Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy

by Charles W. David

It would seem that with domestic bereavement, and the distractions of rebellion and private war, Robert Curthose had enough to occupy him within the limits of his duchy. Yet it was apparently during this critical period that a foolish impulse of generosity towards a friend led him to embark upon an enterprise which resulted in further humiliation and disaster. William of Warenne, one of the barons who had been deprived of his possessions and honors in England after the failure of the invasion of 1101, came to the duke to complain that through loyalty to his cause he had lost the great earldom of Surrey with its annual revenue of 1000 pounds, and besought him to intercede with King Henry in order that he might regain the earldom and the royal favor. Apparently the duke had not yet realized the character of his unscrupulous brother, or the hostile plans which Henry was maturing against him, and he readily consented to William of Warenne’s request.[41]

It must have been towards the end of the year 1103 that Duke Robert crossed the Channel with a small suite of knights and squires and landed at Southampton.[42] Henry I was quick to realize the advantages of the situation, and with perfect unscrupulousness he determined to use them to the utmost. Feigning great indignation that Robert had presumed to enter his dominions without permission and a safe-conduct, he sent his agents—Robert of Meulan seems to have been chiefly charged with the enterprise[43]—to intimate to him that he was in grave danger of capture and imprisonment. The duke was taken completely by surprise. He had no armed force at his back. He was, in fact, at the king’s mercy, although the externals of an honorable reception were accorded him, and he was conducted to the royal court, where negotiations were carried on in private. Henry charged him with a violation of the treaty of Alton in that, instead of punishing traitors with the rigor befitting a prince, he had made peace with Robert of Bellême and had confirmed him in the possession of certain of their father’s domains. The duke, appreciating his helplessness in the situation in which he found himself, humbly promised to make amends; but the king now informed him that he desired something more than this—indeed, that he would not permit him to quit the realm until he had surrendered his claim to the annual subsidy of 3000 marks which was due him under the terms of the treaty of Alton. In order that this crowning humiliation might be cloaked in a garb of decency, the duke was allowed to see the queen, his god-daughter, and to relinquish the subsidy as if at her request.[44] But this clever play upon his chivalrous nature could not conceal the character of the transaction. Robert in his ineffable simplicity had been treacherously taken and robbed. According to William of Malmesbury, the king had even gone the length of inducing him to come to England by a special invitation.[45] However this may be, and whatever the uncertainty about the details of this episode, the sources are agreed as to the character of the part which the king had played in it.[46] Wace avers that it was only then that Robert began to realize that his brother hated him.[47]

William of Warenne was now restored to the royal favor, and recovered his earldom. And the duke, having given full satisfaction in all that was demanded of him, was allowed to return to Normandy, a greater object of contempt than ever among his subjects.[48] It can hardly be doubted that from this moment the king had formed a deliberate project of depriving him of his duchy and of reuniting Normandy to England. Step by step Robert was paving the way to his own destruction, while Henry with equal sureness was preparing himself for the final triumph. Whatever prestige the duke had brought back with him from the Crusade must long since have been dissipated. He had failed lamentably in his attempt to gain the English crown, he had failed to oust an ever encroaching enemy from the strongholds of his duchy, he had failed to subdue his most powerful and lawless subject, Robert of Bellême. He had placed no check upon the anarchy of private war, he had wasted his fortune upon base associates and barren enterprises, and he had alienated the Norman church.

Since the duke’s return from the Crusade, government in Normandy seems to have been almost in abeyance. Nothing could more surely have lost Robert the support of the church than the unrestrained anarchy and disorder which prevailed. Yet there were other grounds on which he was found wanting by the clergy. While dissipating his treasure upon unworthy favorites and unscrupulous courtiers, he had few favors to bestow upon religious foundations. Only a single charter by the duke has survived from the period after his return from the Crusade, a grant of a fair and a market in the village of Cheux to the monks of Saint-Étienne of Caen.[49]

