, in which the scriptural reference to the history of Saul and David may be set down as the garnish of the monk of Saint Evroul, but which contains arguments that are likely enough to have been used on the two sides of the question. An appeal is made to William’s own greatness and victory, to his position as the successor of his father. God, who helps those who trust in him, gives to good fathers a worthy offspring to come after them. The men in the castle, the proud youths and the old men blinded by greediness, had learned that the power of kings had not died out in the island realm. Those who had come from Normandy—here we seem to hear an argument from English mouths—sweeping down upon the land like kites, they who had deemed that the kingly stock had died out in England, had learned that the younger William was in no way weaker than the elder.[222] Mercy was the noblest attribute of a conqueror; something too was due to the men who had helped him to his victory, and who now pleaded for those who had undergone enough of punishment for their error. Answer of the King. Rufus is made to answer that he is thankful both to God and to his faithful followers. But he fears that he should be lacking in that justice which is a king’s first duty, if he were to spare the men who had risen up against him without cause, and who had sought the life of a king who, as he truly said, had done them no harm.[223] The Red King is made to employ the argument which we have so often come across on behalf of that severe discharge of princely duty which made the names of his father and his younger brother live in men’s grateful remembrance. He fears lest their prayers should lead him away from the strait path of justice. He who spares robbers and traitors and perjured persons takes away the peace and safety of the innocent, and only sows loss and slaughter for the good and for the unarmed people.[224] This course is one which the Red King was very far from following in after years; but it is quite possible that he may have made such professions at any stage of his life, and he may have even made them honestly at this stage. Pleadings for Odo. But on behalf of the chiefest of all culprits, the counsellors of mercy had special arguments. Odo is the King’s uncle, the companion of his father in the Conquest of England. He is moreover a bishop, a priest of the Lord, a sharer in the privileges to which, in one side of his twofold character, he had once appealed in vain. The King is implored not to lay hands on one of Odo’s holy calling, not to shed blood which was at once kindred and sacred. Let the Bishop of Bayeux at least be spared, and allowed to go back to his proper place in his Norman diocese.[225] Pleadings for Eustace and Robert of Bellême. Count Eustace too was the son of his father’s old ally and follower—the invasion which Eustace’s father had once wrought in that very shire seems to be conveniently forgotten.[226] Robert of Bellême had been loved and promoted by his father; he held no small part of Normandy; lord of many strong castles, he stood out foremost among the nobles of the duchy.[227] It was no more than the bidding of prudence to win over such men by favours, and to have their friendship instead of their enmity.[228] As for the rest, they were valiant knights, whose proffered services the King would do well not to despise.[229] The King had shown how far he surpassed his enemies in power, riches, and valour; let him now show how far he surpassed them in mercy and greatness of soul.[230]
To this appeal Rufus yielded. The King yields. It was not indeed an appeal to his knightly faith, which was in no way pledged to the defenders of Rochester. But it was an appeal to any gentler feelings that might be in him, and still more so to that vein of self-esteem and self-exaltation which was the leading feature in his character. If Rufus had an opportunity of showing himself greater than other men, as neither justice nor mercy stood in the way of his making the most of it, so neither did any mere feeling of wrath or revenge. As his advisers told him, he was so successful that he could afford to be merciful, and merciful he accordingly was. To have hanged or blinded his enemies would not have so distinctly exalted himself, as he must have felt himself exalted, when those who had defied him, those who had tried to make terms with him, were driven to accept such terms as he chose to give them. He grants terms. The Red King then plighted his faith—and his faith when once so plighted was never broken—that the lives and limbs of the garrison should be safe, that they should come forth from the castle with their arms and horses. But they must leave the realm; they must give up all hope of keeping their lands and honours in England, as long at least as King William lived.[231] To these terms they had to yield; but Odo, even in his extremity, craved for one favour. Odo asks for the honours of war. He had to bear utter discomfiture, the failure of his hopes, the loss of his lands and honours; but he prayed to be at least spared the public scorn of the victors. His proud soul was not ready to bear the looks, the gestures, the triumphant shouts and songs, of the people whom he had trodden to the earth, and who had now risen up to be his conquerors. He asked, it would seem, to be allowed to march out with what in modern phrase are called the honours of war. His particular prayer was that the trumpets might not sound when he and his followers came forth from the castle. This, we are told, was the usual ceremony after the overthrow of an enemy and the taking of a fortress.[232] The King was again wrathful at the request, and said that not for a thousand marks of gold would he grant it.[233] Humiliation of Odo. Odo had therefore to submit, and to drink the cup of his humiliation to the dregs. With sad and downcast looks he and his companions came forth from the stronghold which could shelter them no longer. The trumpets sounded merrily to greet them.[234] But other sounds more fearful than the voice of the trumpet sounded in the ears of Odo as he came forth. Men saw passing before them, a second time hurled down from his high estate—and this time not by the bidding of a Norman king but by the arms of the English people—the man who stood forth in English eyes as the imbodiment of all that was blackest and basest in the foreign dominion. Odo might keep his eyes fixed on the ground, but the eyes of the nation which he had wronged were full upon him. Wrath of the English against him. The English followers of Rufus pressed close upon him, crying out with shouts which all could hear, “Halters, bring halters; hang up the traitor Bishop and his accomplices on the gibbet.” They turned to the King whose throne they had made fast for him, and hailed him as a national ruler. “Mighty King of the English, let not the stirrer up of all evil go away unharmed. The perjured murderer, whose craft and cruelty have taken away the lives of thousands of men, ought not to live any longer.”[235] Cries like these, mingled with every form of cursing and reviling, with every threat which could rise to the lips of an oppressed people in their day of vengeance, sounded in the ears of Odo and his comrades.[236] But the King’s word had been passed, and the thirst for vengeance of the wrathful English had to be baulked. He leaves England for ever. Odo and those who had shared with him in the defence of Rochester went away unhurt; but they had to leave England, and to lose all their English lands and honours, at least for a season. But Odo left England and all that he had in England for ever.[237] The career of the Earl of Kent was over; of the later career of the Bishop of Bayeux we shall hear again.
End of the rebellion. The rebellion was now at an end in southern England. Revolt had been crushed at Worcester, at Pevensey, and at Rochester, and we hear nothing more of those movements of which Bishop Geoffrey had made Bristol the centre, and which had met with such a reverse at the hands of the gallant defenders of Ilchester. The chronology of the whole time is very puzzling. Order of events. We have no exact date for the surrender of Rochester; we are told only that it happened in the beginning of summer.[238] But, as the siege of Pevensey lasted six weeks,[239] it is impossible The Whitsun Assembly. June 4, 1088.to crowd all the events which had happened since Easter into the time between Easter and Whitsuntide. Otherwise the pentecostal Gemót would have been the most natural season for some acts of authority which took place at some time during the year. The King was now in a position to reward and to punish; and some confiscations, some grants, Confiscations and grants.were made by him soon after the rebellion came to an end. “Many Frenchmen forlet their land and went over sea, and the King gave their land to the men that were faithful to him.”[240] Of these confiscations and grants we should be glad to have some details. Did any dispossessed Englishmen win back their ancient heritage? And, if so, did they keep their recovered heritage, notwithstanding the amnesty which at a somewhat later time restored many of the rebels? One thing is clear, that the Frenchmen who are now spoken of were not the men of highest rank and greatest estates among the rebellious Normans. For them there was an amnesty at once. Amnesty of the chief rebels. Them, we are told, the King spared, for the love of his father to whom they had been faithful followers, and out of reverence for their age which opened a speedy prospect of their deaths. He was rewarded, it is added, by their repentant loyalty and thankfulness, which made them eager to please him by gifts and service of all kinds.[241]
The speed with which some of the greatest among the rebel leaders were restored to their old rank and their old places in the King’s favour is shown by the way in which, within a very few months, we find them acting on the King’s side against one who at the worst was their own accomplice, and who himself professed to have had no part or lot in their doings. Versions of the story of the Bishop of Durham. We must now take up again the puzzling story of Bishop William of Durham. We left him, according to his own version, hindered from coming to the King by the violence of the Sheriff of Yorkshire, and suffering a seven weeks’ harrying of his lands which carries us into the month of May.[242] This is exactly the time when the national Chronicler sets the Bishop himself before us as carrying on a general harrying of the North country.[243] It is likely enough that both stories are true; in a civil war above all it is easy, without the assertion of any direct falsehood, to draw two exactly opposite pictures by simply leaving out the doings of each side in turn. Anyhow the King had summoned the Bishop to his presence, and the Bishop had not come. The King again summons the Bishop. The King now sends a more special and urgent summons, demanding the Bishop’s presence in his court, that is, in all likelihood, at the Whitsun Gemót, or at whatever assembly took its place for that year.[244] The message was sent by a prelate of high rank, that Abbot Guy who had just before been forced by Lanfranc upon the unwilling monks of Saint Augustine’s.[245] The Bishop was to accompany the Abbot to the King’s presence. The Bishop’s complaints. But, instead of going with Guy, Bishop William, fearing the King’s wrath and the snares of his enemies, sent another letter, the bearer of which went under the Abbot’s protection.[246] The letter curiously illustrates some of the features of the case. We learn more details of the Sheriff’s doings. Doings of Counts Alan and Odo. He had divided certain of the Bishop’s lands between two very great personages, Count Alan of the Breton and of the Yorkshire Richmond, and Count Odo, husband of the King’s aunt, and seemingly already lord of Holderness.[247] The Sheriff had not only refused the King’s peace to the Bishop; he had formally defied him on the part of the King.[248] Some of the Bishop’s men he had allowed to redeem themselves; but others he had actually sold. Were they the Bishop’s slaves, dealt with as forfeited chattels, or did the Sheriff take on himself to degrade freemen into slavery?[249] The Bishop protests that he is ready to come with a safe-conduct, and to prove before all the barons of the realm that he is wholly innocent of any crime against the King. He adds that he would willingly come at once with the Abbot. He had full faith in the King and his barons; but he feared his personal enemies and the unlearned multitude.[250] Who were these last? Are we again driven to think of the old popular character of the Assembly, and did the Bishop fear that the solemn proceedings of the King’s court would be disturbed by a loyal crowd, ready to deal out summary justice against any one who should be even suspected of treason? The Bishop comes with a safe-conduct. The King sent the safe-conduct that was asked for, and the Bishop came to the King’s court.[251]
The two Williams, King and Bishop, now met face to face. William of Saint-Calais pleaded his rights as a bishop as zealously, and far more fully, than they had been pleaded by the bishop who was also an earl. The Bishop’s ecclesiastical claims. The Bishop of Durham, as Bishop of Durham, held great temporal rights; but William of Saint-Calais was not, like his predecessor Walcher, personally earl of any earldom. Bishop William’s assertion of the new ecclesiastical claims reminds us of two more famous assemblies, in the earlier of which William of Saint-Calais will appear on the other side. In forming our estimate of the whole story, we must never forget that the man who surprised the Red King with claims greater than those of Anselm is the same man who a few years later became the counsellor of the Red King against Anselm. In this first Assembly the Bishop refuses to plead otherwise than according to the privileges of his order. The demand is refused. He craves for the counsel of his Metropolitan Thomas of York and of the other bishops. This also is refused. He offers to make his personal purgation on any charge of treason or perjury. This is refused. The King insists that he shall be tried before the Court after the manner of a layman. He goes back to Durham. This the Bishop refuses;[252] but the King keeps his personal faith, and the Bishop is allowed to go back safely to Durham. We hear much of the ravages done on the Bishop’s lands, both while he was away from Durham and after he had gone back thither.[253] Of ravages done by the Bishop we hear nothing in this version. In this version William of Saint-Calais, blackest of traitors in the Peterborough Chronicle, is still the meekest of confessors.
June-September, 1088. We get no further details of the Bishop of Durham’s story till the beginning of September. But in the meanwhile the Bishop wrote another letter to the King, again asking leave to make his purgation. The only answer, we are told, on the King’s part was to imprison the Bishop’s messenger and to lay waste his lands more thoroughly than ever. But, from the beginning of September, the story is told with great detail. By that time southern England at least was at peace, and by that time too men who had taken a leading part in the rebellion were acting as loyal subjects to the King. Agreement between the Bishop On the day of the Nativity of our Lady an agreement was come to between the Bishop and three of the barons of the North. Two of these were the Counts Alan and Odo, who had received grants of the Bishop’s lands. and the Counts. September 8. They, it seems clear, had had no share in the rebellion; but with them was joined a leading rebel, Roger of Poitou, son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, whom we last heard of as one of Odo’s accomplices at Pevensey. These three, acting in the King’s name, pledged their faith for the Bishop’s personal safety to and from the King’s court. The three barons seem to make themselves in some sort arbiters between the King and the Bishop. His personal safety is guaranteed in any case. But the place to which he is to be safely taken is to differ according to the result of the trial. The terms seem to imply that, if the three barons deem justice to be on the side of the Bishop, he is to be taken back safely to Durham, while, if they deem justice to be on the side of the King, he is to be allowed freely to cross the sea at any haven that he may choose, from Sandwich to Exeter.[254] In case of the Bishop’s return to Durham, if he should find that during his absence any new fortifications have been added to the castle, those fortifications are to be destroyed.[255] If, on the other hand, the Bishop crosses the sea, the castle is to be surrendered to the King. No agreement contrary to this present one was to be extorted from the Bishop on any pretext. The terms were agreed to by the Bishop, and were sworn to, as far as the surrender of the castle was concerned, by seven of the Bishop’s men, seemingly the same seven of whom we have heard before and of whom we shall hear again. All matters were to be settled in the King’s court one way or the other by the coming feast of Saint Michael; but, as this term was plainly too short, the time of meeting was put off by the consent of both sides to an early day in November.
