7. The Revolt of the Earls.—Meanwhile a revolt broke out in England, which was not, like the revolt of Ely, a rising of the English people against strangers, but a revolt of a few of the great men for their own ends. Roger, Earl of Hereford, gave his sister Emma in marriage to Ralph, Earl of Norfolk, against the King’s orders, which was in itself an offence. Then at the bride-ale they began to talk treason, and to plot how they might kill the King and divide the kingdom. Earl Waltheof too was there; but it is not clear how far he consented to their schemes. On the whole it seems most likely that he at first agreed and swore, and then repented and drew back. He went and confessed to Archbishop Lanfranc, who told him to go and tell the King everything. So Waltheof crossed to Normandy and told everything, and the King received him kindly and kept him with him. Meanwhile the two other earls had revolted openly. But they found few men to help them, except their mercenaries and a number of Bretons who were attached to Earl Ralph. Ralph moreover made a league with King Swegen for a Danish fleet to be sent yet again. The English, who might have risen for Edgar or Swegen, thought that no good was likely to come of a revolt like this, and they fought for the King against the earls. Earl Roger was stopped by Bishop Wulfstan and Abbot Æthelwig; the Norman bishops Odo and Geoffrey went against Earl Ralph, who fled to Denmark, while his wife defended the castle of Norwich against the King. The Danes, under Cnut, came at last, and sailed up to York; but they did nothing except rob the minster. Norwich castle surrendered; the revolt was altogether put down, and those who had a hand in it were punished in various ways; but none of them were put to death.
8. The Death of Waltheof.—Ralph of Norfolk had escaped, and his latter end was better than his beginning; for he and his wife went to the crusade and died on the way. Roger of Hereford was kept in prison, some say for the rest of his days. But Waltheof, whose crime, if he had done any, was less than theirs, was in Normandy with the King, and seemingly in his favour. He came back to England with the King, and was soon after put in prison. He was twice brought for trial before an assembly of the great men, and the second time, at Pentecost 1076, he was condemned to death and was beheaded on the hills near Winchester on May 31. This was the only time in his whole reign that William put any man to death except in war. And it is strange that William, who had forgiven his enemies, Waltheof himself among them, over and over again, should have dealt so much more harshly with Waltheof than with Roger and others who were far more guilty. But it is said that Waltheof had many Norman enemies, his wife Judith among them. His earldom of Northumberland was given to his friend Bishop Walcher. The English looked on him as a saint and martyr, and believed that miracles were wrought at his tomb at Crowland. And men generally believed that, after Waltheof’s death, King William’s good luck, which had hitherto followed him in such a wonderful way, began to forsake him.
9. The Rebellion of Robert.—And so it did, whether the death of Waltheof had anything to do with it or not. The very same year the Conqueror suffered his first defeat. For some reason or other, he besieged Dol in Britanny; but he failed and had to fly. Then his son Robert got discontented, because his father refused to give up any part of his dominions to him. Robert went away, and tried to get various princes to help him. King Philip did give him help, and many of the young nobles of Normandy joined him. In 1079 Philip put him in the castle of Gerberoi, and William came to besiege it. In a sally, Robert overthrew his father, who was saved by the Englishman Tokig, son of Wiggod of Wallingford. But William could not take Gerberoi, and he was persuaded to be reconciled to Robert. Meanwhile Malcolm of Scotland made another frightful inroad into Northumberland, and in 1080 Robert was sent to chastise him. Robert did very little, but on his way back he founded a new castle by the Tyne, whence the town of Newcastle took its name. Robert then again quarrelled with his father, and went away into France, never to come back as long as his father lived.
10. The Death of Matilda.—William and his Queen Matilda had lived in all love and confidence up to the time of William’s quarrel with Robert. Then for the first time they also quarrelled, because Matilda would send gifts to her son in his banishment, against his father’s orders. A little later, in 1083, she died. Their second son Richard had already died in a strange way while hunting in the New Forest, and one of their daughters died while on her way to marry a Spanish king. But, besides Robert, William’s other sons, William and Henry, were living; one daughter, Constance, was married to Count Alan of Britanny, and another, Adela, to Count Stephen of Chartres. Another, Cecily, was a nun. Just about the time of Matilda’s death there was another revolt in Maine, where the Viscount Hubert held the castle of Sainte-Susanne for three years (1083–1086) against all William’s power. The castle could not be taken, and at last William was driven to receive Hubert to his favour.
11. The Death of Bishop Walcher.—William had thus during these years to undergo several domestic losses and several defeats in war on the mainland. But his hold on England was as firm as ever. After the revolt of the earls, there was nothing which could be called a rebellion, only a local outbreak, in which a local governor lost his life on account of one particular wrong deed. This was Bishop Walcher of Durham, to whom William had given the earldom of Northumberland. This bishop seems, as a temporal ruler, to have been weak rather than oppressive; he is not charged with wrong-doing himself, but with failing to punish wrong-doers. He had several favourites, both English and foreign, who did much mischief. At last some of them murdered one Ligulf, an Englishman of the highest rank in the country, and withal a chief friend of the bishop himself. But even these men he spared, so that the people believed that he had himself a hand in Ligulf’s murder. So when an Assembly met to judge the case, the people, headed by the chief Englishmen present, killed the bishop and all his followers. Then Odo was sent to punish them; but he took money, and put innocent men to death, and again harried the land. This was in 1080, the year that Robert was sent against the Scots. This was not a revolt against the Norman king as such, but rather a riot, such as might have happened just as well under Edward or Harold, if any earl of theirs had given the same offence.
