The Reign of William Rufus and the Accession of Henry the First, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Edward A. Freeman

CHAPTER III.

THE FIRST WARS OF WILLIAM RUFUS.
1090–1092.[479]

THE Character of the year 1089.rest of the year in which Lanfranc died was unmarked by any striking public event, political or military. The causes of evil which had begun to play their part before the Primate’s death, which were enabled to play it so much more powerfully after his death, were no doubt already at work; but they had as yet not wrought any open change, or done anything specially to impress men’s minds. Natural phænomena. The writers of the time have nothing to record, except natural phænomena, and it must be remembered that natural phænomena, and those mostly of a baleful kind, form a marked feature of the reign of William Rufus. Even he could hardly be charged with directly causing earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests; but, in the ideas of his day, it was natural to look on earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests, either as scourges sent to punish his evil deeds, or else as signs that some more direct vengeance was presently coming upon himself. The ever-living belief of those times in the near connexion between the moral and the physical world must always be borne in mind in reading their history. And in the days of William Rufus there was plenty in both worlds to set men’s minds a-thinking. The great earthquake. Aug. 11, 1089. Lanfranc had not been dead three months before the land was visited with a mighty earthquake. The strongest buildings—​the massive keeps and minsters lately built or still building—​seemed to spring from the ground and sink back again into their places.[480] Then came a lack of the fruits of the earth of all kinds; the harvest was slow in ripening and scanty when it came; men reaped their corn at Martinmas and yet later.[481]

Character of the year 1090. The next year we find no entries of this kind. There was a mighty stir in England and in Normandy; but it was not a mere stirring of the elements. Beginnings of foreign adventure. We now enter on the record of the foreign policy and the foreign wars of the Red King, and we hear the first wail going up from the oppressed folk within his kingdom. Throughout his reign the growth of the prince’s power and the grievances of his people go together. In the former year there was nothing to chronicle but the earthquake and the late harvest. First mention of domestic opposition. This year we hear of the first successes of the King beyond the sea, and we hear, as their natural consequence, that the “land was fordone with unlawful gelds.”[482]

The years 1090–1091. The two years which followed the death of Lanfranc saw the attempt of the first year of Rufus reversed. Instead of the lord of Normandy striving to win England, the lord Successes in Normandy. of England not only strives, but succeeds, in making himself master of a large part of the Norman duchy. Supremacy over Scotland. 1091. Having thus become a continental potentate, the King comes back to his island kingdom, to establish his Imperial supremacy over the greatest vassal of his crown, and to do what his father had not done, to enlarge the borders Annexation of Cumberland. 1092. of his immediate realm by a new land and a new city.

Through a large part then of the present chapter the scene of our story will be removed from England to Normandy. Close connexion of English and Norman history.Yet it is only the scene which is changed, not the actors. One main result of the coming of the first William into England was that for a while the history of Normandy and that of England cannot be kept asunder. The chief men on the one side of the water are the chief The same main actors in both. men on the other side. And the fact that they were so is the main key to the politics of the time. We have in the last chapter seen the working of this fact from one side; we shall now see its working from the other side. The same men flit backwards and forwards from Normandy to England and from England to Normandy. Normandy the chief seat of warfare. But of warfare, public and private, during the reign of William Rufus and still more during the reign of Henry the First, Normandy rather than England is the chosen field. Without warfare of some kind a Norman noble could hardly live. And for that beloved employment Normandy gave many more opportunities than England. The Duke of the Normans, himself after all the man of a higher lord, could not be—​at least no duke but William the Great could be—​in his continental duchy all that the King of the English, Emperor in his own island, could be within his island realm. Contrast between Normandy and England as to private war. Private war was lawful in Normandy—​the Truce of God itself implied its lawfulness; it never was lawful in England. And wars with France, wars with Anjou, the endless struggle in and for the borderland of Maine, went much further towards taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the Norman duchy, than the endless strife on the Welsh and Scottish marches could go towards taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the English kingdom. Normandy then will be our fighting-ground far more than England; but the fighting men will be the same in both lands.

The old and the new generation. The old companions of the Conqueror were by this time beginning to make way for a new generation. The rebellion of 1088 saw the last exploits of some of them. Yet others among them will still be actors for a while. Bishop Odo. Bishop Odo, cut off from playing any part in England, still plays a part in Normandy. The great border earls, Hugh of Hugh. d. 1101. Chester and of Avranches, Roger of Shrewsbury and of Roger. d. 1094. Montgomery, die in the course of our tale, but not till we have something more to tell about both of them, and a good deal to tell about the longer-lived of the two. Robert of Mowbray. Their younger fellow, Robert of Mowbray, after becoming the chief centre of one part of our story, leaves the world by a living death. William of Warren. The new Earl of Surrey, if not already dead, passes away without anything further to record of him; Walter Giffard, d. 1102. Walter Giffard, old as a man, but young as an earl, still lives on. But younger men are coming into sight. William of Eu. William of Eu, the son of the still living Count Robert, has already come before us as a chief actor in our story, and we shall see him as the chiefest sufferer. But above all, two men, whom we have hitherto seen only by fits and starts, now come to the front as chief actors on both sides of the sea. Before we enter on the details of Norman affairs, it will be well to try clearly to take in the character and position of two famous bearers of the same name, great alike in England, in Normandy, and in France, Robert of Bellême. Robert of Bellême, afterwards of Shrewsbury, of Bridgenorth, and of both Montgomeries, and Robert of Meulan. Robert, Count of the French county of Meulan, heir of the great Norman house of Beaumont, and forefather of the great English house of Leicester.

The two Rogers, fathers of the two Roberts, are still living; but for the rest of their days they play a part quite secondary to that played by their sons. History and character of Robert of Bellême. Robert of Bellême, the eldest son of Roger of Montgomery, has already come before us several times, most prominently as a sharer in the rebellion raised by the present Duke against his father in Normandy[483] and in the rebellion raised on his behalf against his brother. Succeeds his mother Mabel. 1082. As son of the slain Countess Mabel,[484] he was heir of the house of Talvas, heir alike of their possessions and of their reputed wickedness. Lord through his mother of the Her inheritance.castle from which he took his name, lord of a crowd of other castles on the border-lands of Normandy, Perche, and Maine, Robert of Bellême, Robert Talvas, Succeeds his father at Montgomery, 1094; stands forth for the present as the son of Mabel rather than as the son of Roger. In after times counties and lordships flowed in upon him from various sources and in various quarters. The death of his father gave him the old Norman possessions of the house of Montgomery; and his brother at Shrewsbury, 1098. the death of his brother gave him the new English possessions of that house, the great earldom of Shrewsbury and all that went with it. We seem to be carried back to past times when we find that Robert of Bellême His wife Agnes of Ponthieu. was married to the daughter of Guy of Ponthieu, the gaoler of Harold, and that, at the accession of William Rufus, Guy had still as many years to reign as the Red King himself. Guy Count of Ponthieu. 1053–1100. Guy’s death at last added Ponthieu to the possessions of the house of Bellême, nominally in the person of Robert’s son William Talvas, practically in that of Robert himself. Greatness of Robert’s possessions. The lord of such lands, master of four and thirty castles,[485] ranked rather with princes than with ordinary nobles; and even now, when Robert held only the inheritance of his mother, the extent and nature of his fiefs gave him a position almost princely. The man alike of Normandy and of France, he could make use of the profitable as well as the dangerous side of a divided allegiance, and it is not without reason that we find the lord of the border-land spoken of by the fitting title of Marquess.[486] Great part played by him. From the death of the Conqueror onwards, through the reigns of Robert and William, till the day when Henry sent him to a life-long prison, Robert of Bellême fills in the history of Normandy and England a place alongside of their sovereigns.

His character. With the inheritance of Mabel and William Talvas, their son and grandson was believed to have succeeded in full measure to the hereditary wickedness of their house. That house is spoken of as one at whose deeds dæmons themselves might shudder,[487] His surname. and Robert himself bears in the traditions of his Cenomannian enemies the frightful surname which has been so unfairly transferred to the father of the Conqueror. His name lives in proverbs. In the land of Maine his abiding works are pointed to as the works of Robert the Devil. Elsewhere the “wonders of Robert of Bellême” became a familiar saying.[488] That Robert was a man of no small natural gifts is plain; to the ordinary accomplishments of the Norman warrior he added a mastery of the more intellectual branches of the art of warfare. His skill in engineering. As the Cenomannian legend shows, he stood at the head of his age in the skill of the military engineer.[489] Firm and daring, ready of wit and ready of speech, he had in him most of the qualities which might have made him great in that or in any other age. His special and wanton cruelty. But, even in that age, he held a place by himself as a kind of incarnation of evil. Restless ambition, reckless contempt of the rights of others, were common to him with many of his neighbours and contemporaries. But he stands almost alone in his habitual delight in the infliction of human suffering. The recklessness which lays waste houses and fields, the cruelty of passion or of policy which slays or mutilates an enemy, were common in his day. But even then we find only a few men of whom it was believed that the pangs of other men were to them a direct source of enjoyment. In Robert sheer love of cruelty displaced even greediness; he refused ransom for his prisoners that he might have the pleasure of putting them to lingering deaths.[490] The received forms of cruelty blinding and mutilation, were not enough for him; he brought the horrors of the East into Western Europe; men, and women too, were left at his bidding to writhe on the sharp stake.[491] Distrustful of all men, artful, flattering, courteous of speech, his profession of friendship was the sure path to destruction.[492] The special vices of William Rufus are not laid to his charge; it is at least to the credit of Latin Christendom in the eleventh century that it needs the union of its two worst sinners to form the likeness of an Ottoman Majesty, Excellency, or Highness in the nineteenth. But his domestic life was hardly happy. His treatment of his wife His wife Agnes, the heiress of Ponthieu, the mother of his one child William Talvas, was long kept by him in bonds in the dungeons of Bellême.[493] and his godson. And, more piteous than all, we read how a little boy, his own godchild, drew near to him in all loving trust. Some say, in the sheer wantonness of cruelty, some say, to avenge some slight fault of the child’s father, the monster drew the boy under his cloak and tore out his eyes with his own hands.[494]

The list of the men, great and small, who were simply wronged and dispossessed by Robert of Bellême, is long indeed.[495] Some of them, it is true, were now and then able to revenge their wrongs with their own arms. His enmity to the men of Domfront; He seems, as might have been expected, to have been the special enemy of all that was specially good in individuals or in communities. He was the bitter foe of the valiant and faithful men of Domfront.[496] to Helias; He was before all things the enemy of Helias of La Flèche. to Rotrou of Perche; He was the enemy of his neighbour Count Rotrou of Perche, who also bears a good character among the princes of his day.[497] to the prelates of Seez. As temporal lord of Seez, he was the enemy of its churches, episcopal and abbatial; he had not that reverence for the foundation of his father which is one of the redeeming features in the character of the Red King. Abbot Ralph, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He underwent excommunication from the zeal of Bishop Serlo, and by the wrongs done by him to Abbot Ralph of Seez, which drove that prelate to seek shelter in England, he unwittingly gave England a worthy primate and Anselm a worthy successor.[498] One is inclined to wonder how such a man gained the special favour of the Conqueror, whose politic sternness had nothing in common with the fiendish brutality of Robert.[499] Perhaps, as in William Rufus, the worst features of his character may for a while have been hidden. It is less surprising that, in the days of William’s sons, we find him in honour at the courts of England, Normandy, and France. But at last vengeance came upon him. His imprisonment by Henry. 1110. When King Henry sent him to spend his days in prison, it was in a prison so strait and darksome that the outer world knew not whether he were dead or alive, nor was the time of his death set down in any record.[500]

Robert Count of Meulan and Earl of Leicester. The other Robert, the son of the other Roger, was a man of a different mould, a man who would perhaps seem more in place in some other age than in that in which he lived. He was the son of the old and worthy Roger of Beaumont, the faithful counsellor of princes, His father Roger of Beaumont. who, like Gulbert of Hugleville, refused to share in the spoils of England.[501] Great, like his namesake, in France, Normandy, and England, Robert passed through a long life unstained by any remarkable crime, though it was hinted that, of his vast possessions on both sides of the sea, some were not fairly come by.[502] He inherits Meulan from his uncle, He is known in history by the name of his French county of Meulan, which he inherited from his mother’s brother, Count Hugh, son of Count Waleran, who withdrew to become a monk of Bec.[503] and Beaumont from his father. From his father, when he too had gone to end his days in his father’s monastery of Preaux, Robert inherited the lordship of Beaumont, called, from his father’s name, Beaumont-le-Roger.[504] His earldom of Leicester. He shared in the Conqueror’s distribution of lands in England, and in after days he received the earldom of Leicester from King Henry, as his less stirring brother Henry had already received that of Warwick from the Red King. His exploits at Senlac. That he was a brave and skilful soldier we cannot doubt; his establishment in England was the reward of good service done at one of the most critical moments of the most terrible of battles.[505] But the warrior of Senlac hardly appears again in the character of a warrior; he His fame for wisdom. lives on for many years as a cold and crafty statesman, the counsellor of successive kings, whose wisdom, surpassing that of all men between Huntingdon and Jerusalem, was deemed, like that of Ahithophel, to be like the oracle of God.[506] His counsels were not always of an amiable kind. Character of his influence with Rufus and Henry. Under Rufus, without, as far as we can see, sharing in his crimes, he checked those chivalrous instincts which were the King’s nearest approach to virtue.[507] Under Henry his influence was used to hinder the promotion of Englishmen in their own land.[508] Yet on the whole his character stands fair. He discouraged foppery and extravagance by precept and example; he was the right-hand man of King Henry in maintaining the peace of the land, and he seems to have shared the higher tastes of the clerkly monarch.[509] Of Anselm he was sometimes the enemy, sometimes the friend.[510] His sons. His sons were well taught, and they could win the admiration of Pope and cardinals by their skill in disputation.[511] The eldest, Waleran, his Norman heir, plays an unlucky part in the reign of Henry;[512] his English heir Robert continued the line of the Earls of Leicester.[513] His last days. His last days were clouded by domestic troubles;[514] and he is said to have formally perilled his own soul in his zeal for the temporal welfare of his sons. His death. 1118. On his death-bed, so the story runs, Archbishop Ralph and other clergy bade him, for his soul’s health, to restore whatever lands he had gained unjustly.[515] Story of his death-bed.What then, he asked, should he leave to his sons? “Your old inheritance,” answered Ralph, “and whatever you have acquired justly. Give up the rest, or you devote your soul to hell.” The fond father answered that he would leave all to them, and would trust to their filial piety to make atonement for his sins.[516] But we are told that Waleran and Robert were too busy increasing by wrong what had been won by wrong to do anything for the soul of their father.[517]

These are the two men who, of secondary importance in the tale of the Conquest and of the reign of the first William, become the most prominent laymen of the reign of the second. The churchmen of the time who stand forth conspicuously for good and for evil will have their place in another chapter. Prominence of the two Roberts. But the two Roberts will, next to the King and the Ætheling, hold the first place in the tale which we have immediately to tell, as they held it still in days of which we shall not have the telling, long after the Ætheling had changed into the King. The force of him of Bellême, the wit of him of Meulan, had their full place in the affairs both of Normandy and of England, and both were brought to bear against the prince and people of Maine.

§ 1. Normandy under Robert.
1087–1090.

Temptations to the invasion of Normandy. That the thought of an invasion of his elder brother’s duchy should present itself to the mind of William Rufus was not very wonderful. The fact that it was his elder brother’s duchy might perhaps be of itself enough to suggest the thought. The dutiful son of his father, whom alone his father had called to rule of his own free will, might feel himself in some sort defrauded, if any part of his father’s dominions was held by a brother whose only claim was the accident of his elder birth, and whose personal unfitness for the rule of men his father had emphatically set forth. Indeed, without seeking for any special motive at all, mere ambition, mere love of enterprise, might be motive enough to lead a prince like Rufus to a campaign beyond the sea, a campaign which might make him master of the native dominion of his father, the land of his own birth. Interest of those who held land in both countries. And such schemes would be supported on grounds of reasonable policy by a large part of the Norman possessors of the soil of England. Holding, many of them, lands on both sides of the sea, it was their interest that the same prince should reign on both sides of the sea, and that they themselves should not be left open to the dangers of a divided allegiance. They had failed to carry out this purpose by putting Robert in possession of England; they might now carry it out by putting William in possession of Normandy. And the attempt might even be made with some show of justice. Provocation given by Robert. The help which Robert had given to the rebellion against Rufus might, in the eyes of Rufus, or of a much more scrupulous prince than Rufus, have been held to justify reprisals. State of Normandy. And to a prince seeking occasions or excuses for an invasion of Normandy the actual condition of that duchy might seem directly to invite the coming of an invader. The invader might almost comfort himself with the belief that his invasion was a charitable work. Any kind of rule, almost any kind of tyranny, might seem an improvement on the state of things which was now rife through the whole length and breadth of the Norman land. His invasion likely to be largely welcome. William Rufus might reasonably think that no small part of the inhabitants of Normandy would welcome invasion from an invader of their own blood, the son of their greatest ruler. And the event showed that he was by no means mistaken in so thinking.

The Conqueror foretells the character of Robert’s reign. No words of man were ever more truly spoken than the words in which William the Great, constrained, as he deemed himself, to leave Normandy in the hands of Robert, was believed to have foretold the fate of the land which should be under his rule. Robert was, so his father is made to call him, proud and foolish, doomed to misfortune; the land would be wretched where he was master.[518] The Conqueror was a true prophet; Utter anarchy of the duchy. when Robert stepped into his father’s place, the work of the fifty years’ rule of his father was undone in a moment. Normandy at once fell back into the state of anarchy from which William had saved it, the state into which it fell when the elder Robert set forth for Jerusalem.[519] Once more every man did what was right in his own eyes. And the Duke did nothing to hinder them. Again we are brought to that standard of the duties of a sovereign of which we have heard so often, that standard which was reached by the Conqueror and by his younger son, but which neither Robert in this generation nor Stephen in the next strove to reach. Character of Robert. Robert, it must always be noticed, is never charged with cruelty or oppression of any kind in his own person. His weak good-nature. His fault was exactly of the opposite kind. He was so mild and good-natured, so ready to listen to every suppliant, to give to every petitioner, to show mercy to every offender, that he utterly neglected the discharge of the first duty of his office, that which the men of his time called doing justice.[520] William the Great had done justice and made peace. Revival of brigandage and private war. The smaller brood of thieves and murderers had been brought to feel the avenging arm of the law. Thieves and murderers on a greater scale, the unruly nobles of the duchy, had been forced to keep back their hands from that form of brigandage which they dignified with the name of private war. Under Robert both classes of offenders found full scope for their energies. He did nothing to restrain either. He neither made peace nor did justice. Lack of “justice.” Brave, liberal, ready of speech, ready of wit and keen of sight in supporting the cause of another, Robert undoubtedly could be. But stronger qualities were needed, and those qualities Robert had not. Sunk in sloth and dissipation, no man heeded him; the land was without a ruler. Forgetful alike of injuries and of benefits, Robert, from the first moment of his reign, tamely endured the most flagrant outrages to the ducal authority, without doing anything to hinder or to avenge.[521]

Spread of vice and evil fashions. In other respects also Normandy suddenly changed from what it had been under the great King-duke. William the Great, strict to austerity in his private life, careful in the observance of all religious duties, a zealous supporter of ecclesiastical discipline, had made his duchy into a kind of paradise in ecclesiastical eyes. All this was now swept away. The same flood of foolish and vicious fashions which overspread England overspread Normandy also. There is nothing to convict Robert personally of the special vices of Rufus; but the life of the unmarried Duke was very unlike the life of his father. And vice of the grossest kind, the vices of Rufus himself, stalked forth into broad daylight, unabashed and unpunished.[522] Weakness of the spiritual power. The ecclesiastical power, no longer supported by the secular arm, was too weak to restrain or to chastise.[523] As every form of violence, so every form of licentiousness, had its full swing in the Normandy of Robert Curthose.

