A short history of the Norman Conquest of England

by Edward A. Freeman

3. Changes in the Church.—Another law of William’s had reference to the affairs of the Church. It had hitherto been the custom in England that both civil and ecclesiastical matters should be dealt with in the general assemblies, both of the whole kingdom and of each shire. In these last the earl and the bishop sat together. William now ordered that the bishops should hold separate courts for Church causes. And all through William’s reign Lanfranc held many synods of the clergy distinct from the general assemblies of the kingdom. In these synods bishops and abbots were deposed, and many new canons were made. This was the time when Pope Gregory the Seventh was trying to forbid the marriage of the clergy everywhere. In England the secular clergy were very commonly married, both the parish priests and the canons in the secular minsters. The rule which Lanfranc laid down was that no canon should even keep a wife to whom he was already married; but the parish priests were allowed to keep their wives, only the unmarried were not to marry, nor was any married man to be ordained. Lanfranc was a monk and a favourer of monks; new monasteries were founded, above all King William’s abbey of the Battle, built, in discharge of his vow, on the hill of Senlac, with its high altar on the spot where Harold’s standard had stood. And monks were put into some churches where there had before been secular priests. The ecclesiastical rule of William and Lanfranc tended on the whole to greater learning and stricter discipline among the clergy; but these gains were purchased by thrusting strangers into all the chief places of the Church as well as of the State.

4. The New Bishops and Abbots.—We have said already that, as the bishops and abbots died, or, when there was any pretext for so doing, were deprived, strangers were appointed, always to the bishoprics, commonly to the abbeys. Some of the foreign abbots were rude or fierce men who despised the English. Such was Turold the stern abbot of Peterborough, of whom we have already heard; such was Paul of Saint Alban’s, who mocked at the old abbots and pulled down their tombs. Such too was Thurstan of Glastonbury, who, when his monks refused to sing the service after a new fashion, brought soldiers into the church, who slew several of them. But for this King William deposed him. But William’s prelates were not as a rule like these. Most of the new bishops worked hard, according to their light, in building their churches, and reforming their chapters and dioceses. Some of them, in obedience to one of Lanfranc’s canons, moved their sees from smaller towns to greater. Thus was the see of Lichfield moved to Chester (afterwards to Coventry), that of Elmham to Thetford (afterwards to Norwich), that of Sherborne to Old Salisbury, that of Dorchester to Lincoln, and, after William’s death, that of Wells to Bath. Some of the new prelates lived on good terms with their English neighbours; there is a document in which Saint Wulfstan and his monks of Worcester enter into a bond of spiritual brotherhood with several abbots, Norman and English, and their monks. But besides this, Saint Wulfstan did one good work which was his own. William’s law against the slave-trade was at first no better kept than the same law when it was put forth by earlier kings. The men of Bristol still went on selling English slaves to Ireland. Bristol was in Wulfstan’s diocese. So he went thither many times, and often preached to the people against their great sin, till they left off sinning, at least for a while.

5. King William and the Pope.—While King William helped Lanfranc in all his reforms, he would not give up a whit of the authority in the affairs of the Church which had been held by the kings who had been before him. Both the English kings and the Norman dukes were used to invest bishops and abbots by giving them the ring and staff, the badges of their office. When Hildebrand, who had so greatly favoured William’s attack on England, became the famous Pope Gregory the Seventh, he tried with all his might to take away this right from the Emperor and other princes; but to the King of the English he never said a word about the matter, and William himself, and for a while his successors after him, went on investing the prelates just as had been done before. At one time Pope Gregory wrote to the King, demanding that the payment of a penny from each house, called Romescot or Peterpence, should be more regularly paid, and not only this, but that the King should become his man for his kingdom. To this William wrote back that he would pay the money, because the kings before him had paid it; but that, as no King of the English before him had ever become the man of the Pope, so neither would he. We must here remark, not only the way in which William stood up for the rights of his crown even against so great a Pope as Gregory, but also the way in which he puts himself exactly in the place of the Old-English kings. Giving himself out as their lawful successor, he claims all that was theirs, but he claims nothing more.

6. The Imprisonment of Bishop Odo.—There was another act of William’s which shows how fully minded he was that no privilege and no favour should hinder him either from carrying out his own will or from doing whatever he thought was for the good order of his kingdom. His brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, had got so puffed up with pride and cruelty that he was no longer to be borne. We may believe that the King was specially displeased with his doings in the North when he was sent to punish the riot in which Bishop Walcher was killed. At last, in 1082, Odo fancied that he was going to be made Pope whenever Gregory died, and he got together a great company, or rather an army, in England and Normandy, and was going to set out for Italy. William was then in Normandy; but he came back to England, called an assembly, and formally accused his brother. He said that Odo’s misdeeds could no longer be borne; what would the Wise Men of the land counsel him to do? The whole assembly held its peace. Then the King said he must do justice, even against his brother; he bade his barons seize him. But in those days it was thought a great matter to seize a bishop, or indeed any priest. So no man stirred. Then King William seized his brother with his own hands. Odo cried out that it was unlawful to seize a bishop, and that none but the Pope could judge him. It is said that Lanfranc had told the King what to say to this. William answered that he did not seize the Bishop of Bayeux, but that he did seize the Earl of Kent. So, whatever might become of the Bishop of Bayeux, the Earl of Kent was kept in prison at Rouen. Pope Gregory pleaded earnestly that he might be set free; but William kept him in ward till the day of his own death.