The Meeting at Salisbury. November 2, 1088. On the appointed day Bishop William of Durham appeared in the King’s court at Salisbury. We have not now, as we had two years before, to deal with a gathering of all the land-owners of England in the great plain. The castle which had been reared within the ditches that fence in the waterless hill became the scene of a meeting of the King and the great men of the realm which may take its place alongside of later meetings of the same kind in the castle by the wood at Rockingham and in the castle by the busy streets of Northampton. We have—from the Bishop’s side only, it must be remembered—a minute and lifelike account of a two days’ debate in the Assembly, a debate in which not a few men with whose names we have been long familiar in our story, in which others whose names and possessions are written in the Great Survey, meet us face to face as living men and utter characteristic speeches in our ears. Urse of Abetot. We are met at the threshold by a well-known form, that of the terrible Sheriff of Worcestershire, Urse of Abetot. Notwithstanding the curse of Ealdred, he flourished and enjoyed court favour, and we now find him the first among the courtiers to meet Bishop William, and to bid him enter the royal presence.[256] That presence the Bishop entered four times in the course of the day, having had three times to withdraw while the Court came to a judgement on points of law touching his case. Conduct of the Bishop. At every stage the Bishop raises some point, renews some protest, interposes some delay or other. And during the whole earlier part of the debate, it is Lanfranc who takes the chief part in answering him; the King says little till a late stage of the controversy. Before Bishop William comes in to the King’s presence, he prays again, but prays in vain, to have the counsel of his brother bishops. None of them, not even his own Metropolitan Thomas, would give him the kiss of peace or even a word of greeting. When he does come in, he first raises the question whether he ought not to be judged, and the other bishops to judge him, in full episcopal dress. Lanfranc’s view of vestments. To the practical mind of Lanfranc questions about vestments did not seem of first-rate importance. “We can judge very well,” he said, “clothed as we are; for garments do not hinder truth.”[257] Case of Thomas at Northampton. 1164. This point, it will be remembered, again came up at Northampton, seventy-six years later. The entrance of Thomas into the King’s hall clad in the full garb of the Primate of all England was one of the most striking features of that memorable day.[258]
A long legal discussion followed, in which Bishop William and Lanfranc were the chief speakers. Some points were merely verbal. Much turned on the construction of the word bishopric. The Bishop of Durham asked to be restored to his bishopric. Lanfranc answered that he had not been disseized of it.[259] In the course of this dispute one or two facts of interest come out. Hostile dealings of the Bishop’s own men. It appears from the Bishop’s complaint that some of the chief men of the patrimony of Saint Cuthberht had made their way to the meeting at Salisbury, and that not as their bishop’s friends. They, his own liegemen, had abjured him; they held the lands of the bishopric in fief of the King; they had made war upon him by the King’s orders, and were now sitting as his judges.[260] The Bishop called on to “do right.” But the main point was that the Bishop should, before matters went any further, do right to the King, that is, acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Court.[261] This demand the Bishop tried to evade by every means; but it was firmly pressed both by Lanfranc and by the lay members of the Court. These last seem to act in close concert with the Primate, and the ecclesiastical writer brings out in a lively way the energy of their way of speaking.[262] In answer to them the Bishop spake words which amounted to a casting aside of all the earlier jurisprudence of England, but which were only a natural inference from that act of the Conqueror which had severed the jurisdictions which ancient English custom had joined together. He denies the authority of the Court. He told the barons of the realm and the other laymen who were present that with them he had nothing to do, that he altogether refused their jurisdiction; he demanded, that, if the King and the Bishops allowed them to be present, they should at least not speak against him.[263] Growth of the new doctrines. The doctrine of ecclesiastical privilege had indeed grown, since, six and thirty years before, the people of England, gathered beneath the walls of London, had declared a traitorous archbishop to be deprived and outlawed, and had by their own act set another in his place. Position of Lanfranc and Bishop William. Yet the position of William of Saint-Calais was more consistent than the position of Lanfranc. William of Saint-Calais wholly denied the right of laymen to judge a bishop; Lanfranc, the assertor of that right, had been placed in his see on the very ground that the deposition of Robert and the election of Stigand were both invalid, as being merely acts of the secular power. Still, however logical might be the Bishop’s argument, his claims were practically new, either in English or in Norman ears. If they had ever been heard of before, it had been only for a moment from the lips of Odo. And we may mark again that, though the words of William of Saint-Calais would have won him favour with Hildebrand, they won him no favour with Lanfranc. Lanfranc represented the traditions of the Conqueror, and in the days of the Conqueror, all things, divine and human, had depended on the Conqueror’s nod.[264]
The King speaks. At this stage the King speaks for the first time, and, in this first speech the words of William the Red are mild enough. He had hoped, he said, that the Bishop would have first made answer to the charges which had been brought against him, and he wondered that he had taken any other course. But the charge had not yet been formally made. Roger Bigod demands that the charge be read. Amid the Bishop’s protests about the rights of his order, this somewhat important point was pressed by one of his fellow-rebels. This was Roger the Bigod, he who from the castle of Norwich had done such harm in the eastern lands, but who now appears as an adviser of the king against whom he had been fighting a few months before. Let the charge, he said, be brought in due form, and let the Bishop be tried according to it.[265] After more protests from the Bishop, the charge was made by Hugh of Beaumont.[266] The charge formally brought. It contained a full statement of the Bishop’s treason and desertion, as already described,[267] and the time is said to have been when the King’s enemies came against him, and when his own men, Bishop Odo, Earl Roger, and many others, strove to take away his crown and kingdom.[268] It is demanded that, on this charge and on any other charges that the King may afterwards bring, the Bishop shall abide by the sentence of the King’s court. We have this statement only in the version of Bishop William himself or of a local partisan. Its probable truth. Yet there is no reason to doubt that it is a fair representation of the formal charge which was brought in the King’s court. That charge brings out quite enough of overt acts of treason to justify even the strong words of the Peterborough Chronicler.[269] With the secret counsels of the rebels during Lent it does not deal; what share Bishop William had had in them might be hard to make out by legal proof, and the charge is quite enough for the King’s purpose without them. But it brings out this special aggravation of the Bishop’s guilt, that, after the rebellion had broken out, after military operations had begun, the Bishop was still at the King’s side, counselling action while he was himself plotting desertion. The flight of Bishop William, as we have already told it, really reads not unlike the flight of Cornbury and Churchill just six centuries later; and it would be pressing the judgement of charity a long way to plead in his behalf the doctrine that in revolutions men live fast.[270] Points not dwelled on. We may notice also that nothing is said about the Bishop’s harryings in Northern England. They might, according to the custom of the time, be almost taken as implied in the fact of his rebellion; or they might be among the other charges which the King had ready to bring forward if he thought good.
The Bishop’s answer. The formal charge was thus laid before the Court, and it was for the Bishop to make his answer. It was the same as before. Hugh of Beaumont might say what he chose;[271] only according to his own ideas of canonical rule would he answer. By this time the wrath of the lay members of the Assembly was waxing hot; Wrath of the lay members. they assailed the Bishop, some, we are told, with arguments, some with revilings.[272] At this stage Bishop William found a friend where we should hardly have looked for one. Speech of Bishop Geoffrey on behalf of William. The brigand Bishop of Coutances, already changed from a rebel into a loyal subject, was there among the great men of the realm. England knew him, not as a prelate of the Church, but as one of the greatest of her land-owners; but now, like Odo, he speaks as a bishop. He appeals to the Archbishops at least to give a hearing to Bishop William’s objection. They, the bishops and abbots, ought no longer to sit there; they ought to withdraw, taking with them some lay assessors, to discuss the point raised by the Bishop of Durham, whether he ought not to be restored to his bishopric before he is called on to plead.[273] Answer of Lanfranc. Again the great ecclesiastical statesman is inclined to scorn, almost to mock, the scruples of lesser men. Canonical subtleties might disturb the conscience of a bishop who had a few months before headed a band of robbers; but the lawyer of Pavia, the teacher of Avranches, the monk of Bec, the Abbot of Saint Stephen’s, the Patriarch of all the nations beyond the sea, had learned, in his long experience, that, as changes of vestments did not greatly matter, so changes of place and procedure did not greatly matter either. As Lanfranc had told Bishop William that they could judge perfectly well in the clothes which they then had on, so now he tells Bishop Geoffrey that they can judge perfectly well in the place and company in which they were now sitting. The Bishop goes out. There was no need to rise; let the Bishop of Durham and his men go out, and the rest of the Court, clergy and laity alike, would judge what was right to be done.[274] The Bishop warned the Court to act according to the canons, and to let no one judge who might not canonically judge a bishop. Lanfranc calmly, but vaguely, assured him that justice would be done.[275] Defiance of Hugh of Beaumont. Hugh of Beaumont told him more plainly, “If I may not to-day judge you and your order, you and your order shall never afterwards judge me.”[276] With one more protest, one more declaration that he would disown any judgement which was not strictly canonical,[277] Bishop William and his followers left the hall of meeting.
Debate in the Bishop’s absence. Our only narrative of these debates, the narrative of Bishop William himself or of some one writing under his inspiration, complains of the long delay before the Bishop was allowed to come back, and gives a description, one which reads like satire, of the assembly which stayed to debate the preliminary point of law. Constitution of the Court. There was the King, with the bishops and earls, the sheriffs and the lesser reeves, with the King’s huntsmen and other officials.[278] The great officers of state, Justiciar, Chancellor, Treasurer, had not yet risen to their full importance; still it is odd to find them, as they would seem to be, thrust in, after the manner of an et cetera, after, it may be, Osgeat the reeve and Croc the huntsman.[279] But anyhow, in this purely official assembly, we may surely see the Theningmannagemót gradually changing into the Curia Regis.[280] The Court, however constituted, debated in the Bishop’s absence on the point of the law which he had raised. The Bishop comes back. On his return, his own Metropolitan, Thomas of York, announced to him the decision of the Assembly. Till he acknowledged the jurisdiction of the Court, the King was not bound to restore anything that had been taken from him. Debate on the word fief. We seem to hear the voice of Flambard, when, in announcing this decision, Thomas makes use of the word fief, which had not hitherto been heard in the discussion.[281] Bishop William catches in vain at the novelty; Archbishop Thomas declines all verbal discussion; whether it is called bishopric or fief, nothing is to be restored till the jurisdiction of the court is acknowledged.[282] Thus baffled, Bishop William has only to fall back on his old protests, his old demand for the counsel of his brother bishops. Lanfranc meets him as a lawyer; the bishops are his judges, and therefore cannot be his counsel.[283] The King now steps in; the Bishop may take counsel with his own men, but he shall have no counsel from any man of his.[284] The Bishop’s seven men. The Bishop answers that, in the seven men whom he has with him—clearly the same seven of whom we have twice heard already—he will find but little help against the power and learning of the whole realm which he sees arrayed against him.[285] He goes out the second time. But he gets no further help; he withdraws the second time for consultation, but it is only with the seven men of his own following.