Building of castles. But, above all, this time stood out, like all times of anarchy, as a time of building and strengthening of castles. One of the means by which the Conqueror had The Conqueror keeps garrisons in the castles of the nobles.maintained the peace of the land had been by keeping garrisons of his own in the castles of such of his nobles as were likely to be dangerous. He had followed this wise policy with the castle of Evreux, the stronghold of Instances at Evreux, and in the Bellême castles.his kinsman Count William. He had followed it with the crowd of castles which, as the inheritance of his mother, had passed to Robert of Bellême, the man who is to be the leading villain of our present drama. But the precautions of the Conqueror lasted no longer than his life; his successor might be defied without danger. At the moment of the King’s death, Robert of Bellême was on his way to the court to “speak with the King,” in the ordinary phrase,[524] on some affairs of his own. He had reached Brionne when he heard of the Conqueror’s death. Robert of Bellême drives out the ducal forces. Instead of going on to offer his homage or support to the new Duke, he turned back, gathered his own followers, marched on Alençon, and by a sudden attack drove the ducal garrison out of the fortress by the Sarthe, the southern bulwark of Normandy. He did the same with better right on his own hill of Bellême, which was not strictly Norman soil. He did so with all his other castles, and with as many of the castles of his neighbours as he could.[525] The lord of Bellême in short established himself as a prince who might well bear himself as independent of the lord of Rouen. The like done by the Count of Evreux and others. Count William of Evreux followed his example; the late King’s garrison was driven out of the fortress which had arisen within the walls of the Roman Mediolanum. William of Breteuil, Ralph of Toesny or of Conches, the nobles of Normandy in general wherever they had the power, all did the like.[526] They drove out the garrisons; they strengthened the old fortresses; they raised new ones, adulterine castles in the phrase of the day, built without the Duke’s licence and placed beyond his control. Those who were strong enough seized on the castles of weaker neighbours. The land was again filled with these robbers’ nests, within whose walls and circuit law was powerless, lairs, as men said, of grievous wolves, who entered in and spared not the flock.[527] Robert’s lavish grants. Some nobles indeed had the decency to go through the form of asking the Duke for gifts which they knew that he would not have strength of mind to refuse them. One of them was William of Breteuil, the son of the famous Earl William of Hereford, the brother of the rebel Roger,[528] and once a sharer in Robert’s rebellion against his father. Ivry. He asked and received the famous tower of Ivry, the tower of Albereda, the now vanished stronghold which once looked down on the plain where Henry of Navarre was in after ages to smite down the forces of the League. This gift involved a wrong to the old Roger of Beaumont, who had held that great fortress by the Conqueror’s commission. Brionne. Roger was accordingly recompensed by a grant of Brionne, the island stronghold in the heart of Normandy, which had played such a part in the early wars of the Conqueror.[529] Thus places specially connected with the memory of the great William, places like Alençon and Brionne, which had cost him no small pains to win or to recover, passed away from his son without a thought. Robert gave to every man everything that he asked for, to the impoverishment of himself and to the strengthening of every other man against him.[530]

The Ætheling Henry. In one corner only of the duchy was there a better state of things to be seen. The Ætheling Henry had received from his dying father a bequest in money, but no share in his territorial dominions.[531] He claims his mother’s lands. He claimed however the English lands which had been held by his mother Matilda, but which the late King had kept in his own hands after her death.[532] This claim had not as yet been made good, and Henry’s possessions still consisted only of his five thousand pounds in money. With part of this he was presently to make a splendid investment. Lavish waste of Robert. While Henry had money but no lands, Robert had wide domains, but his extravagance soon left him without money. The Norman portion of the Conqueror’s hoard was presently scattered broadcast among his mercenary soldiers and other followers. Of these he kept a vast number; men flocked eagerly to a prince who was so ready to give; but before long he was without the means of giving or paying any more. He asks a loan of Henry. He asked Henry for a gift or a loan. The scholar-prince was wary, and refused to throw his money away into the bottomless pit of Robert’s extravagance.[533] The Duke then proposed to sell him some part of his dominions. At this proposal Henry caught gladly, and a bargain was struck. Henry buys the Côtentin and Avranchin. For a payment of three thousand pounds, Henry became master of a noble principality in the western part of the Norman duchy. The conquest of William Longsword,[534] the colony of Harold Blaatand,[535] the whole land from the fortress of Saint James to the haven of Cherbourg, the land of Coutances and Avranches, the castle and abbey of Saint Saviour,[536] and the house that was castle and abbey in one, the house of Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea—​all this became the dominion of Henry, now known as Count of the Côtentin. With these territories he received the superiority over a formidable vassal; he became lord over the Norman possessions of Earl Hugh of Chester.[537] Thus the English-born son of the Norman Conqueror held for his first dominion no contemptible portion of his father’s duchy, as ruler of the Danish land which in earlier days had beaten back an English invasion.[538] In that land, under Henry’s firm rule. the rule of him who was one day to be called the Lion of Justice, there was a nearer approach to peace and order than could be found in other parts of Normandy. The young Count governed his county well and firmly; no such doings went on in the lands of Coutances and Avranches as went on in the rest of the duchy under the no-rule of Duke Robert.[539]

Henry goes to England. Summer, 1088. Henry, Ætheling on one side of the sea and now Count on the other side,[540] next thought of crossing the channel to seek for those estates in his native land which he claimed in right of his mother.[541] These lands, in Cornwall, Buckinghamshire, and specially in Gloucestershire, had mostly formed a part of the forfeited possessions of Brihtric, the man whose name legend has so strangely connected with that of Matilda.[542] Henry must have reached England about the time when the rebellion had been put down, and when the new King might be expected to be in a mood inclined either to justice or to generosity. William promises him the lands of Matilda. William received his brother graciously, and granted, promised, or pretended to grant, the restitution of the lands of their mother.[543] Henry, already a ruler on one side of the sea, a sharer in his father’s inheritance, went back to his peninsula in a character which was yet newer to him, that of a sharer in his father’s conquest, a great land-owner on the other side of the sea. But his luck, which was to shine forth so brightly in after times, forsook him for the present. If Henry ever came into actual possession of his English estates, his tenure of them was short. He seizes them again. At some time which is not distinctly marked, the lands which had been Matilda’s were again seized by William. They are granted to Robert Fitz-hamon.They were granted to one of the rising men of the time, one of the few who had been faithful to the King in the late times of trouble, to Robert Fitz-hamon, perhaps already the terror of the southern Cymry. Thus the old possessions of Brihtric passed into the hands of the lord of the castle of Cardiff, the founder of the minster of Tewkesbury.[544] In the next generation the policy of Henry was to win them back, if not for himself, yet for his son.[545]

Influence of Odo with Robert. If the Count of Coutances failed of his objects in England, a worse fate awaited him for a season on his return to Normandy. He had enemies at the court of Duke Robert; first of all, it would seem, his uncle Odo, lately Earl of Kent and still Bishop of Bayeux. He was now driven from his earldom to his bishopric, like a dragon, we are told, with fiery wings cast down to the earth.[546] Autumn, 1088. The tyrant of Bayeux, the worst of prelates—​such are the names under which Odo now appears in the pages of our chief guide[547]—​had again become Robert’s chief counsellor. His counsel seems to have taken the form of stirring up the Duke’s mind to abiding wrath against his brother of England, and against all who were, or were held to be, his partisans.[548] Henry brings back Robert of Bellême. When Henry left England to come back to Normandy, he brought with him a dangerous companion in the person of Robert of Bellême. That rebel of a few months back was now thoroughly reconciled to Rufus. Duke Robert was even made to believe that his namesake of Bellême, so lately his zealous supporter, was joined with Henry by a mutual oath to support the interests of the King of the English at the expense of the Duke of the Normans.[549] They are seized and imprisoned. The measures of Robert or of Odo were speedily taken; the coasts were watched; the voyagers were seized before they could disembark from their ships.[550] They were put in fetters, and presently consigned to prisons in the keeping of the Bishop. They had not even the comfort of companionship in bonds. While the Ætheling, Count of the Côtentin, was kept in Odo’s episcopal city, the place of imprisonment for the son of the Earl of Shrewsbury was the fortress of Neuilly, in the most distant part of Odo’s diocese, near the frontier stream of Vire which parts the Bessin from Henry’s own peninsula. The less illustrious captive was the first to find a champion. Earl Roger makes war on the Duke. Earl Roger, by the licence of the King, left England, crossed into Normandy, entered into open war with the Duke on behalf of his son, and garrisoned all his own castles and those of his son against him. Vassal of three lords, the lord of Montgomery and Shrewsbury, the father of the lord of Bellême, might almost rank as their peer. As a prince rather than as a mere baron, Earl Roger took to arms. His fortresses. The border-fortresses on the frontier ground of Normandy, Maine, and Perche were all put into a state of defence.[551] Alençon, by the border stream, was again, as in the days when its burghers mocked the Tanner’s grandson,[552] garrisoned against his son and successor. Bellême itself, the cradle of the house of Talvas—​the Rock of Mabel, bearing the name of her who had united the houses of Talvas and Montgomery, and whose blood had been the price of its possession—​Saint-Cenery on its peninsula by the Sarthe, another of the spoils of Mabel’s bloody policy—​all these border strongholds, together with a crowd of others lying more distinctly within the Norman dominions, had again become hostile spots where the Duke of the Normans was defied.

The episcopal gaoler of Bayeux, in his character of chief counsellor of Duke Robert, is described as keeping his feeble nephew somewhat in awe. But his counsels, it is added, were sometimes followed, sometimes despised.[553] Odo’s exhortation to Robert. Now that all Normandy was in a blaze of civil war, Odo came to Rouen, and had an audience of the Duke, seemingly in an assembly of his nobles.[554] If our guide is to be trusted, Robert, who had no love for hearing sermons even from the lips of his father, was now condemned to hear a sermon of no small length from the perhaps even readier lips of his uncle. Odo gave Robert a lecture on the good government of his duchy, on the duty of defending the oppressed and putting down their oppressors. A long list of princes are held up as his examples, the familiar heroes of Persia, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome, among whom, one hardly sees why, Septimius Severus takes his place along with the first Cæsar. Rivalry of Normandy and France. On the same list too come the princes of his own house, the princes whom the warlike French had ever feared, winding up with the name of his own father, greatest of them all.[555] In all this we hear the monk of Saint Evroul rather than the Bishop of Bayeux; but any voice is worth hearing which impresses on us a clearer understanding of the abiding jealousy between Normandy and France. But we may surely hear Odo himself in the practical advice that follows.The line of Talvas to be rooted out. Now is the time to root out the whole accursed stock of Talvas from the Norman duchy. They were an evil generation from the beginning, not one of whom ever died the death of other men.[556] It is as the son of Mabel, not as the son of Roger, that Robert of Bellême comes in for this frightful inheritance, and Odo could not foresee how pious an end the Earl of Shrewsbury was to make in a few years.[557] He reminded the Duke that a crowd of castles, which had been ducal possessions as long as his father lived, had been seized on his father’s death by Robert of Bellême, and their ducal garrisons driven out.[558] It was the Duke’s duty, as the ruler of the land, as a faithful son of Holy Church, to put an end to the tyranny of this usurper, and to give to all his dominions the blessing of lawful government at the hand of their lawful prince.

But the overthrow of the house of Talvas was not the only work to which Odo stirred up his nephew. Affairs of Maine. There was another enterprise to be undertaken before the great lord of the Cenomannian border could be safely attacked. These early days of Robert lead us on at once to that side of the continental wars and continental policy of Rufus which seems to have drawn to itself the smallest amount of English interest at the time,[559] but which is that on which we are now led to look with a deeper interest than any other. Before Robert could safely attack Bellême, he must make sure of Le Mans and of all Maine. Every mention of that noble city, of its counts and its bishops, its renowned church, and its stout-hearted citizens, has a charm which is shared by no other spot between the Loire and the Channel. Helias and Hildebert. And at no stage of its history did the Cenomannian state stand forth with greater brilliancy than in the last days of its independent being, when Le Mans had Helias to its count and Hildebert to its bishop. Those days are still parted from us by a few years; but the advice given by Odo to Robert brings us to the beginning of the chain of events which leads straight to them. The historian of William Rufus must now begin to look forward to the days when Rufus, like his father, tried his strength against the valiant men of the Cenomannian land and city, and tried it at a time when land and city could put forth their full strength back again under a leader worthy of them. But as yet the land of Maine has neither to deal with so mighty a foe nor to rejoice in the guardianship of so worthy a champion. In the stage of the tale which we have now reached, Rufus plays no part at all, and Helias plays only a secondary part. History of Maine under the Conqueror. The general story of Le Mans and Maine has been elsewhere carried down to the last mention of them in the days of the Conqueror.[560] It has been told how the land passed under 1063. William’s power in the days before he crossed the sea to win England[561]—​how the city and land had revolted against the Norman—​how, after trying the rule of a foreign branch of their own princely house, its people had 1073. risen as the first free commonwealth north of the Loire—​how they had been again brought into William’s hand, and that largely by the help of his English warriors[562]—​and how, after the final submission of the city, isolated spots of the Cenomannian land had again risen against the Norman power. The last act of this earlier 1083. drama was when a single Cenomannian fortress successfully withstood the whole strength of Normandy and England.[563] We have seen how Hubert of Beaumont beheld the Conqueror baffled before his hill fortress of Sainte-Susanne, the shattered keep which still stands, sharing with Dol in the Breton land the honour of being the two spots from which William had to turn away, conqueror no longer.[564] 1086. But, if Hubert had beaten back William from his castle, he had found it expedient to return to his allegiance; and, at the death of the Conqueror, Maine seems to have been as thoroughly under William’s power as Normandy and England. Dissatisfaction in Maine. Things changed as soon as the great King had passed away. The land and city which had striven so often against the Conqueror himself were not likely to sit down quietly under the feeble rule of Robert. Relations with Fulk of Anjou. And, besides the standing dislike of the people of Maine to Norman rule, there was a neighbour who was likely to be stirred up by his own ambition to meddle in the affairs of Maine, and to whom the actual provisions of treaties gave at least a colourable claim to do so. By the terms of the peace of Blanchelande, the new Duke of the Normans had become the man of Count Fulk of Anjou for the county of Maine.[565] It is true that the homage had been of the most formal kind. There had been no reservation of authority on the part of the superior lord, nor, as far as we can see, was any service of any kind imposed on the fief, if fief it is to be called. Robert’s homage to Fulk. The homage might almost seem to have been a purely personal act, a homage expressing thankfulness for the surrender of all Angevin rights over Maine, rather than an acknowledgement of Angevin superiority over the land and city. Still Robert, as Count of Maine, had, in some way or other, become Count Fulk’s man, and Count Fulk had, in some way or other, become Robert’s lord. A relation was thus established between them of which the Rechin was sure to take advantage, whenever the time came.

Robert Count of Maine. Robert, on his father’s death, had taken his title of Prince of the Cenomannians as well as that of Duke of the Normans,[566] and his authority seems to have been acknowledged at Le Mans no less than at Rouen. State of things in Maine. We may suspect that there was no very deep felt loyalty in the minds of a people whose rebellious tendencies had deeply impressed the mind of William the Great. He is said—​though we may guess that the etymology comes rather from the reporter than from the speaker—​to have derived the name of their land and city from their currish madness.[567] But there was as yet no open resistance. Of the three chief men in Church and State, Howel. Bishop Howel was an active supporter of the Norman connexion, while Geoffrey of Mayenne and Helias of La Flèche were at least not ready openly to throw it off. Geoffrey of Mayenne. Geoffrey, who had fought against the Conqueror twenty-five years before,[568] who had betrayed the young commonwealth of Le Mans fifteen years before,[569] must have been now advanced in life; but we shall still hear of him for some years to come. Helias. Helias, the chief hero of later wars, was of a younger generation, and now appears for the first time. His descent and position. He was, it will be remembered, the son of John of La Flèche and of Paula the youngest sister of the last Count Herbert.[570] He was therefore, before any other man in the land, the representative of Cenomannian independence, as distinguished both from Norman rule and from Angevin superiority. But his father had, in the Conqueror’s second Cenomannian war, remained faithful to the Norman, alike against commonwealth, Lombard, and Angevin.[571] His son for the present followed the same course. Story of Bishop Howel’s appointment. Bishop Howel was in any case a zealous Norman partisan; according to one story he was a special nominee of the Conqueror, appointed for the express purpose of helping to keep the people of Maine in order. According to the local historian, he had been appointed Dean of Saint Julian’s by his predecessor Arnold, and was, on Arnold’s death, freely and unanimously chosen to the bishopric.[572] In Normandy it was believed that King William, on Arnold’s death, offered the bishopric to one of his own clerks, Samson of Bayeux, who declined the offer on the ground that a bishop, according to apostolic rule, ought to be blameless, while he himself was a grievous sinner in many ways. The King said that Samson must either take the bishopric himself or find some fit person in his stead. Samson recommends him for the see. Samson made his nomination at once. There was in the King’s chapel a clerk, poor, but of noble birth and of virtuous life, Howel by name, and, as his name implied, of Breton birth or descent.[573] He was the man to be bishop of Le Mans. Howel was at once sent for. He came, not knowing to what end he was called. Young in years, slight and mean in figure, he had not the stately presence with which Walcher of Durham had once impressed the mind of Eadgyth, perhaps of William himself.[574] But Howel was not called upon, like Walcher, to be a goodly martyr, but only a confessor on a small scale. William was at first tempted to despise the unconscious candidate for the chair of Saint Julian. But Samson, who, sinner as he may have been, seems not to have been a bad preacher or reasoner, warned the King that God looked not at the outward appearance, but at the heart. William examined further into Howel’s life and conversation, and presently gave him the temporal investiture of the bishopric.[575] At the same time a congé d’élire went to Le Mans, which led to Howel’s “pure and simple” election by the Chapter.[576] A point both of canon and of feudal law turned up. Temporal relations of the bishopric of Le Mans. The old dispute between the Norman Duke and the Angevin Count about the advowson of the bishopric had never been settled; the Peace of Blanchelande was silent on that point. Legally there can be no doubt that the true temporal superior of the Bishop of Le Mans was neither Fulk nor William, but their common, if forgotten, lord King Philip.[577] But, whoever might be his temporal lord, no one doubted that the Bishop of Le Mans was a suffragan, and the suffragan highest in rank, of the Archbishop of Tours.[578] Yet, as things stood, as Tours was in the dominions of Fulk, a subject of William who went to that metropolis for consecration might have been called on to enter into some engagement inconsistent with his Norman loyalty. Howel consecrated at Rouen. April 21, 1085. By a commission therefore from Archbishop Ralph of Tours, Howel received consecration at Rouen from the Primate of the Normans, William the Good Soul.[579]

This story is worth telling, as it is thoroughly characteristic of the Conqueror; but there is this difficulty about it, that we can hardly understand either how the historian of the Bishops of Le Mans could fail to know the succession of the deans of his own church, or else how the head of the chapter of Saint Julian’s could be lurking as a poor clerk in King William’s chapel. Be this as it may, there is thorough agreement as to the episcopal virtues of Howel, as to his zeal in continuing the works in the church of Saint Julian,[580] Howel’s Norman loyalty. and as to his unwavering loyalty to the Norman house. And, builder and adorner of the sanctuary as he was, he did not scruple to rob the altars of the saints of their gold and silver to feed the poor in the day of hunger.[581] His loyalty to Robert seems to have carried with it, for a time at least, the submission of the city. Robert before Le Mans. The Duke drew near at the head of his army. Bishop Odo was again in harness as one of his nephew’s chief captains. With him came not a few of the lords who had seized castles in the Duke’s despite, but who were nevertheless ready to follow his banner. There was the elder Ralph of Toesny, he who had taken the strange message to King Henry after the day of Mortemer, and who had refused to bear the banner of Normandy on the day of Senlac.[582] With him was his nephew, William of Breteuil, the elder and more lucky of the two sons of William Fitz-Osbern. He had been one of Robert’s companions in his day of rebellion, along with the younger Ralph of Toesny and with Robert of Bellême, now their enemy.[583] The host entered Le Mans without resistance, and was received, we are told, with joy by clergy and citizens alike.[584] Messages were sent forth to summon the chief men of the county to come and do their duty to their new lord. Helias came; so did Geoffrey of Mayenne. General submission of the county. When two such leaders submitted, others naturally followed their example. All the chief men of Maine, it would seem, became the liegemen of Duke Robert. Ballon holds out. One obstinate rebel alone, Pagan or Payne of Montdoubleau, defended with his followers the castle of Ballon against the new prince.[585]

The castle of Ballon. The fortress which still held out, one whose name we shall again meet with more than once in the immediate story of the Red King, was a stronghold indeed. About twelve miles north of Le Mans a line of high ground ends to the north in a steep bluff rising above the Cenomannian Orne, the lesser stream of that name which mingles its waters with the Sarthe. The river is not the same prominent feature in the landscape which the Sarthe itself is at Le Mans and at some of the other towns and castles which it washes; it does not in the same way flow directly at the foot of the hill. But it comes fully near enough to place Ballon in the long list of peninsular strongholds. The hill forms a prominent feature in the surrounding landscape; and the view from the height itself, over the wooded plains and gentle hills of Maine, is wide indeed. He who held Ballon against the lord of Normandy, the new lord of Le Mans, might feel how isolated his hillfort stood in the midst of his enemies. To the south Le Mans is seen on its promontory; and, if the mighty pile of Saint Julian’s had not yet reached its present height, yet the twin towers of Howel, the royal tower by their side, the abbey of Saint Vincent then rising above all, may well have caught the eye even more readily than it is caught by the somewhat shapeless mass of the cathedral church in its present state. To the north and north-west the eye stretches over lands which in any normal state of things would have been the lands of enemies, the lands of the houses of Montgomery and Bellême. But at the moment of Robert’s siege the defenders of Ballon must have looked to them as friendly spots, joined in common warfare against the Norman Duke. To the north the eye can reach beyond the Norman border at now rebellious Alençon, to the butte of Chaumont, the isolated hill which looks down upon the Rock of Mabel. To the north-east the horizon skirts the land, at other times the most dangerous of all, but which might now be deemed the most helpful, the native home of the fierce house of Talvas. But, even if Ballon had been begirt on all sides by foes, its defenders might well venture to hope that they could defy them all. The hill had clearly been a stronghold even from præhistoric times. The neck of the promontory is cut off by a vast ditch, which may have fenced in a Cenomannian fortress in days before Cæsar came. This ditch takes in the little town of Ballon with its church. A second ditch surrounds the castle itself, and is carried fully round it on every side. The castle of Ballon therefore does not, like so many of its fellows, strictly overhang the stream or the low ground at its foot. At no point does it, like many other fortresses in the same land, mingle its masonry with the native rock. Ballon is more like Arques[586] on a smaller scale than like any of the strictly river fortresses. Within the ditch, the wall of the castle remains, a gateway, a tower, a house of delicate detail; but every architectural feature at Ballon is later than the days of Rufus; the greater part of the present castle belongs to the latest days of mediæval art. Siege of Ballon. This stronghold, to be fought for over and over again in the course of our story, now underwent the earliest of its sieges which concerns us. August-September, 1088. It held out stoutly for some time during the months of August and September. The loss on both sides was great. At last the besieged The castle surrenders.surrendered, and were admitted to the Duke’s grace.[587] Robert was for a moment the undisputed lord of all Maine.

