A history of England

by Charles Oman

William the Red's arms were as successful against Wales as against Scotland. During his reign the southern half of the land of the Cymry was overrun by Norman barons, who won for themselves new lordships beyond the Wye and Severn, and did homage for them to the king. Many of these adventurers married into the families of the South Welsh princes, and became the inheritors of their local power. In North Wales the Normans pushed across the Dee, and built great castles at Rhuddlan and Flint and Montgomery, but they could not win the mountainous districts about Snowdon, where the native chiefs still maintained a precarious independence.

William obtains possession of Normandy.

Beyond the British seas William waged constant war with his brother Robert, and always had the better of his elder, for the duke, though a brave soldier, was a very incapable ruler, and lost by his shiftless negligence all that he gained by his sword. He was forced in 1091 to cede several of his towns to William, and to promise to make him his heir if he should die without male issue. But in 1096 the king gained possession of the whole, and not a mere fraction, of the Norman duchy. For Robert, seized with a sudden access of piety and a spirit of wandering and unrest, vowed to go off to the First Crusade, which was then being preached. In order to get the money to fit out a large army, he unwisely mortgaged the whole of his lands to his grasping brother for the very moderate sum of £6666. So William ruled Normandy for a space, and Robert went off with half the baronage of Western Christendom, to deliver the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks, and to set up a Christian kingdom in Palestine. Among his companions were the Etheling Eadgar, and many Englishmen more. The duke fought so gallantly against the infidel that the Crusaders offered him the crown of Jerusalem; but he would have none of it, and set his face homeward after four years of absence (1099).

William's extortions.—Quarrel with the Church.—Anselm.

King William meanwhile had been ruling both England and Normandy with a high hand. He and his favourite minister, Ralf Flambard, had been devising all manner of new ways for raising money. When a tenant of the crown died, they would not let his son or heir succeed to his estate till he had paid an extortionate fine to the king. When a bishop or an abbot died, they kept his place empty for months—or even for years—and confiscated all the revenues of the see or abbey during the vacancy. It was on this question that there broke out the celebrated quarrel between William the Red and Archbishop Anselm. When Lanfranc, his father's wise counsellor, died in 1089, the king left the see of Canterbury unfilled for nearly four years, and embezzled its revenues. But, being stricken with illness in 1093, he had a moment of compunction, and filled up the archbishopric by appointing Anselm, Abbot of Bec. Anselm, like his predecessor Lanfranc, was a learned and pious Italian monk, who had governed his Norman abbey so well that he won the respect of all his neighbours. He was only persuaded with difficulty to accept the position of head of the English Church. "Will you couple me, a poor weak old sheep, to that fierce young bull the King of England?" he asked, when the bishops came to offer him the primacy. But they forced the pastoral staff into his hands, and hurried him off to be installed. When William recovered from his sickness he began to ask large sums of money from Anselm, in return for the piece of preferment that he had received. The king called this exacting his feudal dues, but the archbishop called it simony, the ancient crime of Simon Magus, who offered gold to the apostles to buy spiritual privileges. He sent £500, but when the king asked for more, utterly refused to comply. From this time forth there was constant strife between William and Anselm, the first beginning of that intermittent war between the crown and the Church which was to last for more than two centuries. The archbishop was always withstanding the king. When two popes disputed the tiara at Rome, William refused to acknowledge either; but Anselm would not allow that there was any doubt, did homage to Urban, and thus forced the king's hand by committing England to one side in the dispute. When Urban sent over to Anselm the pall, [9] the sign of his metropolitan jurisdiction over the island, the king wished to deliver it to the archbishop with his own hands. But Anselm vowed that this was receiving spiritual things from a secular master, and would not take it save with his own hands and from the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. Nor did he cease denouncing the ill living of the king and his courtiers, till William grew so wrath that he would have slain him, had not all England revered the fearless archbishop as a saint. At last he found a way of molesting Anselm under form of law: he declared that the lands of the see of Canterbury had not sent an adequate feudal contingent to his Welsh wars, and imposed enormous fines on the archbishop for a breach of his duties as a tenant-in-chief of the crown. Soon afterwards Anselm left the realm, abandoning the king to his own devices as incorrigible, and took his way to Pope Urban at Rome; nor did he return till William was dead.

Death of William II.

The end of the Red King was sudden and tragic. He was hunting in the New Forest—the great tract in Hampshire which his father had cleared of its inhabitants and turned into one vast deer-park—and he had chanced to draw apart from all his followers save Walter Tyrrel, one of his chief favourites. A great hart came bounding between them. The king loosed an arrow at it, and missed; "Shoot, Walter, shoot in the devil's name!" he cried. Tyrrel shot in haste, but missed the stag and pierced his master to the heart. Leaving William dead on the ground, he galloped off to the shore and took ship for the continent. William's corpse lay lost in the wood till a charcoal-burner came upon it next day, and bore it in his cart to Winchester. Such was the strange funeral procession of the lord of England and Normandy. William's death grieved none save his favourites and boon companions, for his manner of living was hateful to all good men, and his taxes and extortions had turned from him the hearts of all his subjects (August 2, 1100).

Election of Henry I.—His charter.

When the throne of England was thus suddenly left vacant, it remained to be seen who would become William's successor. His elder brother Robert, whom the baronage would have preferred, because of his slackness and easy ways, was still far away, on his return journey from the Crusade. But Henry, his younger brother, was on the spot, and knew how to take advantage of the opportunity. Hastily assembling the few members of the Great Council who were near at hand, he prevailed upon them by bribes or promises to elect him king, and was proclaimed at Winchester only three days after William's death, and long before the news that the throne was vacant had reached the turbulent barons of the North and West. After his proclamation at Winchester, Henry moved to London, and there was crowned. He did his best to win the good opinion of all his subjects by issuing a charter of promises to the nation, wherein he bound himself to abide by "the laws of Edward the Confessor," that is, the ancient customs of England, and not to ask of any man more than his due share of taxation—agreeing to abandon the arbitrary and illegal fines on succession to heritages which William II. had always exacted. He then proceeded to fill up all the abbeys and bishoprics which William had kept vacant for his own profit, to recall Anselm from his exile, and to cast into prison Ralf Flambard, [10] the chief instrument of his brother's oppression and extortions.