12. Death of Cnut of Denmark.—Thus there was nothing, except the inroad of Malcolm, to be called war in England after the revolt of the earls in 1075. But in William’s last years a very formidable attack on England was threatened. Cnut of Denmark, who had twice sailed up the Humber, never quite gave up the thoughts of conquering or delivering England. When he himself became king, he made great preparations, and was joined by his father-in-law Robert of Flanders, and by Olaf of Norway, the son of Harold Hardrada. In 1085 Cnut got together a great fleet, and William brought over a vast host of mercenaries to guard the land. But a quarrel arose between Cnut and his brother Olaf, and the next year Cnut was killed in a church by his own men, and was called a saint and martyr. Thus the danger was turned away from William.
13. Summary.—We have thus seen how William, having gradually conquered all England, went on to assert the old lordship of the English crown over the rest of Britain. He could not however, any more than the kings before him, keep matters wholly quiet on the Welsh and Scottish borders. In Wales the power of his earls advanced; but King Malcolm, though he became William’s man, remained a dangerous enemy. In England there was no real popular revolt after the submission of Ely. The English generally did not favour the rebel earls, and the death of Bishop Walcher was a riot rather than a revolt. On the whole, the land remained quite quiet under William’s rule. Beyond sea Maine revolted and was conquered afresh; but after this great success came several petty wars in which William’s good fortune came to an end. Yet, when England was concerned, it came back again, as the great preparations of Cnut came to nothing. William had also his domestic troubles, the rebellion of one son, the death of another, and the death of his wife. And in all this the men of the time saw the penalty for the death of Waltheof.
CHAPTER XII.
How King William ruled the Land.
1. William’s Government.—We have thus seen how a foreign prince won, and how he kept, the kingdom of England, and how little, after he had once really won it, his rule was disturbed either by revolts at home or by attacks from abroad. We now ask, What was the nature of his government in England all this time? The answer must be that with which we started at first, namely that his government was different both from that of a lawful native king and from that of a conqueror who had come in without any show of right. William was no wanton oppressor, and he no doubt honestly wished to rule his kingdom as well as he could. He even tried to learn English, that he might the better do his duty as an English king. He professed to rule according to the law of King Edward, that is, to rule as well and justly as King Edward had done. And in fact he made very few changes in the old laws. The changes which began with his reign were mostly those gradual changes which could not fail to happen when all circumstances were so greatly changed. The laws might still be the same; but their working could not be the same, when the king was a stranger, and when all the greatest estates and offices had passed into the hands of strangers. By the end of William’s reign there were very few Englishmen holding great estates; there was no English earl and only one English bishop. Again, William’s government was much stronger than that of any king who had been before him; he was better able to enforce the law, and he did enforce it very strictly. The English writers give him all praise for making good peace in the land, that is for severely punishing all wrong-doers. A king who did this in those days was forgiven much that was bad in other ways. The special complaint which men made against William’s government was that he was greedy and covetous, and laid on heavy taxes which men deemed to be wrongful. This is no doubt true; but it is to be remembered that regular taxation was then coming in as something new, and that in no age are men fond of having their money taken from them.
2. William’s Laws.—William however did make some new laws. These laws were solemnly enacted in the regular assemblies of the kingdom; but then those assemblies were gradually changing from gatherings of Englishmen into gatherings of Normans. He renewed, as the saying went, Edward’s Law, with such changes as he said were for the good of the English people. Some of these changes were made merely for the time, while there was still a distinction between English and French. This last is the word commonly used to take in both the Normans and all the other French-speaking people whom William had brought with him. Frenchmen who had settled in King Edward’s time were to reckon as Englishmen. Normans and Englishmen were to live in peace, but as the Normans were often killed privily, a special law was made for their protection. If the murderer was not to be found, the hundred was to pay. And for some purposes each nation was to keep its own law. Both English and Normans used, in doubtful cases, to appeal to the judgement of God; but the Normans sought to find out the truth by single combat and the English by the ordeal of hot iron. William allowed both ways, and ordered that each man might keep the custom of his own nation. He forbade the slave-trade by which men were sold out of the land, chiefly to Ireland. This had been forbidden by earlier kings also, but William himself could not wholly get rid of the evil practice. He forbade the punishment of death; criminals might be blinded or mutilated, but not hanged or otherwise killed. This rule he most strictly observed himself, save only in the case of Waltheof. And just at the end of his reign, in 1086, in a great assembly at Salisbury, he made what was in the end the most important law of all. Every man in the land, of whatever other lord he might be the man, swore to be faithful to King William in all things, even against his other lord. Of how great moment this law was we shall see presently.