The Danes had boasted that they would keep their Yule at York. William kept his Yule there instead. He sent to Winchester for the regalia of the Confessor; and in the midst of the blackened ruins, while the English, for miles around, wandered starving in the snows, feeding on carrion, on rats and mice, and, at last, upon each other’s corpses, he sat in his royal robes, and gave away the lands of Edwin and Morcar to his liegemen. And thus, like the Romans, from whom he derived both his strategy and his civilization, he “made a solitude and called it peace.”
He did not give away Waltheof’s lands; and only part of Gospatrick’s. He wanted Gospatrick; he loved Waltheof, and wanted him likewise.
Therefore, through the desert which he himself had made, he forced his way up to the Tees a second time, over snow-covered moors; and this time St. Cuthbert had sent no fog, being satisfied, presumably, with William’s orthodox attachment to St. Peter and Rome; so the Conqueror treated quietly with Waltheof and Gospatrick, who lay at Durham.
Gospatrick got back his ancestral earldom from Tees to Tyne; and paid down for it much hard money and treasure; bought it, in fact, he said.
Waltheof got back his earldom, and much of Morcar’s. From the fens to the Tees was to be his province. And then, to the astonishment alike of Normans and English, and it may be, of himself, he married Judith, the Conqueror’s niece; and became, once more, William’s loved and trusted friend—or slave.
It seems inexplicable at first sight. Inexplicable, save as an instance of that fascination which the strong sometimes exercise over the weak.
Then William turned southwest. Edwin, wild Edric, the dispossessed Thane of Shropshire, and the wilder Blethwallon and his Welshmen, were still harrying and slaying. They had just attacked Shrewsbury. William would come upon them by a way they thought not of.
So over the backbone of England, by way, probably, of Halifax, or Huddersfield, through pathless moors and bogs, down towards the plains of Lancashire and Cheshire, he pushed over and on. His soldiers from the plains of sunny France could not face the cold, the rain, the bogs, the hideous gorges, the valiant peasants,—still the finest and shrewdest race of men in all England,—who set upon them in wooded glens, or rolled stones on them from the limestone crags. They prayed to be dismissed, to go home.
“Cowards might go back,” said William; “he should go on. If he could not ride, he would walk. Whoever lagged, he would be foremost.” And, cheered by his example, the army at last debouched upon the Cheshire flats.
Then he fell upon Edwin, as he had fallen upon Morcar. He drove the wild Welsh through the pass of Mold, and up into their native hills. He laid all waste with fire and sword for many a mile, as Domesday-book testifies to this day. He strengthened the walls of Chester, and trampled out the last embers of rebellion; he went down south to Salisbury, King of England once again.