Further schemes of Odo. The first part of Bishop Odo’s counsel was thus successfully carried out. But the submission of Maine was in Odo’s scheme only a means to the thorough rooting out of the house of Bellême. And Robert found himself in such sure possession of Le Mans and Maine that he could call on the warriors of city and county to follow him in carrying out the second part of the Bishop’s scheme. Robert attacks Saint Cenery. The first point for attack among the fortresses held on behalf of Earl Roger or his captive son was the castle of Saint Cenery. Description and history of the fortress. This was a border fortress of Normandy and Maine, one which could boast of a long and stirring history, and its small remains still occupy a site worthy of the tale which they have to tell. Just within the Norman border, some miles west of the town and castle of Alençon, not far from the junction of the lesser stream of Sarthon with the boundary river, a long narrow peninsula is formed by the windings of the Sarthe. It forms an advanced post of Normandy thrust forward with the Cenomannian land on three sides of it. The greater part of the peninsula consists of a steep and rocky hill,[588] which, as it draws near to its point, is washed by the stream on either side, though nearer to the isthmus the height rises immediately above alluvial meadows between its base and the river. The site was a tempting one for the foundation of a castle, in days when, though there might be hostile ground on three sides, yet no bow-shot or catapult from any hostile point could reach the highest part of the hill. Yet, as the name of the place is ecclesiastical, so its earliest memories are ecclesiastical, and its occupation as a fortress was, in the days of our story, a thing of yesterday. Cenericus or Cenery, a saint of the seventh century, gave the place its name. Monastery of Saint Cenery.A monastery arose, where a hundred and forty monks prayed around the tomb of their patron. His memory is still cherished on his own ground. A church contemporary with our story, a church of the eleventh century crowned by a tower of the twelfth, rises boldly above the swift stream which flows below the three apses of its eastern end. Within, the art of a later but still early age has adorned its walls with the forms of a series of holy persons, among whom the sainted hero of the spot holds a chief place.[589] But if the name of Saint Cenery first suggests the ecclesiastical history of the place, its surname[590] marks a chief feature in its secular history. The place is still Saint Cenery-le-Gerey. That is, it keeps the name of the famous house of Geroy, the name so dear to the heart of the monk of Saint Evroul.[591] For the monastery of Saint Cenery was but short-lived. The monks flee to Château-Thierry. When the wiking Hasting was laying waste the land, the monks of Saint Cenery fled away with the body of their patron, like that of Saint Cuthberht in our own land, to the safer resting-place of Château-Thierry in the land of Soissons.[592] As things now stand, the peninsula of Saint Cenery, with its church and the site of its castle, might suggest, as a lesser object suggests, a greater, the grouping of abbey and castle on that more renowned peninsula where the relics of Saint Cuthberht at last found shelter. The forsaken monastery was never restored. The holy place lost its holiness; over the tombs of the ancient monks arose a den of thieves, a special fortress of crime.[593] In other words, after a century and a half of desolation, a castle arose on the tempting site which was supplied by the neck of the peninsula.[594] Fragments of its masonry may still be seen, and its precinct seems to have taken in the church and the whole peninsula, though in the greater part of its circuit no defence was needed beyond the steep and scarped sides of the rocky hill itself. The castle founded by Geoffrey of Mayenne for William of Geroy.The castle was the work of a man whose name has been familiar to us for thirty years, a man who was still living, and who was actually in the host before the fortress of his own rearing. Geoffrey of Mayenne was closely connected, as kinsman and as lord, with William the son of Geroy. When Geoffrey fell into the hands of William Talvas, the faithful vassal ransomed his lord by the sacrifice of his own castle of Montacute, which stood just beyond the Sarthon within the borders of Maine. To repair this loss of his friend, no doubt also to repay the invasion of Cenomannian soil by a like invasion of Norman soil, and to put some check in the teeth of the house of Bellême, Geoffrey built the castle of Saint Cenery on the left bank of the Sarthe, and gave it as a gift of thankfulness to the son of Geroy.[595] But the inhabitants of the new stronghold, in their dangerous border position, never knew peace or good luck, but were visited with every kind of evil.[596] History of the descendants of Geroy. The sons of the pious and virtuous Geroy yielded to the influence of the spot; they fell into crime and rebellion, and were punished by banishments and strange deaths. The second lord of Saint Cenery, Robert the brother of William, had rebelled against the Conqueror; he had held his fortress against him, and he had died in a mysterious way of a poisoned apple.[597] His son and successor Arnold found how dangerous was the greed and hate of a powerful and unscrupulous neighbour. Roche-Mabille. Nearly north from Saint Cenery, at much the same distance as Alençon is to the east, not far from the foot of the hill of Chaumont which makes so marked a feature in the whole surrounding landscape, on a peninsula formed by a bend of the Sarthon, just within the borders of Maine as Saint Cenery is just within the borders of Normandy, rises the solitary rock which once had been known as Jaugy. There we still trace the ruins of the castle which bore the name of the cruel Countess, the despoiler of the house of Jaugy, the castle of the Rock of Mabel.[598] To the possessor of the Rock of Mabel the mightier rock of Saint Cenery, forming part of the same natural line of defence, could not fail to be an object of covetousness. Arnold died of poison, by the practice of the ruthless wife of Roger of Montgomery. Saint Cenery seized by Mabel. Saint Cenery became part of the possessions of the fierce line of Bellême; and, under its present master, it doubtless deserved the strongest of the names bestowed on it by the monk of Saint Evroul.

Saint Cenery held by Robert Carrel. At this moment Saint Cenery was held on behalf of Robert of Bellême by a specially valiant captain named Robert Carrel.[599] We have no details of the siege. We are told nothing of the positions occupied by the besiegers, The siege. or how they became masters of the seemingly impregnable height. We are told that the resistance was long and fierce; Surrender of Saint Cenery. but at last the castle was taken; and, as failure of provisions is spoken of as the cause, we may guess that the garrison was driven to surrender. If so, the surrender must have been to the Duke’s mercy, and the mercy of Duke Robert or of his counsellors was cruel. Robert Carrel blinded. The Duke, we are told, in his wrath, ordered the eyes of Robert Carrel to be put out. The personal act of the Duke in the case of the rebel leader seems to be contrasted with Other mutilations.the sentence of a more regular tribunal of some kind, by which mutilations of various kinds were dealt out to others of the garrison.[600] Yet personal cruelty is so inconsistent with the ordinary character of Robert that we are driven to suppose either that some strong personal influence was brought to bear on the Duke’s mind, or else that Robert Carrel had given some unpardonable offence during the course of the siege. But it is worth while to notice the words which seem to imply that the punishment of the other defenders of Saint Cenery was the work of some body which at least claimed to act in a judicial character. Question of the military tribunal. We can hardly look as yet for the subtlety of a separate military jurisdiction, for what we should now call a court-martial. That can hardly be thought of, except in the case of a standing body of soldiers, like Cnut’s housecarls, with a constitution and rules of their own.[601] But as in free England we have seen the army—​that is, the nation in arms—​act on occasion the part of a national assembly, so in more aristocratic Normandy the same principle would apply in another shape. The chief men of Normandy were there, each in command of his own followers. If Robert or his immediate counsellors wished that the cruel punishments to be dealt out to the revolted garrison should not be merely their own work, if they wished the responsibility of them to be shared by a larger body, the means were easy. There was a court of peers ready at hand, before whom they might arraign the traitors.

Claims of Robert, grandson of Geroy. But if there were those within Saint Cenery who were marked for punishment, there was one without its walls who claimed restitution. A son of Geroy’s son Robert, bearing his father’s name, had, like others of his family, served with credit in the wars of Apulia and Sicily. He was now in the Duke’s army, seemingly among the warriors of Maine, ready to play his part in winning back the castle of his father from the son of the murderess of his uncle. Geoffrey of Mayenne and the rest of the Cenomannian leaders asked of the Duke that the son of the former owner of the castle, Geoffrey’s own kinsman and vassal, should be restored to the inheritance of his father, the inheritance which his father held in the first instance by Geoffrey’s own gift. The warfare which was now waging was waged against the son of the woman by whom one lord of Saint Cenery had been treacherously slain. The triumph of right would be complete, if the banished man were restored to his own, at the prayer of the first giver. The castle granted to him. The Duke consented; Saint Cenery was granted afresh to the representative of the house of Geroy; Geoffrey saw the castle of his own rearing once more in friendly hands. The new lord strengthened the defences of his fortress, and held it as a post to be guarded with all care against the common enemy, the son of Mabel.[602]

Two fortresses were thus won from the revolters; and the success of the Duke at both places, his severity at one of them, had their effect on those who still defended other castles for Robert of Bellême.[603] Surrender of Alençon,
of Bellême. Alençon, where the great William had wrought so stern a vengeance for the mockeries of its citizens, stood ready to receive his son without resistance. So did Bellême itself, the fortress which gave its name to the descendants of the line of Talvas, the centre of their power, where their ancient chapel of Mabel’s day still crowns the elder castle hill, standing, isolated below the town and fortress of later date.[604] Its defenders made up their minds to submit to the summons of the Duke, if only the Duke would come near to summon them. The other castles ready to surrender. So did the garrisons of all the other castles which still remained in rebellion. Frightened at the doom of Robert Carrel and his companions, they stood ready to surrender as soon as the Duke should come. But it is not clear whether the Duke ever did draw near to receive the fortresses which were ready to open their gates to him. Robert had had enough of success, or of the exertions which were needful for success. It would almost seem as if the siege of Saint Cenery had been as much as he could go through, and as if he turned back at once on its surrender. At all events he stopped just when complete victory was within his grasp. He longed for the idle repose of his palace. Robert disbands his army. His army was disbanded; every man who followed the Duke’s banner had the Duke’s licence to go to his own home.[605]

Robert of Bellême still in prison. All this while, it will be remembered, Robert of Bellême himself was actually in bonds in the keeping of Bishop Odo. The war had been waged rather against his father Earl Roger than against himself. But it was wholly on Robert’s account that it had been waged. Whatever we may think of the right or wrong of his imprisonment at the moment when it took place, there can be no doubt that it was for the general good of the Norman duchy that Robert of Bellême should be hindered from doing mischief. He was the arch-rebel against his sovereign, the arch-plunderer of his neighbours, the man who, in that fierce age, was branded by common consent as the cruellest of the cruel. It was to break his power, to win back the castles which he had seized, that the hosts of Normandy and Maine had been brought together; it was for the crime of maintaining his cause that Robert Carrel and his comrades had undergone their cruel punishment. But the fates of the chief and of his subaltern were widely different. Duke Robert, weary of warfare, was even more than ever disposed to mercy, that is more than ever disposed to gratify the biddings of a weak good-nature. Earl Roger prays for his son’s release. Earl Roger marked the favourable moment, when the host was disbanded, and when the Duke had gone back to the idle pleasures of Rouen. He sent eloquent messengers, charged with many promises in his name—​promises doubtless of good behaviour on the part of his son—​and prayed for the release of the prisoner.[606] With Duke Robert an appeal of this kind from a man like Earl Roger went for more than all reasonable forethought for himself and his duchy. The welfare of thousands was sacrificed to a weak pity for one man. Robert of Bellême set free.Robert of Bellême was set free. His promises were of course forgotten; gratitude and loyalty were forgotten. Till a wiser sovereign sent him in after days to a prison from which there was no escape, he went on with his His career.career of plunder and torture, of utter contempt and defiance of the ducal authority.[607] But, under such a prince as Robert, contempt and defiance of the ducal authority was no disqualification for appearing from time to time as a ducal counsellor.[608]

Robert of Bellême was thus set free, because his father had asked for his freedom. A prince who sought to keep any kind of consistency in his acts could hardly have kept his own brother Henry in ward one moment after the prison doors were opened to his fellow-captive. But it would seem that the gaol-delivery at Bayeux did not follow at once on that at Neuilly. Henry set free. Henry was still kept in his prison, till, at the general request of all the chief lords of Normandy, he was set free.[609] He went back to his county of the Côtentin with no good will to either of his brothers.[610] Here he strove to strengthen himself in every way, by holding the castles of his principality, by winning friends and hiring mercenaries. Henry strengthens his castles. He strengthened the castles of Coutances and Avranches, those of Cherbourg by the northern rocks and of Gavray in the southern part of the Côtentin. His partisans. Among his counsellors and supporters were some men of note, as Richard of Redvers, and the greater name of the native lord of Avranches, Earl Hugh of Chester.[611] Indeed all the lords of the Côtentin stood by their Count, save only the gloomy, and perhaps banished, Robert of Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland. That we find the lords of two English earldoms thus close together in a corner of Normandy shows how thoroughly the history of the kingdom and that of the duchy form at this moment one tale. His good government. While the Count and Ætheling was strengthened by such support, the land of Coutances and Avranches enjoyed another moment of peace and order, while the rest of Normandy was torn in pieces by the quarrels of Robert of Bellême and his like.

§ 2. The first Successes of William Rufus.
1090.

Schemes of William Rufus. While the duchy of Normandy had thus become one scene of anarchy under the no-government of its nominal prince, the King of the English had been carefully watching the revolutions of his brother’s dominions. He now deemed that the time had come to avenge the wrongs which he deemed that he had suffered at his brother’s hands. He must have seen that he had not much to fear from a prince who had let slip such advantages as Robert had held in his hands after the taking of Saint Cenery. He watched his time; he made his preparations, and was now ready to take the decisive step of crossing the sea himself or sending others to cross it. But even William Rufus in all his pride and self-confidence knew that it did not depend wholly on himself to send either native or adopted Englishmen on such an errand. He had learned enough of English constitutional law not to think of venturing on a foreign war without the constitutional sanction of his kingdom. He consults the Assembly at Winchester. Easter, 1090.In a Gemót at Winchester, seemingly the Easter Gemót of the third year of his reign,[612] he laid his schemes before the assembled Witan, and obtained their consent to a war with the Duke of the Normans. His speech. If we may trust the one report which we have of his speech, William the Red had as good reasons to give for an invasion of Normandy as his father had once had to give for an invasion of England. He went forth to avenge the wrongs which his brother had done to him, the rebellion which he had stirred up in his kingdom. But he went also from the purest motives of piety and humanity. The prince who had tried to deprive him of his dominions had shown himself utterly unable to rule his own. A cry had come into the ears of him, the Red King, to which he could not refuse to hearken. It was the cry of the holy Church, the cry of the widow and the orphan. All were alike oppressed by the thieves and murderers whom the weakness of Robert allowed to do their will throughout the Norman land. That land looked back with a sigh to the days of William the Great, who had saved Normandy alike from foreign and from domestic foes. It became his son, the inheritor of his name and crown, to follow in his steps, and to do the same work again. He called on all who had been his father’s men, on all who held fiefs of his granting in Normandy or in England, to come forward and show their prowess for the deliverance of the suffering duchy.[613] But it was for them to take counsel and to decide. His constitutional language. Let the Assembly declare its judgement on his proposal. His purpose was, with their consent, to send over an army to Normandy, at once to take vengeance for his own wrongs, and to carry out the charitable work of delivering the Church and the oppressed, and of chastising evil-doers with the sword of justice.[614]

This constitutional language in the mouth of William Rufus sounds somewhat strange in our ears; the profession of high and holy purposes sounds stranger still. There is of course no likelihood that we are reading a genuine report of an actual speech; still the words of our historian are not without their value. No one would have been likely to invent those words, unless they had fairly represented the relations which still existed between a King of the English and the Assembly of his kingdom. The piety may all come from the brain of the monk of Saint Evroul; Its witness to constitutional usage. but the constitutional doctrines which he has worked into the speech cannot fail to set forth the ordinary constitutional usage of the time. Even in the darkest hour in which England had any settled government at all, in the reign of the worst of all our kings, it was not the will of the King alone, not the will of any private cabal or cabinet, but the will of the Great Council of the nation, which, just as in the days of King Eadward,[615] decided questions of peace and war.

The Witan unanimously agreed to the King’s proposal, and applauded, so we are told, the lofty spirit—​the technical name is used—​of the King himself.[616] War voted by the Witan. War was at once voted, and it might have been expected that a brilliant campaign would at once have followed on the warlike vote. We might have looked to see the Red King, the mirror of chivalry, cross the sea, as his father had done on the opposite errand, at the head of the whole force of his realm. We might have looked to see a series of gallant feats of arms take place between the two hostile brothers. The real story is widely different. The King stays in England. William Rufus did not cross the sea till a year after war had been declared, and remarkably little fighting happened, both while he stayed in England and after he set forth for Normandy. His policy. But we have seen that William Rufus, as a true Norman, was, with all his chivalry, at least as much fox as lion.[617] And a ruler of England, above all, a son of William the Great, had many weapons at his command, one only of which could the Duke of the Normans hope to withstand with weapons of the like kind. His advantages in a a struggle with Robert. Robert was in his own person as stout a man-at-arms as Rufus, and, if the chivalry of Normandy could only be persuaded to rally round his banner, he might, as the valiant leader of a valiant host, withstand on equal terms any force that the island monarch could bring against him. But courage, and, we may add, whenever he chose to use it, real military skill, were the only weapons which Robert had at his bidding. The armoury of the Red King contained a choice of many others, any one of which alone might make courage and military skill wholly useless. William, headstrong as he often showed himself, could on occasion bide his time as well as his father, and, well as he loved fighting, he knew that a land in such a state as Normandy was under Robert could be won by easier means. Besides daring and generalship equal to that of Robert, Rufus had statecraft; and he was not minded to use even his generalship as long as his statecraft could serve his turn. He knew, or his ready wit divined, that there were men of all classes in Normandy who would be willing to do his main work for him without his striking a blow, without his crossing the sea in person, almost without a blow being struck in his behalf. He had only to declare himself his brother’s rival, and it was the interest of most of the chief men in Normandy to support his claims against his brother. Interest of the chief Normans. The very same motives which had led the Normans in England to revolt against William on behalf of Robert would now lead the Normans in Normandy to revolt against Robert on behalf of William. Norman nobles and land-owners who held lands on both sides of the sea had deemed it for their interest that one lord should rule on both sides of the sea. They had then deemed it for their interest that that lord should be Robert rather than William. The former doctrine still kept all its force; on the second point they had learned something by experience. Position of William and Robert. If England and Normandy were to have one sovereign, that sovereign must needs be William and not Robert. There was not the faintest chance of placing Robert on the royal throne of England; there was a very fair chance of placing William in the ducal chair of Normandy. Simply as a ruler, as one who commanded the powers of the state and the army, William had shown that he had it in his power to reward and to punish. Robert had shown that it was quite beyond his power to reward or to punish anybody. He who drew on himself the wrath of the King was likely enough to lose his estates in England; he who drew on himself the wrath of the Duke had no need to be fearful of losing his estates in Normandy. Power of William’s wealth. And William had the means of making a yet more direct appeal to the interests of not a few of his brother’s subjects, in a way in which it was still more certain that his brother would not appeal to any of his subjects. The hoard at Winchester was still well filled. If it had been largely drawn upon, it was again filled to the brim with treasures brought in by every kind of unrighteous exactions. Already was the land “fordone with unlawful gelds;”[618] but the King had the profit of them. But there was no longer any hoard at Rouen out of which Robert could hire the choicest troops of all lands to defend his duchy, as William could hire them to attack it. Hiring of mercenaries. And the wealth at William’s command might do much even without hiring a single mercenary. The castles of Normandy were strong; but few of them were so strong that, in the words of King Philip—​Philip of Macedon, not Philip of France—​an Bribes. ass laden with gold could not find its way into them.[619] Armed at all points, master alike of gold and steel, able to work himself and to command the services of others alike with the head and with the hand, William Rufus could, at least in contending with Robert, conquer when he chose and how he chose. Bribes. He conquers without leaving England. And for a while he chose, like the Persian king of old, to win towns and castles without stirring from his hearth.[620]

Edwᵈ. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

Map illustrating the
NORMAN CAMPAIGN.
A.D. 1091.

Submission of Saint Valery. The first point of the mainland which the Red King won was one which lay beyond the strict bounds of the Norman duchy; but no spot, either in Normandy or in England, was more closely connected with the fortunes of his house. And it was one which had a certain fitness as the beginning of such a campaign. The first spot of continental ground which was added to the dominion of one who called himself King of the English, and who at least was truly King of England, was the spot from which his father had set forth for the conquest of England. He won it by the means which were specially his own. “By his cunning or by his treasures he gat him the castle at Saint Valery and the havens.”[621] Englishmen had fought for the elder William in Maine and before Gerberoi;[622] but that was merely to win back the lost possessions of the Norman Duke. Now the wealth and the arms of England were used to win castles beyond the sea for a prince whose possessions and whose titles up to that moment were purely English. Beginning of English action on the continent. In the history of England as a power—​and the history of England as a power had no small effect on the history of the English as a people—​the taking of Saint Valery is the beginning of a chain of events which leads on, not only to the fight of Tinchebray and the first loss of Rouen, but to the fight of Crecy and the fight of Chastillon, to the taking of Boulogne and the loss of Calais.

Saint Valery had, by the forced commendation of the still reigning Count Guy, passed under Norman superiority;[623] but it was no part of the true Norman land. Submission of Stephen of Aumale. The first fortress within the Norman duchy which passed into the hands of Rufus was the castle of Aumale, standing just within the Norman border, on the upper course of the river of Eu. Its lord, the first of the great Norman nobles to submit to William and to receive his garrison into his castle, was Stephen, son of Count Odo of Champagne and of Adelaide, whole sister of the Conqueror, cousin-german therefore of the two contending princes.[624] Aumale was won, as Saint Valery had been won, by cunning or by treasure. Stephen may simply have learned to see that it was better for him to have the same lord at Aumale and in Holderness, or his eyes may have been yet further enlightened by the brightness of English gold. But the Red King had other means at his disposal, and it seems that other means were needed, if not to win, at least to keep Aumale. Aumale strengthened as the King’s headquarters. The defences of the castle were greatly strengthened at the King’s cost,[625] and it became a centre for further operations. “Therein he set his knights, and they did harms upon the land, in harrying and in burning.”[626] Other castles were soon added to the Red King’s dominion. Submission of Count Robert of Eu and his son William; Count Robert of Eu, whom we have heard of alike at Mortemer and in Lindesey,[627] the father of the man whom we have more lately heard of at Berkeley, still held the house where William the Great had received Harold as his guest,[628] hard by the church where he had received Matilda as his bride.[629] The Count had been enriched with lands in southern England; he is not recorded as having joined in his son’s rebellion; and the lord of Eu now transferred the allegiance of his Norman county to the prince of whom he held his command on the rocks of Hastings.[630] Aumale and Eu, two of the most important points on the eastern border of Normandy, are thus the first places which we hear of as receiving Rufus on the mainland. We shall hear of both names again, but in quite another kind of tale, before the reign of Rufus is over.

of Gerard of Gournay. The next Norman noble to join the cause of William was another lord of the same frontier, who held a point of hardly less importance to the south of Eu and Aumale. This was Gerard of Gournay, son of the warrior of Mortemer who had gone to end his days as a monk of Bec,[631] son-in-law of the new Earl of Surrey,[632] husband of perhaps the only woman on Norman ground who bore the name of English Eadgyth.[633] His castle of Gournay, from which many men and more than one place[634] in England have drawn their name, stood on the upper course of the Epte, close to the French border. The fortress itself has vanished; The church of Gournay. but the minster of Saint Hildebert, where the massive work of Gerard’s day has been partly recast in the lighter style of the next century, still remains, with its mighty pillars, its varied and fantastic carvings, to make Gournay a place of artistic pilgrimage. Nor is it hard to trace the line of the ancient walls of the town, showing how the border stream of Epte was pressed into the service of the Norman engineers. The adhesion of the lord of Gournay seems to have been of the highest importance to the cause of Rufus. The influence of Gerard reached over a wide district north of his main dwelling. Other castles of Gerard. Along with Gournay, he placed at the King’s disposal his fortress of La Ferté Saint Samson, crowning a height looking over the vale of Bray, and his other fortress of Gaillefontaine to the north-east, on another height by the wood of its own name, overlooking the early course of the Bethune or Dieppe, the stream which joins the eastern Varenne by the hill of Arques.[635] Gerard too was not only ready in receiving the King’s forces into his own castles, but zealous also in bringing over his neighbours to follow his example.[636] Among these was the lord of Wigmore, late the rebel of Worcester, Ralph of Mortemer.[637] Submission of Earl Walter Giffard. Old Walter Giffard too, now Earl of Buckingham in England, had English interests far too precious to allow him to oppose his island sovereign. His castle of Longueville. He held the stronghold of Longueville—​the north-eastern Longueville by the Scie, the stream which, small as it is, pours its waters independently into the Channel between Dieppe and Saint Valery-in-Caux. There, from a bottom fenced in by hills on every side, the village, the church where the hand of the modern destroyer has spared only a few fragments of the days of Norman greatness, the priory which has been utterly swept away, all looked up to a hill on the right bank of the stream which art had changed into a stronghold worthy to rank alongside of Arques and Gisors. Girt about with a deep ditch, on the more exposed southern side with a double ditch, the hill was crowned by a shell-keep which still remains, though patched and shattered, and a donjon which has been wholly swept away. In this fortress the aged warrior of Arques and Senlac received, like so many of his neighbours, the troops which William of England had sent to bring the Norman duchy under his power.

