After the defeat of this attempt to bring help to the besieged at Pevensey, nothing more was heard of Duke Robert’s coming in person. Alleged death of William of Warren. If we may believe a single confused and doubtful narrative, the defenders of the castle had at least the satisfaction of slaying one of the chief men in the royal army. We are told that Earl William of Warren was mortally wounded in the leg by an arrow from the walls of Pevensey, and was carried to Lewes only to die there.[207] However this may be, the failure of the Norman expedition carried with it the failure of the hopes of the besieged. The castle surrenders. Food now began to fail them, and Odo and Robert found that there was nothing left for them but to surrender to their nephew on the best terms that they could get. Of the terms which were granted to the Count of Mortain and lord of Cornwall we hear nothing. The Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent was a more important person, and we have full details of everything that concerned him. Terms granted to Odo. The terms granted to the chief stirrer up of the whole rebellion were certainly favourable. He was called on to swear that he would leave England, and would never come back, unless the King sent for him, and that, before he Rochester to be surrendered. went, he would cause the castle of Rochester to be surrendered.[208] For the better carrying out of the last of his engagements, the Bishop was sent on towards Rochester in the keeping of a small body of the King’s troops, while the King himself slowly followed.[209] No further treachery was feared; it was taken for granted that those who held the castle for Odo would give it up at once when Odo came in person to bid them do so. These hopes were vain; the young nobles who were left in the castle, Count Eustace, Robert of Bellême, and the rest, were not scrupulous as to the faith of treaties, and they had no mind to give up their stronghold till they were made to do so by force of arms. Odo was brought before the walls of Rochester. The leaders of the party that brought him called on the defenders of the castle to surrender; such was the bidding alike of the King who was absent and of the Bishop who was there in person. But Odo’s friends could see from the wall that the voices of the King’s messengers told one story, while the looks of the Bishop told another. The garrison refuse to surrender; Odo taken prisoner by his own friends. They threw open the gates; they rushed forth on the King’s men, who were in no case to resist them, and carried both them and the Bishop prisoners into the castle.[210] Odo was doubtless a willing captive; once within the walls of Rochester, he again became the life and soul of the defence.
It perhaps did not tend to the moral improvement of William Rufus to find himself thus shamefully deceived by one so near of kin to himself, so high in ecclesiastical rank. At the moment the treachery of Odo stirred him up to greater efforts. Rochester should be won, though it might need the whole strength of the kingdom to win it. William’s Niðing Proclamation. But the King saw that it was only by English hands that it could be won. He gathered around him his English followers, and by their advice put out a proclamation in ancient form bidding all men, French and English, from port and from upland, to come with all speed to the royal muster, if they would not be branded with the shameful name of Nithing. That name, the name which had been fixed, as the lowest badge of infamy, on the murderer Swegen,[211] was a name under which no Englishman could live; and it seems to have been held that strangers settled on English ground would have put on enough of English feeling to be stirred in the like sort by the fear of having such a mark set upon them. What the Frenchmen did we are not told; The second English muster. but the fyrd of England answered loyally to the call of a King who thus knew how to appeal to the most deep-set feelings and traditions of Englishmen.[212] Men came in crowds to King William’s muster, and, in the course of May, a vast host beset the fortress of Rochester. The siege of Rochester. According to a practice of which we have often heard already, two temporary forts, no doubt of wood, were raised, so as to hem in the besieged and to cut off their communications from without.[213] The site of one at least of these may be looked for on the high ground to the south of the castle, said to be itself partly artificial, and known as Boley Hill.[214] The besieged soon found that all resistance was useless. They were absolutely alone. Pevensey and Tunbridge were now in the King’s hands; since the overthrow of Duke Robert’s fleet, they could look for no help from Normandy; they could look for none from yet more distant Bristol or Durham. Straits of the besieged. Till the siege began, they had lived at the cost of the loyal inhabitants of Kent and London. For not only the Archbishop, but most of the chief land-owners of Kent were on the King’s side.[215] This is a point to be noticed amid the general falling away of the Normans. For the land-owners of Kent, a land where no Englishman was a tenant-in-chief, were a class preeminently Norman. But we can well believe that the rule of Odo, who spared neither French nor English who stood in his way,[216] may have been little more to the liking of his own countrymen than it was to that of the men of the land. But all chance of plunder was now cut off; a crowd of men and horses were packed closely together within the circuit of the fortress, with little heed to health or cleanliness. Plague of flies. Sickness was rife among them, and a plague of flies, a plague which is likened to the ancient plague of Egypt, added to their distress.[217] There was no hope within their own defences, and beyond them a host lay spread which there was no chance of overcoming. At last the heart of Odo himself failed him. They agree to surrender. He and his fiercest comrades, Eustace of Boulogne, even Robert of Bellême, at last brought themselves to crave for peace at the hands of the offended and victorious King.