The result of their secret debate suggests that Bishop William in truth took counsel with no one but himself. Surely no seven men of English or Norman birth could have been found to suggest the course which William of Saint-Calais now took. For he came back to utter words which must have sounded strange indeed either in English or in Norman ears. He comes back and appeals to Rome. “The judgement which has here been given I reject, because it is made against the canons and against our law; nor was I canonically summoned; but I stand here compelled by the force of the King’s army, and despoiled of my bishopric, beyond the bounds of my province, in the absence of all my comprovincial bishops. I am compelled to plead my cause in a lay assembly; and my enemies, who refuse me their counsel and speech and the kiss of peace, laying aside the things which I have said, judge me of things which I have not said; and they are at once accusers and judges; and I find it forbidden in our law to admit such a judgement as I in my folly was willing to admit.[286] The Archbishop of Canterbury and my own Primate ought, out of regard for God and our order, to save me of their good will from this encroachment. Because then, through the King’s enmity, I see you all against me, I appeal to the Apostolic See of Rome, to the Holy Church, and to the Blessed Peter and his Vicar, that he may take order for a just sentence in my affair; for to his disposition the ancient authority of the Apostles and their successors and of the canons reserves the greater ecclesiastical causes and the judgement of bishops.”[287]
Character of the appeal. Such an appeal as this was indeed going to the root of the matter. It was laying down the rule against which Englishmen had yet to strive for more than four hundred years. William of Saint-Calais not only declared that there were causes with which no English tribunal was competent to deal, but he laid down that among such causes were to be reckoned all judgements where any bishop—if not every priest—was an accused party. Bishop William could not even claim that, as one charged with an ecclesiastical offence, he had a right to appeal to the highest ecclesiastical judge. Even such a claim as this was a novelty either in Normandy or in England; but William of Saint-Calais was not charged with any ecclesiastical offence. Except so far as the indictment involved the charge of perjury, that debateable ground of the two jurisdictions, the offence laid to the Bishop’s charge was a purely temporal one, that of treason against his lord the King. So arraigned, he refuses the judgement of the King of the English and his Witan, and appeals from them to the Bishop of Rome. He justifies his appeal by referring to some law other than the law of England, some special law of his own order, by which, he alleges, he is forbidden to submit to any such judgements as that of the national assembly of the realm of which he is a subject. We again instinctively ask, how would William the Great have dealt with such an appeal, if any man had been so hardy as to make it in his hearing? But we again see how the ecclesiastical system which William the Great had brought in was one which needed his own mighty hand to guide.[288] He was indeed, in all causes and over all persons, ecclesiastical and temporal, within his dominions supreme. But the moment he himself was gone, that great supremacy seems to have fallen in pieces. Arguments of Lanfranc. Lanfranc himself, steadily as he maintains the royal authority throughout the dispute, seems to shrink from boldly grappling with the Bishop’s claim. Some lesser fallacies we are not surprised to find passed over. The daring statement that the sole right of the Bishop of Rome to judge other bishops was established by the Apostles may perhaps have seemed less strange even to Lanfranc than it does to us. William’s comprovincials. But Lanfranc must have smiled, and Thomas of York must have smiled yet more, at the Bishop of Durham’s grotesque complaint that he was deprived of the help of his comprovincial bishops.[289] It was a vain hope indeed, if he thought that King Malcolm would allow him the comfort of any brotherly counsel from Glasgow or Saint Andrews. But the real point is that Lanfranc seems to avoid giving any direct answer to Bishop William’s claim to appeal to a court beyond the sea. Instead of stoutly denying the right of any English subject to appeal to any foreign power from the judgement of the highest court in England, he falls back into Bishop William’s own subtleties about “fief” and “bishopric;” and he appeals to the case of Odo, where it was only the Earl and not the Bishop who was dealt with.[290] The verbal question goes on, till the Bishop declares that he has no skill to dispute against the wisdom of Lanfranc; he has been driven to appeal to the apostolic see, and he wishes to have the leave of the King and the Archbishop to go to the see to which he has appealed.[291] The Bishop goes out the third time. A third time does he, at Lanfranc’s bidding, leave the hall while this question is debated by the King and his council. On his return the final sentence is pronounced by the mouth of Hugh of Beaumont. He comes back, and sentence is pronounced.As the Bishop has refused to answer the charges brought against him by the King, as he invites the King to a tribunal at Rome, the Bishop’s fief is declared forfeited by the judgement of the King’s court and the barons. It really says a good deal for the long-suffering of the prelates and barons, and of the Red King himself, He renews his appeal. that Bishop William again ventured to make his appeal in more offensive terms than before. He is ready, in any place where justice reigns and not violence, to purge himself of all charges of crime and perjury. He will prove in the Roman Church that the judgement which has just been pronounced is false and unjust.[292] Hugh of Beaumont is driven to a retort; “I and my companions are ready to confirm our judgement in this court.” The Bishop again declares that he will enter into no pleadings in that court. Let him speak never so well, his words are perverted by the King’s partisans. They have no respect for the apostolic authority, and, even after he has made his appeal, they load him with an unjust judgement. He will go to Rome to seek the help of God and of Saint Peter.[293]
Up to this time the King has taken only a secondary part in the lively dispute which has been going on in his presence. We have listened chiefly to the pithy sayings of Lanfranc and to the official utterances of Hugh of Beaumont. Speeches of the King. But now Rufus himself steps in as a chief speaker, and that certainly in a characteristic strain. His patience had borne a good deal, but it was now beginning to give way. The King’s short and pointed sentences, uttered, we must remember, with a fierce look and a stammering tongue, are a marked contrast to the long-turned periods and legal subtleties of the Bishop. He now steps into the dispute from a very practical side; “My will is that you give me up your castle, as you will not abide by the sentence of my court.”[294] More distinctions, more protests, more appeals to Rome, only stir up the Red King to the use of his familiar oath; “By the face of Lucca, you shall never go out of my hands till I have your castle.”[295] The Bishop was now fairly in the mouth of the lion; yet he again goes through the whole story of his wrongs and his innocence, with some particulars which we have not hitherto heard. When his possessions were seized by the King’s officers, though a hundred of his own knights looked on, no resistance had been offered to the King’s will.[296] He had now nothing left but his episcopal city; if the King wished to take that, he would offer no resistance, save by the power of God. He would only warn him, on behalf of God and Saint Peter and his Vicar the Pope, not to take it. He would give hostages and sureties that, while he went to Rome, his own men should keep the castle, and that, if the King wished, they should keep it for his service.[297] The King again spoke; “Be sure, Bishop, that you shall never go to Durham, nor shall your men hold Durham, nor shall you escape my hands, unless you freely give up the castle to me.”[298] The Bishop appeals to Counts Odo and Alan. The Bishop now for once says not a word about canonical rights; he appeals, more shortly and more prudently, to the plighted faith of the two Counts who had promised that he should go back to Durham. But Lanfranc argues that the Bishop has forfeited his safe-conduct, and that, if he refuses to give up the castle, the King may rightly arrest him.[299] Cries of the lay members. At this hint the lay members of the Assembly joined in with one voice, the foremost among them being that Randolf Peverel of whose possessions and supposed kindred we have had elsewhere to speak.[300] “Take him,” was the cry, “take him; for that old gaoler speaks well.”[301] But at this stage the Bishop finds friends in the Counts whose faith had been pledged to his safe-conduct. Intervention of Count Alan. Count Alan formally states the terms of the agreement, and prays the King—Odo and Roger joining with him in the prayer—that he may not be forced to belie his faith, as otherwise the King should have no further service from him.[302] But in Lanfranc’s view the second of the two cases which were contemplated in the agreement had taken place. The King was not bound to let the Bishop go back to Durham; all that he was now bound to do was to give him ships and a safe-conduct out of the realm.[303] The dispute goes on in the usual style. The Bishop appeals yet again. The Bishop continues his appeal to Rome; he again invokes what he calls specially the Christian law, pointing, it would seem, to a volume in his own hand;[304] while Lanfranc asserts the authority of the King’s court.[305] The King then steps in with one of his short speeches; “You may say what you will, but you shall not escape my hands, unless you first give up the castle to me.”[306] The Bishop then makes a shorter protest than usual, the drift of which seems to be that he is ready to suffer any loss rather than be personally arrested.[307] The final sentence. The sentence of the Court is now finally passed. A day is fixed by which the Bishop’s men should leave the city of Durham and the King’s men take possession of it instead.[308]
The judgement of the Assembly had thus formally gone against the claims of the Bishop of Durham; but his The Bishop asks for an allowance.resources were not at an end. Defeated on all points of law, he makes an appeal to the King’s generosity. Will his lord the King, he now prays, leave him something from his bishopric on which he may at least be able to live? Lanfranc again answers; “Shall you go to Rome, Answer of Lanfranc.to the King’s hurt and to the dishonour of all of us, and shall the King leave lands to you? Stay in his land, and he will give back to you all your bishopric, except the city, on the one condition that you do right to him in his court by the judgement of his barons.”[309] Bishop William, almost parodying the words of a much earlier appeal to Rome, says that he has appealed to the Apostolic See, and to the Apostolic See he will go.[310] Lanfranc retorts; “If you go to Rome without the King’s leave, we will tell him what he ought to do with your bishopric.” Bishop William answers in a long speech, renewing his protests of innocence and his offers of purgation, and setting forth the services which he claimed to have done for the King at Dover, Hastings, and London. The Bishop many times makes his prayer, and the King as often refuses. Then Lanfranc counsels him to throw himself wholly on the King’s mercy; if he will do so, he himself will plead for him at the King’s feet. But the Bishop still goes on about the authority of the canons and the honour of the Church; he will earnestly pray for the King’s mercy, but he will accept no uncanonical judgement. The King’s offers. The King then makes a new proposal; “Let the Bishop give me sureties that he will do nought to my hurt on this side the sea, and that neither my brother nor any of my brother’s men shall keep the ships which I shall provide to my damage or against the will of their crews.”[311] It certainly was demanding a good deal to expect Bishop William to go surety for either the will or the power of Duke Robert to do or to hinder anything. The Bishop pleads that the Counts pledged their faith that he should not be obliged to enter into any agreement except the one which had been made at Durham. The King and Ralph Paganel. And the Sheriff of Yorkshire, Ralph Paganel, the same who had been the spoiler of the Bishop’s goods, bears witness that his claim was a just one.[312] By this time the wrath of the Red King was gradually kindling; he turns on the Sheriff with some sharpness; “Hold your peace; for no surety will I endure to lose my ships; but if the Bishop will give this surety which I ask, I will ask for no other.”[313] The Bishop falls back on his old plea; he will enter into no agreement save that into which he entered with the Counts. The King again swears by the face of Lucca that the Bishop shall not cross the sea that year, unless he gives the required surety for the ships.[314] The Bishop then protests that, rather than be arrested, he will give the surety and more than the surety which is demanded; but he calls all men to witness that he does this unwillingly and through fear of arrest.[315] He gives the surety, and another stage in the long debate ends.
Question of the safe-conduct. A new point, happily the last, was raised when the Bishop, having given the required surety, asked for ships and a safe-conduct. The King says that he shall have them as soon as the castle of Durham is in the King’s power; till then, he shall have no safe-conduct, but shall stay at Wilton.[316] He again meekly protests; he will endure the wrong against which he has no means of striving.[317] Then a man of Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances steps in with a new count. Charges against the Bishop’s men. The men who held the Bishop of Durham’s castle had—before the Bishop came to the King’s court; therefore, it might be inferred, with his knowledge—taken two hundred beasts belonging to the Bishop of Coutances which were under the King’s safe-conduct. Bishop Geoffrey had surely seen more than two hundred beasts brought into Bristol as the spoil of loyal men in Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Wiltshire; but he is careful to exact the redress of his own loss from his brother bishop and rebel. The men of the Bishop of Durham had refused to pay the price of the beasts; they refused even when Walter of Eyncourt—we have met him in Lincolnshire[318]—bade them do so in the King’s name; he William, the man of Bishop Geoffrey, demands that the price be paid to his lord.[319] The King puts it to the barons whether he can implead the Bishop on this charge also.[320] Interposition of Lanfranc on behalf of the Bishop. Lanfranc, for the first time helping his brother prelate, rules that this cannot be done. Bishop William cannot be impleaded any further, because he now holds nothing of the King—the surrender of the castle of Durham is thus held to be already made—and is entitled to the King’s safe-conduct.[321] The Bishop to leave England. The Assembly now breaks up for the day; the Bishop is to choose the haven from which he will sail, and to make known his choice on the morrow.
The next day the Court again comes together. The Bishop of Durham asks Count Alan to find him a haven and ships at Southampton. Conditions of the Bishop’s sailing. The King steps in; “Know well, Bishop, that you shall never cross the channel till I have your castle”—adding, with a remembrance of the doings of another prelate at Rochester—“for the Bishop of Bayeux made me smart with that kind of thing.”[322] If the castle of Durham was in the King’s hands by the fixed day, the fourteenth day of November, the Bishop should have the ships and the safe-conduct without further delay. November 21,1088. The King then bids Count Alan and the Sheriff Gilbert[323] to give the Bishop at Southampton such ships as might be needful for his voyage seven days after the day fixed for the surrender of the castle. November 14. Meanwhile, on the appointed day, the castle of Durham was received into the King’s hands by Ivo Taillebois and Erneis of Burun—names with which we have long been familiar.[324] They disseized the Bishop of his church and castle and all his land; but they gave to the Bishop’s men a writ under the King’s seal, promising the most perfect safety to the Bishop and his men through all England and in their voyage.[325] And, according to the most obvious meaning of the narrative, Heppo, the King’s balistarius—a man of whom, like Ivo Taillebois, we have heard in Lincolnshire—was put into their hands as surety for the observance of the safe-conduct.
It might have seemed that the Bishop’s troubles were now ended, so far as they could be ended by leaving the land which he professed to look on as a land of persecution. But a crowd of hindrances were put in the way of his voyage. Action of Ivo Taillebois. Notwithstanding the safe-conduct given to the Bishop’s men, a number of wrongs were done to them by Ivo Taillebois, whose conduct may be thought to bear out his character as drawn in the legendary history of Crowland. The great grievance was that in defiance—so men thought at Durham—of Lanfranc’s judgement that Bishop William was not bound to plead in the matter of the beasts taken from the Bishop of Coutances, two of his knights were forced to plead on that charge.[326] November 21. Meanwhile the day came which had been appointed for the Bishop’s voyage. He had been waiting at Wilton, under the care of a certain Robert of Conteville, who had been assigned, at his own request, to keep him from all harm.[327] The Bishop’s voyage delayed. The castle had been duly given up; all seemed ready for his crossing. Bishop William asked the Sheriff Gilbert and his guardian Robert for ships, to cross in the company of Robert of Mowbray.[328] Under orders from the King,[329] November 26. they kept him for five days longer, when Robert of Conteville took him to Southampton. The wind was favourable, and the Bishop craved for leave to set sail at once. The King’s officers forbade him to sail that day; the next day, when the wind had become contrary, they, seemingly in mockery, gave him leave to sail. Charge against the monk Geoffrey. While he waited for a favourable wind, a new charge was brought against him, founded on the alleged doings of one of his monks, Geoffrey by name, of whom we shall afterwards hear as being in his special confidence. By the sentence of forfeiture pronounced by the Court, all the Bishop’s goods had become the property of the Crown. It was therefore deemed an invasion of the King’s rights when, after the Bishop had gone to the King’s court, Geoffrey took a large number of beasts from the Bishop’s demesne. He had also taken away part of the garrison of the castle, who had killed a man of the King’s. New summons against the Bishop. On this charge Bishop William was summoned to appear in the King’s court at the Christmas Gemót to be held in London. One of the bearers of the summons was no less famous a man than Bishop Osmund of Salisbury, a man of a local reputation almost saintly.[330] His argument with Osmund. Bishop William again appeals to the old agreement; he protests his innocence of any share in the acts of Geoffrey, though he adds that he might lawfully have done what he would with his own up to the moment when he was formally disseized.[331] These words might seem to imply that the act of Geoffrey, though done after the Bishop had left Durham, was done before the sentence was finally pronounced. But he cannot go to the King’s court; he has nothing left; he has eaten his horses; that is seemingly their price.[332] He is still repeatedly forbidden to cross, even alone.[333] In answer to an earnest message that he might be allowed to go to Rome, The Bishop again summoned by Walkelin. the King sent Walkelin Bishop of Winchester with two companions, one of them Hugh of Port, a well-known Domesday name, to summon him to send Geoffrey for trial to Durham and to appear himself in London at the Christmas Gemót to answer for the deeds of his men.[334] In defiance of all prayers and protests, the King’s officers kept the Bishop in ward night and day; in his sadness he sent a message to the Counts who had given him the safe-conduct, praying them by the faith of their baptism to have him released from his imprisonment and allowed to cross the sea.[335] Interposition of the Counts. They answered his appeal. At their urgent prayer, the King at last let him cross. He at last crosses to Normandy. He sailed to Normandy, where he was honourably received by Duke Robert, and—so the Durham writer believed—entrusted with the care of his whole duchy.[336] Perhaps it was owing to these new worldly cares that, though we often hear of him again, we do not hear of him as a suppliant at the court of Rome.