Ralph of Toesny and Count William of Evreux. The domains of all these lords lay in the lands on the right bank of the Seine, the oldest, but, as I have often remarked, not the truest Normandy. But the Red King also won a valuable ally in quite another part of the duchy. This was Ralph of Conches or of Toesny, with whom we are now most concerned as the husband of the warlike Isabel of Montfort, and, in that character rather than in any other, the enemy of the Countess Heloise and of her husband Count William of Evreux. The rival lords were in fact half-brothers. The old Roger of Toesny, the warlike pilgrim of Spain,[638] was succeeded by Ralph, who has so often played his part in our story, and whom we last met in Duke Robert’s army before Le Mans.[639] The widow of Roger, the mother of Ralph, had married Richard Count of Evreux, and was by him the mother of the present Count William.[640] Enmity of their wives. But this near kindred by birth had less strength to bind the brothers together than the fierce rivalry of their wives had to set them at feud with one another. The jealousy of these two warlike ladies kept a large part of Normandy in a constant uproar. Our historian bitterly laments the amount of bloodshed and havoc which was the result of their rivalry.[641] Countess Heloise of Evreux. Heloise was of the house of the Counts of Nevers, the Burgundian city by the Loire, a descent which carries us a little out of our usual geographical range.[642] Tall, handsome, and ready of speech, she ruled her husband and the whole land of Evreux with an absolute sway. Her will was everything; the counsels of the barons of the county went for nothing.[643] Violent and greedy, she quarrelled with many of the nobles of Normandy, with Count Robert of Meulan among them, and stirred up her husband to many disputes and wars to gratify her fierce passions.[644] At this time some slight which she had received from the lady of Conches had led her to entangle her husband in a bitter feud with his half-brother. Isabel of Montfort. Isabel or Elizabeth—​the two names are, as usual, given to her indifferently—​the wife of Ralph of Toesny, was a daughter of the French house of Montfort,[645] the house of our own Simon. Like her rival, she must now have been long past her youth; but, while Heloise was childless,[646] Isabel was the mother of several children, among them of a son who has already played a part in Norman history. This was that younger Ralph of Toesny who married the daughter of Waltheof and who had taken a part in the present Duke’s rebellion against his father.[647] Handsome, eloquent, self-willed, and overbearing, like her rival, Isabel had qualities which gained her somewhat more of personal regard than the Countess of Evreux. She was liberal and pleasant and merry of speech, and made herself agreeable to those immediately about her. Moreover, while of Heloise we read indeed that she stirred up wars, but not that she waged them in her own person, Isabel, like the ancient Queens of the Amazons, went forth to the fight, mounted and armed, and attended by a knightly following.[648] War between Conches and Evreux. The struggle between the ladies of Evreux and Conches was at its height at the moment when the castles of eastern Normandy were falling one by one into the hands of Rufus. Isabel and Ralph were just now sore pressed. Ralph in vain asks help of the Duke. The lord of Conches therefore went to Duke Robert and craved his help;[649] but from Duke Robert no help was to be had for any man. Ralph then bethought him of a stronger protector, in the sovereign of his English possessions. He submits to William.King William gladly received such a petition, and bade Count Stephen and Gerard of Gournay, and all who had joined him in Normandy, to give all the help that they could to the new proselyte.[650] Advance of William’s party. The cause of the Red King prospered everywhere; well nigh all Normandy to the right of Seine was in the obedience of Rufus. All its chief men had, in a phrase which startles us in that generation, “joined the English.”[651] And for them the King of the English was open-handed. Into the hoard at Winchester the wealth of England flowed in the shape of every kind of unlawful exaction. Out of it it flowed as freely to enable the new subjects of King William to strengthen the defences of their castles and to hire mercenaries to defend them.[652]

Helias of Saint-Saens. During all this time Duke Robert himself does not seem to have thought of striking a blow. But there was one man at least between Seine and Somme who was ready both to give and to take blows on his behalf. He marries Robert’s daughter. Robert had given one of his natural children, a daughter born, to him in his wandering days,[653] in marriage to Helias, lord of Saint-Saens.[654] Helias, like so many of the Norman nobles, came of a house which had risen to importance His descent.through the loves of Gunnor and Richard the Fearless.[655] A daughter of one of Gunnor’s sisters married Richard Viscount of Rouen, and became the mother of Lambert of Saint-Saens, the father of Helias.[656] Helias and the daughter of Robert had thus a common, though distant, forefather in the father of Gunnor. He has Caux as his wife’s dowry. With his wife Helias received a goodly dowry, nothing less, we are told, than the whole land of Caux.[657] Helias’ own lordship of Saint-Saens lies on the upper course of the Position of Saint-Saens. Varenne, in a deep bottom girt on all sides by wooded hills, one of which, known as the Câtelier, overhanging the town to the north, seems to have been the site of the castle of Helias. His stronghold has vanished; but the church on which the height looks down, if no rival to Saint Hildebert of Gournay, still keeps considerable remains of an age but little later than that with which we have to do. Importance of his position. The possessions of Helias, both those which he inherited and those which he received with his wife, made his resistance to the invader of no small help to the cause of his father-in-law. They barred the nearest way to Rouen, not indeed from Gournay, but from Eu and Aumale. They came right between these last fortresses and the domain of Walter Giffard at Longueville. Of the three streams which meet by Arques, while Helias himself held the upper Varenne at Saint-Saens, Bures. his wife’s fortress of Bures held the middle course of the Bethune or Dieppe below Gerard’s Gaillefontaine, and below Drincourt, not yet the New Castle of King Henry.[658] The massive church, with parts dating from the days of Norman independence, rises on the left slope of the valley above an island in the stream. But the site of the castle which formed part of the marriage portion of Duke Robert’s daughter is hard to trace. Helias holds Arques. But lower down, nearer the point where the streams meet, the bride of Helias had brought him a noble gift indeed. Through her he was lord of Arques, with its donjon and its ditches, the mighty castle whose tale has been told in recording the history of an earlier generation.[659] A glance at the map will show how strong a position in eastern Normandy was held by the man who commanded at once Saint-Saens, Bures, and Arques. But the son-in-law of Duke Robert deserves our notice for something better than his birth, his marriage, or his domains. Faithfulness of Helias towards Robert. Helias of Saint-Saens was, in his personal character, a worthy namesake of Helias of La Flêche. Among the crimes and treasons of that age, we dwell with delight on the unswerving faithfulness with which, through many years and amidst all the ups and downs of fortune, he clave to the reigning Duke and to his son after him.[660] But this his later history lies beyond the bounds of our immediate tale. What directly concerns us now is that Helias was the one noble of Normandy whom the gold of England could not tempt. It would be almost ungenerous to put on record the fact that, unlike most of his neighbours, he had no English estates to lose. The later life of Helias puts him above all suspicion of meaner motives. Saint-Saens, Arques, Bures, and all Caux, remained faithful to Duke Robert.

With this honourable exception, an exception which greatly lessened the value of his new conquests, William Rufus had won, without hand-strokes, without his personal presence, a good half of the original grant to Rolf, the greater part of the diocese of Rouen. William’s dealings with France. He was soon to win yet another triumph by his peculiar policy. By those arms which were specially his own, he was to win over an ally, or at least to secure the neutrality of an enemy, of far higher rank, though perhaps of hardly greater practical power, than the Count of Aumale and the aged lord of Longueville. Robert asks help of Philip. Robert in his helplessness cried to his over-lord at Paris. Had not his father done the same to Philip’s father? Had not King Henry played a part at least equal to that of Duke William among the lifted lances of Val-ès-dunes?[661] Philip had had his jest on the bulky frame of the Conqueror, and his jest had been avenged among the candles of the bloody churching at Mantes.[662] By this time at least, so some of our authorities imply, Philip had brought himself to a case in which the same jest might have been made upon himself with a good deal more of point. Philip comes to help. At the prayer of his vassal the bulky King of the French left his table and his dainties, and set forth, sighing and groaning at the unusual exertion, to come to the help of the aggrieved Duke.[663] It was a strange beginning of the direct rivalry between England and France. Meeting of the Norman and French armies. King Philip came with a great host into Normandy. And Robert must somewhere or other have found forces to join those of his royal ally. And now was shown the value of the position which was held by the faithful Helias in the land of Caux. They march on Eu. It must have been by his help that the combined armies of Robert and Philip were able to march to the furthest point of the Red King’s new acquisitions, to the furthest point of the Norman duchy itself, to the castle of Eu, which was held, we are told, by a vast host, Norman and English.[664] Let an honest voice from Peterborough tell what followed. “And the King and the Earl with a huge fyrd beset the castle about where the King’s men of England in it were. Philip bribed to go back. The King William of England sent to Philip the Franks’ King, and he for his love or for his mickle treasure forlet so his man the Earl Robert and his land, and went again to France and let them so be.”[665] A Latin writer does not think it needful to allow Philip the perhaps ironical alternative of the English writer. Love between Philip and William Rufus is not thought of. We are simply told that, while Philip was promising great things, the money of the King of England met him—​the wealth of Rufus seems to be personified. Before its presence his courage was broken; he loosed his girdle and went back to his banquet.[666]

The first English subsidy. Thus the special weapons of Rufus could overcome even kings at a distance. But, ludicrous as the tale sounds in the way in which it is told, this negotiation between Philip and William is really, in an European, and even in an English point of view, the most important event in the whole story. We should hardly be wrong in calling this payment to Philip the first instance of the employment of English money in the shape of subsidies to foreign princes. For such it in strictness was. It was not, like a Danegeld, money paid to buy off a foreign invader. Nor was it like the simple hiring of mercenaries at home or abroad. It is, like later subsidies, money paid to a foreign sovereign, on condition of his promoting, or at least not thwarting, the policy of a sovereign of England. The appetite[667] which was now first awakened in Philip of Paris soon came to be shared by other princes, and it lasted in full force for many ages. First direct dealings between England and France. Again, we have now for the first time direct political dealings between a purely insular King of England—​we may forestall the territorial style when speaking of England as a state rather than of Englishmen as a nation—​and a French King at Paris. The embassies which passed between Eadward and Henry, even when Henry made his appeal on behalf of Godwine,[668] hardly make an exception. Different position of the two Williams. William the Great had dealt with France as a Norman duke; if, in the latter part of his reign, he had wielded the strength of England as well as the strength of Normandy, he had wielded it, as far as France was concerned, wholly for Norman purposes. But William the Red, though his position arose wholly out of the new relations between England and Normandy, was still for the present a purely English king. Relation of England, Normandy, and France. The first years of Rufus and the first years of Henry the First are alike breaks in the hundred and forty years of union between England and Normandy.[669] Had not a Norman duke conquered England, an English king would not have been seeking to conquer Normandy; but, as a matter of fact, an English king, who had no dominions on the mainland, was seeking to conquer Normandy. And he was seeking to win it with the good will, or at least the neutrality, of the French King. This was a state of things which could have happened only during the few years when different sons of the Conqueror ruled in England and in Normandy. Whenever England and Normandy were united, whether by conquest or by inheritance, the old strife between France and Normandy led England into the struggle. But at the present moment an alliance between England and France against Normandy was as possible as any other political combination. Results of Rufus’ dealings with Philip. And the arts of Rufus secured, if not French alliance, at least French neutrality. But either alliance or neutrality was in its own nature destructive of itself. Let either Normandy win England or England win Normandy, and the old state of things again began. The union of England and Normandy meant enmity between England and France, an enmity which survived their separation.[670] Friendly dealings between William and Philip were a step towards the union of England and Normandy, and thereby a step towards that open enmity between England and France which began under Rufus himself and which lasted down to our fathers’ times. The bribe which Philip took at Eu has its place in the chain of events which led to Bouvines, to Crécy, and to Waterloo.

State of Normandy. But while things were thus, unknown to the actors in them, taking a turn which was permanently to affect the history of mankind, the immediate business of the time went on as before in the lands of Northern Gaul. In Normandy that immediate business was mutual destruction—​civil war is too lofty a name; in Maine it was deliverance from the Norman yoke. I am not called on to tell in detail the whole story of every local strife between one Norman baron and another, not even in those rare cases when the Duke himself stepped in as a judge or as a party in the strife. Those who loved nothing so well as slaughter, plunder, and burning, had now to make up for the many years during which the strong hand of William the Great had kept them back from those enjoyments. Private wars not interrupted by the invasion. They had no thought of stopping, though the kings of England and France, or all the kings of the earth, should appear in arms on Norman soil. Many a brilliant feat of arms, as it was deemed in those days, must be left to local remembrance; even at events which closely touched many of the chief names of our story we can do no more than glance. The revolt of Maine will have to be spoken of at length in another chapter; Action of Robert of Bellême. among strictly Norman affairs we naturally find Robert of Bellême playing his usual part towards his sovereign and his neighbours, and we find the tower of Ivry and the fortified hall of Brionne ever supplying subjects of strife to the turbulent nobles. We see Robert of Bellême at war with his immediate neighbour Geoffrey Count of Perche,[671] and driving Abbot Ralph of Seez to seek shelter in England.[672] We also find him beaten back from the walls of Exmes by Gilbert of Laigle and the other warriors of his house, the house of which we have heard in the Malfosse of Senlac and beneath the rocks of Sainte-Susanne.[673] William of Breteuil loses, wins, and loses again, his late grant of the tower of Ivry, and the second time he is driven to give both the tower and the hand of his natural daughter as his own ransom from a specially cruel imprisonment at the hands of a rebellious vassal.[674] Brionne forms the centre of a tale in which its new lord and his son, the other Roger and the other Robert of our story, play over again the part of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his son of Bellême. Robert of Meulan claims the tower of Ivry. Robert of Meulan comes from England to assert his claim among others to the much-contested tower of Ivry. The Duke reminds him that he had given Brionne to his father in exchange for Ivry. The Count of Meulan gives a threatening answer.[675] He is imprisoned, but set free at the intercession of his father. The Duke, with unusual spirit, puts him in prison, seizes Brionne, and puts it into a state of defence. Then the old Roger of Beaumont, old a generation earlier,[676] obtains, by the recital of his own exploits, the deliverance of his son.[677] He then prays, not without golden arguments, for the restitution of Brionne.[678] Robert takes Brionne. The officer in command, Robert son of Baldwin, asserts his own hereditary claim, and, at the head of six knights only, stands a siege, though not a long one, against the combined forces of the Duke and of the Count of Meulan and his father.[679] This siege is remarkable. The summer days were hot; all things were dry; the besiegers shot red-hot arrows against the roof of the fortified hall, and set fire to it.[680] So Duke Robert boasted that he had taken in a day the river-fortress which had held out for three years against his father.[681]

These events concern us only because we know the actors, and because they helped to keep up that state of confusion in the Norman duchy which supplied the Red King at once with an excuse for his invasion, and with the means for carrying out his schemes. Advance of Rufus. It must be remembered that the two stories are actually contemporary; while Robert was besieging Brionne, the fortresses of eastern Normandy were already falling one by one into the hands of Rufus. It is even quite possible that Robert of Meulan’s voyage from England to Normandy, and the demands made by him and his father on the Duke, were actually planned between the cunning Count and the Red King as a means of increasing the confusion which reigned in the duchy. But there are tales of local strife which concern us more nearly. The war of Conches and Evreux. The war of the half-brothers, the war of the Amazons, the strife between Conches and Evreux, between Isabel and Heloise, is an immediate part of the tale of William Rufus. The lord of Conches was strengthened in his struggle with his brother by forces directly sent to his help by the King’s order.[682] Movement at Rouen. The war went on; and, while it was still going on, a far more important movement began in the greatest city of Normandy, a movement in which the King of the English was yet more directly concerned. Up to this time his plans had been everywhere crowned with success. His campaign, if campaign we can call it, had begun soon after Easter. Half a year had passed, and nearly the whole of the oldest, though not the truest, Normandy had fallen into his hands without his stirring out of his island realm. It now became doubtful whether Robert could keep even the capital of his duchy.

November, 1090. The month of November of this year saw stirring scenes alike in the streets of Rouen and beneath the walls of Conches. But, while Conches was openly aided by the King’s troops, no force from England or from the parts of Normandy which William had already won had as yet drawn near to Rouen. Rufus knew other means to gain over the burghers of a great city as well as the lords of castles and smaller towns. State of things in Rouen. The glimpse which we now get of the internal state of the Norman metropolis tells us, like so many other glimpses which are given us in the history of these times, just enough to make us wish to be told more. A state of things is revealed to us which we are not used to in the history of Normandy. Rouen appears for a moment as something like an independent commonwealth, though an enemy might call it a commonwealth which seemed to be singularly bent on its own destruction. The municipal spirit. The same municipal spirit which we have seen so strong at Exeter and at Le Mans[683] shows itself now for a moment at Rouen. We may be sure that under the rule of William the Great no man had dreamed of a commune in the capital of Normandy. His arm, we may be sure, had protected the men of Rouen, like all his other subjects, in the enjoyment of all rights and privileges which were not inconsistent with his own dominion. But in his day Rouen could have seen no demagogues, no tyrants, no armies in civic pay, no dealings of its citizens with any prince other than their own sovereign. But the rule of William the Great was over; in Robert’s days it may well have seemed that the citizens of so great a city were better able to rule themselves, or at all events that they were entitled to choose their own ruler. When the arts of Rufus, his gifts and his promises, began to work at Rouen in the same way in which they had worked on the castles of the eastern border, his agents had to deal, not with a prince or a lord, but with a body of citizens under the leadership of one of whom one doubts whether he should be called a demagogue or a tyrant. We seem to be carried over two hundred and forty years to the dealings of Edward the Third with the mighty brewer of Ghent. Conan demagogue or tyrant. The Artevelde of Rouen was Conan—​the name suggests a Breton origin—​the son of Gilbert surnamed Pilatus. He was the richest man in the city; his craft is not told us; but we must always remember that a citizen was not necessarily a trader.[684] His wealth was such that it enabled him to feed troops of mercenaries and to take armed knights into his pay.[685] Another leading citizen, next in wealth to Conan, was William the son of Ansgar,[686] whose name seems to imply the purest Norman blood. Conan’s treaty with William. Conan had entered into a treaty with William, the object of which, we are told, was to betray the metropolis of Normandy and the Duke of the Normans—​the sleepy Duke, as our guide calls him—​into the power of the island King.[687] The citizens favour William. Nor was this merely the scheme of Conan and William; public feeling in the city went heartily with them. A party still clave to the Duke; but the mass of the men of Rouen threw in their lot with Conan, and were, like him, ready to receive William as their sovereign instead of Robert.[688] They may well have thought that, in the present state of things, any change would be for the better; the utter lawlessness of the time, which might have its charms for turbulent nobles, would have no charms for the burghers of a great city. Or the men of Rouen may have argued then, much as the men of Bourdeaux argued ages later, that they were likely to enjoy a greater measure of municipal freedom, under a King of the English, dwelling apart from them in his own island, than they would ever win from a Duke of the Normans, holding his court and castle in Rouen itself. Yet the friends of Robert might have their arguments too. A party for Robert. The party of mere conservatism, the party of order, would naturally cleave to him. But other motives might well come in. True friends of the commune might doubt whether William the Red was likely to be a very safe protector of civic freedom. They might argue that, if they must needs have a master, their liberties were less likely to be meddled with under such a master as Robert. But the party of the Duke’s friends, on whatever grounds it stood by him, was the weaker party. A majority of the citizens was zealous for William. A day fixed for the surrender to William. A day was fixed by Conan with the general consent, on which the city was to be given up,[689] and the King’s forces were invited to come from Gournay and other points in his obedience. Robert sends for help. Robert seems to have stayed in the capital which was passing from him; but he felt that, if he was to have supporters, he must seek for them beyond its walls. He sent to tell his plight to those of the nobles of Normandy in whom he still put any trust.[690] And he also hastened to seek help in a reconciliation with some neighbours and subjects with whom he was at variance.

Henry and Robert of Bellême come to the Duke’s help. It is certainly a little startling, after the history of the past year, to find at the head of the list of Duke Robert’s new allies the names of the Ætheling Henry and of Robert of Bellême. We may well fancy that they took up arms, not so much to support the rights of the Duke against the King as to check the dangerous example of a great city taking upon itself to choose among the claims of kings, dukes, and counts. Danger of the example of Rouen. Robert of Bellême may indeed have simply hastened to any quarter from which the scent of coming slaughter greeted him. But Henry the Clerk could always have given a reason for anything that he did. Popular movements at Rouen might supply dangerous precedents at Coutances. The Count of Coutances too might have better hopes of becoming Duke of Rouen, if Rouen were still held for a while by such a prince as Robert, than he could have if the city became either the seat of a powerful commonwealth or the stronghold of a powerful king. But, from whatever motive, Henry came, and he was the first to come.[691] Others to whom the Duke’s messengers set forth his desolate state[692] came also. Others who help Robert. Robert of Bellême, so lately his prisoner, Count William of Evreux and his nephew William of Breteuil, all hastened, if not to the deliverance of Duke Robert, at least to the overthrow of Conan. And with them came Reginald of Warren, the younger son of William and Gundrada,[693] and Gilbert of Laigle, fresh from his victory over his mightiest comrade.[694] November 3, 1090. At the beginning of November Duke Robert was still in the castle of Rouen; but his brother Henry was now with him within its walls, and the captains Henry at Rouen. who had come to his help were thundering at the gates of the rebellious city.

E. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

ROUEN

Rouen in the eleventh century. The Rouen of those days, like the Le Mans, the York, and the Lincoln, of those days, was still the Roman city, the old Rothomagus. As in those and in countless other cases, large and populous suburbs had spread themselves over the neighbouring country; at Rouen, as at York, those suburbs had passed the river; but the city itself, the walled space to be attacked and defended in wartime, was still of the same extent as it had been in the days before Rolf and before Chlodwig. The rectangular space marking the Roman camp stretched on its southern side nearly to the Seine, whose stream, not yet fenced in by quays, reached further inland on that side than it now does. Position of the city. Rouen is essentially a river city, not a hill city. The metropolitan church does indeed stand on sensibly higher ground than the buildings close to the river; but to one fresh from Le Mans or Chartres the rise which has to be mastered seems trifling indeed. For a hill city the obvious site would have been on the natural akropolis supplied by the height of Saint Katharine to the south-east. Yet Rouen is a city of the mainland; the islands which divide the waters of the Seine must have been tempting points for Rolf in his Wiking days; but even the largest of them, the Isle of the Cross, was hardly large enough for a town to grow upon it. Of the walls of Rothomagus not a fragment is left; yet the impress of a Roman chester is hard to wipe out; it is still easy to trace its lines among the streets and buildings of the greatly enlarged mediæval and modern city. Frightful as has been the havoc which the metropolis of Normandy has undergone in our own time, mercilessly as the besom of destruction has swept over its ancient streets, churches, and houses, the dæmon of modern improvement has spared enough to enable us, if not to tell the towers, yet in idea to mark well the bulwarks, of the city where the Conqueror reigned. The ducal castles. Near the south-west corner of the parallelogram, not far from the river-side, had stood the earlier castle of the Dukes. Its site in after times became the friary of the Cordeliers, a small fragment of whose church, as well as another desecrated church within the castle precinct, does in some faint way preserve the memory of the dwelling-place of Rolf.[695] But by the days of Robert, the dukes had moved their dwelling to the south-eastern corner, also near the river, where the site of the castle is marked by the vast halles, and by the graceful Renaissance porch, where the chapter of our Lady of Rouen yearly, on the feast of the Ascension, exercised the prerogative of mercy by saving one prisoner condemned to die. Here the memory of the castle, though only its memory, lives in the names of the Haute and the Basse Vieille Tour, one of which is soon to be famous in our story. The eastern side of the city. On the eastern side the wall was washed by a small tributary of the Seine, the Rebecq, a stream whose course has withdrawn from sight almost as thoroughly as the Fleet of London or the Frome of Bristol.[696] On this side of the city lay a large swampy tract, whose name of Mala palus still lives in a Rue Malpalu[697], though a more distant part of it has taken the more ambitious name of the Field of Mars. The archbishopric. Within the wall lay the metropolitan church of our Lady and the palace of the Primate of Normandy. If this last reached to anything like its present extent to the east, the Archbishops of Rouen, like the Counts of Maine,[698] must have been reckoned among the men who sat on the wall. Abbey of Saint Ouen. Outside the city, but close under the wall, near its north-eastern corner, stood the great abbey of Saint Ouen, the arch-monastery,[699] still ruled by its Abbot Nicolas, though his long reign was now drawing to an end.[700] At the opposite north-western angle, but much further from the walls, where the higher ground begins to rise above the city, stood the priory of Saint Gervase, the scene of the Conqueror’s death.[701] Priory of Saint Gervase. Saint Gervase indeed stood, not only far beyond the Roman walls, but beyond those fortifications of later times which took Saint Ouen’s within the city. For Rouen grew as Le Mans grew. Castle of Bouvreil. On the higher ground like Saint Gervase, but more to the east, rose the castle of Bouvreil, which Philip of Paris, after the loss of Norman independence, reared to hold down the conquered city. Walls of Saint Lewis. Between his grandfather’s castle and the ancient wall Saint Lewis traced out the newer line of fortification which is marked by the modern boulevards. His walls are gone, as well as the walls of Rothomagus; but of the house of bondage of Philip Augustus one tower still stands, while of the dwelling-place of her own princes even mediæval Rouen had preserved nothing.

The gates. The four sides of the Roman enclosure were of course pierced by the four chief gates of the city, of three of which we hear in our story. Of these the western, the gate of Caux, is in some sort represented by the Renaissance gate of the Great Clock[702] with its adjoining tower. The northern gate bore the name of Saint Apollonius. The river was spanned by at least one bridge, which crossed it by way of the island of the Cross, near the second ducal castle. Suburbs beyond the Seine. Beyond the stream lay the suburb of Hermentrudeville, now Saint Sever, where Anselm had waited during the sickness of the Conqueror.[703] There too the Duchess Matilda, soon to be Queen, had begun the monastery of the meadow, the monastery of our Lady of Good News, the house of Pratum or Pré, whose church still stood unfinished, awaiting the perfecting hand of her youngest son.[704]

Fright of Duke Robert. Meanwhile the elder and best-beloved son of Matilda was trembling within the city on the right bank of the broad river. Luckily he had the presence of his youngest brother, the English Ætheling, the Count of the Côtentin, to strengthen him. Personal courage Duke Robert never lacked at any time; but something more than personal courage was now needed. Robert was perhaps not frightened, but he was puzzled; at such a moment he seemed to the calm judgement of Henry to be simply in the way; it was for wiser heads to take counsel without him. But deliverance was at hand. Both sides of the Seine sent their helpers. Approach of Gilbert and Reginald. Gilbert of Laigle crossed the bridge by the island close under the ducal tower, and turned to the left to the attack of the southern gate. Reginald of Warren at the head of three hundred knights drew near to the gate of Caux.[705] Efforts of Conan. Against this twofold attack Conan strove hard to keep up the hearts of his partisans. He made speeches exhorting to a valiant defence. Division among the citizens. Many obeyed; but the city was already divided; while one party hastened to the southern gate to withstand the assault of Gilbert, another party sped to open the western gate and to let in the forces of Reginald. Utter confusion. Soldiers of the King of the English, the advanced guard doubtless of a greater host to come, were already in the city, stirring up the party of Conan to swifter and fiercer action.[706] Soldiers and citizens were huddled together in wild confusion; shouts passed to and fro for King and Duke; men at either gate smote down neighbours and kinsmen to the sound of either war-cry.[707] The strength of the city was turned against itself. The hopes of the commonwealth of Rouen, either as a free city or as a favoured ally of the island King, were quenched in the blood of its citizens. Le Mans and Exeter had fallen; but they had fallen more worthily than this.

Henry sends Duke Robert away. Meanwhile Henry and those who were with him in the castle deemed that the time had come for the defenders of the ducal stronghold to join their friends within and without the city. But there was one inhabitant of the castle whose presence was deemed an encumbrance at such a moment. Men were shouting for the Duke of the Normans; but the wiser heads of his friends deemed that the Duke of the Normans was just then best out of the way. Robert came down from the tower, eager to join in the fray and to give help to the citizens of his own party.[708] But all was wild tumult; it needed a cooler head than Robert’s to distinguish friend from foe. He might easily rush on destruction in some ignoble form, and bring dishonour on the Norman name itself.[709] He was persuaded by his friends to forego his warlike purposes, and to suffer himself to be led out of harm’s way. While every other man in the metropolis of Normandy was giving and taking blows, the lord of Normandy, in mere personal prowess one of the foremost soldiers in his duchy, was smuggled out of his capital as one who could not be trusted to let his blows fall in the right place. With a few comrades he passed through the eastern gate into the suburb of the Evil Swamp, just below the castle walls. No attacks from the east. It is to be noticed that no fighting on this side of the city is mentioned. The King’s troops were specially looked for to approach from Gournay, and the east gate was the natural path by which an army from Gournay would seek to enter Rouen. One would have expected that one at least of the relieving parties would have hastened to make sure of this most important point. Yet one division takes its post by the southern gate, another by the western, none by the eastern. Were operations on that side made needless, either by the neighbourhood of the castle, by any difficulties of the marshy ground, or by the disposition of the inhabitants of the suburb? Certain it is that Duke Robert’s nearest neighbours outside his capital were loyal to him. The men of the Evil Swamp received the Duke gladly as their special lord.[710] He allowed himself to be put into a boat, and ferried across to the suburb on the left bank. There he was received by one of his special counsellors, William of Arques, a monk of Molesme, and was kept safely in his mother’s monastery till all danger was over.[711]

It was clearly not wholly for the sake of such a prince as this that so many Norman leaders, Henry of Coutances among them, had made up their minds that the republican movement at Rouen was to be put down. The moment for putting it down had come. Gilbert enters Rouen. Gilbert of Laigle had by this time, by the strength of his own forces and by the help of the citizens of his party, entered Rouen through the southern gate. His forces now joined the company of Henry; they thus became far more than a match for the citizens of Conan’s party, even strengthened as they were by those of the King’s men who were in the city. Slaughter of the citizens. A great slaughter of the citizens followed; the soldiers of Rufus contrived to flee out of the city, and to find shelter in the neighbouring woods;[712] the city was full of death, flight, and weeping; innocent and guilty fell together; Conan taken prisoner. Conan and others of the ringleaders were taken prisoners. Conan himself was led into the castle, and there Henry took him for his own share of the spoil, not indeed for ransom, but to be dealt with in a strange and dreadful fashion. It is one of the contrasts of human nature that Henry, the great and wise ruler, the king who made peace for man and deer, the good man of whom there was mickle awe and in whose day none durst hurt other, should have been more than once guilty in his own person of acts of calm and deliberate cruelty which have no parallel in the acts of his father, nor in those of either of his brothers. Fate of Conan. So now Conan was doomed to a fate which was made the sterner by the bitter personal mockery which he had to endure from Henry’s own mouth. The Ætheling led his victim up through the several stages of the loftiest tower of the castle, till a wide view was opened to his eyes through the uppermost windows.[713] Henry and Conan in the tower. Henry bade Conan look out on the fair prospect which lay before him. He bade him think how goodly a land it was which he had striven to bring under his dominion.[714] These words well express the light in which Conan’s schemes would look in princely eyes; the question was not whether Robert or William should reign in Rouen; it was whether Conan should reign there as demagogue or tyrant in the teeth of all princely rights. Henry went on to point out the beauties of the landscape in detail; the eyes of the scholar-prince could perhaps better enjoy them than the eyes of Rufus or of Robert of Bellême. Beyond the river lay the pleasant park, the woody land rich in beasts of chase. There was the Seine washing the walls of the city, the river rich in fish, bearing on its waters the ships which enriched Rouen with the wares of many lands.[715] On the other side he bade him look on the city itself thronged with people, its noble churches, its goodly houses. The modern reader stops for a moment to think that, of the buildings which then met the eye of Conan, churches, castles, halls of wealthy burghers like himself, clustering within and without the ancient walls, all doubtless goodly works according to the sterner standard of that day, hardly a stone is left to meet his own eye as he looks down from hill or tower on the great buildings of modern Rouen. It was another Saint Romanus, another Saint Ouen, of far different outline and style from those on which we now gaze, which Henry called on Conan to admire at that awful moment. He bade him mark the splendour of the city; he bade him think of its dignity as the spot which had been from of old the head of Normandy.[716] The trembling wretch felt the mockery; all that was left to him was to groan and cry for mercy. He confessed his guilt; he simply craved for grace in the name of their common Maker. He would give to his lord all the gold and silver of his hoard and the hoards of his kinsfolk; he would wipe out the stain of his past disloyalty by faithful service for the rest of his days.[717] The Conqueror would have granted such a prayer in sheer greatness of soul; the Red King might well have deemed it beneath him to harm so lowly a suppliant. But the stern purpose of Henry was fixed, and his wrath, when it was once kindled, was as fierce as that of his father or his brother. “By the soul of my mother”—​that seems to have been the most sacred of oaths with Matilda’s defrauded heir, as he looked out towards the church of her building—​“there shall be no ransom for the traitor, but rather a hastening of the death which he deserves.”[718] Conan no longer pleaded for life; he thought only of the welfare of his soul. “For the love of God, at least grant me a confessor.”[719] Had the Lion of Justice reached that height of malice which seeks to kill the soul as well as the body? At Conan’s last prayer his wrath reached its height;[720] Conan should have no time for shrift any more than for ransom. If the clergy of Saint Romanus already enjoyed their privilege of mercy, they were to have no chance of exercising it on behalf of this arch-criminal. Death of Conan. With all the strength of both his hands, Henry thrust Conan, like Eadric,[721] through the window of the tower. He fell from the giddy height, and died, so it was said, before he reached the ground. His body was tied to the tail of a pack-horse and dragged through the streets of Rouen to strike terror into his followers. The spot from which he was hurled took the name of the Leap of Conan.[722] The tower, as I have said, has perished; the site of the Leap of Conan must be sought for in imagination, at some point, perhaps the south-eastern corner, of the vast halles of ancient Rouen.

Policy of Henry. The rule of Robert was now restored in Rouen, so far as Robert could be said to rule at any time in Rouen or elsewhere. It is remarkable that after the death of Conan we lose sight of Henry; that is, as far as Rouen is concerned, for we shall before long hear of him again in quite different relations towards his two brothers. He may well have thought that one fearful example was needed, but that one fearful example was enough. He would secure the punishment of the ringleader, even by doing the hangman’s duty with his own hands; but mere havoc and massacre had no charms for him at any time. His policy might well have forestalled the later English rule, “Smite the leaders and spare the commons.” If Robert or anybody else was to reign in Rouen, nothing would be gained by killing, driving out, or recklessly spoiling, the people over whom he was to reign. But there were men at his side to whom the utmost licence of warfare was the most cherished of enjoyments. The Duke, never personally cruel,[723] was in a merciful mood. Robert brought back. When all danger was over, he was brought across the river from his monastery to the castle. He saw how much the city had already suffered; his heart was touched, and he was not minded to inflict any further punishment. Treatment of the citizens. But he had to yield to the sterner counsels of those about him, and to allow a heavy vengeance to be meted out.[724] He seems however to have prevailed so far as to hinder the shedding of blood. At least we hear nothing of any general slaughter. The fierce men who had brought him back seem to have contented themselves with plunder and leading into captivity. The citizens of Rouen were dealt with by their countrymen as men deal with barbarian robbers. They were spoiled of all their goods and led away into bondage. Robert of Bellême and William of Breteuil, if they spared life, spared it only to deal out on their captives all the horrors of the prison-house.[725] Imprisonment and ransom of William son of Ansgar. The richest man in Rouen after the dead Conan, William the son of Ansgar, became the spoil of William of Breteuil. After a long and painful imprisonment, he regained his liberty on paying a mighty ransom of three thousand pounds.[726]

Before his captive was set free, the lord of Breteuil himself learned what it was to endure imprisonment, this time doubtless of a milder kind than that which he inflicted on William the son of Ansgar or that which himself endured at the hands of Ascelin.[727] Count William marches against Conches. November, 1090. The Count of Evreux and his nephew of Breteuil must have marched almost at once from their successful enterprise at Rouen to a less successful enterprise at Conches. For it was still November when Count William or his Countess resolved on a great attack on the stronghold of their rival.[728] Evreux was doubtless the starting-point for an undertaking which followed naturally on the work which had been done at Rouen. The Count of Evreux might keep on the garb of Norman patriotism which he had worn in the assault on the rebellious capital, and his Countess might add to the other crimes with which she charged Ralph and Isabel a share in the crime of Conan, that of traitorous dealing with the invading enemy. The forces of Evreux and Breteuil were therefore arrayed to march together against the stronghold of the common kinsman and enemy at Conches.

No contrast could well be greater than the contrast between the spot from which Count William set forth and the spot which he led his troops to attack. Position of Evreux and Conches. Near as Conches and Evreux are, they are more thoroughly cut off from one another than many spots which are far more distant on the map. The forest of Evreux parts the hills of Conches from the capital of Count William’s county. The small stream of the Iton flows by the homes of both the rival heroines. But at Conches it flows below the hill crowned by castle, church, and abbey; at Evreux its swift stream had ages before been taught to act as a fosse to the four walls of a Roman chester. Position of Mediolanum or Evreux. Low down in the valley, like our own Bath, with the hills standing round about his city, the Count of Evreux lived among the memorials of elder days. The walls of Mediolanum, which can still be traced through a large part of their circuit, fenced in to the south the minster of Our Lady and the palace of the Bishop, then still tenanted by the eloquent Gilbert.[729] His home, like that of his metropolitan at Rouen,[730] might seem to stand upon the Roman wall itself. At the north-west corner, the wall fenced in the castle from which Count William had driven out the Conqueror’s garrison, and where he, either then or at some later time, overthrew the Conqueror’s donjon.[731] History of Evreux. The wall of Mediolanum, like the wall of the Athenian akropolis, had fragments of ornamental work, shattered columns, capitals, cornices, built in among its materials. It would thus seem to belong to a late stage of Roman rule, when the Frank was dreaded as a dangerous neighbour, perhaps when he had already once laid Mediolanum waste. To the north, much as at Le Mans and at Rouen, the city in later times enlarged its borders, as, in later times still, it has enlarged them far to the south. The “Little City”—​a name still borne by a street within the Roman circuit—​is a poor representative of the Old Rome on the Cenomannian height;[732] but both alike bear witness to the small size of the original Roman encampments, and to the gradual process by which they were enlarged into the cities of modern times. The Roman walls. But in the days of William and Heloise the circuit of Roman Mediolanum was still the circuit of Norman Evreux. And, as in so many other places, the oldest monuments have outlived many that were newer. Small traces of the eleventh century at Evreux. Neither church, castle, nor episcopal palace, keeps any fragments of the days of the warlike Countess; it is only in the minster of Saint Taurinus without the walls that some small witnesses of those times are to be found. Even the Romanesque portions of the church of Our Lady must be later than Count William’s day, and the greater part of the building of the twelfth century has given way to some of the most graceful conceptions of the architects of the fourteenth. The home of the Bishop has taken the shape of a stately dwelling in the latest style of mediæval art; the home of the Count has vanished like the donjon which Count William overthrew. But the old defences within which bishops and counts had fixed themselves in successive ages still live on, to no small extent in their actual masonry, and in the greater part of their circuit in their still easily marked lines. And, high upon the hills, the eye rests on the stronghold of yet earlier days, bearing the local The Câtelier. name of the Câtelier, the earth-works which rise above Evreux as the earth-works of Sinodun rise above the northern Dorchester. Here we may perhaps see the point where the Gaul still held out on the hill, when the Roman had already entrenched himself by the river-side. At Evreux the works of the earliest times, the works of the latest times, the works of several intermediate times, are there in their fulness. But there is nothing whatever left in the city directly to remind us of the times with which we are now dealing. A man might pass through Evreux, he might make a diligent search into the monuments of Evreux, and, unless he had learned the fact from other sources, he might fail to find out that Evreux had ever had counts or temporal lords of any kind.

E. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

EVREUX

Position of Conches. It is otherwise with the fortress of the warlike lady of the hills, against which the warlike lady of the river-city now bade the forces of her husband’s county to march. The home of Isabel has no more of her actual work or date to show than the home of Heloise; but the impress of the state of things which she represents is stamped for ever on the stronghold of the house of Toesny. At Evreux the Count and his followers lived in the midst of works which, even in their day, were ancient; at Conches, on the other hand, all was in that day new. Conches had already its minster, its castle, most likely its growing town; but all were the works of its present lord or of his father. The hill of Conches is another of those peninsular hills which, as the chosen sites of castles, play so large a part in our story. But the castle of Conches does not itself crown a promontory, like the castle of Ballon. The cause doubtless was that at Conches the abode of peace came first, and the abode of warfare came only second. Either Ralph himself, the first of his house who bears the surname of Conches as well as that of Toesny, Foundation of the monastery. or else his fierce father in some milder moment, had planted on the hill a colony of monks, the house of Saint Peter of Conches or Castellion.[733] The monastery arose on that point of the high ground which is most nearly peninsular, that stretching towards the north. To the south of the abbey presently grew up the town with its church, a town which, in after times at least, was girded by a wall, and which was sheltered or threatened The castle. by the castle of its lords at the end furthest from the monastery. To the east, the height on which town and castle stand side by side rises sheer from a low and swampy plain, girt in by hills on every side, lying like the arena of a natural amphitheatre. On the hill-side art has helped nature by escarpments; the mound of the castle, girt by its deep and winding ditch, rises as it rose in the days of Ralph and Isabel; but the round donjon on the mound and the other remaining buildings of the fortress cannot claim an earlier date than the thirteenth century. The donjon and the apse of the parish church, a gem of the latest days of French art, now stand nobly side by side; in Isabel’s day they had other and ruder forerunners. The abbey. But of the abbey, which must have balanced the castle itself in the general view, small traces only now remain; it has become quite secondary in the general aspect of the place, which gathers wholly round the parish church and the donjon. The western side of the hill, towards the forest which takes its name from Conches, shows nearly the same features as the eastern side on a smaller scale. It looks down on another plain girt in by hills; but on this side the slope of the hill of Conches itself is gentler, and the town is here defended by a wall. Altogether it was a formidable undertaking when the lord of the ancient city in the vale carried his arms against the fortress, the work of his brother, which had arisen within his own memory on the height overlooking his own river.

Siege of Conches. Count William thus began his winter siege of Conches; but, as usual, we get no intelligible account of the siege as a military operation. We are told nothing of the Count’s line of march, or by what means he sought to bring the castle to submission. Near kindred of the combatants. But, as usual too, we have no lack of personal anecdotes, anecdotes some of which remind us how near were the family ties between the fierce nobles who tore one another in pieces. We have already mentioned one nephew of the Count of Evreux who came with him to the attack of Conches. But William of Breteuil was nephew alike of both the contending brothers. His mother Adeliza, daughter of Roger of Toesny, wife of Earl William of Hereford before he went to seek a loftier bride in Flanders,[734] was the whole sister of Ralph of Conches and the half-sister of Count William of Evreux.[735] Another nephew and follower of Count William, Richard of Montfort, son of his whole sister, was moreover a brother of the Penthesileia of Conches.[736] The fate of these two kinsmen was different. Death of Richard of Montfort. Richard, in warring against his sister’s castle, with some chance of meeting his sister personally in the field, did not respect the sanctity of the neighbouring abbey of her husband’s foundation. He heeded not the tears of the monks who prayed him to spare the holy place. A chance shot of which he presently died was looked on as the reward of his sacrilege. Both sides mourned for one so nearly allied to both leaders.[737] William of Breteuil taken prisoner. William of Breteuil, the ally of his uncle of Evreux, became the captive of his uncle of Conches. That wary captain, when the host of Evreux came a-plundering, was at the head of a large force of his own followers and of the King of England’s soldiers.[738] But he bade his men keep back till the foe was laden with booty; they were then to set upon them in their retreat. His orders were successfully carried out. Many of the party became the prisoners of the lord of Conches, among them the lord of Breteuil, the gaoler of William the son of Ansgar.[739] Of this incident came a peace which ended the three years’ warfare of the half-brothers.[740] The captive William of Breteuil procured his freedom by a ransom of three thousand pounds paid to his uncle of Conches, which was presently made good to him by the ransom of his own victim from Rouen. Settlement of the county of Evreux on young Roger of Conches. Moreover, as he had no lawful issue,[741] he settled his estates on his young cousin Roger, the younger son of Ralph and Isabel. The same youthful heir was also chosen by his childless uncle of Evreux to succeed him in his county.[742] Perhaps Duke Robert confirmed all these arrangements as a matter of course; perhaps the consent of such an over-lord was not deemed worth the asking.

The young Roger of Toesny thus seemed to have a brilliant destiny opened to him, but he was not doomed to be lord either of Evreux or of Breteuil. He was, it is implied, too good for this world, at all events for such a world as that of Normandy in the reign of Robert. Character of Roger. Pious, gentle, kind to men of all classes, despising the pomp of apparel which was the fashion of his day,[743] the young Roger attracts us as one of a class of whom there may have been more among the chivalry of Normandy than we are apt to think at first sight. An order could not be wholly corrupt which numbered among its members such men as Herlwin of Bec, as Gulbert of Hugleville,[744] and the younger son of Ralph of Conches. A tale is told of him, a tale touching in itself and one which gives us our only glimpse of the inner and milder life of the castle of Conches under the rule of its Amazonian mistress. A number of knights sat idle in the hall, sporting and amusing themselves with talk in the presence of the lady Isabel.[745] At last they told their dreams. The three dreams. One whose name is not given, said that he had seen the form of the Saviour on the cross, writhing in agony and looking on him with a terrible countenance. All who heard the dream said that some fearful judgement was hanging over the head of the dreamer. Baldwin of Boulogne. Then spoke Baldwin the son of Count Eustace of Boulogne, one of the mightier sons of an ignoble father.[746] He too had seen his Lord hanging on the cross; but the divine form was bright and glorious; the divine face smiled kindly on the dreamer; the divine hand blessed him and traced the sign of the cross over his head.[747] All said that rich gifts of divine favour were in store for him. Roger’s dream. Then the young Roger crept near to his mother, and told her that he too knew one not far off who had beheld his vision also. Isabel asked of her son of whom he spoke and what the seer had beheld. The youth blushed and hesitated, but, pressed by his mother and his comrades, he told how there was one who had lately seen his vision of the Lord, how the Saviour had placed his hand on his head, and had bidden him, as his beloved, to come quickly that he might receive the joys of life. And he added that he knew that he who was thus called of his Lord would not long abide in this world.