7. The New Forest.—There is no doubt that William was always anxious to do justice, whenever so to do did not hinder his own plans. And this makes a great difference between him and mere oppressors who seem really to like to do mischief. But we have seen that he could do very dreadful things for the sake of his policy, and after a while he came to do things only less dreadful for the sake of his own pleasure. Nearly all men of that time were fond of hunting; William was specially so. For his pleasure in this way he made a forest in Hampshire, not far from his capital at Winchester, and, after eight hundred years, that forest is called the New Forest still. It must be remembered that a forest does not properly mean land all covered with wood. There were sure to be wooded parts in a forest, but the whole was not wood. A forest is land which is kept waste for hunting, and which is put out of the common law of the land, and ruled by the special and harsher law of the forest. Very hard punishments were decreed against either man or beast that meddled with the king’s game. Now, to make or enlarge his New Forest, William did not scruple to turn tilled land into a wilderness, to take men’s land from them, and to destroy houses and churches. Just as men thought that William lost his luck after the death of Waltheof, so men thought that the New Forest brought a special curse on his house. Certain it is that three of his house, his two sons Richard and William, and his grandson a son of Robert, all died in a strange way in the Forest.

8. The Great Survey.—One of the greatest acts of William’s reign, and that by which we come to learn more about England in his time than from any other source, was done in the assembly held at Gloucester at the Christmas of 1085. Then the King had, as the Chronicle says, “very deep speech with his Wise Men.” This “deep speech” in English is in French parlement; and so we see how our assemblies came by their later name. And the end of the deep speech was that commissioners were sent through all England, save only the bishopric of Durham and the earldom of Northumberland, to make a survey of the land. They were to set down by whom every piece of land, great and small, was held then, by whom it had been held in King Edward’s day, what it was worth now, and what it had been worth in King Edward’s day. All this was written in a book kept at Winchester, which men called Domesday Book. It is a most wonderful record, and tells us more of the state of England just at that moment than we know of it for a long time before or after. But above all things we see how far the land had passed from Englishmen to Normans and other strangers. There are only a very few Englishmen who keep great estates at all like those of the chief Normans; but it is quite a mistake to think that every Englishman was driven out of his hearth and home. Crowds of Englishmen keep small estates or fragments of great ones, sometimes held straight of the King, sometimes of a Norman or an Englishman in William’s favour. And when any man, Norman or English, had a claim against any other man, Norman or English, it was fairly set down in the book, for the King to judge of.

9. The Oath of Allegiance.—Another act, no less important than the great survey, followed close upon it. When the survey was made, and the King knew how all the land in his kingdom was held, he called all the landowners of any account to a great assembly at Salisbury in August 1086. There they all, of whatever lord they were the men, sware oaths to King William and became his men. That is to say, William had made up his mind to hinder in his kingdom the evils which were growing up in other lands. Elsewhere it was generally held that a man was bound to fight for his own lord, even against his overlord the king. In this way the kingdom of Karolingia or France, and the kingdoms held by the Emperors, broke up into principalities which were practically independent. Most surely William himself would have been greatly amazed if a man of the Duke of the Normans had refused to go against the King of the French. But he took care that there should at least be no such questions in the kingdom of England. Every man in William’s kingdom became the King’s man first of all, and was to obey him against all other men. There never was any one law made in England of greater moment than this. England for a long time had been getting more united, when the coming of William brought in two sets of tendencies. On the one hand the general strength of his government, and the mere fact that the land was conquered, did much to make the land yet more united. On the other hand, many of William’s followers had brought with them the new notions which caused other kingdoms to split in pieces. This wise law settled that the first set of tendencies should get the upper hand, and that the land should become more united by reason of the Conquest. Since William’s day no man has ever thought of dividing the kingdom of England.

10. The Last Tax.—The great survey and the oath of allegiance were nearly the last acts of William in England. All that he did afterwards was to lay on one more heavy tax. This was a tax of six shillings on every hide of land, a tax which could be both more easily and more fairly raised now that the survey was made. Men cried out more than ever, and altogether it was a sad and strange time. There were bad crops and fires and famines, and many chief men both in England and Normandy died. And now the time came for the great ruler of both those lands to die also.

CHAPTER XIII.
The Two Williams.

1. King William’s Last War.—The way in which the Conqueror came by his death was hardly worthy of the great deeds of his life. The land between Rouen and Paris, on the rivers Seine and Oise, known as the Vexin, was a land which had long been disputed between Normandy and France. Border quarrels were always going on, and just now there were great complaints of inroads made by the French commanders in Mantes, the chief town of the Vexin, on the lands of various Normans. William made answer by calling on Philip to give up to him the town of Mantes and the whole Vexin. Philip only answered by making jests on William, who was just now keeping quiet at Rouen, seeking by medical treatment to lessen the bulk of his body. Philip said that the King of the English was lying in, and that there would be a great show of candles at his churching. Then King William was very wroth, and swore his most fearful oaths that, when he rose up, he would light a hundred thousand candles at the cost of the French King. So in August 1087, as soon as he was able to get up, he entered the Vexin and harried the land cruelly. He reached Mantes (August 15), entered the town, caused it to be set on fire, and rode about to see the burning. At last his horse stumbled, perhaps on the burning embers; he was thrown forward on the tall bow of his saddle, and received a wound inside which made him give over. He was carried to Rouen, and there lay in the priory of Saint Gervase outside the city.