Grouping of events in the reign of Rufus. The chief events of the reign of William Rufus fall into two classes. There is the military side; there is the ecclesiastical and constitutional side. There is the side which shows us the noblest and the basest type of the warrior in Helias of La Flèche and in Robert of Bellême. There is the side which shows us the noblest and the basest type of the priest in Anselm of Canterbury and in Randolf of Durham. The two sides go on together. The most striking features in both belong to a somewhat later time than that which we have now reached. But it is the military side in its earlier stages which most directly connects itself with the tale which we have gone through in the present chapter. The first Norman campaign of the Red King comes in date before the archiepiscopate of Anselm; it comes in idea before the administration of Randolf Flambard. On the other hand, it is directly connected with the war of Pevensey and Rochester, with the banishment of Bishop Odo and Bishop William. We will therefore pass to it as the chief subject of our next chapter.
CHAPTER III.
THE FIRST WARS OF WILLIAM RUFUS.
1090–1092.[479]
THE Character of the year 1089.rest of the year in which Lanfranc died was unmarked by any striking public event, political or military. The causes of evil which had begun to play their part before the Primate’s death, which were enabled to play it so much more powerfully after his death, were no doubt already at work; but they had as yet not wrought any open change, or done anything specially to impress men’s minds. Natural phænomena. The writers of the time have nothing to record, except natural phænomena, and it must be remembered that natural phænomena, and those mostly of a baleful kind, form a marked feature of the reign of William Rufus. Even he could hardly be charged with directly causing earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests; but, in the ideas of his day, it was natural to look on earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests, either as scourges sent to punish his evil deeds, or else as signs that some more direct vengeance was presently coming upon himself. The ever-living belief of those times in the near connexion between the moral and the physical world must always be borne in mind in reading their history. And in the days of William Rufus there was plenty in both worlds to set men’s minds a-thinking. The great earthquake. Aug. 11, 1089. Lanfranc had not been dead three months before the land was visited with a mighty earthquake. The strongest buildings—the massive keeps and minsters lately built or still building—seemed to spring from the ground and sink back again into their places.[480] Then came a lack of the fruits of the earth of all kinds; the harvest was slow in ripening and scanty when it came; men reaped their corn at Martinmas and yet later.[481]
Character of the year 1090. The next year we find no entries of this kind. There was a mighty stir in England and in Normandy; but it was not a mere stirring of the elements. Beginnings of foreign adventure. We now enter on the record of the foreign policy and the foreign wars of the Red King, and we hear the first wail going up from the oppressed folk within his kingdom. Throughout his reign the growth of the prince’s power and the grievances of his people go together. In the former year there was nothing to chronicle but the earthquake and the late harvest. First mention of domestic opposition. This year we hear of the first successes of the King beyond the sea, and we hear, as their natural consequence, that the “land was fordone with unlawful gelds.”[482]
The years 1090–1091. The two years which followed the death of Lanfranc saw the attempt of the first year of Rufus reversed. Instead of the lord of Normandy striving to win England, the lord Successes in Normandy. of England not only strives, but succeeds, in making himself master of a large part of the Norman duchy. Supremacy over Scotland. 1091. Having thus become a continental potentate, the King comes back to his island kingdom, to establish his Imperial supremacy over the greatest vassal of his crown, and to do what his father had not done, to enlarge the borders Annexation of Cumberland. 1092. of his immediate realm by a new land and a new city.
Through a large part then of the present chapter the scene of our story will be removed from England to Normandy. Close connexion of English and Norman history.Yet it is only the scene which is changed, not the actors. One main result of the coming of the first William into England was that for a while the history of Normandy and that of England cannot be kept asunder. The chief men on the one side of the water are the chief The same main actors in both. men on the other side. And the fact that they were so is the main key to the politics of the time. We have in the last chapter seen the working of this fact from one side; we shall now see its working from the other side. The same men flit backwards and forwards from Normandy to England and from England to Normandy. Normandy the chief seat of warfare. But of warfare, public and private, during the reign of William Rufus and still more during the reign of Henry the First, Normandy rather than England is the chosen field. Without warfare of some kind a Norman noble could hardly live. And for that beloved employment Normandy gave many more opportunities than England. The Duke of the Normans, himself after all the man of a higher lord, could not be—at least no duke but William the Great could be—in his continental duchy all that the King of the English, Emperor in his own island, could be within his island realm. Contrast between Normandy and England as to private war. Private war was lawful in Normandy—the Truce of God itself implied its lawfulness; it never was lawful in England. And wars with France, wars with Anjou, the endless struggle in and for the borderland of Maine, went much further towards taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the Norman duchy, than the endless strife on the Welsh and Scottish marches could go towards taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the English kingdom. Normandy then will be our fighting-ground far more than England; but the fighting men will be the same in both lands.