Such talk as this in the hall of Conches, in the presence of its warlike lady, whether we deem it the record of real dreams or a mere pious imagining after the fact, seems like a fresh oasis in the dreary wilderness of unnatural war. Fulfilment of the dreams. Each vision was of course fulfilled. The nameless knight, wounded ere long in one of the combats of the time, died without the sacraments. Baldwin of Boulogne, afterwards son-in-law of Ralph and Isabel,[748] was indeed called to bear the cross, but in a way which men perhaps had not thought of six years before Pope Urban preached at Clermont. Count of Edessa, King of Jerusalem, the name of Baldwin lives in the annals of crusading Europe; to Englishmen it perhaps comes home most nearly as the name of a comrade of our own Robert son of Godwine.[749] Death of young Roger. But a brighter crown than that of Baldwin’s kingdom was, long before Baldwin reigned, the reward of the young Roger. A few months after the date of the tale, he died peacefully in his bed, full of faith and hope, and, amid the grief of many, his body was laid in the minster of Saint Peter of his father’s rearing.[750]

Later treaty between the two brothers.
1100. There was thus peace between Conches and Evreux, a peace which does not seem to have been again broken. Ten years later, in a time of renewed licence, we find the two brothers joining in a private war against Count Robert of Meulan.[751] Eight years later again, when Banishment and death of Count William. April 18, 1108. Count William and his Countess were busy building a monastery at Noyon, they fell under the displeasure of King Henry, and died in banishment in the land of Anjou.[752] Ralph of Toesny was succeeded by his son the younger Ralph, and Isabel, after a long widowhood, withdrew as a penitent to atone for the errors of her youth, one would think of her later days also, in a life of religion.[753]

Orderic’s picture of Normandy. It is after recording the war of Conches and the sack of Rouen that the monk of Saint Evroul takes up his parable to set forth the general wretchedness of Normandy in the blackest colours with which the pictures of Hebrew prophets and Latin poets could furnish him. And it is Orderic the Englishman[754] that speaks. His English feelings. In his Norman cell he never forgot that he first drew breath by the banks of the Severn. In his eyes the woes of Normandy were the righteous punishment for the wrongs of England. The proud people who had gloried in their conquest, who had slain or driven out the native sons of the land, who had taken to themselves their possessions and commands, were now themselves bowed down with sorrows. The wealth which they had stolen from others served now not to their delight but to their torment.[755] Normandy, like Babylon, had now to drink of the same cup of tribulation, of which she had given others to drink even to drunkenness. A Fury without a curb raged through the land, and smote down its inhabitants. The clergy, the monks, the unarmed people, everywhere wept and groaned. None were glad save thieves and robbers, and they were not long to be glad.[756] And so he follows out the same strain through a crowd of prophetic images, the locust, the mildew, and every other instrument of divine wrath. We admit the aptness of his parallel when he tells us that in those days there was no king nor duke in the Norman Jerusalem; we are less able to follow the analogy when he adds that the rebellious folk sacrificed at Dan and Bethel to the golden calves of Jeroboam.[757] At last, when his stock of metaphors is worn out, he goes back to his story to tell the same tale of crime and sorrow in other parts of the Norman duchy.[758]

§ 3. Personal Coming of William Rufus.
1091.

In a general view of the state of affairs, William Rufus had lost much more by the check of his plans at Rouen than he could gain by any successes of his Norman allies at Conches. The attempt of the Count of Evreux on the castle of his new vassal had been baffled; but his own far greater scheme, the scheme by which he had hoped to win the capital of Normandy, had been baffled also. It may have been this failure which led Christmas Gemót at Westminster. 1090.the King to see that his own presence was needed beyond the sea. The Christmas Gemót of the year was held, not, as usual, at Gloucester, but at Westminster. At Candlemas the King crossed to Normandy with a great fleet.[759] The King crosses to Normandy. February, 1091.The two things are mentioned together, as if to imply that a further sanction of the assembled Witan was given to this new stage of the war. War indeed between William and Robert there was none. It does not seem that a single blow was struck to withstand the invader. But blows were given and taken in Normandy throughout the winter with as much zeal as ever. And this time Duke Robert himself was helping to give and take them. Duke Robert helps Robert of Bellême. Stranger than all, he was giving and taking them in the character of an ally of Robert of Bellême against men who seem to have done nothing but defend themselves against the attacks of the last-named common enemy of mankind. Hugh of Grantmesnil and Richard of Courcy. Old Hugh of Grantmesnil, once the Conqueror’s lieutenant at Winchester and afterwards his Sheriff of Leicestershire,[760] was connected by family ties with Richard of Courcy,[761] and the spots from which they took their names, in the diocese of Seez, between the Dive and the Oudon, lay at no great distance from one another. They thus lay between Earl Roger’s own Montgomery[762] and a series of new fortresses on the Orne and the neighbouring streams, by which Earl Roger’s son hoped to extend his power over the whole land of Hiesmes.[763] Hugh and Richard strengthened themselves against the tyrant—​such is the name which Robert bears—​gathering their allies and putting their castles in a state of defence. Their united forces were too much for the lord of Bellême. He sought help from his sovereign, and the Duke, who was not allowed to strike a blow for his own Rouen, appeared as the besieger of Courcy, no less than of Brionne. He who had fought to turn the tyrant out of Ballon and Saint Cenery now fought to put Courcy into the tyrant’s power.

Siege of Courcy. January, 1091. The siege of Courcy began in January.[764] At the end of the month or the beginning of the next, a piece of news came which caused the Duke and the other besiegers to cease from their work. News of William’s coming. February. Robert himself could see that there was something else to be done besides making war on Hugh of Grantmesnil on behalf of Robert of Bellême, when the King of the English was in his own person on Norman ground. The siege raised. The host before Courcy broke up; some doubtless went to their own homes;[765] but we may suspect that some found their way to Eu. For there it was that King William had fixed his quarters; there the great men of Normandy were gathering around him. They did not come empty-handed. They welcomed the King with royal gifts; but it was to receive far greater gifts in return. Men flock to William from all parts. Thither too men were flocking to him, not only from Normandy, but from France, Flanders, Britanny, and all the neighbouring lands. And all who came went away saying that the King of the English was a far richer and more bountiful lord than any of their own princes.[766] In such a state of things it was useless for Robert to think of meeting his brother in arms. His only hope was to save some part of his dominions by negotiation before the whole Norman land had passed into the hands of the island king. Treaty of Caen. 1091. A treaty of peace was concluded, by which Robert kept his capital and the greater part of his duchy, but by which William was established as a powerful and dangerous continental neighbour, hemming in what was left of Normandy on every side.

The treaty was agreed to, seemingly under the mediation of the King of the French, in a meeting of the rival brothers at Caen.[767] Cession of Norman territory to William. The territorial cession made by Robert mainly took the form of recognizing the commendations which so many Norman nobles had made to the Red King. They had sought him to lord, and their lord he was to be. The fiefs held by the lords of Eu, Aumale, Gournay, and Conches, and all others who had submitted to William, passed away from Robert. They were to be held of the King of the English, under what title, if any, does not appear. To hold a fief of William Rufus meant something quite different from holding a fief of Robert. The over-lordship of Robert meant nothing at all; it did not hinder his vassal from making war at pleasure either on his lord or on any fellow-vassal. But the over-lordship of William Rufus, like that of his father, meant real sovereignty; the lords who submitted to him had given themselves a master. If any of them had a mind to live in peace, their chance certainly became greater; in any case the dread of William’s power, combined with the attractions of the rich hoard which was so freely opened, might account for the sacrifice of a wild independence. Their geographical aspect. The territory thus ceded to the east, the lands of Eu, Aumale, and Gournay, involved a complete surrender of the eastern frontier of the duchy. The addition of the lands of Conches formed an outpost to the south. Rouen was thus hemmed in on two sides. But this was not enough, in the ideas of the Red King, to secure a scientific frontier. The lord of the island realm must hold some points to strengthen his approach to the mainland, something better than the single port of Eu in one corner of the duchy. Robert had therefore to surrender two points of coast which had not, as far as we have heard, been occupied by William or by his Norman allies. Cession of Fécamp and Cherbourg. Rouen was to be further hemmed in to the north-west, by the cession of Fécamp, abbey and palace. The occupation of this point had the further advantage for William that it put a check on the districts which had been kept for Robert by Helias of Saint-Saen. These were now threatened by Fécamp on one side and by Eu and Aumale on the other. And William’s demands on the Duke of the Normans contained one clause which could be carried out only at the cost of the Count of the Côtentin. Henry’s fortress of Cherbourg, not so long before strengthened by him,[768] was also to pass to William. So early was the art known by which a more powerful prince, with no ground to show except his own will, claims the right to shut out a weaker prince or people from the seaboard which nature has designed for them.

William demands Saint Michael’s Mount. Besides Cherbourg, the Red King demanded the island fortress of Saint Michael’s Mount, the abbey in peril of the sea. Otherwise he seems to have claimed nothing in the west of Normandy. Robert might reign, if he could, over the lands which his father had brought into submission on the day of Val-ès-Dunes. Nor were the great cessions which Robert made to be wholly without recompence. It might be taken for granted that the Duke whose territories were thus cut off was to have some compensation in another shape out of the wealth of England. Money paid to Robert. So it was; vast gifts were given by the lord of the hoard at Winchester to the pauper prince at Rouen.[769] But he was not to be left without territorial compensation also. The lost dominions of the Conqueror to be restored to Robert. William not only undertook to bring under Robert’s obedience all those who were in arms against him throughout Normandy; he further undertook to win back for him all the dominions which their father had ever held, except those lands which, by the terms of the treaty, were to fall to William himself. This involved a very considerable enlargement of Robert’s dominions, besides turning his nominal rule into a reality in the lands where he was already sovereign in name. It was aimed at lands both within and without the bounds of the Norman duchy. Maine, city and county, was again in revolt against its Norman lords.[770] Projected recovery of Maine. By this clause of the treaty William bound himself to recover Maine for Robert. This obligation he certainly never even attempted to fulfil. He did not meddle with Maine till the Norman lord and the English King were again one. Then the recovery of Maine, or at least of its capital, became one of the chief objects of his policy.

But this clause had also a more remarkable application. Its terms were to be brought to bear on one nearer by blood and neighbourhood to both the contending princes than either Cenomannian counts or Cenomannian citizens. Henry to be despoiled of the Côtentin. The terms of the treaty amounted to a partition of the dominions of the Count of the Côtentin between his two brothers. Cherbourg and Saint Michael’s Mount were, as we have seen, formally assigned to William, and the remainder of Henry’s principality certainly came under the head of lands which had been held by William the Great and which the treaty did not assign to William the Red. As such they were to be won back for Robert by the help of William. That is to say, William and Robert agreed to divide between themselves the territory which Henry had fairly bought with money from Robert. No agreement could be more unprincipled. Character of the agreement. As between prince and prince, no title could be better than Henry’s title to his county; while, if the welfare of the people of Coutances and Avranches was to be thought of, the proposed change meant their transfer from a prince who knew the art of ruling to a prince whose nominal rule was everywhere simple anarchy. Neither Robert nor William was likely to be troubled with moral scruples; neither was likely to think much of the terms of a bargain and sale; but one might have expected that Robert would have felt some thankfulness to his youngest brother for his ready help in putting down the rebellious movement at Rouen.[771] William might indeed on that same account look on Henry as an enemy; but such enmity could hardly be decently professed in a treaty of alliance between Robert and William. We may perhaps believe that the chief feeling which the affair of Rouen had awakened in Robert’s mind was rather mortification than gratitude. A brother who had acted so vigorously when he himself was not allowed to act at all was dangerous as a neighbour or as a vassal. The memory of his services was humiliating; it was not well to have a brother so near at hand, and in command of so powerful a force, a brother who, if he had at one moment hastened to his elder brother’s defence, might at some other moment come with equal speed on an opposite errand. But whatever were their motives, King and Duke agreed to rob their youngest brother of his dominions. Henry attacked at once.And the importance which was attached to this part of the treaty is shown by the speed and energy with which it was carried out. While the recovery of Maine was delayed or forgotten, the recovery of the Côtentin was the first act of the contracting princes after the conclusion of the treaty.

Probable objects of William. But, when we look to some other terms of the treaty, it is possible that, in the mind of William at least, the spoliation of Henry had a deeper object. One purpose of the treaty was to settle the succession both to the kingdom of England and to the duchy of Normandy. Settlement of the English and Norman succession.Neither the imperial crown nor the ducal coronet had at this moment any direct and undoubted heir, according to any doctrine of succession. Both William and Robert were at this time unmarried; Robert had more than one illegitimate child; no children of William Rufus are recorded at any time. William and Robert to succeed one another. The treaty provided that, if either King or Duke died without lawful issue during the lifetime of his brother, the survivor should succeed to his dominions. I have spoken elsewhere of the constitutional aspect of this agreement.[772] Constitutional aspect of the agreement.It was an attempt to barter away beforehand the right of the Witan of England to bestow the crown of a deceased king on whatever successor they thought good. And, like all such attempts, before and after, till the great act of settlement which put an end to the nineteen years’ anarchy,[773] it came to nothing. Growth of the hereditary principle, But that such an agreement should have been made shows what fresh strength had been given by the Norman Conquest to the whole class of ideas of which the doctrine of hereditary succession to kingdoms forms a part.[774] But, putting this view of the matter aside, the objects of the provision, as a family compact, were obvious. It was William’s manifest interest to shut out Robert’s sons from any share in the inheritance of their father. and of the doctrine of legitimacy. This was easily done. The stricter doctrine of legitimacy of birth was fast growing.[775] It was but unwillingly that Normandy had, sixty years earlier, acknowledged the bastard of an earlier Robert; it was most unlikely that Normandy would submit to a bastard of the present Robert, while there yet lived lawful sons of him who had made the name of Bastard glorious. Robert, on the other hand, might not be unwilling to give up so faint a chance on the part of his own children, in order to be himself declared presumptive heir to the crown of England. But there were others to be shut out, one of whom at least was far more dangerous than the natural sons of Robert. The two Æthelings There were then in Normandy two men who bore the English title of Ætheling, one of the old race, one of the new; one whom Englishmen had once chosen as the last of the old race, another to whom Englishmen looked as the first of the new race who had any claim to the privileges of kingly birth. Henry; We must always remember that, in English eyes, Henry, the son of a crowned King of the English, born of his crowned Lady on English ground, had a claim which was not shared by his brothers, foreign born sons of a mere Norman Duke and Duchess.[776] Eadgar. The kingly and native birth of Henry might put his claims at least on a level with those of Eadgar, who, male heir of Ecgberht and Cerdic as he was, was born of uncrowned parents in a foreign land.[777] Indeed it might seem that by this time all thoughts of a restoration of the West-Saxon house had passed out of the range of practical politics, and that the claims of Eadgar were no longer entitled to a thought. The Red King however seems to have deemed otherwise. He was clearly determined to secure himself against the remotest chances of danger. Henry was to be despoiled; Eadgar banished from Normandy. Eadgar was to be banished. Eadgar had come back from Apulia;[778] he was now living in Normandy on terms of the closest friendship with the Duke, who had enriched him with grants of land, and, as we have seen, admitted him to his inmost counsels.[779] We know not whether Eadgar had given the Red King any personal offence, or whether William was simply jealous of him as a possible rival for the crown. At any rate, whether by a formal clause of the treaty or not, he called on Robert to confiscate Eadgar’s Norman estates and to make him leave his dominions.[780] William’s policy towards Henry and Eadgar. Neither towards Henry nor towards Eadgar would the policy of William Rufus seem to have been wise; but sound policy, in any high sense, was not one of the attributes of William Rufus. Whatever may be said of Henry’s relations towards Normandy, he was more likely to plot against his brother of England if he became a landless wanderer than if he remained Count of Coutances and Avranches. As for Eadgar, it might possibly have been a gain if he could have been sent back to Apulia or provided for in his native Hungary. As it was, he straightway betook himself to a land where he was likely to be far more dangerous than he could ever be in Normandy. Eadgar goes to Scotland. As in the days of William the Great,[781] he went at once to the court of his brother-in-law of Scotland.[782] It may be that William presently saw that he had taken a false step in the treatment of both the Æthelings. At a later time we shall see both Henry and Eadgar enjoying his full favour and confidence.

The man before whose eyes the crown of England had twice been dangled in mockery, and the man who was hereafter to grasp that crown with a grasp like that of the Conqueror himself, were thus both doomed to be for the moment despoiled of lands and honours. The followers of each side to be restored. To men of less exalted degree the treaty was more favourable. King and Duke alike, so far to the credit of both of them, stipulated for the safety and restoration of their several partisans in the dominions of the other. All supporters of William in any of those parts of Normandy which were not to be ceded to him were to suffer no harm at the hands of Robert. The rebels of 1088 to be restored. And, what was much more important, all those who had lost their lands in England three years before on account of their share in the rebellion on behalf of Robert were to have their lands back again. An exception, formal or practical, must have been made in the case of Bishop Odo. He certainly was not restored to his earldom of Kent.

The treaty sworn to. The treaty was sworn to by twelve chief men on each side.[783] The English Chronicler remarks, with perfect truth, It stands but a little while. that it stood but a little while.[784] But one part at least was carried out at once and with great vigour. William and Robert march against Henry. Within less than a month after William had landed in Normandy to dispossess Robert, he and Robert marched together to dispossess Henry. They spent their Lent in besieging him in his last stronghold. Lent, 1091.When the Count of Coutances heard of the coalition against him, he made ready for a vigorous resistance. Henry’s position. He put his two cities of Coutances and Avranches and his other fortresses into a state of defence, and gathered a force, Norman and Breton, to garrison them.[785] Britanny indeed was the only quarter from which he received any help in his struggle.[786] Earl Hugh of Chester and others betray their castles to William. Those who seemed to be his firmest friends turned against him. Even Earl Hugh of Chester, the foremost man in the land from which his father had taken his name,[787] had no mind to jeopard his great English palatinate for the sake of keeping his paternal Avranches in the obedience of the Ætheling. Henry’s other supporters, Richard of Redvers, it is to be supposed, among them, were of the same mind. They saw no hope that Henry could withstand the might, above all the wealth, of Rufus; they accordingly surrendered their fortresses into the King’s hands.[788] Henry takes up his quarters at Saint Michael’s Mount. One stronghold only was now left to Henry, one of the two which had been specially marked out to be taken from him, the monastic fortress of Saint Michael. The sacred mount was then famous and venerable through all Normandy, and far beyond the bounds of Normandy. The buildings on the Mount. Of that vast and wondrous pile of buildings, halls, cloister, church, buildings which elsewhere stand side by side, but which here are heaped one upon another, little could then have been standing. The minster itself, which crowns all, had begun to be rebuilt seventy years before by the Abbot Hildebert,[789] and it may be that some parts of his work have lived through the natural accidents of the next age[790] and the destruction and disfigurement of later times. But the series of pillared halls, knightly and monastic, which give its special character to the abbey of the Mount, are all of far later date than the war of the three brothers. Yet the house of the warrior archangel was already at once knightly and monastic. Abbot Roger. 1085. The reigning abbot Roger was, in strict ecclesiastical eyes, a prelate of doubtful title. He had come in—​as countless other bishops and abbots of Normandy and England had come in—​less by free election of the monks than by the will of the great Duke and King.[791] What personal share Roger took in the struggle is not recorded; but some at least of his monks, The monks welcome Henry. like the monks of Ely in the days of Hereward,[792] welcomed the small body of followers who still clave to Henry, and at whose head he now took up his last position of defence in the island sanctuary.[793]

Siege of the Mount. Lent, 1091 Here Henry was besieged by his two brothers, Duke and King. Yet we hear of nothing which can in strictness be called a siege. The Mount stands in the mouth of a bay within a bay. Its position. At high water it is strictly an island; at low water it is surrounded by a vast wilderness of sand—​those treacherous sands from which thirty years before Harold had rescued the soldiers of the elder William[794] , and which stretch back as far as the rocks of Cancale on the Breton shore. The inner bay. In this sense the bay of Saint Michael may be counted to stretch from Cancale to the opposite point on the Norman coast, where the land begins to bend inwards to form the narrower bay. This last may be counted to stretch from the mouth of the border stream of Coesnon below Pontorson to Genetz lying on the coast nearly due west from Avranches. The Mount itself and its satellite the smaller rock of Tombelaine lie nearly in a straight line between these two points. Alternately inaccessible by land and by water, accessible by land at any time only by certain known routes at different points, the Mount would seem to be incapable of direct attack by any weapons known in the eleventh century. On the other hand, it would be easy to cut it off from all communication with the outer world by the occupation of the needful points on the shore and by the help of a blockading fleet. Later sieges. 1417–1424. And in the great siege three hundred and thirty years later—​when Normandy had again a kingly duke of the blood of Rolf and Henry, but when the Mount clave to the King of Paris or of Bourges—​we hear both of the blockading fleet of England and of the series of posts with which the shore was lined. No mention of ships. Without a fleet the Mount could hardly be said to be besieged; but, on the other hand, its insular position would be of no use to its defenders, unless they had either ships at command or friends beyond sea. In the present case we hear nothing of ships on either side, nor of any help coming to the besieged. Nor do we hear of any systematic occupation of the whole coast. Positions of the besiegers. We hear only that the besiegers occupied two points which commanded the two sides of the inner bay, On the north the Duke took up his quarters at Genetz; to the south the besiegers occupied Arderon, not far from the mouth of the Coesnon, while King William of England established himself in the central position of Avranches.[795] Character of the siege. The siege thus became an affair of endless small attacks and skirmishes. We hear of the plundering expeditions which Henry was able to make into the lands of Avranches and even of Coutances, lands which had once been his own, but which had now become hostile ground.[796] We hear too how, before each of the extreme points occupied by the besiegers, before Genetz and before Arderon, Combats the knights on both sides met every day in various feats of arms, feats, it would seem, savouring rather of the bravado of the tourney than of any rational military purpose.[797]

Edwᵈ. Weller

For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.

