Fortunes of Henry. In the same year in which King William of England thus advanced and strengthened the borders of his kingdom by strength of arms, his youngest brother again became a ruler of men by a nobler title. Whatever was the date or the length of Henry’s day of distress, it came to an end about the time of the restoration of Carlisle. No call could be more honourable than that which again set him in a place of power. Domfront held by Robert of Bellême. Among the many victims of Robert of Bellême were the people of Domfront, the old conquest of William the Great. The castle had passed into the hands of the tyrant, and grievous was the oppression which Domfront and the coasts thereof suffered at his hands. The men of Domfront choose Henry to lord. 1093. The inhabitants, under the lead of a chief man of the place, Harecher or Archard by name, rose in revolt, and chose the banished Count of the Côtentin as their lord and defender against the common enemy of mankind. In company with this local patriot, Henry came to Domfront; he accepted the offered lordship, and entered into the closest relations with those who had chosen him. He bound himself to respect all their local customs, and never to give them over to any other master. Henry kept his word; amidst all changes, he clave to Domfront for the rest of his days as a specially cherished possession.[893]
Position of Domfront. It was indeed, both in its position and in its associations, a noble starting-point for one who had to carve out a dominion for himself by his wits or by his sword. It was a place of happy omen for a son of William the Conqueror, as the place where his father first began to deserve that title, his first possession beyond the elder bounds of his own duchy.[894] Henry was now lord of the rocky peninsula, which, impregnable as it had once been deemed, had yielded to the terror of his father’s name, and where the donjon of his father’s rearing opened its doors to receive his greatest son as a prince and a deliverer. On one side, the Varenne flowed far beneath the rock, parting it from the wilder rocks beyond the stream. On the other side, on the same level as the castle, but with a slight dip between the two, just like the dip which parts town and castle at Nottingham,[895] was the walled town, in after days itself a mighty fortress, girded with double walls and towers in thick array, and entered by a grim and frowning gateway with two massive flanking towers grounded on the solid rock. But, of all spots in the world, Domfront is one whose lord could never bear to be lord of Domfront only. From few spots not fixed on actual Alps or Pyrenees can the eye range over a wider prospect than it ranges over from the castle steep of Henry’s new lordship. To the north the view is by comparison shut in; but on this side lies the way into the true heart of Normandy, to Caen and Bayeux and all that lies between. To the west the eye catches the hills of the Avranchin; to the south the land of Maine stretches far away, the land of his father’s victories at Ambrières and at Mayenne, the land whose sight suggests that the land of Anjou lies yet beyond it. To the south Henry might look on lands which were to be the inheritance of his children; to the north he looked on lands which were one day to be his own; but to the south-west, towards Mortain and Avranches and the Archangel’s Mount, his eye might light on a region some of the most famous spots of which he was presently to win with his own right hand.
Change in Henry’s affairs.
His old friends join him For the tide in Henry’s affairs turned fast, as soon as the wanderer of the Vexin became the chosen lord of Domfront. His old friends in his former principality began to flock around him once more. Earl Hugh was again on his side, with Richard of Redvers and the rest.[896] Earl Hugh.And he had now a mightier friend than all. King Henry restored to William’s favour. William of England soon found out that he had not played a wise part for his own interests, or at least for his own plans, in strengthening his elder brother at the expense of the younger. Henry at war with Robert. He was now again scheming against Robert; he therefore favoured the growth of the new power on the Cenomannian border. It was with the Red King’s full sanction that Domfront became the head-quarters of a warfare which Henry waged against both Roberts, the Duke and the tyrant of Bellême.[897] He made many expeditions, which were largely rewarded with plunder and captives, and in the course of which some picturesque incidents happened which may call for some notice later in our story.[898] For the present we are concerned rather with the re-establishment of Henry’s power, of which his possession of Domfront was at once the earnest and the beginning. He gets back his county. Favoured by William, helped by his former friends, Henry was soon again a powerful prince, lord of the greater part of his old county of Coutances and Avranches. And this dominion was secured on his southern border by the occupation of another fortress almost as important as Domfront itself, and no less closely connected with the memory of Henry’s father.