Lesson of the war: the King stronger than any one noble. It was a great and a hard lesson which Odo and his accomplices learned at Pevensey and Rochester. It was the great lesson of English history, the great result of the teaching of William the Great on the day of Salisbury, that no one noble, however great his power, however strong the force which he could gather round him, could strive with any hope of success against the King of the whole land. In the royal army itself Odo might see one who had risen as high as himself among the conquerors of England, the father of the fiercest of the warriors who stood beside him, following indeed the King’s bidding, but following it against his will. Odo and Roger of Montgomery. Roger of Montgomery was in the host before Rochester, an unwilling partner in a siege which was waged against his own sons. Both he and other Normans in the King’s army are charged with giving more of real help to the besieged than they gave to the King whom they no longer dared to withstand openly.[218] But it was in vain that even so great a lord as Earl Roger sought to strive or to plot against England and her King. The unity of England. The policy of the Conqueror, crowning the work of earlier kings, had made England a land in which no Earl of Kent or of Shrewsbury could gather a host able to withstand the King of the English at the head of the English people.[219] When the days came that kings were to be brought low, it was not by the might of this or that overgrown noble, but by the people of the land, with the barons of the land acting only as the first rank of the people. Those days were yet far away; but an earlier stage in the chain of progress had been reached. The Norman nobles had taken one step towards becoming the first rank of the English people, when they learned that King and people together were stronger than they.
Rufus refuses terms to the besieged. The defenders of Rochester had brought themselves to ask for peace; but they still thought that they could make terms with their sovereign. Let the King secure to them the lands and honours which they held in his kingdom, and they would give up the castle of Rochester to his will; they would hold all that they had as of his grant, and would serve him faithfully as their natural lord.[220] The wrath of the Red King burst forth, as well it might. Odo at least was asking at Rochester for more favourable terms than those to which he had already sworn at Pevensey. William answered that he would grant no terms; he had strength enough to take the castle, whether they chose to surrender it or not. The King’s threats.And the story runs that he added—not altogether in the spirit of his father—that all the traitors within the walls should be hanged on gibbets, or put to such other forms of death as might please him.[221] But those of his followers who had friends or kinsfolk within the castle came to the King to crave mercy for them. Pleadings for the besieged. A dialogue follows in our most detailed account, in which the scriptural reference to the history of Saul and David may be set down as the garnish of the monk of Saint Evroul, but which contains arguments that are likely enough to have been used on the two sides of the question. An appeal is made to William’s own greatness and victory, to his position as the successor of his father. God, who helps those who trust in him, gives to good fathers a worthy offspring to come after them. The men in the castle, the proud youths and the old men blinded by greediness, had learned that the power of kings had not died out in the island realm. Those who had come from Normandy—here we seem to hear an argument from English mouths—sweeping down upon the land like kites, they who had deemed that the kingly stock had died out in England, had learned that the younger William was in no way weaker than the elder.[222] Mercy was the noblest attribute of a conqueror; something too was due to the men who had helped him to his victory, and who now pleaded for those who had undergone enough of punishment for their error. Answer of the King. Rufus is made to answer that he is thankful both to God and to his faithful followers. But he fears that he should be lacking in that justice which is a king’s first duty, if he were to spare the men who had risen up against him without cause, and who had sought the life of a king who, as he truly said, had done them no harm.