Map to illustrate the
SIEGE of Sᵀ MICHAEL’S MOUNT.
A.D. 1091.

Personal anecdotes. We now get, in the shape of those personal anecdotes in which this reign is so rich, pictures of more than one side of the strangely mixed character of the Red King. At the other end of Normandy William had won lands and castles without dealing a single blow with his own sword, and with a singularly small outlay of blows from the swords of others. At Eu, at Aumale, and at Gournay, the work had been done with gold far more than with steel. Beneath Saint Michael’s Mount steel was to have its turn; and, when steel was the metal to be used, William Rufus was sure to be in his own person the foremost among those who used it. The change of scene seemed to have turned the wary trafficker into the most reckless of knights errant. Amidst such scenes he became, in the eyes of his own age, the peer of the most renowned of those Nine Worthies the tale of whom was made up only in his own day. William compared to Alexander. We shall see at a later stage how the question was raised whether the soul of the Dictator Cæsar had not passed into the body of the Red King; by the sands of Saint Michael’s bay he was held to have placed himself on a level with the Macedonian Alexander. The likeness could hardly be carried on through the general military character of the two princes; for Alexander, when he began an enterprise, commonly carried it on to the end. And it may be doubted whether Alexander ever jeoparded his own life in the senseless way in which Rufus in the tale is made to jeopard his. We must picture to ourselves the royal head-quarters between the height of Avranches and the sands of Saint Michael’s bay. Knight-errantry of William. The King goes forth from his tent, and mounts the horse which he had that morning bought for fifteen marks of silver.[798] He sees the enemy at a distance riding proudly towards him. Alone, waiting for no comrade, borne on both by eagerness for the fray and by the belief that no one would dare to withstand a king face to face, he gallops forward and charges the advancing party.[799] The King upset. The newly bought horse is killed; the King falls under him; he is ignominiously dragged along by the foot, but the strength of his chain-armour saves him from any actual wound.[800] By this time the knight who had unhorsed him has his hand on the hilt of his sword, ready to deal a deadly blow. William, frightened by the extremity of his danger, cries out, “Hold, rascal, I am the King of England.”[801] The words had that kind of magic effect which is so often wrought by the personal presence of royalty. From any rational view of the business in hand, to slay, or better still to capture, the hostile king should have been the first object of every man in Henry’s garrison. To no case better applied the wise order of the Syrian monarch, “Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the King of Israel.”[802] But as soon as a voice which some at least of them knew proclaimed that it was a king who lay helpless among them, every arm was stayed. The soldiers of Henry tremble at the thought of what they were so near doing; with all worship they raise the King from the ground and bring him another horse.[803] His treatment of the knight who unhorsed him. William springs unaided on his back; he casts a keen glance on the band around him,[804] and asks, “Who unhorsed me?” As they were muttering one to another, the daring man who had done the deed came forward and said, “I, who took you, not for a king but for a knight.” A bold answer was never displeasing to Rufus; he looked approval, and said, “By the face of Lucca,[805] you shall be mine; your name shall be written in my book,[806] and you shall receive the reward of good service.” Here the story ends; we are to suppose that William, instead of being carried a prisoner to the Mount, rode back free to Avranches, having lessened the small force of Henry by a stout knight and two horses.

Character of the story. The tale is told as an example of the magnanimity of the Red King. And there is something which moves a kind of admiration in the picture of a man, helpless among a crowd of enemies, yet bearing himself as if they were his prisoners, instead of his being theirs. The point of the story is that Rufus did no harm, that he felt no ill will, towards the man who had unhorsed, and all but killed him; that he honoured his bold deed and bold bearing, and promised him favour and promotion. But had the soldiers of Henry done their duty, William would have had no opportunity, at least no immediate opportunity, of doing either good or harm to his antagonist. William assumes that the enemy will not dare to withstand him, and his assumption is so far justified that he is withstood only by one who knows not who he is, and whose words imply that, if he had known, he would not have ventured to withstand him. Trusting to this kind of superstitious dread, William is able to speak and act as he might have spoken if the man who unhorsed him had been brought before him in his own tent. Comparison with Richard the First. Richard of the Lion-heart, when the archer who had given him his death-wound was brought before him, first designed him for a death of torture, and then, on hearing a bold answer, granted him life and freedom.[807] In this, as in some other cases, the Red King, the earliest model of chivalry, certainly does not lose by comparison with the successor who is more commonly looked on as its ideal.[808]

Another and perhaps better known story which is told of this siege puts the character of William Rufus in another light, while it brings out the character of Robert in a lively form. Contrast between William and Robert. The Duke, heedless of the consequences of his acts but not cruel in his own person, was, above all men, open to those passing bursts of generosity which are quite consistent with utter weakness and want of principle. William Rufus was always open to an appeal to his knightly generosity, to that higher form of self-assertion which forbade him to harm one who was beneath him, and which taught him to admire a bold deed or word even when directed against himself. But the ties of kindred, still more the ties of common humanity, sat very lightly on him. The gentler soul of Robert was by no means dead to them. He did not shrink from waging an unjust war against his brother and deliverer; he did not shrink from despoiling that brother and deliverer of dominions which he had sold to him by his own act for a fair price; but he did shrink from the thought of letting the brother against whom he warred suffer actual bodily hardships when he could hinder them. Lack of water on the Mount. The defenders of the Mount had, according to one account, plenty of meat; but all our narratives agree as to the difficulty of providing fresh water for the fortress which twice in the day was surrounded by the waves.[809] Henry asks to be allowed to take water. Henry sent a message to the Duke, praying that he might be allowed access to fresh water; his brothers might, if they thought good, make war on him by the valour of their soldiers; they should not press the powers of nature into their service, or deprive him of those gifts of Providence which were open to all human beings.[810] Answer of Robert and William. Robert was moved; he gave orders to the sentinels at Genetz not to hinder the besieged from coming to the mainland for water.[811] One version even adds that he added the further gift of a tun of the best wine.[812] This kind of generosity, where no appeal was made to his own personal pride, was by no means to the taste of Rufus; as a commander carrying on war, he was ready to press the rights of warfare to the uttermost. When he heard what Robert had done, he mocked at his brother’s weakness; it was a fine way of making war to give the enemy meat and drink.[813] Robert answered, in words which do him honour, but which would have done him more honour if they had been spoken at the beginning as a reason for forbearing an unjust attack on his brother—​“Shall we let our brother die of thirst? Where shall we find another, if we lose him?”[814]

Such are these two famous stories of the war waged beneath the mount of the Archangel. Both are eminently characteristic; there is no reason why both may not be true. But we must withhold our belief when one of our tale-tellers adds that William turned away from the siege in contempt for Robert’s weakness.[815] A more sober guide tells us that when, for fifteen days, Henry and his followers had held up against lack of water and Henry surrenders. threatening lack of food,[816] the wary youth saw the hopelessness of further resistance, and offered to surrender the Mount on honourable terms. He demanded a free passage for himself and his garrison. William, already tired of a siege in which he had made little progress and which had cost him many men and horses,[817] gladly accepted the terms. Henry, still Ætheling, though no longer Count, marched forth from his island stronghold with all the honours of war.[818] We are to suppose that, according to the terms of the treaty, the King took possession of the Mount itself, and the Duke of the rest of Henry’s former county. William at Eu. William stayed on the mainland, in the parts of Normandy which had been ceded to him, for full six months, having his head-quarters at Eu.[819] He goes back to England. August, 1091. In August the affairs of his island kingdom called him back again; and, strange to say, both his brothers went with him as his guests and allies.[820]

Fortunes of Henry. At this moment the past and the future alike lead us to look with more interest on the fates of the dispossessed Ætheling than on those of any other of the actors in our story. But there is at first sight some little difficulty in finding out what those fates were. His presence in England in 1091. From our English authorities we could only gather that Henry was in England before the end of the year in which the siege took place, and that three years later he was again beyond sea, in favour with William and at enmity with Robert. From other writers we get a version, which Story of Henry’s adventures. takes no notice of any visit to England, but which gives us a moving tale of Henry’s experiences in Normandy and the neighbouring lands. It is one of those cases where a writer, telling his own part of the story, altogether forgets, perhaps without formally contradicting, other parts. In such a case he is likely to stumble in some of his dates and details; but this need not lead us altogether to cast aside the main features of his story. It is plain that, for some time after the surrender of the Mount, Henry was, to say the least, landless. In the pictures of his actual distress and adversity there may well be somewhat of exaggeration; but they draw from one who is not a flatterer the important remark that, having known adversity himself, he learned to be gracious in after years to the sufferings of others.[821] His alleged wanderings. We are perhaps startled by such a saying when we think of some particular acts of Henry; but this witness does not stand alone; and, among the contradictions of human nature, there is nothing impossible in the belief that such a spirit may have existed alongside of many particular acts of cruelty.[822] But it is certain that Henry’s season of adversity must have been shorter than it appears in the picture of it which is given to us. We are told that, soon after he left the Mount, he found himself very nearly a solitary wanderer. He first went into Britanny, the only land from which he had received any help, and thanked his friends there for their services. Thence he betook himself to France, and spent, we are told, nearly two years in the borderland of the Vexin, the land which had been the scene of his father’s last and fatal warfare, and which was again to be the scene of warfare before his brother’s reign was ended. There, with a train cut down to one knight, one clerk, and three esquires, Henry wandered to and fro, seeking shelter where he could.[823] Whatever truth there may be in these details, the time of Henry’s probation could not have been spread over anything like a period of two years. He may have been a wanderer during the few months which immediately followed the surrender of the Mount; but, if so, he was reconciled to both his brothers long before the end of the year. Or he may, from some unexplained reason, have again become a wanderer during some months of the following year. There is nothing in any way impossible or unlikely in either story. What is certain is that, before the end of the next year, Henry had again an establishment on Gaulish ground, and one gained in the most honourable way. Robert and Henry accompany William to England. And it is equally certain that when King William went back to England in the month of August in the present year he took both of his brothers with him.[824]

§ 4. The Scottish Expedition of William Rufus.
August–October, 1091.

Affairs of Scotland. The business which called William back to his kingdom was a serious one; it was no other than to drive back or to avenge a Scottish invasion. King Malcolm, who seems to have stayed quiet during the rebellion three years before, now took up arms. We cannot help connecting this step with the visit of his brother-in-law, and the words of the Chronicler seem directly to imply that Malcolm’s invasion was the consequence of Eadgar’s coming.[825] From one version we might almost think that Malcolm had been called on to do homage and had refused.[826] This is perfectly possible in itself; but the time of William’s special occupation with Norman affairs seems oddly chosen for such a summons. An earlier time, some point in the blank period between the rebellion and the Norman campaign, would have seemed more natural for such a purpose. Malcolm’s invasion of Northumberland. May, 1091. However this may be, now, in the month of May, Malcolm took advantage of William’s absence in Normandy to invade Northumberland for the fourth time. He designed, we are told, to go much further and do much more, words which might almost suggest a purpose of asserting the claims of Eadgar to the English crown. Whatever were his objects, they were not carried out, save one which was doubtless not the least among them, that of carrying off great spoil from Northumberland.[827] The furthest point that Malcolm reached was Chester-le-Street, a point unpleasantly near to the bishopless monks of Durham.[828] He is driven back. There the men in local command went against him and drove him back. In the national Chronicle they appear as “the good men who guarded this land.”[829] In this way of speaking, as in many other phrases in our own and other tongues, the word “good” means rank and office rather than moral goodness. The “good men.” Yet the latter idea is not wholly absent; the name would hardly be given to men who were engaged in a cause which the writer wholly condemned. The “good men” here spoken of must have been mainly Normans, with Earl Robert of Mowbray at their head. Earl Robert was not likely to have won much love from the English people. Yet he passed for a “good man,” when he did his duty for England, when he guarded the land and drove back the Scottish invader. Of any wish to put Malcolm in the place of either the elder or the younger William we see no trace at any stage of our story. Beyond this emphatic sentence, we get no details. As in so many other cases, if conquest was the object of Malcolm’s expedition, plunder was the only result.

William and Robert in England. August, 1091. The news of this harrying of the northern part of his kingdom brought King William back from Normandy in the course of August. With him, as we have said, came Robert and Henry. Why was the Duke’s presence needed? One account hints that his coming had some reference to the actors in the late rebellion, some of whom at least were now restored to their estates.[830] Relations between Robert and Malcolm. Another version speaks of an old friendship between Robert and Malcolm;[831] and there was a tie of spiritual affinity between them arising out of Robert’s relation as godfather to a child of Malcolm.[832] It was perhaps in this character that Robert came to act, if need should be, as a welcome negotiator with his Scottish gossip. Stronger side of Robert and Eadgar. One strange thing is that, on more than one occasion in our story, both Robert and Eadgar, two men who seem so incapable of vigorous or rational action on behalf of themselves, play a distinctly creditable part when acting on behalf of others. But this is really no uncommon inconsistency of human nature; men are often found who are good advisers in the affairs of others, while they are by no means wise managers of their own. Robert in truth appears to most advantage anywhere out of his own duchy. Neither the warrior of the crusade nor the negotiator with the Scot seems to be the same man as the Duke who could not be trusted to defend his own palace.

William sets forth. In the present case there was more of negotiation than of warfare. Of actual fighting there seems to have been none. William got together, as his father had done in the like case,[833] a great force by land and sea for the invasion of Scotland. With the land force the King and the Duke set forth; but seemingly with no haste, as time was found for a great ecclesiastical ceremony on the way. Durham in the absence of Bishop William. For three years the church of Durham had been without a shepherd, and the castle of Durham had been in the hands of the King. The monks of Saint Cuthberht’s abbey had feared that this irregular time would be an evil time for them. But they put their trust in God and their patron saint, and went to the King to ask his favour. The King’s favourable treatment of the monks. Rufus was specially gracious and merciful; he rose up to greet Prior Turgot, the head of the embassy, and he gave orders that the monks of Durham should be in no way disturbed, but should keep full possession of their rights and property, exactly as if the Bishop had remained in occupation of his see.[834] We may even venture to guess that they had a somewhat fuller possession of them during the Bishop’s absence. We are expressly told by the local historian that the Red King did not deal with Durham as he dealt with other churches; he took nothing from the monks, and even gave them something of his own.[835] Works at Durham. The new society—​for it must be remembered that the monks of Durham were a body of Bishop William’s own bringing in[836]—​flourished so greatly during this irregular state of things that it was now that they built their refectory.[837] But a time of more settled order was now to come. Reconciliation of Bishop William with the King. Bishop William of Saint-Calais, whatever had been his crimes three years back, was among those whom King William had engaged by his treaty with his brother to restore to their lands and honours. Besides this general claim, it was believed, at Durham at least, that the banished prelate had earned his restoration by a signal service done to the King. In the third year of his banishment an unnamed Norman fortress was holding out for the King; but its garrison was sore pressed, and its capture by the enemy seemed imminent. The Bishop, by what means of persuasion we are not told, but it does not seem to have been by force, caused the besiegers to raise the siege.[838] This service won the King’s thorough good He is restored to his bishopric. September 3, 1091. will, and William, on his march to Scotland, personally put the Bishop once more in possession of his see and of all its rights and belongings, temporal and spiritual.[839] Bishop William did not come back empty-handed; he brought with him costly gifts for his church, ornaments, gold and silver vessels, and, above all, many books.[840] And, at some time before the year was out, we find him confirming with great solemnity, with the witness of the great men of the realm, certain grants of the Conqueror to the monks of his church.[841] The return of the Bishop was an event not only of local but of national importance. His renewed influence with the King. He was restored by the King, not only to his formal favour, but to a high place in his innermost counsels. Bishop William was not one of those who come back from banishment having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He had, in his sojourn beyond the sea, learned an altogether new doctrine as to the relations between bishops and kings.

The march which had been interrupted by the ceremony at Durham was clearly a slow one. William was at Durham in the first days of September; much later in the month a heavy blow fell on one part of the expedition. Loss of the ships. Michaelmas, 1091. The greater part of the ships were lost a few days before the feast of Michaelmas, and we are told that this happened before the King could reach Scotland. The King was therefore several weeks in journeying from Durham to the border of the true Scotland, the Firth of Forth; and we are told that many of the land force also perished of cold and hunger.[842] The army however which remained was strong enough to make Malcolm feel less eager for deeds of arms than he had most likely felt in May. William and Malcolm by the Scots’ Water.At last, near the shore of the Scots’ Water, the estuary which parted English Lothian from Scottish Fife, the two kings met face to face, seemingly in battle array, but without coming to any exchange of blows. It is marked in a pointed way that Malcolm had crossed from his kingdom to his earldom. He “went out of Scotland into Lothian in England, and there abode,”[843] There a negotiation took place. Mediation of Robert and Eadgar. The ambassadors or mediators were Duke Robert and the Ætheling Eadgar.[844] According to the most picturesque version, Malcolm, who is conceived as still keeping on the northern side of the firth, sends a message to William to the effect that he owes no homage to him, but that, if he can have an interview with Robert, he will do to him whatever is right. Conference of Robert and Malcolm. By the advice of his Wise Men,[845] William sends his brother, who is courteously received by the Scottish King for three days. Somewhat like the Moabite king of old, though with quite another purpose, Malcolm takes his visitor to the tops of various hills, and shows him the hosts of Scotland encamped in the plains and dales below. With so mighty a force he is ready to withstand any one who should try to cross the firth; he would be well pleased if any enemy would make the attempt. Malcolm’s homage to Robert. He then suddenly turns to the question of homage. He had received the earldom of Lothian from King Eadward, when his great-niece Margaret was betrothed to him. The late King William had confirmed the gifts of his predecessor, and, at his bidding, he, Malcolm, had become the man of his eldest son, his present visitor Duke Robert. To him he would discharge his duty; to the present King William he owed no duty at all. He appealed to the Gospel for the doctrine that no man could serve two lords, the doctrine which had been so practically pressed on Robert’s behalf three years before.[846] Robert admitted the truth of Malcolm’s statement; but he argued that times were changed, and that the decrees of his father had lost their old force. It would be wise to accept the reigning King as his lord, a lord nearer, richer, and more powerful, than he could pretend to be himself. Malcolm might be sure of a gracious reception from William, if he came on such an errand. He submits to William. Malcolm was convinced; he went to the King of the English; he was favourably received, and a peace was agreed on. It is added that the two kings then disbanded their armies, and went together into England.[847]

This last statement throws some doubt upon the whole of this version; for Malcolm’s alleged journey to England at this moment is clearly a confusion with events which happened two years later. Question as to the betrothal of Margaret. The references too to the earldom of Lothian and to an earlier betrothal of Margaret are a little startling; yet it is perhaps not quite hopeless to reconcile them with better ascertained facts. As I have elsewhere suggested, this earlier betrothal of Margaret to Malcolm is not necessarily inconsistent with his later marriage with her after the intermediate stage of Ingebiorg.[848] Malcolm may at one time have been in no hurry to carry out a marriage dictated by political reasons; yet he may have afterwards become eager for the same marriage after he had seen her whose hand was designed for him. Question of Lothian. As for the Lothian earldom, we here see the beginning of the later Scottish argument, that homage was due from the Scottish to the English king only for lands held within the kingdom of England. At this stage Lothian was the land held within the kingdom of England; it was what Northumberland, Huntingdon, or any other confessedly English land held by the Scottish king, was in later times. When Malcolm was restored to his crown by the arms of Siward,[849] no doubt Lothian was granted to him among other things. Only Malcolm takes up the line, or our historian thinks it in character to make him take up the line, of implying, though not directly asserting, that Lothian was the only possession for which homage was due. And, on the strictest view of English claims, Malcolm would be right in at least drawing a marked distinction between Scotland and Lothian. He owed both kingdom and earldom to the intervention of Eadward and Siward; but Lothian was a grant from Eadward in a sense in which Scotland was not. Over Scotland neither Eadward nor William could claim more than an external superiority. Lothian was still English ground, as much as the land which is now beginning to be distinguished as Northumberland.

Treaty between William and Malcolm. The version of Malcolm’s submission which I have just gone through is certainly worth examining, and I do not see that it contradicts the simpler and more certain version. According to this account, the negotiation was carried on between Robert and Eadgar. The agreement to which the mediators came was that Malcolm should renew to the younger William the homage which he had paid to the elder.[850] On the other hand, he was to receive all lands and everything else that he had before held in England, specially, it would seem, twelve vills or mansions for his reception on his way to the English court.[851] Malcolm does homage. On these terms Malcolm became the man of William; Eadgar also was reconciled to William. The two kings parted on good terms, but the Chronicler notices, in a phrase of which he is rather fond, that it “little while stood.”[852]

William, Robert, and Eadgar now took their journey back again, as it is specially marked, from Northumberland into Wessex.[853] Return of William. The realm of Ælfred is still looked on as the special dwelling-place of his successors from beyond the sea. But it would seem that, at some stage of their southward journey, at some time before the year was out, they joined with other men of royal and princely descent in setting their crosses to a document, in itself of merely local importance, but which is clothed with a higher interest by the names of those who sign it. Evidence of the Durham charters. A grant of certain churches to the convent of Durham becomes a piece of national history when, besides the signatures for which we might naturally look, it bears the names of King William the Second, of Robert his brother, of Henry his brother, of Duncan son of King Malcolm, of Eadgar the Ætheling, and of Siward Barn.[854] This is the only time when all these persons could have met. There is no sign of any later visit of Robert to England during the reign of William. But the signatures of Henry and Duncan teach us more. Duncan. Duncan, it will be remembered, had been given as a hostage at Abernethy;[855] he had been set free by the Conqueror on his death-bed; he had been knighted by Robert, and allowed to go whither he would.[856] Had he already made his way back to his own land, or did he come in the train of his latest benefactor? In the former case, had he been again given as a hostage? Or had William found out that the son of Ingebiorg might possibly be useful to him? It is certain that, two years later, Duncan was at William’s court and in William’s favour; and it looks very much as if he had, in whatever character, gone back to England with the King. Eadgar. The signature of Eadgar shows that the document must be later than the treaty with Malcolm by which he was reconciled to William, that is, that it was signed on the journey southward, not on the journey northward. Henry. The signature of Henry is our only hint that he had any share at all in the Scottish business, and it throws a perfectly new light on this part of his history. He was plainly in England, seemingly in favour with both his brothers, and things look as if he too, though he is nowhere mentioned, must have gone on the march to Scotland. Siward Barn. Siward Barn, like Duncan, was one of those who were set free by William the Great on his death-bed. We now learn that he shared the good luck of Duncan and Wulf, not the bad luck of Morkere and Wulfnoth. He signs as one of the great men of the north, with Arnold of Percy, with the Sheriff Morel, and with Earl Robert himself.