Importance of the story of William of Saint-Calais. The tale of Bishop William of Durham is long, perhaps in some of its stages it is wearisome; but it is too important a contribution to our story to be left out or cut short. It sets before us the earliest of those debates in the King’s court of which we shall come across other memorable examples before the reign of Rufus is over. Illustrations of jurisprudence. We see the forms and the spirit of the jurisprudence of England in the days immediately following the Norman Conquest, a jurisprudence which, both in its forms and its spirit, has become strongly technical, but which still has not yet become the exclusive possession of a professional class. Bishops, earls, sheriffs, are still, as of old, learned in the law, and are fully able to carry on a legal discussion in their own persons. And we see that a legal discussion in those days could be carried out with a good deal of freedom of speech on all sides. Legal trickery of the Bishop. As to the matter of the debate, all that we know of Bishop William, both afterwards and at this time from other sources, can leave hardly any doubt that he was simply availing himself of every legal subtlety, of every pretended ecclesiastical privilege, in order to escape a real trial in which he knew that he would have no safe ground on the merits of the case. Reasons for proceeding against him. And, if it be asked why the Bishop of Durham should have been picked out for legal prosecution, while his accomplices were forgiven and were actually sitting as his judges, the answer is to be found in the circumstances of the case. As we read the tale in all other accounts, as we read of it in the formal charge brought by Hugh of Beaumont, we see that there was a special treachery in Bishop William’s rebellion which distinguished his case from that of all other rebels. Why he should have joined the revolt at all, how he could expect that any change could make him greater than he already was, is certainly a difficulty; but the fact seems certain, and, if it be true, it quite accounts for the special enmity with which he was now pursued. The idea of the Bishop which the story conveys to us is that of a subtle man, full of resources, well able to counterfeit innocence, and to employ the highest ecclesiastical claims as a means to escape punishment for a civil crime. The first appeal to Rome made by William of Saint-Calais. It was from the mouth of William of Saint-Calais that, for the first time as far as we can see, men who were English by birth or settlement heard the doctrine that the King of the English had a superior on earth, that the decrees of the Witan of England could be rightly appealed from to a foreign power. The later career of the Bishop makes him a strange champion of any such teaching. The largest charity will not allow us to give him credit for the pure single-mindedness of Anselm, or even for the conscious self-devotion of Thomas. We feel throughout that he is simply using every verbal technicality in order to avoid any discussion of the real facts. A trial and conviction would hardly have brought with them any harsher punishment than the forfeiture and banishment which he actually underwent. But it made a fairer show in men’s eyes to undergo forfeiture and banishment in the character of a persecuted confessor than to undergo the same amount of loss in the character of a convicted traitor.
Behaviour of Lanfranc; The part played by Lanfranc is eminently characteristic. Practically he maintains the royal supremacy on every point; but he makes no formal declaration which could commit him to anti-papal theories. of the King. As for William Rufus, one is really inclined for a long while to admire his patience through a discussion which must have been both wearisome and provoking, rather than to feel any wonder that, towards the end of the day, he begins to break out into somewhat stronger language. But in the latter part of the story, like Henry the Second but unlike Henry the First, he stoops from his own thoroughly good position. He shows a purpose to take every advantage however mean, and to crush the Bishop in any way, fair or foul. So at least it seems in our story; but one would like to hear the other side, as one is unwilling to fancy either Bishop Walkelin or Bishop Osmund directly lending himself to sheer palpable wrong. The lesser actors. But, after all, not the least attractive part of the story is the glimpse which it gives us of the lesser actors, some of them men of whom we know from other sources the mere names and nothing more. We feel brought nearer to the real life of the eleventh century every time that we are admitted to see a Domesday name becoming something more than a name, to see Ralph Paganel, Hugh of Port, and Heppo the Balistarius playing their parts in an actual story. The short sharp speeches put into the mouths of some of the smaller actors, as well as those which are put into the mouth of the King, both add to the liveliness of the story and increase our faith in its trustworthiness. Conduct of the laity, As in some other pictures of the kind, the laity, both the great men and the general body, stand out on the whole in favourable colours. not favourable to the Bishop. It is perfectly plain, from Bishop William’s own words,[337] that he had not, like Anselm and Thomas, the mass of the people on his side. It is equally plain that the majority of the assembly, though they certainly gave him a fair hearing, were neither inclined to his cause nor convinced by his arguments. And the conduct of the Counts Alan and Odo and their companion Roger of Poitou is throughout that of strictly honourable men, anxious to carry out to the letter every point to which they have pledged their faith. The Red King, having merely pledged his faith as a king, and not in that more fantastic character in which he always held his plighted word as sacred, is less scrupulous on this head.
The affair of Bishop William brings us almost to the last days of the year of the rebellion. But, much earlier in the year, events of some importance had been happening in other parts of the island. No recorded movement in Scotland. We are almost tempted to take for granted that so great a stir in northern England as that which accompanied the banishment of the Bishop of Durham must have been accompanied or followed by some action on the part of King Malcolm of Scotland. None such however is spoken of. Movements in Wales. But the stirs on the Western border had been taken advantage of by the enemies of England on that side. We have seen that British allies played a part on the side of the rebels in the attack on Worcester. Further north, independent Britons deemed that the time was come for a renewal of the old border strife. When Earl Hugh of Chester and the Marquess Robert of Rhuddlan took opposite sides in a civil war, it was indeed an inviting moment for any of the neighbouring Welsh princes. The time seems to have been one of even more confusion than usual among the Britons. State of Wales. The year after the death of the Conqueror is marked in their annals as a special time of civil warfare, in which allies were brought by sea from Scotland and Ireland. Rhys restored by a fleet from Ireland. Rhys the son of Tewdwr, of whom we have already heard,[338] was driven from his kingdom by the sons of Bleddyn, and won it again by the help of a fleet from Ireland.[339] Men were struck by the vast rewards in money and captives with which he repaid his naval allies, who are spoken of as if some of them were still heathens.[340] These movements are not recorded by any English or Norman writer, nor do the Welsh annals record the event with which Norman and English feeling was more deeply concerned. But there was clearly a connexion between the two. Gruffydd the son of Cynan appears in the British annals as an ally of the restored Rhys,[341] Gruffydd’s Irish allies. and we now find a King Gruffydd, not only carrying slaughter by land into the English territory, but appearing in the more unusual character of the head of a seafaring expedition. We may feel pretty sure that it was the presence of the allies from Ireland—both native Irish, it would seem, and Scandinavian settlers—which combined with the disturbed state of England to lead Gruffydd to a frightful inroad on the lands of the most cruel enemy of the Britons, the Marquess Robert. He attacks Rhuddlan. The Welsh King and his allies marched as far as the new stronghold of Rhuddlan; they burned much and slew many men, and carried off many prisoners, doubtless for the Irish slave-market.[342] It was clearly through this doubtless far more profitable raid on the English territory that Rhys and Gruffydd found the means of rewarding their Irish and Scandinavian allies.
Robert of Rhuddlan. This inroad took place while the civil war in England was going on,[343] a war in which it must be remembered that other British warriors had borne their part.[344] While the lands of Rhuddlan were wasted, the Marquess Robert was busy far away at the siege of Rochester. His probable change of party. This would make us think that, like Earl Roger, he changed sides early,[345] and that he was now in the royal camp, helping to besiege Odo and his accomplices. He returns to North Wales. After the surrender of Rochester, the news of the grievous blow which had been dealt to himself and his lands brought Robert back to North Wales, wrathful and full of threats.[346] The enemy must by this time have withdrawn from the neighbourhood of Rhuddlan; for we now hear of the Marquess in the north-western corner of the land which he had brought under his rule. The peninsula of Dwyganwy. He was now in the peninsula which ends to the north in that vast headland which, like the other headland which ends the peninsula of Gower to the west, bears the name of the Orm’s Head.[347] The mountain itself, thick set with remains which were most likely ancient when Suetonius passed by to Mona, forms a strong contrast to the flat ground at its foot which stretches southward towards the tidal mouth of the Conwy. But that flat ground is broken by several isolated hills, once doubtless, like the Head itself, islands. Of these the two most conspicuous, two peaks of no great height but of marked steepness and ruggedness, rise close together, one almost immediately above the Conwy shore, the other landwards behind it. They are in fact two peaks of a single hill, with a dip between the two, as on the Capitoline hill of Rome. Here was the old British stronghold of Dwyganwy, The castle of Dwyganwy. famous in early times as the royal seat of Maelgwyn, him who is apostrophized in the lament of Gildas by the name of the dragon—the worm—of the island.[348] That stronghold had now passed into the hands of the Marquess Robert, and had been by him strengthened with all the newly imported skill of Normandy. The castle of Dwyganwy plays a part in every Welsh war during the next two centuries, and we can hardly fancy that much of Robert’s work survives in the remains of buildings which are to be traced on both peaks and in the dip between them. But it is likely that at all times the habitable part of the castle lay between the two peaks, while the peaks themselves formed merely military defences. Robert at Dwyganwy. Here then Robert was keeping his head-quarters in the opening days of July. At noon on one of the summer days the Marquess was sleeping—between the peaks, we may fancy, whether in any building or in the open air. He was roused from his slumber by stirring tidings. Approach of Gruffydd. July 3, 1088. King Gruffydd, at the head of three ships, had entered the mouth of the Conwy; he had brought his ships to anchor; his pirate crews had landed and were laying waste the country. The tide ebbed; the ships stood on the dry land; the followers of Gruffydd spread themselves far and wide over the flat country, and carried prisoners and cattle to their ships.[349] The Marquess rose; he climbed the height immediately above him, a height which looks on the flat land, the open sea, the estuary now crowned on the other side by Conwy with its diadem of towers, over the inland hills, and on the Orm’s Head itself rising in the full view to the northward. He saw beneath him a sight which might have stirred a more sluggish soul. As King Henry had looked down on the slaughter of his troops at Varaville,[350] so Robert, from his fortified post of Dwyganwy, saw his men carried off in bonds and thrown into the ships along with the sheep.[351] Eagerness of Robert. He sent forth orders for a general gathering, and made ready for an attack on the plunderers at the head of such men as were with him at the moment. They were few; they were unarmed; but he called on them to make their way down the steep hillside and to fall on the plunderers on the shore before the returning tide enabled them to carry off their booty.[352] The appeal met with no hearty answer; the followers of the valiant Marquess pleaded their small numbers and the hard task of making their way down the steep and rocky height.[353] But Robert was not to be kept back; he still saw what was doing through the whole of the peninsular lowlands. He could not bear to let the favourable moment pass by. Without his cuirass, attended only by a single knight, Osbern of Orgères, he went down to attack the enemy on the shores of the estuary.[354] Death of Robert. When the Britons saw him alone, with only a single companion and no defence but his shield, they gathered round him to overwhelm him with darts and arrows, none daring to attack him with the sword.[355] He still stood, wounded, with his shield bristling with missiles, but still defying his enemies. At last his wounds bore him down. The weight of the encumbered shield was too much for him; he sank on his knees[356] , and commended his soul to God and His Mother. Then the enemy rushed on him with one accord; they smote off his head in sight of his followers, and fixed it as a trophy on the mast of one of the ships.[357] Men saw all this from the hilltop with grief and rage; but they could give no help. A crowd came together on the shore; but it was too late; the lord of Rhuddlan was already slain. By this time the invaders were able to put to sea, and the followers of Robert were also able to get their ships together and follow them. They followed in wrath and sorrow, as they saw the head of their chief on the mast.[358] Gruffydd must have felt himself the weaker. He ordered the head to be taken down and cast into the sea. On this the pursuers gave up the chase; His burial at Chester. they took up the body of the slain Marquess, and, amidst much grief of Normans and English,[359] buried him in Saint Werburh’s minster at Chester.[360]
We are well pleased to have preserved to us this living piece of personal anecdote, which reminds us for a moment of the deaths of Harold and of Hereward. Connexion of Robert with Saint Evroul. Its preservation we doubtless owe to the connexion of Robert of Rhuddlan with the house of Saint Evroul. Otherwise we might have known no more of the conqueror of North Wales than we can learn from the entries in Domesday which record his possessions.[361] But Robert, nephew of Hugh of Grantmesnil, had enriched his uncle’s foundation with estates in England, and in the city of Chester itself.[362] He was therefore not allowed to sleep for ever in the foreign soil of Chester. He had a brother Arnold, a monk of Saint Evroul, zealous in all things for his house, who had begged endless gifts for it from his kinsfolk in England, Sicily, and elsewhere. His translation to Saint Evroul. Some years after Robert’s death, Arnold came to England, and, by the leave of Bishop Robert of Chester or Coventry—Bishop of the Mercians in the phrase of the monk who was born in his diocese—translated the body of Robert to the minster of Saint Evroul. There a skilful painter, Reginald surnamed Bartholomew—most likely a monk who had taken the apostolic name on entering religion—was employed to adorn the tomb of Robert and the arch which sheltered it with all the devices of his art.[363] Orderic writes his epitaph. And the English monk Vital—we know him better by his English and worldly name—was set to compose the epitaph of one who had in some sort, like himself, passed from Mercia to Saint Evroul.[364] In his history Orderic deemed it his duty to brand Robert’s dealings with the Welsh as breaches of the natural law which binds man to man.[365] Its character. And it may be that something of the same feeling peeps out in the words of the epitaph itself, which prays with unusual fervour for the forgiveness of Robert’s sins.[366] Yet in the verses which record his acts, his campaigns against the Briton appear as worthy exploits alongside of his zeal for holy things and his special love for the house of Ouche. It is not easy to track out all these exploits, even in the narrative of Orderic himself, much less in the annals of Robert’s British enemies. But all the mightiest names of the Cymry are set forth in order, as having felt the might of the daring Marquess. He had built Rhuddlan and had guarded it against the fierce people of the land. He had ofttimes crossed beyond Conwy and Snowdon in arms. He had put King Bleddyn to flight and had won great spoil from him. He had carried off King Howel as a prisoner in bonds. He had taken King Gruffydd and had overthrown Trahaern. That Howel, his former captive, should rejoice at his fall is in no way wonderful; but the epitaph speaks further of the treachery of a certain Owen, of which there is no mention in the prose narrative.[367] In any case Robert of Rhuddlan stands out as one of the mightiest enemies of the Northern Cymry, and the tale of his end is one of the most picturesque in this reign of picturesque incidents.