[223] The Red King is made to employ the argument which we have so often come across on behalf of that severe discharge of princely duty which made the names of his father and his younger brother live in men’s grateful remembrance. He fears lest their prayers should lead him away from the strait path of justice. He who spares robbers and traitors and perjured persons takes away the peace and safety of the innocent, and only sows loss and slaughter for the good and for the unarmed people.[224] This course is one which the Red King was very far from following in after years; but it is quite possible that he may have made such professions at any stage of his life, and he may have even made them honestly at this stage. Pleadings for Odo. But on behalf of the chiefest of all culprits, the counsellors of mercy had special arguments. Odo is the King’s uncle, the companion of his father in the Conquest of England. He is moreover a bishop, a priest of the Lord, a sharer in the privileges to which, in one side of his twofold character, he had once appealed in vain. The King is implored not to lay hands on one of Odo’s holy calling, not to shed blood which was at once kindred and sacred. Let the Bishop of Bayeux at least be spared, and allowed to go back to his proper place in his Norman diocese.[225] Pleadings for Eustace and Robert of Bellême. Count Eustace too was the son of his father’s old ally and follower—the invasion which Eustace’s father had once wrought in that very shire seems to be conveniently forgotten.[226] Robert of Bellême had been loved and promoted by his father; he held no small part of Normandy; lord of many strong castles, he stood out foremost among the nobles of the duchy.[227] It was no more than the bidding of prudence to win over such men by favours, and to have their friendship instead of their enmity.[228] As for the rest, they were valiant knights, whose proffered services the King would do well not to despise.[229] The King had shown how far he surpassed his enemies in power, riches, and valour; let him now show how far he surpassed them in mercy and greatness of soul.[230]
To this appeal Rufus yielded. The King yields. It was not indeed an appeal to his knightly faith, which was in no way pledged to the defenders of Rochester. But it was an appeal to any gentler feelings that might be in him, and still more so to that vein of self-esteem and self-exaltation which was the leading feature in his character. If Rufus had an opportunity of showing himself greater than other men, as neither justice nor mercy stood in the way of his making the most of it, so neither did any mere feeling of wrath or revenge. As his advisers told him, he was so successful that he could afford to be merciful, and merciful he accordingly was. To have hanged or blinded his enemies would not have so distinctly exalted himself, as he must have felt himself exalted, when those who had defied him, those who had tried to make terms with him, were driven to accept such terms as he chose to give them. He grants terms. The Red King then plighted his faith—and his faith when once so plighted was never broken—that the lives and limbs of the garrison should be safe, that they should come forth from the castle with their arms and horses. But they must leave the realm; they must give up all hope of keeping their lands and honours in England, as long at least as King William lived.[231] To these terms they had to yield; but Odo, even in his extremity, craved for one favour. Odo asks for the honours of war. He had to bear utter discomfiture, the failure of his hopes, the loss of his lands and honours; but he prayed to be at least spared the public scorn of the victors. His proud soul was not ready to bear the looks, the gestures, the triumphant shouts and songs, of the people whom he had trodden to the earth, and who had now risen up to be his conquerors. He asked, it would seem, to be allowed to march out with what in modern phrase are called the honours of war. His particular prayer was that the trumpets might not sound when he and his followers came forth from the castle. This, we are told, was the usual ceremony after the overthrow of an enemy and the taking of a fortress.[232] The King was again wrathful at the request, and said that not for a thousand marks of gold would he grant it.[233] Humiliation of Odo. Odo had therefore to submit, and to drink the cup of his humiliation to the dregs. With sad and downcast looks he and his companions came forth from the stronghold which could shelter them no longer. The trumpets sounded merrily to greet them.