One thing is plain, namely, that this document was not signed in the regular Christmas Assembly of the year. By that time Robert and Eadgar were no longer in England. By that time Robert and William had again quarrelled. Fresh dispute between William and Robert. We may guess that some of Robert’s old partisans had been less lucky than the Bishop of Durham. At all events, some points in the treaty of Caen remained unfulfilled. Then, as in later times, a diplomatic engagement was not found strong enough to carry itself out by its own force, like a physical law of nature. We are not told what was the special point complained of; but something which the Red King should have done for Robert or for his partisans was left undone.[857] It was simply as a man and a king that Rufus had entered into any engagements with his brother. His knightly honour was not pledged; the treaty therefore came under the head of those promises which no man can fulfil.[858] We are told in a pointed way that Robert stayed with his brother till nearly the time of Christmas. The matter in dispute, whatever it was, might have been fittingly discussed in the Christmas Assembly; only it might have been hard to find the formula by which the Duke of the Normans was to appeal the King of the English of bad faith before his own Witan. Robert and Eadgar leave England. December 23, 1091. Two days before the feast Robert took ship in Wight, and sailed to Normandy, taking the Ætheling Eadgar with him.[859]

Natural phænomena. Fall of the tower at Winchcombe. October 15, 1091. Either the reign of Rufus was really richer than other times in striking natural phænomena, or else they were specially noticed as signs of the times. About the time of the King’s Scottish expedition, the tower of the minster at Winchcombe was smitten by a mighty thunderbolt, and fell in ruins on the body of the church, crushing the most hallowed images in its fall. The Chthonian Zeus had no place in the mythology of the times; but this destruction, which left behind it a thick smoke and an evil smell, was deemed to be the work of the evil one, the signs of whose presence were got rid of only by the most solemn chants and processions.[860] Two days later, Great wind in London. October 17, 1091. London was visited by a fearful wind, which blew down seven churches and houses to the number of six hundred. Above all, the wooden roof of the church of Saint Mary-le-bow was carried off, and its beams were hurled to the ground with such force that they were driven into the hard earth, and had to be sawn off as they stood.[861] Two men who were in the church were crushed. The citizens could have hardly repaired their houses before another blow came upon them. Fire in London. March 28, 1092. Early in the next year the greater part of London was destroyed by fire.[862] By Eastertide the cathedral churches of two of the dioceses whose seats had been moved in the late reign stood ready for consecration. Consecration of the church of Salisbury. April 5, 1092. On the waterless hill which then was Salisbury, within the everlasting ditches of the elder time, looking down on the field of battle which had decreed that Britain should be English[863] and on the field of council which had decreed that England should be one,[864] Norman Osmund, the doctor of the ritual lore of England, had finished the work which Lotharingian Hermann had began. The new mother church of the lands of Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset, the elder minster of Saint Mary, whose stones were borne away to build the soaring steeple of its successor but whose foundations may still be traced on the turf of the forsaken city, now awaited its hallowing. There was then no archbishop in southern England; the rite was done by Osmund himself with the help of his two nearest episcopal neighbours, Walkelin of Winchester and John of Bath.[865] The ceremony had thus a specially West-Saxon character. The three bishops who came together at Salisbury represented the three—​once four—​churches, among which the old West-Saxon diocese, the diocese of Winchester, had been parted asunder.[866] But at Salisbury too, the elements, if somewhat less hostile than at Winchcombe and London, were by no means friendly. The tower roof thrown down. April 10. Five days only after the hallowing, the lightning fell, as at Winchcombe; the peaked roof or low spire which sheltered the tower—​doubtless of wood covered with lead—​was thrown down, and its fall did much damage to the walls of the new minster.[867]

A day later by a month had been fixed for another ceremony of the same kind, the crowning of the work of a prelate who seems to have wished for a more stately ceremony and a greater gathering than the almost domestic rite which had satisfied Bishop Osmund. Remigius, Almoner of Fécamp, Bishop of Dorchester, Bishop of Remigius of Lincoln. Lincoln, was drawing near the end of his famous episcopate. He had reformed the constitution of his chapter and diocese; and we hear that he was no less zealous in reforming the manners of his flock.[868] The darling sin of Bristol—​most likely the darling sin of every great trading-town—​was rife at Lincoln also; and Remigius, like Wulfstan, preached against the wicked custom by which men sold their country-folk, sometimes their kinsfolk, to a life of shame or of bondage in foreign lands.[869] Completion of the minster. But beyond all this, he had finished his great work on the hill of Lincoln; the elder church of Saint Mary had grown into the great minster of which later rebuildings and enlargements have still left us some small remnants.[870] The eastern limb had as yet no need to overleap the Roman wall of Lindum; but Remigius had reared, and sought to consecrate, no fragment, but a perfect church. His doorways are there in the western front to show that the building has received no enlargement on that side from Remigius’ day to our own. The work was done, and its founder felt his last end coming. He was eager to see the house which he had builded dedicated to its holy use before he himself passed away. But an unlooked-for hindrance came. The only archbishop in the land, Thomas of York, claimed the district in which Remigius had built his church as belonging to his own diocese.[871] Thomas of York claims the jurisdiction of Lindesey. This does not seem to have been by virtue of the claim that the whole diocese of Dorchester came within his metropolitan jurisdiction.[872] The argument was that Lindesey, won for the Christian faith by Paullinus, won for the Northumbrian realm by Ecgfrith, was part of the diocesan jurisdiction of the Bishop of York. And, whatever the truth of the case might be, the warmest of all admirers of Remigius goes some way to strengthen the doctrine of Thomas, when he speaks of Lindesey almost as a conquered land won by the prowess of Remigius from the Northumbrian enemy.[873] The time was not one for doubtful disputations. Remigius wins over the King. Remigius, saint as he is pictured to us, knew how to use those baser arguments which were convincing above all others in the days of the Red King. His original appointment in the days of the Conqueror had not been altogether beyond suspicion;[874] and it was now whispered that it was by the help of a bribe that he won the zealous adhesion of William Rufus to his cause. Rufus was at least impartial; he was clearly ready to give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages, and what he would do for a Jew he would also do for a bishop. All the bishops of England were bidden by royal order to come together at the appointed day for the dedication of the church of Lincoln.[875] Gathering for the consecration at Lincoln. May 9, 1092. A vast crowd of men of all ranks came to Lincoln; the course of the story suggests that the King himself was there; all the bishops came, save one only. Robert of Hereford, the friend of Wulfstan, the Lotharingian skilled in the lore of the stars, knew by his science that the rite would not take place in the lifetime of Remigius. He therefore deemed it needless to travel to Lincoln for nothing.[876] Death of Remigius. May 6, 1092. His skill was not deceived; three days before the appointed time Remigius died.[877] The dedication of the church was delayed; it was done in the days of his successor, some years later.[878] Meanwhile Remigius himself won the honours of a saint in local esteem, and wonders of healing were wrought at his tomb for the benefit of not a few of divers tongues and even of divers creeds.[879]

§ 5. The Conquest and Colonization of Carlisle.
1092.

William’s conquest of Carlisle. It was seemingly from this fruitless gathering at Lincoln that William the Red went forth to what was in truth the greatest exploit of his reign. He went on a strange errand, to enlarge the bounds of England by overthrowing the last shadow of independent English rule. Hitherto the northern border of England had shown a tendency to fall back rather than to advance, and a generation later the same tendency showed itself again. But Rufus did what neither his father nor his brother did; he enlarged the actual kingdom of England by the addition of a new shire, a new earldom—​in process of time a new bishopric—​and he raised as its capital a renewed city whose calling it was to be the foremost bulwark of England in her northern wars. Whatever any other spot on either side of the sea may be bound to do, Carlisle, city and earldom, is bound to pay to the Red King the honours of a founder. And the Saxon branch of the English people must see in him one who planted a strong colony of their blood on the lands of men of other races, kindred and alien. Mistakes as to the position of Cumberland and Westmoreland. There is a certain amusement in seeing the endless discussions in which men have entangled themselves in order to explain the simple fact that Cumberland and Westmoreland are not entered in Domesday, forgetful that it was just as reasonable to look for them there as it would have been to look there for Caithness or the Côtentin. Cumberland and Westmoreland, by those names, formed no part of the English kingdom when the Conqueror drew up his Survey. Parts of the lands so called, those parts which till recent changes formed part, first of the diocese of York, afterwards of that of Chester, are entered in Domesday in their natural place, as parts of Yorkshire.[880] The other parts are not entered, for the simple reason that they were then no part of the kingdom of England. It was now, in the third or fourth year of William Rufus, that they became so.

History of Carlisle. Lugubalia or Caerluel was reckoned among the Roman cities of Britain. It was reckoned too among the cities of the Northumbrian realm, in the great days of that realm, 603–685. from the victory of Æthelfrith at Dægsanstan to the fall of Ecgfrith at Nectansmere.[881] Then the Northumbrian power fell back from the whole land between Clyde and Solway, and all trace of Lugubalia is lost in the confused history of the land of the Northern Britons. Its site, to say the least, must have formed part of that northern British land whose king and people sought Eadward the Unconquered to father and lord.[882] It must have formed part of that well nigh first of territorial fiefs which Eadmund the Doer-of-great-deeds granted to his Scottish fellow-worker.[883] It must have formed part of the under-kingdom which so long served as an appanage for the heirs of Scottish kingship. But, amidst all these changes, though the land passed under the over-lordship of the Basileus of Britain, yet it never, from Ecgfrith to Rufus, passed under the immediate dominion of any English king. And, as far as the city itself was concerned, for the last two centuries before Rufus the site was all that was left to pass to any one. Scandinavians in Cumberland. The history of Scandinavian influence in Cumberland is one of the great puzzles of our early history. The Northman is there to speak for himself; but it is not easy to say how and when he came there.[884] But one result of Scandinavian occupation or Scandinavian inroad was the overthrow of Lugubalia. Carlisle destroyed by Scandinavians. We gather that it fell, as Anderida fell before Ælle and Cissa, as Aquæ Solis fell before Ceawlin, as the City of the Legions fell before Æthelfrith.[885] But now the son of the Conqueror was to be to Lugubalia what the daughter of Ælfred had been to the City of the Legions. The king who made the land of Carlisle English bade the walls of Carlisle again rise, to fence in a city of men, a colony of the Saxon land.

Dolfin lord of Carlisle. At this moment the land of Carlisle, defined, as we can hardly doubt, by the limits of the ancient diocese, was the only spot of Britain where any man of English race ruled. Its prince, lord, earl—​no definite title is given him—​was Dolfin the son of Gospatric, a scion of the old Northumbrian princely house and sprung by female descent from the Imperial stock of Wessex.[886] When or how Dolfin had got possession of his lordship we know not; but it can hardly fail to have been a grant from Malcolm, and it must have been held by him in the character of a man of the Scottish king.

Dolfin driven out, the city restored and the castle built. 1092. We are not told whether either Dolfin or Malcolm had given any new offence to William, or whether there was any other motive for the King’s action at this moment. We can record only the event. Rufus went northward with a great force to Carlisle. He drove out Dolfin; he restored the forsaken city; he built the castle; he left a garrison in it, and went southward again.[887] But this was not all.The Saxon colony. Not only was the restored city to be a bulwark of England, but the conquered land was to become a colony of Englishmen. Many churlish folk were sent thither with wives and cattle, to dwell in the land and to till it.[888] We thus see, what seems always to be forgotten in discussions of Cumbrian ethnology, that, at least in the immediate district of Carlisle, the last element in its mixed population was distinctly Saxon.[889] Supposed connexion with the making of the New Forest. Ingenious writers have guessed that the men who were now settled at Carlisle were the very men who had been deprived of their homes and lands at the making of the New Forest. There is no evidence for this guess, and every likelihood is against it. Though I hold that the dispossessed land-owners and occupiers of Hampshire are not an imaginary class,[890] yet I cannot think that they can have formed so large a class as to have gone any way towards colonizing even so small a district as the old diocese of Carlisle. But it is plain that the land needed inhabitants, and that the new inhabitants were sought for in the south of England. In the Carlisle district then the order of settlement among the races of Britain is different from what it is anywhere else. Elsewhere it is Briton, Angle or Saxon, Dane or Northman. Here, as far as one can see, the order must be Briton, Angle, Pict, Northman, Saxon.

The land and earldom of Carlisle. The land now added to England is strictly the land of Carlisle. We do not hear the names of Cumberland or Westmoreland till after the times with which we are dealing. The restored city gave its name to the land, to its earls, when it had earls, to its bishops when it had bishops.[891] And truly of all the cities of England none is more memorable in its own special way than that which now for the first time became a city of united England. History and character of the city. The local history of Carlisle stands out beyond that of almost any other English city on the surface of English history. It has not, as local history so often has; to be dug out of special records by special research. Called into fresh being to be the bulwark of England against Scotland, Carlisle remained the bulwark of England against Scotland as long as England needed any bulwark on that side. In every Scottish war, from Stephen to George the Second, Carlisle plays its part. Its analogy with Edinburgh and Stirling. Nor is it perhaps unfit that a city whose special work was to act as a check upon the Scot should itself have in its general look somewhat of a Scottish character. The site of the city and castle instinctively reminds us of the sites of Edinburgh and Stirling. It is a likeness in miniature; but it is a likeness none the less. The hill which is crowned by Carlisle castle is lower than the hills which are crowned by the two famous Scottish fortresses; but in all three cases the original city climbs the hill whose highest point is crowned by the castle. At Carlisle the castle stands at the northern end of the city, and its look-out over the Eden, towards the Scottish march, is emphatically the look-out of a sentinel. It looks out towards the land which so long was hostile; but it looks out also on one spot which suggests the memories of times when Scots, Picts, and Britons may have been there, but when they found no English or Danish adversaries to meet them. The Roman wall avoids Lugubalia itself, though the inner line of foss, which runs some way south of the wall itself, is said to be traced along the line which divides the castle from the city. But among the most prominent points of view from the castle is Stanwix, the site of the nearest Roman station, which seems to bear about it the memory of the stones of the ancient builders. The wall and the castle. Here, on the brow of the hill, cut off by a ditch like so many headlands of the same kind, on a site which had doubtless been a place of strength for ages before the Roman came, the Red King reared the new bulwark of his realm. Of the works of his age there are still large remains; how much is the work of Rufus himself, how much of his successor, it might be hard to say. The square keep is there, though sadly disfigured by the unhappy use of the castle as a barrack; a large part of the wall, both of city and castle, is still, after many patchings and rebuildings, of Norman date; it is still in many places plainly built out of Roman stones. Here and there one is even tempted to think that some of those stones in the lower part of the wall may have stood there since Carlisle was Lugubalia. Castle and city bear about them the memories of many later times and many stirring scenes in history. Works of Rufus and Henry at Carlisle. But on that spot we are most called on to trace out, in church and city and castle, every scrap that reminds us of the two founders of Carlisle, the two royal sons of the Conqueror. The names which before all others live on that site are those of William who raised up city and fortress from the sleep of ages, and of Henry who completed the work by adding Carlisle to the tale of English episcopal sees.[892]

Fortunes of Henry. In the same year in which King William of England thus advanced and strengthened the borders of his kingdom by strength of arms, his youngest brother again became a ruler of men by a nobler title. Whatever was the date or the length of Henry’s day of distress, it came to an end about the time of the restoration of Carlisle. No call could be more honourable than that which again set him in a place of power. Domfront held by Robert of Bellême. Among the many victims of Robert of Bellême were the people of Domfront, the old conquest of William the Great. The castle had passed into the hands of the tyrant, and grievous was the oppression which Domfront and the coasts thereof suffered at his hands. The men of Domfront choose Henry to lord. 1093. The inhabitants, under the lead of a chief man of the place, Harecher or Archard by name, rose in revolt, and chose the banished Count of the Côtentin as their lord and defender against the common enemy of mankind. In company with this local patriot, Henry came to Domfront; he accepted the offered lordship, and entered into the closest relations with those who had chosen him. He bound himself to respect all their local customs, and never to give them over to any other master. Henry kept his word; amidst all changes, he clave to Domfront for the rest of his days as a specially cherished possession.[893]

Position of Domfront. It was indeed, both in its position and in its associations, a noble starting-point for one who had to carve out a dominion for himself by his wits or by his sword. It was a place of happy omen for a son of William the Conqueror, as the place where his father first began to deserve that title, his first possession beyond the elder bounds of his own duchy.[894] Henry was now lord of the rocky peninsula, which, impregnable as it had once been deemed, had yielded to the terror of his father’s name, and where the donjon of his father’s rearing opened its doors to receive his greatest son as a prince and a deliverer. On one side, the Varenne flowed far beneath the rock, parting it from the wilder rocks beyond the stream. On the other side, on the same level as the castle, but with a slight dip between the two, just like the dip which parts town and castle at Nottingham,[895] was the walled town, in after days itself a mighty fortress, girded with double walls and towers in thick array, and entered by a grim and frowning gateway with two massive flanking towers grounded on the solid rock. But, of all spots in the world, Domfront is one whose lord could never bear to be lord of Domfront only. From few spots not fixed on actual Alps or Pyrenees can the eye range over a wider prospect than it ranges over from the castle steep of Henry’s new lordship. To the north the view is by comparison shut in; but on this side lies the way into the true heart of Normandy, to Caen and Bayeux and all that lies between. To the west the eye catches the hills of the Avranchin; to the south the land of Maine stretches far away, the land of his father’s victories at Ambrières and at Mayenne, the land whose sight suggests that the land of Anjou lies yet beyond it. To the south Henry might look on lands which were to be the inheritance of his children; to the north he looked on lands which were one day to be his own; but to the south-west, towards Mortain and Avranches and the Archangel’s Mount, his eye might light on a region some of the most famous spots of which he was presently to win with his own right hand.

Change in Henry’s affairs.
His old friends join him For the tide in Henry’s affairs turned fast, as soon as the wanderer of the Vexin became the chosen lord of Domfront. His old friends in his former principality began to flock around him once more. Earl Hugh was again on his side, with Richard of Redvers and the rest.[896] Earl Hugh.And he had now a mightier friend than all. King Henry restored to William’s favour. William of England soon found out that he had not played a wise part for his own interests, or at least for his own plans, in strengthening his elder brother at the expense of the younger. Henry at war with Robert. He was now again scheming against Robert; he therefore favoured the growth of the new power on the Cenomannian border. It was with the Red King’s full sanction that Domfront became the head-quarters of a warfare which Henry waged against both Roberts, the Duke and the tyrant of Bellême.[897] He made many expeditions, which were largely rewarded with plunder and captives, and in the course of which some picturesque incidents happened which may call for some notice later in our story.[898] For the present we are concerned rather with the re-establishment of Henry’s power, of which his possession of Domfront was at once the earnest and the beginning. He gets back his county. Favoured by William, helped by his former friends, Henry was soon again a powerful prince, lord of the greater part of his old county of Coutances and Avranches. And this dominion was secured on his southern border by the occupation of another fortress almost as important as Domfront itself, and no less closely connected with the memory of Henry’s father.

Castle of Saint James occupied by Henry. This was the castle of Saint James, the stronghold which the Conqueror reared to guard the Breton march,[899] which stands close on that dangerous frontier, in the southernmost part of the land of Avranches. That hilly and wooded land puts on at this point a somewhat bolder character. Its position. A peninsular hill with steep sides, and with a rushing beck, the Beuvron, between itself and the opposite heights, was a point which the eye of William the Great had marked out as a fitting site for a border-castle. Yet the castle did not occupy the exact spot where one would have looked for it. We should have thought to find it at the very head of the promontory, commanding the valley on all sides. It is so at Ballon; it is not so at Saint Cenery or at Conches. But in a more marked way than either of these, the castle of Saint James stood on one side of the hill, the south side certainly, the side looking towards the dangerous land, but still not occupying the most commanding position of all. In this choice of a site we may perhaps see a mark of the Conqueror’s respect for religion. The ecclesiastical name of the place shows that, in William’s day, the church of Saint James already occupied the lofty site which its successor still keeps. Castle-builders less scrupulous than the great William might perhaps have ventured, like Geoffrey of Mayenne at Saint Cenery,[900] to build their fortress on the holy ground. The Conqueror had been content with the less favourable part of the hill, and at Saint James, as at Conches, church and castle stood side by side. The natural beauty of the site cannot pass away; the look-out over the valley on either side is fairer and more peaceful now than it was in William’s day; but every care has been taken to destroy or to mutilate all that could directly remind us of the days when Saint James was a stronghold of dukes and kings. Slight remains of the castle. The elder church has given way to a structure strangely made up of modern buildings and ancient fragments. The tower of the Conqueror still gives its name to the Place of the Fort; but there are no such remains as we see in the shattered keep of Domfront, hardly such remains as may be traced out at Saint Cenery and on the Rock of Mabel. A line of wall to the south, strengthening the scarped hill-side like the oldest walls of Rome, is all that is left to speak to us of the castle which was William’s most famous work on that border of his dominions. Nothing beyond these small scraps is left of the fortress whose building led to that memorable march against the Breton in which William and Harold fought as fellow-soldiers.[901]

The castle granted to Earl Hugh. We are not told what were Henry’s relations with Britanny at the time when this great border fortress passed into his hands. Bretons had been his only friends at the time of the siege of the Mount; but their friendship for the Count of the Côtentin was perhaps felt for him, not so much in that character as in that of the enemy of the Norman Duke and the English King. It may possibly mark a feeling that the Celtic peninsula might again become a dangerous land, when the guardianship of the chief bulwark against the Bretwealas of the mainland was given to one who had full experience of warfare with the Bretwealas of the great island. The Earl of Chester had a hereditary call to be the keeper of the castle of Saint James. The fortress had, on its first building, been entrusted by the Conqueror to the guardianship of Earl Hugh’s father, the Viscount Richard of Avranches. Hugh’s treason when King and Duke came against him was now forgotten; his earlier and later services were remembered; and the restored prince, now once more Count as well as Ætheling, granted the border castle, not as a mere castellanship, but as his own proper fief, to the lord of the distant City of the Legions.[902]

We have thus seen the power of William the Red firmly established on both sides of the sea. He had received the homage of Scotland; he had enlarged the bounds of England; he had won for himself a Norman dominion hemming in the dominions which are left to the nominal sovereign of the Norman land. And it is wonderful with how little fighting all this had been done. It was only before the island rock of Saint Michael that the chivalrous King had any opportunity of winning renown by feats of chivalry. A year follows, crowded with events, but all of them events which happened within the four seas of our own island. Our next chapter will therefore deal mainly with English affairs, and with some aspects of English affairs which yield in importance to none in the whole history of England. One of the chief personages of our story now comes before us in the form of the holy Anselm. Few more striking personal contrasts are to be found in the whole range of history than those parts of our tale where Anselm and William meet face to face. But more memorable still, in a general aspect of English history, is the work which has been silently going on ever since William Rufus was made fast on his throne, the work which stands broadly forth as a finished thing when the controversy between King and Primate begins. Assuredly no “feudal system” was ever introduced into England by any law of William the Great; but it is only a slight stretch of language to say that something which, if any one chooses, may be called a “feudal system” was, during these years, devised in and for England by the craft and subtlety of Randolf Flambard.