End of the Norman Conquest. The rebellion was now over, and the new King was firm upon his throne. And with the rebellion, the last scene, as we have already said, of the Norman Conquest was over also. Englishmen and Normans had, for the last time under those names, met in open fight on English soil. Whether of the two had won the victory? The Conquest confirmed and undone.Such a question might admit of different answers when the Norman King vanquished the Norman nobility at the head of the English people. In one sense the Conquest was confirmed; in another sense it was undone. How far undone. Men must have felt that the Conquest was undone, that the wergeld of those who fell two-and-twenty years back was indeed paid, when the second Norman host that strove to land on the beach of Pevensey, instead of marching on to Hastings, to Senlac, to London, and to York, was beaten back from the English coast by the arms of Englishmen. They must have felt that it was undone, when the castles on which Englishmen looked as the darkest badges of bondage were stormed by an English host, gathered together at the same bidding which had gathered men together to fight at Sherstone and at Stamfordbridge. He must have been Nithing indeed who did not feel that the wrongs of many days were paid for, when the arch-oppressor, the most loathed of all his race, came forth with downcast looks to meet the jeers and curses of the nation on which he had trampled. Days like the day of Tunbridge, the day of Pevensey, and the day of Rochester, are among the days which make the heart of a nation swell higher for their memory. They were days on which the Englishman overcame the Norman, days which ruled that he who would reign over England must reign with the good will of the English people. Tendencies to union. The fusion of Normans and English was as yet far from being brought to perfection; indeed nothing could show more clearly than those days that the gap between the two nations still yawned in all its fulness. But nothing did more than the work of those days at once to fill up the gap and to rule in what way it should be filled up. Those days showed that the land was still an English land, that the choice of its ruler rested in the last resort with the true folk of the land. Those days ruled that Normans and English should become one people; but they further ruled, if there could be any doubt about the matter, that they were to become one people by the Normans becoming Englishmen, not by the English becoming Normans. It is significant that, in recording the next general rebellion, the Chronicler no longer marks the traitors as “the richest Frenchmen that were on this land;” they are simply “the head men here on land who took rede together against the King.”[368]
How far confirmed. But, if in this way the Conquest was undone, if it was ruled that England was still to be England, in another way the Conquest was confirmed. The English people showed that the English crown was still theirs to bestow; but at the same time they showed that they had no longer a thought of bestowing it out of the house of their Conqueror. The Norman dynasty accepted. When the English people came together at the bidding of the Conqueror’s son, when they willingly plighted their faith to him and called on him, as King of the English, to trust himself to English loyalty, they formally accepted the Conquest, so far as it took the form of a change of dynasty. Men pressed to fight for King William against the pretender Robert; not a voice was raised for Eadgar or Wulf or Olaf of Denmark. The stock of the Bastard of Falaise was received as the cynecyn of England, instead of the stock of Cerdic and Woden; for there must have been few indeed who remembered that William the Red, unlike his father, unlike Harold, unlike Cnut, did come of the stock of Cerdic and Woden by the spindle-side.[369] And, in admitting the change of dynasty, all was admitted which the change of dynasty immediately implied. Men who accepted the son could not ask for the wiping out of the acts of the father. They could not ask for a new confiscation and a new Domesday the other way. In accepting the son of the Conqueror, they also accepted the settlement of the Conqueror. Acceptance of the Norman nobility in an English character. His earls, his bishops, his knights, his grantees of land from Wight to Cheviot, were accepted as lawful owners of English lands and offices. But the very acceptance implied that they could hold English lands and offices only in the character of Englishmen, and that that character they must now put on.
In this way the reign of William Rufus marks a stage in the developement or recovery of English nationality and freedom. And yet at the time the days of Rufus must have seemed the darkest of all days. Rufus’ breach of his promises. No reign ever began with brighter promises than the real reign of William the Red; for we can hardly count his reign as really beginning till the rebellion was put down. No reign ever became blacker. No king was ever more distinctly placed on his throne by the good will of his people. No other king was ever hated as William Rufus lived to be hated. No other king more utterly and shamefully broke the promises of good government by which he had gained his crown. Englishmen not oppressed as such; And yet we may doubt whether William Rufus can be fairly set down as an oppressor of Englishmen, in the sense which those words would bear in the mouths of a certain school of writers. His reign is rather a reign of general wrong-doing, a reign of oppression which regarded no distinctions of race, rank, or order, a time when the mercenary soldier, of whatever race, did what he thought good, and when all other men had to put up with what he thought good. but the general oppression touches them most. In such a state of things the burthen of oppression would undoubtedly fall by far the most heavily upon the native English; they would be the class most open to suffering and least able to obtain redress. The broken promises of the King had been specially made to them, and they would feel specially aggrieved and disheartened at his breach of them. Still the good government which Rufus promised, but which he did not give, was a good government which would have profited all the King’s men, French and English, and the lack of it pressed, in its measure, on all the King’s men, French and English. There is at least nothing to show that, during the reign of Rufus, Englishmen, as Englishmen, were formally and purposely picked out as victims. We must further remember that no legal barrier parted the two races, and that the legal innovations of the reign of Rufus, as mainly affecting the King’s military tenants, bore most hardly on a class which was more largely Norman than English. Rufus and the English. On the other hand, it is certain that native Englishmen did sometimes, if rarely, rise to high places, both ecclesiastical and temporal, in the days of Rufus. Of the many stories current about this king, not above one or two throw any light on his relations to the native English class of his subjects. The one saying of his that bears on the subject savours of good-humoured banter rather than of dislike or even contempt.[370] On the whole, dark as is the picture given us of the reign of Rufus, we cannot look on it as having at all turned back or checked the course of national advance. The mercenaries. When mercenary soldiers have the upper hand, they are sure to be chosen rather from strangers of any race than from natives of the land of any race. There is indeed no reason to think that either a native Englishman or a man of Norman descent born in England would, if he were strong, brave, and faithful, be shut out from the Red King’s military family. The eye of Rufus must have been keen enough to mark many an act of good service done on the shore of Pevensey or beneath the stronghold of Rochester. But all experience shows that the tendency of such military families is to recruit themselves anywhere rather than among the sons of the soil. And nothing draws the sons of the soil more closely together than the presence of strangers on the soil. In their presence they learn to forget any mutual grievances against one another. Their favour helps the fusion of races. In after times Normans and English drew together against Brabançons and Poitevins. We may feel sure that they did so from the beginning, and that the reign of Rufus really had its share in making ready the way for the fusion of the two races, by making both races feel themselves fellow-sufferers in a time of common wrong-doing.
The rebellion and its suppression, the affairs of the Bishop of Durham, and the striking episode by the Orm’s Head, fill up the first stirring year of the Red King. But the year of the rebellion is also marked by one or two ecclesiastical events, which throw some light on the state of things in the early days of Rufus, while he still had Lanfranc to his guide. Sale of ecclesiastical offices. The great ecclesiastical crimes of the Red King in his after days were the bestowal of bishoprics and abbeys for money, and the practice of keeping them vacant for his own profit. Of these two abuses, the former seems to have been the earlier in date. The keeping prelacies vacant was one of the devices of Randolf Flambard, Prolonging of vacancies. and it could hardly have been brought into play during the very first year of Rufus. The influence of Lanfranc too would be powerful to hinder so public an act as the keeping vacant of a bishopric or abbey; it would be less powerful to hinder a private transaction on the King’s part which might be done without the Primate’s knowledge. Add to this, that, while the filling a church or keeping it vacant was a matter of fact about which there could be no doubt, the question whether the King had or had not received a bribe was a matter of surmise and suspicion, even when the surmise and suspicion happened to be just. It is then not wonderful that we find Rufus charged with corrupt dealings of this last kind at a very early stage of his reign. Case of Thurstan of Glastonbury. We have seen that Thurstan, the fierce Abbot of Glastonbury, was, by one of the first acts of Rufus, restored to the office which he had so unworthily filled, and from which the Conqueror had so worthily put him aside. And we have seen that it was at least the general belief that his restoration was brought about by a lavish gift to the King’s hoard.[371] But three prelacies, two bishoprics and a great abbey, which either were vacant at the moment of the Conqueror’s death or which fell vacant very soon after, were filled without any unreasonable delay. Geoffrey Bishop of Chichester; dies September 25, 1088. Stigand, Bishop of Chichester, died about the time of the Conqeror’s death, whether before or after, and his see was filled by his successor before the end of the year.[372] Geoffrey’s own tenure was short; he died in the year of the rebellion, and, as his see did then remain vacant three years, we may set that down as the beginning of the evil practice.[373] Death of Scotland of Saint Augustine’s and Ælfsige of Bath. About the same time died Scotland Abbot of Saint Augustine’s, and the English Ælfsige, who still kept the abbey of Bath. Not long after died Ælfsige’s diocesan, the Lotharingian Gisa, who had striven so hard to bring in the Lotharingian discipline among his canons of Wells.[374] Death of Bishop Gisa. 1088. The bishopric of the Sumorsætan was thus among the first sees which fell to the disposal of William the Red, and his disposal of it led to one of the most marked changes in its history. The bishopric of Somerset granted to John of Tours. The bishopric was given to John, called de Villula, a physician of Tours, one of the men of eminence whom the discerning patronage of William the Great had brought from lands alike beyond his island realm and beyond his continental duchy. John was a trusty counsellor of the Red King, employed by him in many affairs, and withal a zealous encourager of learning.[375] But he had little regard to the traditions and feelings of Englishmen, least of all to those of the canons of Wells. He removes the see to Bath. Like Hermann, Remigius, and other bishops of his time, he carried out the policy of transferring episcopal sees to the chief towns of their dioceses. But the way in which he carried out his scheme, if not exactly like the violent inroad of Robert of Limesey on the church of Coventry,[376] was at least like the first designs of Hermann on the church of Malmesbury, which had been thwarted by the interposition of Earl Harold.[377] The change was made in a perfectly orderly manner, but by the secular power only. The abbey of Bath was now vacant by the death of its abbot Ælfsige. Bishop John procured that the vacant post should be granted to himself and his successors for the increase of the bishopric of Somerset. This was done by a royal grant made at Winchester soon after the suppression of the rebellion, and confirmed somewhat later in a meeting of the Witan at Dover.[378] John then transferred his bishopsettle from its older seat at Wells to the church which had now become his. Grant of the temporal lordship. He next procured a grant of the temporal lordship of the “old borough,” which was perhaps of less value after its late burning by Robert of Mowbray.[379] Thus, in the language of the time, Andrew had to yield to Simon, the younger brother to the elder.[380] That is, the church of Saint Peter at Bath, with its Benedictine monks, displaced the church of Saint Andrew at Wells, with its secular canons freshly instructed in the rule of Chrodegang, as the head church of the bishopric of Somerset. The line of the independent abbots of Bath came to an end; their office was merged in the bishopric, by the new style of Bishop of Bath. Thus the old Roman city in a corner of the land of the Sumorsætan, which has never claimed the temporal headship of that land, became for a while the seat of its chief pastor.
That so great an ecclesiastical change should be The change made wholly by the civil authority. wrought by the authority of the King and his Witan—perhaps in the first instance by the King’s authority only—shows clearly how strong an ecclesiastical supremacy the new king had inherited from his father and his father’s English predecessors. By the authority of the Great Council of the realm, but without any licence from Pope or synod, an ancient ecclesiastical office was abolished, the constitution of one church was altered, and another was degraded from its rank as an episcopal see. The change was made, so says the Red King’s charter, for the good of the Red King’s soul, and for the profit of his kingdom and people. It is more certain that it was eminently distasteful to both the ecclesiastical bodies which were immediately concerned. Power of bishops. The treatment which they met with illustrates the absolute power which the bishops of the eleventh century exercised over their monks and canons, but which so largely passed away from them in the course of the twelfth. Dislike to the change on the part of the canons of Wells To the canons of Wells Bishop John was as stern a master or conqueror as Bishop Robert was to the monks of Coventry. They were deprived of their revenues, deprived of the common buildings which had been built for them by Gisa, and left to live how they might in the little town which had sprung up at the bishop’s gate.[381] and the monks of Bath. To the English monks of Offa’s house at Bath the new bishop was hardly gentler; he deemed them dolts and barbarians, and cut short their revenues and allowances. It was not till he was surrounded by a more enlightened company of monks of his own choosing that he began to restore something for the relief of their poor estate.[382] Buildings of John of Tours. 1088–1122. But in his architectural works he was magnificent. His long reign of thirty-four years allowed him, not only to begin, but seemingly to finish, the great church of Saint Peter of Bath, of which a few traces only remain, and the nave only of which is represented by the present building.[383] The church of Bath called abbey. And though, since the days of Ælfsige, there has never been an Abbot of Bath distinct from the Bishop, yet abbey, and not minster or cathedral, is the name by which the church of Bath is always known to this day.[384]
Disturbances on the appointment of Guy at Saint Augustine’s. The disturbances at Saint Augustine’s which followed the death of Abbot Scotland, and the chief features of which have been described elsewhere, must have taken place earlier in the year. For the appointment or intrusion of Guy took place while Odo was still acting as Earl of Kent.[385] But the great outbreak, in which the citizens of Canterbury took part with the monks against the Abbot, did not happen till after the death of Lanfranc. Then monks and citizens alike made an armed attack on Guy, and hard fighting, accompanied by many wounds and some deaths, was waged between them and the Abbot’s military following.[386] Flight of Guy. The Abbot himself escaped only by fleeing to the rival house of Christ Church. Then came two Bishops, Walkelin of Winchester and Gundulf of Rochester, accompanied by some lay nobles, with the King’s orders to punish the offenders. Punishment of the rebellious monks. The monks were scourged; but, by the intercession of the Prior and monks of Christ Church, the discipline was inflicted privately with no lay eyes to behold.[387] They were then scattered through different monasteries, and twenty-four monks of Christ Church, with their sub-prior Anthony as Prior, were sent to colonize the empty cloister of Saint Augustine’s.[388] Punishment of the citizens. The doom of the citizens was harder; those who were found guilty of a share in the attack on the Abbot lost their eyes.[389] The justice of the Red King, stern as it was, thus drew the distinction for which Thomas of London strove in after days. The lives and limbs of monastic offenders were sacred.