[234] But other sounds more fearful than the voice of the trumpet sounded in the ears of Odo as he came forth. Men saw passing before them, a second time hurled down from his high estate—and this time not by the bidding of a Norman king but by the arms of the English people—the man who stood forth in English eyes as the imbodiment of all that was blackest and basest in the foreign dominion. Odo might keep his eyes fixed on the ground, but the eyes of the nation which he had wronged were full upon him. Wrath of the English against him. The English followers of Rufus pressed close upon him, crying out with shouts which all could hear, “Halters, bring halters; hang up the traitor Bishop and his accomplices on the gibbet.” They turned to the King whose throne they had made fast for him, and hailed him as a national ruler. “Mighty King of the English, let not the stirrer up of all evil go away unharmed. The perjured murderer, whose craft and cruelty have taken away the lives of thousands of men, ought not to live any longer.”[235] Cries like these, mingled with every form of cursing and reviling, with every threat which could rise to the lips of an oppressed people in their day of vengeance, sounded in the ears of Odo and his comrades.[236] But the King’s word had been passed, and the thirst for vengeance of the wrathful English had to be baulked. He leaves England for ever. Odo and those who had shared with him in the defence of Rochester went away unhurt; but they had to leave England, and to lose all their English lands and honours, at least for a season. But Odo left England and all that he had in England for ever.[237] The career of the Earl of Kent was over; of the later career of the Bishop of Bayeux we shall hear again.
End of the rebellion. The rebellion was now at an end in southern England. Revolt had been crushed at Worcester, at Pevensey, and at Rochester, and we hear nothing more of those movements of which Bishop Geoffrey had made Bristol the centre, and which had met with such a reverse at the hands of the gallant defenders of Ilchester. The chronology of the whole time is very puzzling. Order of events. We have no exact date for the surrender of Rochester; we are told only that it happened in the beginning of summer.[238] But, as the siege of Pevensey lasted six weeks,[239] it is impossible The Whitsun Assembly. June 4, 1088.to crowd all the events which had happened since Easter into the time between Easter and Whitsuntide. Otherwise the pentecostal Gemót would have been the most natural season for some acts of authority which took place at some time during the year. The King was now in a position to reward and to punish; and some confiscations, some grants, Confiscations and grants.were made by him soon after the rebellion came to an end. “Many Frenchmen forlet their land and went over sea, and the King gave their land to the men that were faithful to him.”[240] Of these confiscations and grants we should be glad to have some details. Did any dispossessed Englishmen win back their ancient heritage? And, if so, did they keep their recovered heritage, notwithstanding the amnesty which at a somewhat later time restored many of the rebels? One thing is clear, that the Frenchmen who are now spoken of were not the men of highest rank and greatest estates among the rebellious Normans. For them there was an amnesty at once. Amnesty of the chief rebels. Them, we are told, the King spared, for the love of his father to whom they had been faithful followers, and out of reverence for their age which opened a speedy prospect of their deaths. He was rewarded, it is added, by their repentant loyalty and thankfulness, which made them eager to please him by gifts and service of all kinds.[241]