Castle of Saint James occupied by Henry. This was the castle of Saint James, the stronghold which the Conqueror reared to guard the Breton march,[899] which stands close on that dangerous frontier, in the southernmost part of the land of Avranches. That hilly and wooded land puts on at this point a somewhat bolder character. Its position. A peninsular hill with steep sides, and with a rushing beck, the Beuvron, between itself and the opposite heights, was a point which the eye of William the Great had marked out as a fitting site for a border-castle. Yet the castle did not occupy the exact spot where one would have looked for it. We should have thought to find it at the very head of the promontory, commanding the valley on all sides. It is so at Ballon; it is not so at Saint Cenery or at Conches. But in a more marked way than either of these, the castle of Saint James stood on one side of the hill, the south side certainly, the side looking towards the dangerous land, but still not occupying the most commanding position of all. In this choice of a site we may perhaps see a mark of the Conqueror’s respect for religion. The ecclesiastical name of the place shows that, in William’s day, the church of Saint James already occupied the lofty site which its successor still keeps. Castle-builders less scrupulous than the great William might perhaps have ventured, like Geoffrey of Mayenne at Saint Cenery,[900] to build their fortress on the holy ground. The Conqueror had been content with the less favourable part of the hill, and at Saint James, as at Conches, church and castle stood side by side. The natural beauty of the site cannot pass away; the look-out over the valley on either side is fairer and more peaceful now than it was in William’s day; but every care has been taken to destroy or to mutilate all that could directly remind us of the days when Saint James was a stronghold of dukes and kings. Slight remains of the castle. The elder church has given way to a structure strangely made up of modern buildings and ancient fragments. The tower of the Conqueror still gives its name to the Place of the Fort; but there are no such remains as we see in the shattered keep of Domfront, hardly such remains as may be traced out at Saint Cenery and on the Rock of Mabel. A line of wall to the south, strengthening the scarped hill-side like the oldest walls of Rome, is all that is left to speak to us of the castle which was William’s most famous work on that border of his dominions. Nothing beyond these small scraps is left of the fortress whose building led to that memorable march against the Breton in which William and Harold fought as fellow-soldiers.[901]
The castle granted to Earl Hugh. We are not told what were Henry’s relations with Britanny at the time when this great border fortress passed into his hands. Bretons had been his only friends at the time of the siege of the Mount; but their friendship for the Count of the Côtentin was perhaps felt for him, not so much in that character as in that of the enemy of the Norman Duke and the English King. It may possibly mark a feeling that the Celtic peninsula might again become a dangerous land, when the guardianship of the chief bulwark against the Bretwealas of the mainland was given to one who had full experience of warfare with the Bretwealas of the great island. The Earl of Chester had a hereditary call to be the keeper of the castle of Saint James. The fortress had, on its first building, been entrusted by the Conqueror to the guardianship of Earl Hugh’s father, the Viscount Richard of Avranches. Hugh’s treason when King and Duke came against him was now forgotten; his earlier and later services were remembered; and the restored prince, now once more Count as well as Ætheling, granted the border castle, not as a mere castellanship, but as his own proper fief, to the lord of the distant City of the Legions.[902]
We have thus seen the power of William the Red firmly established on both sides of the sea. He had received the homage of Scotland; he had enlarged the bounds of England; he had won for himself a Norman dominion hemming in the dominions which are left to the nominal sovereign of the Norman land. And it is wonderful with how little fighting all this had been done. It was only before the island rock of Saint Michael that the chivalrous King had any opportunity of winning renown by feats of chivalry. A year follows, crowded with events, but all of them events which happened within the four seas of our own island. Our next chapter will therefore deal mainly with English affairs, and with some aspects of English affairs which yield in importance to none in the whole history of England. One of the chief personages of our story now comes before us in the form of the holy Anselm. Few more striking personal contrasts are to be found in the whole range of history than those parts of our tale where Anselm and William meet face to face. But more memorable still, in a general aspect of English history, is the work which has been silently going on ever since William Rufus was made fast on his throne, the work which stands broadly forth as a finished thing when the controversy between King and Primate begins. Assuredly no “feudal system” was ever introduced into England by any law of William the Great; but it is only a slight stretch of language to say that something which, if any one chooses, may be called a “feudal system” was, during these years, devised in and for England by the craft and subtlety of Randolf Flambard.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PRIMACY OF ANSELM AND THE ACQUISITION OF NORMANDY.[903]
1093–1097.
THE Character of the early years of William Rufus. 1087–1092. story of the first five years of the Red King’s reign may be written with little, if any, forsaking of strict chronological order. The accession, the rebellion, the affairs of Normandy, the affairs of Scotland, follow one another in successive or nearly successive years, as the main subjects which challenge our attention. Chronological sequence of the history. One set of events leads to another. The rebellion followed naturally on the accession; the interference of Rufus in Normandy followed naturally on the rebellion; the Scottish invasion seems to have been the immediate occasion of the banishment of Eadgar from Normandy. But during the whole of the five years there is no great interlacing of different parts of the main story; at no stage are two distinct sets of events of equal moment going on at the same time; the historian is hardly called on to forsake the arrangement of the annalist. While the events recorded by the annalist were in doing, some of the greatest changes in English history were silently going on; but they were not changes of a kind which could be set down in the shape of annals. More complicated character of the next period. 1093–1098. From the end of the year which saw the restoration of Carlisle the nature of the story changes. Different scenes of the drama of equal importance are now acting at once. For the next five years we have three several lines of contemporary story, which are now and then intertwined, but which on the whole did not seriously affect one another. Three distinct sets of contemporary events. Each is best told by itself, with as little reference to either of the others as may be. And each begins in the year of which we have now reached the threshold. The sixth year of William Rufus saw the beginning of the primacy of Anselm, the beginning of the main dealings of the reign with Wales and Scotland, the beginning of renewed interference in the Norman duchy. Aspects of Rufus with regard to each. It will be well to keep these three lines of narrative as distinct as may be. They show the Red King in three different characters. In the first story he appears as the representative of the new form which the kingship of Primacy of Anselm.England has taken with reference both to temporal and to spiritual matters within the kingdom. In the second story we see him asserting the powers of the English crown beyond the kingdom of England, but within the island of Britain. Affairs of Scotland and Wales. And here, alongside of the affairs of Scotland, perhaps not very closely connected with them by any chain of cause and effect, but forming one general subject with them as distinguished alike from purely domestic and from continental affairs, will come the relations between England and Wales during the reign of William Rufus. Continental schemes. In the third story we see the beginning of the events which led to those wider schemes of continental policy which almost wholly occupy the last three years of the reign. Revolt of Robert of Mowbray. 1095. One event only of much moment stands apart from the general thread of any of the three stories. It stands by itself, as one of those events which might easily have led to great changes, but which, as a matter of fact, passed away without much result. This is the conspiracy and revolt of Robert of Mowbray and William of Eu, which may, dramatically at least, be connected with either the Scottish or the Norman story, but which, as a matter of actual English history, stands apart from all.