§ 3. The Character of William Rufus.
Death of Lanfranc. May 24, 1089. The one great event recorded in the year after the rebellion was the death of Archbishop Lanfranc, an event at once important in itself, and still more important in the effect which it had on the character of William Rufus, and in its consequent effect on the general Its effects.march of events. The removal of a man who had played so great a part in all affairs since the earliest days of the Conquest, who had been for so many years, both before and after the Conquest, the right hand man of the Conqueror, was in itself no small change. For good or for evil, the Lombard Primate had left his mark for ever on the Church and realm of England. Position of Lanfranc in England and Normandy. One of the abetters of the Conquest, the chief instrument of the Conqueror, he had found the way to the good will of the conquered people, with whom and with whose land either his feelings or his policy led him freely to identify himself.[390] It must never be forgotten that, if Lanfranc was a stranger in England, he was no less a stranger in Normandy. As such, he was doubtless better able to act as a kind of mediator between the Norman King and the English people; he could do somewhat, if not to lighten the yoke, at least to make it less galling. In the last events of his life we have seen him act as one of the leaders in a cause which was at once that of the English people and of the Norman King. We have seen too some specimens of his worldly wisdom, of his skill in fence and debate. An ecclesiastical statesman rather than either a saint or strictly a churchman, it seems rather a narrow view of him when the national Chronicler sends him out of the world with the hope that he was gone to the heavenly kingdom, but with the special character of the venerable father and patron of monks.[391] His primacy of nearly nineteen years ended in the May of the year following the rebellion.[392] His burial at Christ Church. He was buried in the metropolitan church of his own rebuilding, and, when his shorter choir gave way to the grander conceptions of the days of his successor, the sweet savour that came from his tomb made all men sure that the pious hope of the Chronicler had been fulfilled.[393]
Lanfranc was borne to his grave amid general sorrow.[394] But the sorrow might have been yet deeper, if men had known the effect which his death would have on the character of the King and his reign. Change for the worse in the King’s character. Up to this time the worst features of the character of William Rufus had not shown themselves in their fulness. As long as his father lived, as long as Lanfranc lived, he had in some measure kept them in check. We need not suppose any sudden or violent change. It is the manifest exaggeration of a writer who had his own reasons for drawing as favourable a picture as he could of the Red King, when we are told that, as long as Lanfranc lived, he showed himself, under that wholesome influence, the perfect model of a ruler.[395] There can be no doubt that, while Lanfranc yet lived, William Rufus began to cast aside his fetters, and to look on his monitor with some degree of ill will. Lanfranc’s rebukes of William. The Primate had already had to rebuke him for breach of the solemn promises of his coronation, and it was then that he received the characteristic and memorable answer that no man could keep all his promises. But there is no reason to doubt that the death of Lanfranc set Rufus free from the last traces of moral restraint.[396] His dutiful submission to his father had been the best feature in his character; and it is clear that some measure of the same feeling extended itself to the guardian to whose care his father, both in life and in death, had entrusted him. But now he was no longer under tutors and governors; there was no longer any man to whom he could in any sense look up. He was left to his own devices, or to the counsels of men whose counsels were not likely to improve him. It was not a wholesome exchange when the authority of Lanfranc and William the Great was exchanged for the cunning service of Randolf Flambard and the military companionship of Robert of Bellême.
Picture of William Rufus. As soon then as Lanfranc was dead, William Rufus burst all bounds, and the man stood forth as he was, or as his unhappy circumstances had made him. We may now look at him, physically and morally, as he is drawn in very elaborate pictures by contemporary hands. William, the third son of the Conqueror, was born before his father came into England; but I do not know that there is any evidence to fix the exact year of his birth. Birth of William Rufus, c. 1060. He is spoken of as young[397] at the time of his accession, and from the date of the marriage of the Conqueror and Matilda, it would seem likely that their third son would then be about twenty-seven years of age. He would therefore be hardly thirty at the time of the death of Lanfranc. His outward appearance. The description of his personal appearance is not specially inviting. In his bodily form he seems, like his brother Robert,[398] a kind of caricature of his father, as Rufus, though certainly not Robert, was also in some of his moral and mental qualities. He was a man of no great stature, of a thick square frame, with a projecting stomach. His bodily strength was great; his eye was restless; his speech was stammering, especially when he was stirred to anger. He lacked the power of speech which had belonged to his father and had even descended to his elder brother; his pent-up wrath or merriment, or whatever the momentary passion might be, broke out in short sharp sentences, often showing some readiness of wit, but no continued flow of speech. His surname of Rufus. He had the yellow hair of his race, and the ruddiness of his countenance gave him the surname which has stuck to him so closely. The second William is yet more emphatically the Red King than his father is either the Bastard or the Conqueror. Unlike most other names of the kind, his surname is not only used by contemporary writers, but it is used by them almost as a proper name.[399] Up to the time of his accession, he had played no part in public affairs; in truth he had no opportunity of playing any. The policy of the Conqueror had kept his sons dependent on himself, without governments or estates.[400] Rufus in youth. We have a picture of Rufus in his youthful days, as the young soldier foremost in every strife, who deemed himself disgraced, if any other took to his arms before himself, if he was not the first to challenge an enemy or to overthrow any enemy that challenged his side.[401] His filial duty. Above all things, he had shown himself a dutiful son, cleaving steadfastly to his father, both in peace and war. His filial zeal had been increased after the rebellion of his brother, when the hope of the succession had begun to be opened to himself.[402] By his father’s side, in defence of his father, he had himself received a wound at Gerberoi.[403] Such was his character beyond the sea; but the one fact known of him in England before his father’s death is that he had, like most men of his time who had the chance, possessed himself in some illegal way of a small amount of ecclesiastical land.[404] It is quite possible that both his father and Lanfranc may have been deceived as to his real character. His natural gifts. In the stormy times which followed his accession, he had shown the qualities of an able captain and something more. He had shown great readiness of spirit, great power of adapting himself to circumstances, great skill in keeping friends and in winning over enemies. No man could doubt that the new King of the English had in him the power, if he chose to use it, of becoming a great and a good ruler. His conduct during the rebellion. And assuredly he could not be charged with anything like either cruelty or breach of faith at any stage of the warfare by which his crown was made fast to him. If he anywhere showed the cloven foot, it was in the matter of the Bishop of Durham. Case of the Bishop of Durham. Even there we can have no doubt that he spared a traitor; but he may have been hasty in the earliest stage of the quarrel; he certainly, in its latter stages, showed signs of that small personal spite, that disposition to take mean personal advantages of an enemy, which was so common in the kings of those days. Still, whatever Lanfranc may have found to rebuke, whatever may have been the beginnings of evil while the Primate yet lived, no public act of the new king is as yet recorded which would lead us to pass any severe sentence upon him, if he is judged according to the measure of his own times.
It is indeed remarkable that the pictures of evil-doing which mark the reign of Rufus from the Chronicle onwards are, except when they take the form of personal anecdote, mainly of a general kind. General charges against Rufus. Those pictures, those anecdotes, leave no room to doubt that the reign of Rufus was a reign of fearful oppression; but his oppression seems to have consisted more in the unrestrained Little personal cruelty; licence which he allowed to his followers than in any special deeds of personal cruelty done by his own hands or by his immediate orders. comparison with his father and brother. Rufus certainly did not share his father’s life-long shrinking from taking human life anywhere but in battle; but his brother Henry, the model ruler of his time, the king who made peace for man and deer, is really chargeable with uglier deeds in his own person than any that can be distinctly proved against the Red King. We are driven back to our old distinction. The excesses of the followers of Rufus, the reign of unright and unlaw which they brought with them, did or threatened harm to every man in his dominions; the occasional cruelties of Henry hurt only a few people, while the general strictness of his rule profited every one. His profligacy and irreligion. What makes William Rufus stand out personally in so specially hateful a light is not so much deeds of personal cruelty, as indulgence in the foulest forms of vice, combined with a form of irreligion which startled not only saints but ordinary sinners. Redeeming features in his character. And the point is that, hateful as these features in his character were, they did not hinder the presence of other features which were not hateful in the view of his own age, of some indeed which are not hateful in the view of any age.
His marked personality. The marked personality of William Rufus, the way in which that personality stamped itself on the memory of his age, is shown by the elaborate pictures which we have of his character, and by the crowd of personal anecdotes by which those pictures are illustrated. Allowing for the sure tendency of such a character to get worse, we may take our survey of the Red King as he seemed in men’s eyes when the restraints of his earlier life were taken away. As long as his father lived, he had little power to do evil; as long as Lanfranc lived, he was kept within some kind of bounds by respect for the man to whom he owed so much. When Lanfranc was gone, he either was corrupted by prosperity, or else, like Tiberius,[405] his natural character was now for the first time able to show itself in the absence of restraint. Comparison with his father. His character then stood out boldly, and men might compare him with his father. William the Red may pass for William the Great with all his nobler qualities, intellectual and moral, left out.[406] He could be, when he chose, either a great captain or a great ruler; but it was only by fits and starts that he chose to be either. His alleged firmness of purpose. His memory was strong; he at least never forgot an injury; he had also a kind of firmness of purpose; that is, he was earnest in whatever he undertook for good or for evil, and could not easily be turned from his will.[407] His caprice. But he lacked that true steadiness of purpose, that power of waiting for the right time, that unfailing adaptation of means to ends, which lends somewhat of moral dignity even to the worst deeds of his father. The elder William, we may be sure, loved power and loved success; he loved them as the objects and the rewards of a well-studied and abiding policy. The younger William rather loved the excitement of winning them, and the ostentatious display of them when they were won. Hard as it was for others to turn him from his purpose, no man was more easily turned from it by his own caprice. No man began so many things and finished so few of them. His military undertakings are always ably planned and set on foot with great vigour. His unfinished campaigns. But his campaigns come to an end without any visible cause. After elaborate preparations and energetic beginnings, the Red King turns away to something else, often without either any marked success to satisfy him or any marked defeat to discourage him. If he could not carry his point at the first rush, he seems to have lacked steadiness to go on. We have seen what he could do when fighting for his crown at the head of a loyal nation. He does not show in so favourable a light, even as a captain, much less as a man, when he was fighting to gratify a restless ambition at the head of hirelings gathered from every land.
His “magnanimity.” The two qualities for which he is chiefly praised by the writer who strives to make the best of him are his magnanimity and his liberality. The former word must not be taken in its modern English use. It is reckoned as a virtue; it therefore does not exactly answer to the older English use of the word “high-minded;” but it perhaps comes nearer to it than to anything that would be spoken of as magnanimity now. It was at all events a virtue which easily degenerated into a vice; the magnanimity of William Rufus changed, it is allowed, by degrees into needless harshness.[408] The leading feature of the Red King’s character was a boundless pride and self-confidence, tempered by occasional fits of that kind of generosity which is really the offspring of pride. His boundless pride. We see little in him either of real justice or of real mercy; but he held himself too high to hurt those whom he deemed it beneath him to hurt. His overweening notion of his own greatness, personal and official, his belief in the dignity of kings and specially in the dignity of King William of England, led him, perhaps not to a belief in his star like Buonaparte, certainly not to a belief in any favouring power, like Sulla,[409] but to a kind of conviction that neither human strength nor the powers of nature could or ought to withstand his will. This high opinion of himself he asserted after his own fashion. The stern and dignified aspect of his father degenerated in him into the mere affectation of a lofty bearing, a fierce and threatening look.[410] His private demeanour. This was for the outside world; in the lighter moments of more familiar intercourse, the grim pleasantry into which the stately courtesy of his father sometimes relaxed degenerated in him into a habit of reckless jesting, which took the specially shameless form of mocking excuses for his own evil deeds.[411] Indeed his boasted loftiness of spirit sometimes laid him open to be mocked and cheated by those around him. Trick of his chamberlain. One of the endless stories about him, stories which, true or false, mark the character of the man, told how, when his chamberlain brought him a pair of new boots, he asked the price. Hearing that they cost three shillings only—a good price, one would have thought, in the coinage of those times—he bade his officer take them away as unworthy of a king and bring him a pair worth a mark of silver. The cunning chamberlain brought a worse pair, which he professed to have bought at the higher price, and which Rufus accordingly pronounced to be worthy of a King’s majesty.[412] Such a tale could not have been believed or invented except of a man in whose nature true dignity, true greatness of soul, found no place, but who was puffed up with a feeling of his own importance, which, if it could sometimes be shaped into the likeness of something nobler, could also sometimes sink into vanity of the silliest and most childish kind.