But the church had greater and more positive grievances against Robert Curthose. His peace and friendship with Robert of Bellême were an unpardonable offence; and by granting lucrative rights over the bishopric of Séez to this turbulent vassal,[50] the duke had aroused enemies whose influence against him was to prove disastrous in the crisis of 1105. As has already been explained,[51] Serlo, bishop of Séez, and Ralph, abbot of Saint-Martin of Séez, deemed it intolerable longer to endure the oppression of the tyrant; and going into voluntary exile, they sought an asylum in England, where they were warmly welcomed by Henry I.[52] The value which the king attached to the support and services of Abbot Ralph may perhaps be judged by the fact that he was promoted to the see of Rochester in 1108 and made archbishop of Canterbury in 1114; and it is no mere chance that it was Bishop Serlo who was to welcome King Henry and his invading army in Normandy in 1105, and to preach the sermon which was to stand as the public justification of the king’s action in dispossessing his brother of the duchy.[53]

But the duke had sinned further against the church through the practice of simony. A peculiarly flagrant case occurred in 1105 in connection with the abbey of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives. Upon the death of Abbot Fulk, the duke sold the abbacy for one hundred and forty-five marks of silver to a certain Robert, a wicked monk of Saint-Denis, who like a devouring wolf drove out the monks, built a stronghold in the sacred precincts of the monastery, and garrisoned it with armed retainers whom he hired out of profits derived from the sale of ecclesiastical ornaments belonging to the abbey.[54]

More notorious still, and more fatal to the good name of the duke, was the situation which arose in the bishopric of Lisieux upon the death of Gilbert Maminot in August 1101. At first Ranulf Flambard, the notorious bishop of Durham, succeeded in gaining the vacant see for his brother Fulcher, who, in spite of his illiteracy, had some commendable qualities; and since he lived but a few months after his consecration, no active protest was raised against him.[55] But upon his death, Flambard resorted to a more scandalous measure and obtained the see for his son Thomas, a youth some twelve years of age.[56] The duke invested the boy with the sacred office, at the same time agreeing that, if he should die, another of Flambard’s sons, who was still younger, should succeed to the bishopric.[57] And meanwhile Flambard himself administered the affairs of the see, “not as bishop but as steward.”[58]

So matters stood for some three years, until in 1105 the great canonist and reformer, Ivo of Chartres, intervened, and through his immense influence elevated what had hitherto been but a flagrant local abuse into an affair of something like European importance. He wrote to the Norman bishops demanding that they put an end to such a scandal.[59] Meanwhile, the serious danger in which Robert Curthose stood of losing his duchy brought him for a moment to his senses, and, at the urgent warning of the archbishop of Rouen and of the bishop of Évreux, he had Flambard and his sons ejected from the see, and gave orders for a canonical election.[60] The choice of the clergy fell upon William, archdeacon of Évreux, a worthy man, who went at once to the metropolitan and demanded consecration;[61] and Ivo of Chartres wrote to congratulate the Norman bishops upon having purged the church of the ‘dirty boys’ who had been thrust into the sacred office.[62] But now new complications arose. It so happened that William Bonne-Ame, archbishop of Rouen, was then under sentence of excommunication, and therefore incompetent to install the new bishop elect. Accordingly, the latter wrote Bishop Ivo to inquire whether under the circumstances he might legitimately receive consecration from the suffragans of the excommunicated archbishop. Ivo confessed himself unable to answer the question, and referred the bishop elect to Rome to deal directly with the Holy See.[63]

During this unexpected delay, Flambard executed another ‘tergiversation.’ He induced the duke, in return for a great sum, to confer the bishopric upon one of his clerks, a certain William de Pacy.[64] Again the venerable Ivo wrote to the archbishop of Rouen and the bishop of Évreux to protest against this new introduction of uncleanness into the church which they had so recently purged, and to warn them that unless they acted with vigor to correct this latest abuse, he would bring the “filthy, fetid rumor to the apostolic ears” to their no small disadvantage.[65] The threat was not without avail. William de Pacy was summoned to Rouen to answer before the metropolitan for his conduct, and was able to make no defence. He freely admitted that he had received the bishopric neither by election of clergy and people nor by the free gift of the duke. Judgment upon him, however, was suspended—perhaps because the archbishop was still under sentence of excommunication—and he was sent to Rome, there to be condemned for simony.[66] Bishop Ivo wrote to the Pope setting forth in detail the whole course of the disgraceful business.