The speed with which some of the greatest among the rebel leaders were restored to their old rank and their old places in the King’s favour is shown by the way in which, within a very few months, we find them acting on the King’s side against one who at the worst was their own accomplice, and who himself professed to have had no part or lot in their doings. Versions of the story of the Bishop of Durham. We must now take up again the puzzling story of Bishop William of Durham. We left him, according to his own version, hindered from coming to the King by the violence of the Sheriff of Yorkshire, and suffering a seven weeks’ harrying of his lands which carries us into the month of May.[242] This is exactly the time when the national Chronicler sets the Bishop himself before us as carrying on a general harrying of the North country.[243] It is likely enough that both stories are true; in a civil war above all it is easy, without the assertion of any direct falsehood, to draw two exactly opposite pictures by simply leaving out the doings of each side in turn. Anyhow the King had summoned the Bishop to his presence, and the Bishop had not come. The King again summons the Bishop. The King now sends a more special and urgent summons, demanding the Bishop’s presence in his court, that is, in all likelihood, at the Whitsun Gemót, or at whatever assembly took its place for that year.[244] The message was sent by a prelate of high rank, that Abbot Guy who had just before been forced by Lanfranc upon the unwilling monks of Saint Augustine’s.[245] The Bishop was to accompany the Abbot to the King’s presence. The Bishop’s complaints. But, instead of going with Guy, Bishop William, fearing the King’s wrath and the snares of his enemies, sent another letter, the bearer of which went under the Abbot’s protection.[246] The letter curiously illustrates some of the features of the case. We learn more details of the Sheriff’s doings. Doings of Counts Alan and Odo. He had divided certain of the Bishop’s lands between two very great personages, Count Alan of the Breton and of the Yorkshire Richmond, and Count Odo, husband of the King’s aunt, and seemingly already lord of Holderness.[247] The Sheriff had not only refused the King’s peace to the Bishop; he had formally defied him on the part of the King.[248] Some of the Bishop’s men he had allowed to redeem themselves; but others he had actually sold. Were they the Bishop’s slaves, dealt with as forfeited chattels, or did the Sheriff take on himself to degrade freemen into slavery?[249] The Bishop protests that he is ready to come with a safe-conduct, and to prove before all the barons of the realm that he is wholly innocent of any crime against the King. He adds that he would willingly come at once with the Abbot. He had full faith in the King and his barons; but he feared his personal enemies and the unlearned multitude.[250] Who were these last? Are we again driven to think of the old popular character of the Assembly, and did the Bishop fear that the solemn proceedings of the King’s court would be disturbed by a loyal crowd, ready to deal out summary justice against any one who should be even suspected of treason? The Bishop comes with a safe-conduct. The King sent the safe-conduct that was asked for, and the Bishop came to the King’s court.[251]
The two Williams, King and Bishop, now met face to face. William of Saint-Calais pleaded his rights as a bishop as zealously, and far more fully, than they had been pleaded by the bishop who was also an earl. The Bishop’s ecclesiastical claims. The Bishop of Durham, as Bishop of Durham, held great temporal rights; but William of Saint-Calais was not, like his predecessor Walcher, personally earl of any earldom. Bishop William’s assertion of the new ecclesiastical claims reminds us of two more famous assemblies, in the earlier of which William of Saint-Calais will appear on the other side. In forming our estimate of the whole story, we must never forget that the man who surprised the Red King with claims greater than those of Anselm is the same man who a few years later became the counsellor of the Red King against Anselm. In this first Assembly the Bishop refuses to plead otherwise than according to the privileges of his order. The demand is refused. He craves for the counsel of his Metropolitan Thomas of York and of the other bishops. This also is refused. He offers to make his personal purgation on any charge of treason or perjury. This is refused. The King insists that he shall be tried before the Court after the manner of a layman. He goes back to Durham. This the Bishop refuses;[252] but the King keeps his personal faith, and the Bishop is allowed to go back safely to Durham. We hear much of the ravages done on the Bishop’s lands, both while he was away from Durham and after he had gone back thither.[253] Of ravages done by the Bishop we hear nothing in this version. In this version William of Saint-Calais, blackest of traitors in the Peterborough Chronicle, is still the meekest of confessors.