His “liberality.” But the quality for which the Red King was most famous in his own day, a quality which was, we are told, blazed abroad through all lands, East and West, was what his own age called his boundless liberality. The wealth of England was a standing subject of wonder in other lands, and in the days of Rufus men wondered no less at the lavish way in which it was scattered abroad by the open hand of her King.[413] But the liberality of Rufus had no claim to that name in its higher sense.[414] It was not that kind of liberality which spends ungrudgingly for good purposes out of stores which have been honestly come by; it was a liberality which gave for purposes of wrong out of stores which were brought together by wrong. His wastefulness. It was a liberality which consisted in the most reckless personal waste in matters of daily life, and which in public affairs took the form of lavish bribes paid to seduce the subjects of other princes from their allegiance, of lavish payments to troops of mercenary soldiers, hired for the oppression of his own dominions and the disquieting of the dominions of others. It was said of him that the merchant could draw from him any price for his wares, and that the soldier could draw from him any pay for his services.[415] The sources which supplied William with his wealth were of a piece with the objects to which his wealth was applied; under him the two ideas of liberality and oppression can never be separated. What was called liberality by the foreign mercenary was called extortion by the plundered Englishman. His reward to the loyal troops after the rebellion. The hoard at Winchester, full as the Conqueror had left it, could not stay full for ever; it is implied that it was greatly drawn upon by gifts to those who saved William’s crown and kingdom at Pevensey and Rochester.[416] This was of a truth the best spent money of the Red King’s reign; for it rewarded true and honest service, and service done by the hands of Englishmen. But to fill the hoard again, to keep it filled amid the constant drain, to keep up with the lavishness of one to whom prodigality had become part of his nature,[417] needed every kind of unrighteous extortion. His extortions. The land was bowed down by what, in the living speech of our forefathers, was called ungeld; money, that is, wrung from the people by unrede, unright, and unlaw.[418] His generally strict government. Like his father, Rufus was, as a rule, strict in preserving the peace of the land; his hand was heavy on the murderer and the robber. The law of his father which forbade the punishment of death[419] was either formally repealed or allowed to fall into disuse. The robber was now sent to the gallows; but, when he had got thither, he might still save his neck by a timely payment to the King’s coffers.[420] And the sternness of the law which smote offenders who had no such prevailing plea was relaxed also in favour of all who were in the immediate service of the King.[421] His lavishness to his mercenaries. The chief objects of William’s boasted liberality were his mercenary soldiers, picked men from all lands. A strong hand and a ready wit, by whomsoever shown and howsoever proved, were a passport to the Red King’s service and to his personal favour.[422] And those who thus won his personal favour were more likely to be altogether strangers than natives of the land, whether of the conquering or of the conquered race. Chiefly foreigners. We may suspect that the settled inhabitants of England, whether English or Norman, knew the King’s mercenaries mainly as a body of aliens who had licence to do any kind of wrong among them without fear of punishment. The native Englishman and his Norman neighbour had alike to complain of the chartered brigands who went through the land, wasting the substance of those who tilled it, and snatching the food out of the very mouths of the wretched.[423] Their wrongdoings. A more detailed picture sets before us how, when the King drew near to any place, men fled from their houses into the woods, or anywhere else where they could hide themselves. For the King’s followers, when they were quartered in any house, carried off, sold, or burned, whatever was in it. They took the householder’s store of drink to wash the feet of their horses, and everywhere offered the cruellest of insults to men’s wives and daughters.[424] And for all this no redress was to be had; the law of the land and the discipline of the camp had alike become a dead letter in the case of offenders of this class. The oppressions of the King’s immediate company were often complained of in better times and under better kings; but they seem to have reached a greater height under William Rufus than at any time before or after. Statute of Henry against them. 1108. We hear of no such doings under the settled rule of the Conqueror; under Henry they were checked by a statute of fearful severity.[425] As usual, the picture of the time cannot be so well drawn in any words as those in which the native Chronicler draws it in our own tongue. King William “was very strong and stern over his land and his men and his neighbours, and very much to be feared, and, through evil men’s rede that to him ever welcome were, and through his own greediness, he harassed his land with his army and with ungeld. For in his days ilk right fell away, and ilk unright for God and for world uprose.”[426]
Thus were the promises with which William Rufus had bought the help of the English people in his day of danger utterly trampled under foot. He had promised them good laws and freedom from unrighteous taxes; he had promised them that they should have again, as in the days of Cnut,[427] the right of every man to slay the beasts of the field for his lawful needs. Instead of all this, the reign of the younger William became, above all other reigns, a reign of unlaw and of ungeld. Stricter forest laws. The savage pleasures of the father, for the sake of which he had laid waste the homes and fields of Hampshire, were sought after by the son with a yet keener zest, and were fenced in by a yet sterner code. In the days of William the Red the man who slew a hart had, what he had not in the days of William the Great, to pay for his crime with his life.[428] The working of this stern law is shown in one of the many stories of William Rufus, a story of which we should like to hear the end a little more clearly.[429] Story of the fifty Englishmen. Fifty men were charged with having taken, killed, and eaten the King’s deer. We are so generally left to guess at the nationality of the lesser actors in our story that our attention is specially called to the marked way in which we are told that they were men of Old-English birth, once of high rank in the land, and who had contrived still to keep some remnants of their ancient wealth.[430] They belonged doubtless to the class of King’s thegns; if we were told in what shire the tale was laid, Domesday might help us to their names. Why mentioned as Englishmen. This is one of the very few passages which might suggest the notion that Englishmen, as Englishmen, were specially picked out for oppression. And it may well be true that the forest laws pressed with special harshness on native Englishmen; no man would have so great temptation to offend against them as a dispossessed Englishman. What is not shown is that a man of Norman birth who offended in the same way would have fared any better. The mention of the accused men as Englishmen comes from the teller of the story only; and he most likely points out the fact in order to explain what next follows. On their denying the charge, they were sent to the ordeal of hot iron. Granting that killing a deer was a crime at all, this was simply the ancient English way of dealing with the alleged criminal. We are therefore a little surprised when our informant seems to speak of the appeal to the ordeal as a piece of special cruelty.[431] Their acquittal by ordeal. The fiery test was gone through; but God, we are told, took care to save the innocent, and on the third day, when their hands were formally examined, they were found to be unhurt. The King in his wrath uttered words of blasphemy. The King’s blasphemous comment. Men said that God was a just judge; he would believe it no longer. God was no judge of these matters; he would for the future take them into his own hands.[432] To understand the full force of such words, we must remember that the ordeal was, in its own nature, an appeal to the judgement of God in cases when there was no evidence on which man could found a judgement.[433] What happened further we are not told; it can hardly be meant that the men in whose favour the judgement of God was held to have been given were sent to the gallows all the same.
Special vices of Rufus. In this last story the most distinctive feature of the character of William Rufus comes out. In many of his recorded deeds we see the picture of an evil man and an evil king, but still of a man and a king whose deeds might find many parallels in other times and places. But the story in which he mocks at the ordeal leads us to those other points in him which give him a place of his own, a place which perhaps none other in the long roll-call of evil kings can dispute with him. Other kings have been cruel; others have been lustful; others have broken their faith with their people, and have said in their hearts that there was no God. But the Red King stands well nigh alone in bringing back the foulest vices of heathendom into a Christian land, and at the same time openly proclaiming himself the personal enemy of his Maker.
Contrast between Rufus and his father. It is with regard to his daily life and to the beliefs and objects which his age looked on as sacred that William Rufus stands out in the most glaring contrast to his father. William the Great, I need hardly repeat, was austere in his personal morals and a strict observer of every outward religious duty. His court was decent; the men who stood before him kept, we are told, to the modesty of the elder days. Old and new fashions of dress. Their clothes were fitted to the form of their bodies, leaving them ready to run or ride or do anything that was to be done.[434] They shaved their beards—all save penitents, captives, and pilgrims—and cut their hair close.[435] But with the death of William, of Pope Gregory, and of other religious princes, the good old times passed away, and their decorous fashions were forgotten through all the Western lands.[436] Then vain and foppish forms of attire came in. The gilded youth of Normandy and of Norman England began to wear long garments like women, which hindered walking or acting of any kind; they let their hair grow long like women; they copied the walk and mien of women.[437] The pointed shoes. Above all, their feet were shod with shoes with long curved points, like the horns of rams or the tails of scorpions. These long and puffed shoes were the device of a courtier of Rufus, Robert henceforth surnamed the Cornard, and they were further improved by Count Fulk of Anjou, when he wished to hide the swellings on his gouty feet.[438] The long hair and the long-pointed shoes serve as special subjects for declamation among the moral writers of the time.[439] Fashionable vices of the time. But these unseemly fashions were only the outward signs of the deeper corruption within. The courtiers, the minions, of Rufus, forerunners of the minions of the last Henry of Valois, altogether forsook the law of God and the customs of their fathers. The day they passed in sleep; the night in revellings, dicing, and vain talk.[440] Vices before unknown, the vices of the East, the special sin, as Englishmen then deemed, of the Norman, were rife among them. Personal crimes of the King. And deepest of all in guilt was the Red King himself. Into the details of the private life of Rufus it is well not to grope too narrowly. In him England might see on her own soil the habits of the ancient Greek and the modern Turk. His sins were of a kind from which his brother Henry, no model of moral perfection, was deemed to be wholly free, and which he was believed to look upon with loathing.[441]
Sinners, even of the special type of the Red King, have before now been zealous supporters of orthodoxy. If William persecuted Anselm, Constans defended Athanasius. His irreligion. But the foulness of William’s life was of a piece with his open mockery of everything which other men in his day held sacred. Whatever else divided Englishman and Norman, they were at least one in religious doctrine and religious worship. In matters of dogma Stigand was as orthodox as Lanfranc. But now, among the endless classes of adventurers whom the Conquest brought to try their luck in the conquered land, came men of a race whom Normans and Englishmen alike looked on as cut off from all national and religious fellowship. Coming of the Jews. In the wake of the Conqueror the Jews of Rouen found their way to London,[442] and before long we find settlements of the Hebrew race in the chief cities and boroughs of England, at York, Winchester, Lincoln, Bristol, Oxford, and even at the gates of the Abbots of Saint Edmund’s and Saint Alban’s.[443] Their position in England. They came as the King’s special men, or more truly his special chattels, strangers alike to the Church and to the commonwealth of England, but strong in the protection of a master who commonly found it to his interest to defend them against all others. Hated, feared, and loathed, but far too deeply feared to be scorned or oppressed, they stalked defiantly among the people of the land, on whose wants they throve. They lived safe from harm or insult, save now and then, when popular wrath burst all bounds, and when their proud mansions and fortified quarters could shelter them no longer from raging crowds eager to wash out their debts in the blood of their creditors.[444] The romantic picture of the despised, trembling, Jew, cringing before every Christian that he meets, is, in any age of English history, simply a romantic picture. Favour shown to them by Rufus. In the days of Rufus at all events, the Jews of Rouen and London stood erect before the prince of the land, and they seem to have enjoyed no small share of his favour and personal familiarity. The presence of the unbelieving Hebrew supplied the Red King with many opportunities for mocking at Christianity and its ministers. He is even said to have shown himself more than once, when it was to his interest so to show himself, as a kind of missionary of the Hebrew faith. He was not the only prince of his age who discouraged conversions to Christianity on the part of distinct races who could be made more useful, if they remained distinct, and who could in no way be kept so distinct as if they remained in the position of infidels. Comparison with the Sicilian Saracens. Count Roger of Sicily found that the unbelieving Saracens,[445] and William Rufus found that the unbelieving Hebrews, were, each in their own way, more profitable to their several masters than if they had been allowed to lose their distinct being among their Christian neighbours. William’s vein of mockery. But in the whole dealings of Rufus with the Jews there is a vein of mockery in which, if Roger shared, it is not recorded. It is true that we do not find Rufus taking the part of the Jew, except when the Jew made it worth his while to do so. But when he did take the Jew’s part, he clearly found a malicious pleasure in taking it. He enjoyed showing favour to the Jew, because so to do gave annoyance to the Christian.