The old and the new generation. The old companions of the Conqueror were by this time beginning to make way for a new generation. The rebellion of 1088 saw the last exploits of some of them. Yet others among them will still be actors for a while. Bishop Odo. Bishop Odo, cut off from playing any part in England, still plays a part in Normandy. The great border earls, Hugh of Hugh. d. 1101. Chester and of Avranches, Roger of Shrewsbury and of Roger. d. 1094. Montgomery, die in the course of our tale, but not till we have something more to tell about both of them, and a good deal to tell about the longer-lived of the two. Robert of Mowbray. Their younger fellow, Robert of Mowbray, after becoming the chief centre of one part of our story, leaves the world by a living death. William of Warren. The new Earl of Surrey, if not already dead, passes away without anything further to record of him; Walter Giffard, d. 1102. Walter Giffard, old as a man, but young as an earl, still lives on. But younger men are coming into sight. William of Eu. William of Eu, the son of the still living Count Robert, has already come before us as a chief actor in our story, and we shall see him as the chiefest sufferer. But above all, two men, whom we have hitherto seen only by fits and starts, now come to the front as chief actors on both sides of the sea. Before we enter on the details of Norman affairs, it will be well to try clearly to take in the character and position of two famous bearers of the same name, great alike in England, in Normandy, and in France, Robert of Bellême. Robert of Bellême, afterwards of Shrewsbury, of Bridgenorth, and of both Montgomeries, and Robert of Meulan. Robert, Count of the French county of Meulan, heir of the great Norman house of Beaumont, and forefather of the great English house of Leicester.
The two Rogers, fathers of the two Roberts, are still living; but for the rest of their days they play a part quite secondary to that played by their sons. History and character of Robert of Bellême. Robert of Bellême, the eldest son of Roger of Montgomery, has already come before us several times, most prominently as a sharer in the rebellion raised by the present Duke against his father in Normandy[483] and in the rebellion raised on his behalf against his brother. Succeeds his mother Mabel. 1082. As son of the slain Countess Mabel,[484] he was heir of the house of Talvas, heir alike of their possessions and of their reputed wickedness. Lord through his mother of the Her inheritance.castle from which he took his name, lord of a crowd of other castles on the border-lands of Normandy, Perche, and Maine, Robert of Bellême, Robert Talvas, Succeeds his father at Montgomery, 1094; stands forth for the present as the son of Mabel rather than as the son of Roger. In after times counties and lordships flowed in upon him from various sources and in various quarters. The death of his father gave him the old Norman possessions of the house of Montgomery; and his brother at Shrewsbury, 1098. the death of his brother gave him the new English possessions of that house, the great earldom of Shrewsbury and all that went with it. We seem to be carried back to past times when we find that Robert of Bellême His wife Agnes of Ponthieu. was married to the daughter of Guy of Ponthieu, the gaoler of Harold, and that, at the accession of William Rufus, Guy had still as many years to reign as the Red King himself. Guy Count of Ponthieu. 1053–1100. Guy’s death at last added Ponthieu to the possessions of the house of Bellême, nominally in the person of Robert’s son William Talvas, practically in that of Robert himself. Greatness of Robert’s possessions. The lord of such lands, master of four and thirty castles,[485] ranked rather with princes than with ordinary nobles; and even now, when Robert held only the inheritance of his mother, the extent and nature of his fiefs gave him a position almost princely. The man alike of Normandy and of France, he could make use of the profitable as well as the dangerous side of a divided allegiance, and it is not without reason that we find the lord of the border-land spoken of by the fitting title of Marquess.[486] Great part played by him. From the death of the Conqueror onwards, through the reigns of Robert and William, till the day when Henry sent him to a life-long prison, Robert of Bellême fills in the history of Normandy and England a place alongside of their sovereigns.