June-September, 1088. We get no further details of the Bishop of Durham’s story till the beginning of September. But in the meanwhile the Bishop wrote another letter to the King, again asking leave to make his purgation. The only answer, we are told, on the King’s part was to imprison the Bishop’s messenger and to lay waste his lands more thoroughly than ever. But, from the beginning of September, the story is told with great detail. By that time southern England at least was at peace, and by that time too men who had taken a leading part in the rebellion were acting as loyal subjects to the King. Agreement between the Bishop On the day of the Nativity of our Lady an agreement was come to between the Bishop and three of the barons of the North. Two of these were the Counts Alan and Odo, who had received grants of the Bishop’s lands. and the Counts. September 8. They, it seems clear, had had no share in the rebellion; but with them was joined a leading rebel, Roger of Poitou, son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, whom we last heard of as one of Odo’s accomplices at Pevensey. These three, acting in the King’s name, pledged their faith for the Bishop’s personal safety to and from the King’s court. The three barons seem to make themselves in some sort arbiters between the King and the Bishop. His personal safety is guaranteed in any case. But the place to which he is to be safely taken is to differ according to the result of the trial. The terms seem to imply that, if the three barons deem justice to be on the side of the Bishop, he is to be taken back safely to Durham, while, if they deem justice to be on the side of the King, he is to be allowed freely to cross the sea at any haven that he may choose, from Sandwich to Exeter.[254] In case of the Bishop’s return to Durham, if he should find that during his absence any new fortifications have been added to the castle, those fortifications are to be destroyed.[255] If, on the other hand, the Bishop crosses the sea, the castle is to be surrendered to the King. No agreement contrary to this present one was to be extorted from the Bishop on any pretext. The terms were agreed to by the Bishop, and were sworn to, as far as the surrender of the castle was concerned, by seven of the Bishop’s men, seemingly the same seven of whom we have heard before and of whom we shall hear again. All matters were to be settled in the King’s court one way or the other by the coming feast of Saint Michael; but, as this term was plainly too short, the time of meeting was put off by the consent of both sides to an early day in November.
The Meeting at Salisbury. November 2, 1088. On the appointed day Bishop William of Durham appeared in the King’s court at Salisbury. We have not now, as we had two years before, to deal with a gathering of all the land-owners of England in the great plain. The castle which had been reared within the ditches that fence in the waterless hill became the scene of a meeting of the King and the great men of the realm which may take its place alongside of later meetings of the same kind in the castle by the wood at Rockingham and in the castle by the busy streets of Northampton. We have—from the Bishop’s side only, it must be remembered—a minute and lifelike account of a two days’ debate in the Assembly, a debate in which not a few men with whose names we have been long familiar in our story, in which others whose names and possessions are written in the Great Survey, meet us face to face as living men and utter characteristic speeches in our ears. Urse of Abetot. We are met at the threshold by a well-known form, that of the terrible Sheriff of Worcestershire, Urse of Abetot. Notwithstanding the curse of Ealdred, he flourished and enjoyed court favour, and we now find him the first among the courtiers to meet Bishop William, and to bid him enter the royal presence.[256] That presence the Bishop entered four times in the course of the day, having had three times to withdraw while the Court came to a judgement on points of law touching his case. Conduct of the Bishop. At every stage the Bishop raises some point, renews some protest, interposes some delay or other. And during the whole earlier part of the debate, it is Lanfranc who takes the chief part in answering him; the King says little till a late stage of the controversy. Before Bishop William comes in to the King’s presence, he prays again, but prays in vain, to have the counsel of his brother bishops. None of them, not even his own Metropolitan Thomas, would give him the kiss of peace or even a word of greeting. When he does come in, he first raises the question whether he ought not to be judged, and the other bishops to judge him, in full episcopal dress. Lanfranc’s view of vestments. To the practical mind of Lanfranc questions about vestments did not seem of first-rate importance. “We can judge very well,” he said, “clothed as we are; for garments do not hinder truth.”[257] Case of Thomas at Northampton. 1164. This point, it will be remembered, again came up at Northampton, seventy-six years later. The entrance of Thomas into the King’s hall clad in the full garb of the Primate of all England was one of the most striking features of that memorable day.[258]