Question of William’s scepticism. Whether Rufus was in any strict sense an intellectual sceptic may be doubted. That he was such cannot be inferred from his bidding in bitter mockery the Jewish rabbis and the bishops of England to dispute before him on the tenets of their several creeds, promising to embrace the faith of the strangers, if they should have the better in the discussion. The dispute between Jews and Christians. The discussion took place in London, most likely when the prelates were gathered for some Whitsun Gemót. The Christian cause was supported by several bishops and clerks—one would like to have their names—who argued, we are told, in great fear on behalf of the faith which was thus jeoparded.[446] As is usual in such cases, each side claimed the victory;[447] but in any case the arguments on the Hebrew side were not so overwhelming as to make the King become an avowed votary of Moses. Still he did what he could to hinder the ranks of the Church from being swelled at the cost of the synagogue. In a story which must belong to the latter part of his reign, we read how the Jews of Rouen began to be frightened at the great numbers of their body who fell away from the law of their fathers. Jews turn back again. They came to the King, and, by a large bribe, obtained from him a promise that the converts should be constrained to go back to the faith which they had forsaken. They were brought before Rufus, and most of them were by his terrible threats forced again to apostatize.[448] The tale of the Red King’s success in this crooked kind of missionary enterprise reached the ears of a Jew father—where we are not told—whose only and well-beloved son was lost to him by conversion to the Christian faith. Story of the convert Stephen and his father. The young man had been favoured with a vision of the protomartyr Stephen, who had bidden him ask for baptism and take his own name at the font.[449] He went to a priest, told his tale, and was admitted to baptism by the name which was appointed to him. His father, mourning for his loss, went to King William and made his complaint; praying that at his command his son might be restored to his old faith.[450] Rufus held his peace; the argument which alone persuaded him to meddle in such matters had not yet been urged.[451] A promise of sixty marks of silver, payable on the second conversion of the youth, brought the King to another mind,[452] and Stephen was called into the royal presence. A dialogue took place between the King and the neophyte, in which Rufus, remembering Dispute between Stephen and the King. perhaps the one redeeming feature in his own life, pressed Stephen’s return to Judaism as a matter of filial duty. The youth humbly suggests that the King is joking. Rufus waxes wroth, and takes to words of abuse and to his usual oath. Stephen’s eyes shall be torn out, if he does not presently obey his bidding.[453] The youth stands firm, and even rebukes the King. He can be no good Christian who, instead of trying to win to Christ those who are estranged from him, strives to drive back those who have already embraced his faith. Rufus, put to shame by the answer, has nothing to say, but drives Stephen from his presence with scorn.[454] The Jew father is waiting without. His son overwhelms him with words of abuse which even zeal for his new faith would hardly justify. He would no longer acknowledge a father in one whose own father was the Devil, and who, not satisfied with his own damnation, sought the damnation of his son.[455] With this somewhat harsh way of putting matters, the zealous youth vanishes from the story; the Jew father has yet another turn with the Red King. The King’s compromise with Stephen’s father. He is called in, and Rufus says that he has done what he had been asked to do, and demands the promised payment for his pains.[456] The Jew expostulates. His son, he says, is firmer than ever in his Christian faith and in his hatred towards himself. Yet the King says that he has done what he had been asked, and demands payment. “Finish,” he goes on, with a boldness which challenges some sympathy, “what you have begun, and then we will settle about my promise; such was our agreement.”[457] It is characteristic of Rufus not to be angry at a really bold word. Evidently entering into the grotesque side of the dispute, he rejects the doctrine of payment by results; he answers that he has done his best, and that, though he had not succeeded, he cannot go away with nothing for his trouble.[458] At last, after some further haggling, the parties in this strange dispute come to a compromise. The Jew pays, and the King receives, half the sum which had been promised in the beginning.
A king of whom such stories as these could be told, whether every detail is literally true or not, must have utterly cast aside all the decencies of his own or of any other age. But Rufus, according to the tales told of him, went even further than this. William’s defiance of God. He is charged with a kind of personal defiance of the Almighty, quite distinct alike from mere carelessness and from speculative unbelief. When he recovered from the sickness which forms such an epoch in his life, 1093.“God,” he said, “shall never see me a good man; I have suffered too much at his hands.”[459] He mocked at God’s judgement and doubted his justice—his disbelief in the ordeal is quoted as an instance. Either God did not know the deeds of men, or else he weighed them in an unfair balance.[460] He was wroth if any one ventured to add the usual reserve of God’s will to anything which he, King William, undertook or ordered to be undertaken. He had that belief in himself that he would have everything referred to his own wisdom and power only.[461] Modern ideas might be less shocked at another alleged sign of his impiety. His contempt for the saints. He was said to have declared publicly that neither Saint Peter nor any other saint had any influence with God, and that he would ask none of them for help.[462] In all this we are again left in doubt whether we are dealing with a speculative unbeliever, or only with one who was so puffed up with pride that he liked not to be reminded of any power greater than his own, least of all of a power which might some day call him to account for his evil deeds. Frequency of blasphemy. And though William Rufus clearly went lengths in his defiance of God to which even bad men were unaccustomed, we must remember that something of the same kind in a less degree was not uncommon in his time. Blasphemy strictly so called, that is, neither simple irreverence nor intellectual unbelief, but direct reviling and defiance of a power which, by the very terms of the defiance, is believed in, is a vice of which Englishmen of our own day have hardly any notion. But, as it has many parallels in heathen creeds, as it has not yet died out in all parts of Christendom, so it was by no means unknown in the days with which we are dealing. Its frequency at a somewhat later time is shown when Contrast of Saint Lewis. the biographer of Saint Lewis sets it down as one of his special virtues, that he never, under any circumstance, allowed any reviling of God or the saints.[463] Case of Henry the Second. On the other hand, we find Henry the Second, whom there is no reason whatever to look on as a speculative unbeliever, indulging, as in lesser forms of irreverence, so also in direct reviling of God.[464] But the vice, to us so revolting and unintelligible, seems to have reached its highest point in the King of whom men said in proverbs that he every morning got up a worse man than he lay down, and every evening lay down a worse man than he got up.[465]
Thus far we are inclined to see in our second William a character of unmixed blackness, alike as a man and as a King. There seems no room left for even pagan virtues in the oppressor, the blasphemer, the man given up to vices at whose foulness ordinary sinners stood aghast. Redeeming features in Rufus’ character. Yet nothing is plainer than that there was something in the character of William Rufus which made him not wholly hateful in the eyes of his own age. There was a side to him which, if we may not strictly call it virtuous, has yet in it something akin to virtue, as compared with other sides of him. Little personal cruelty. There is, as I have already hinted, amidst all the general oppressions of his reign, amidst all the special outrages which he at least allowed to go unpunished, no sign in him of that direct delight in human suffering which marks some of his contemporaries. Respect to his father’s memory. I have spoken of his dutiful obedience to his father while he lived; and the sentiment of filial duty lived on after his father’s death, and showed itself in some singular forms of respect for his memory. Elsewhere the enemy and spoiler of the Church, towards his father’s ecclesiastical foundations Rufus appears as a benefactor. Saint Stephen’s, the monument of his father’s penance, Battle, the monument of his father’s victory, were both the objects of his bounty.[466] But it is singularly characteristic that the means for bounty towards Saint Stephen at Caen were found in the plunder of the Holy Cross at Waltham.[467] His foundations. At York, strangely out of the common range of his actions, we find him counted as a second founder of the hospital of Saint Peter; we find him changing its site, enlarging its buildings and revenues, but specially setting forth that he was confirming the gifts of his father.[468] We shall see that, in all his wars, it was his special ambition to keep whatever had been his father’s; whatever he lost or won, it was a point of honour to hold the great trophy of his father’s continental victories. Le Mans. In other warfare the Red King might halt or dally or put up with an imperfect conquest. But when Le Mans, castle and city, was to be kept or won, when the royal tower of his father was in jeopardy or in hostile hands, then the heart of Rufus never waxed weak in counsel, his arm never faltered in the fight.
His chivalrous spirit. But one form of words which I have just used opens to us one special side of the character of the Red King which is apt to be overlooked. I have spoken of the point of honour. I am not sure that, in the generation before Rufus, those words could have applied in all their fulness either to Harold of England or to William of Normandy, either to Gyrth of East-Anglia or to Roger of Beaumont. Chivalry a new thing. But to no man that ever lived was the whole train of thoughts and feelings suggested by those words more abidingly present than they were to the Red King. It might be going too far to say that William Rufus was the first gentleman, as his claim to that title might be disputed by his forefather Duke Richard the Good.[469] But he was certainly the first man in any very prominent place by whom the whole set of words, thoughts, and feelings, which belong to the titles of knight and gentleman were habitually and ostentatiously thrust forward.
True character of chivalry. We have now in short reached the days of chivalry, the days of that spirit on which two of the masters of history have spoken in words so strong that I should hardly venture to follow them.[470] Of that spirit, the spirit which, instead of striving to obey the whole law of right, picks out a few of its precepts to be observed under certain circumstances and towards certain classes of people, William the Red was one of the foremost models. The knight and the monk. The knight, like the monk, arbitrarily picks out certain virtues, to be observed in such an exclusive and one-sided way as almost to turn them into vices. He has his arbitrary code of honour to supplant alike the law of God and the law of the land. That code teaches the duties of good faith, courtesy, mercy—under certain circumstances and towards certain people. His word when kept and when broken. Was William Rufus a man of his word? His subjects as a body had no reason to think so; the princes of other lands had no reason to think so. His promises to his people went for nothing; his treaties with other princes went for nothing.[471] To observe both of these was the dull everyday duty of a Christian man whom it had pleased God to call to a particular state of life, that namely of a king. Holding, as Rufus did, that no man could keep all his promises,[472] these were the class of promises that he thought it needless to try to keep. But when William plighted his word in the character of the probus miles, the preux chevalier, in modern phrase, as “an officer and a gentleman,” no man kept it more strictly. No man cared less for the justice of his wars; no man cared less for the wrong and suffering which his warfare caused. His knightly courtesy. But no man ever more scrupulously observed all the mere courtesies of warfare. He was not like Robert of Bellême. The life and limb of the prisoner of knightly rank were safe in his hands. Indeed any man of any rank who appealed to his personal generosity was always safe. Under the influence of the law of honour, the tyrant, the blasphemer, the extortioner, the oppressor who neither feared God nor regarded man, puts on an air of unselfishness, of unworldliness. His trust in the knightly word of others. Strict in the observance of his own knightly word, he places unbounded confidence in the knightly word of others. He thrusts indignantly aside the suggestion of colder spirits that a captive knight may possibly break his parole.[473] Contrast with Helias. We shall see all this as we follow the tale of his strife with Helias of Maine, one who was as scrupulous an observer of the law of honour as himself, but one who did not let the law of honour stand in the place of higher and older laws. Importance of this side of his character. And this is a side of the character of Rufus on which it is important to dwell, as it is one which the popular conception of him, a conception perfectly true as far as it goes, is apt to leave out. We have not grasped the likeness of the real man, unless we remember that the man whose crimes and vices the popular picture has not exaggerated, carried with him through life a sentimental standard of filial duty and reverence, and a knightly conscience, if the phrase may pass, as quick to speak and as sure to be obeyed as the higher conscience of Anselm or Helias. Without fully taking this in, we shall not easily understand the twofold light in which Rufus looked to the men of his own age, in whose eyes he clearly was not wholly hateful. And without fully taking it in, we shall fail to give him his place in the general history of England, Normandy, and mankind in general. He marks the beginning of a new æra. In William Rufus we have not only to study a very varied and remarkable phase of human nature; we have also to look on a man who marks the beginning of a new age and a new state of feeling.
The Red King has indeed this advantage, that the other parts of his character are so bad that the chivalrous side of him stands out as a relief, as at least comparative light amid surrounding darkness. Chivalry the bad side of some princes; There are other princes in whom the chivalrous side is the dark side, because there are other parts of their character better than chivalry. The essence of chivalry is that the fantastic and capricious law of honour displaces all the forms of the law of right. Its one-sided nature. The standard of the good knight, the rule of good faith, respect, and courtesy, as due from one knight to another, displaces the higher standard of the man, the citizen, and the Christian. There are perhaps whole ages, there certainly are particular men, in which this lower standard has its use. Any check, any law, is better than no check and no law. Its incidental use. He who cannot rise to the higher rank of an honest man had better be a knight and gentleman than a mere knave and ruffian. If a man cannot be kept back from all crimes by the law of right, it is a gain that he should be kept back from some crimes by the law of honour. It was better that William Rufus should show mercy and keep his word in some particular kind of cases than that he should never show mercy or keep his word at all. But the very fact that such an one as Rufus could feel bound by the law of honour shows how feeble a check the law of honour is. And we must remember that the very feeling of courtesy and deference towards men of a certain rank led only to more reckless and contemptuous oppression of all who lay without the favoured pale. And, at least as regards particular men, the beginning of the days of chivalry was the falling back from a higher standard. Instances of obedience to a higher law. We have come across men in our own story who showed that they obeyed a better law than that of honour. It was not at the bidding of chivalry or honour, it was not in the character of knight or gentleman, that Herlwin made light of his own wrongs by the side of those of his poor peasants,[474] or that Harold refused to harry the lands of the men who had chosen him to be their king.[475] Practical working of chivalry. But the law of honour and chivalry was most fully obeyed, the character of knight and gentleman was shown in its full perfection, when the Knight without Fear and without Bayard.Reproach refused to expose himself to toils of war which were too dangerous for any but the base churl.[476] It was fully carried out when the mirror of chivalry, the The Black Prince. Black Prince himself, gave their lives to the French knights who fought against him, and murdered the unarmed men, women, and children, who craved for mercy.[477] Francis the First of France. It was no less worthily carried out by the king who ever had the faith of a gentleman on his lips, who boasted that he had never broken his word except to women, and who betrayed, not only the women, but the allied princes and commonwealths who trusted in him. William the Red at least need not shrink from a comparison with Francis of Valois.[478] Twofold character of the Black Prince. But it must not be forgotten that one of the chivalrous heroes on our list had a side to him better than his chivalry. William the Great assuredly, and I believe William the Red also, would have shrunk from such a deed as the slaughter of Limoges. But he who wrought the slaughter of Limoges was also the patriotic statesman of the Good Parliament. The knight, courteous and bloody as became his knighthood, could turn about and act as something better than a knight. In such a man we must measure the balance of good and evil as we can, and the chivalrous side of him is the evil side. In William Rufus the chivalrous side is the better side; it is the comparatively bright spot in a picture otherwise of utter blackness.
Grouping of events in the reign of Rufus. The chief events of the reign of William Rufus fall into two classes. There is the military side; there is the ecclesiastical and constitutional side. There is the side which shows us the noblest and the basest type of the warrior in Helias of La Flèche and in Robert of Bellême. There is the side which shows us the noblest and the basest type of the priest in Anselm of Canterbury and in Randolf of Durham. The two sides go on together. The most striking features in both belong to a somewhat later time than that which we have now reached. But it is the military side in its earlier stages which most directly connects itself with the tale which we have gone through in the present chapter. The first Norman campaign of the Red King comes in date before the archiepiscopate of Anselm; it comes in idea before the administration of Randolf Flambard. On the other hand, it is directly connected with the war of Pevensey and Rochester, with the banishment of Bishop Odo and Bishop William. We will therefore pass to it as the chief subject of our next chapter.