There is so much of simple moral grandeur in this appeal of the righteous man against moral evil that we might almost have wished that Anselm’s discourse had ended at this point, and that he had not gone on to speak of matters which to us seem to have less of a moral and more of a technical nature. Ecclesiastical grievances. Yet Anselm would doubtless have thought himself faithless to his duty, if he had left the King’s presence without making a special appeal about the special grievances of ecclesiastical bodies. Moreover the wrongs of the bishoprics and abbeys were distinctly moral wrongs; the King’s doings involved breach of law, breach of trust; they were grievances on which the head of the ecclesiastical order was, as such, specially bound to enlarge. Wrongs of the church tenants. But they were also grievances which did not touch the ecclesiastical order only; the wrongs done to the tenants of the vacant churches are constantly dwelled on as one of the worst features of the system brought in by Rufus and Flambard. Anselm therefore deemed it his duty, before he parted from the King, to say a word on this matter also, a matter in which there could be no doubt that the King himself was the chief sinner. No bishopric was now vacant; but several abbeys, Saint Alban’s among them, were in the hands of Flambard. He prays the King to fill the vacant abbeys. Such a state of things called for his own care as Primate; he appealed to William to give him his help as King. In the monasteries which were left without rulers discipline became lax; the monks fell into evil courses; they died without confession. He prayed the King to allow the appointment of abbots to the vacant churches, lest he should draw on himself the judgement which must follow on the evils to which their vacancies gave cause.[1249] The King seems to have been less able to endure this rebuke than the other. The disorders of his courtiers and of his own private life he could not defend on any showing; but the demand that the abbeys should be filled touched what he looked on as one of his royal rights. Rufus burst forth in wrath. “Are not the abbeys mine? The abbeys in what sense the King’s. Tush, you do as you choose with your manors; shall not I do as I choose with my abbeys?”[1250] The answer of Anselm drew a distinction which was a very practical one in those days, and which affects our legal language still. To this day the King, the Bishop, the Chapter, all speak of any episcopal see as “our cathedral church,” and all speak, from their several points of view, with equal truth. Such a church is the king’s church by virtue of the fundatorial rights which he claims, in some cases by real historic succession, in all cases by a legal theory. By virtue of those fundatorial rights, he claims to be informed of every vacancy, and to give his consent to a new election. In this sense Anselm did not deny that the abbeys were the King’s abbeys; he did deny that they were the King’s in the further sense in which Rufus claimed them. “The abbeys are yours,” he said, “to defend and guard as an advocate; they are not yours to spoil and lay waste. They are God’s; they are given that his servants may live of them, not that you may make campaigns and battles at their cost.[1251] You have manors and revenues of many kinds, out of which you may carry on all that belongs to you. Leave, may it please you, the churches to have their own.” Hostile answer of Rufus. “Truly,” says the King, “you know that what you say is most unpleasing to me. Your predecessor would never have dared to speak so to my father. I will do nothing on your account.” When Anselm then saw that he was casting his words to the winds,[1252] he rose and went his way.
Lanfranc and Anselm. It may be that William Rufus spoke truly, and that Lanfranc would not, in any case, have dared to speak to the Conqueror as Anselm dared to speak to him. Lanfranc, with much that was great and good in him, was not a prophet of righteousness like Anselm. But it is far more certain that Lanfranc was never put to the test. The Conqueror never gave him any need to speak to him as Anselm had now need to speak to his son. What we blame in William the Great, what men like Wimund of Saint Leutfred dared to blame in him, Lanfranc could not blame. The position of Lanfranc in England involved the position of William. And, once granting that position, there was comparatively little to blame in the elder William. The beheading of Waltheof, the making of the New Forest, stand almost alone; and the beheading of Waltheof was at least no private murder; it was the judgement of what was in form a competent court. The harshness and greediness with which the Conqueror is justly charged was, after all, a small matter compared with the utter unlaw of his son’s reign. No need to rebuke the Conqueror on these points. And on the two subjects of Anselm’s present discourse, the elder William needed no rebuke at any time. His private life was at all times absolutely blameless, and, neither as Duke nor as King, did he ever turn his ecclesiastical supremacy into a source of gain. On both those points Lanfranc had as good a right to speak as Anselm; but on those points he was never called on to speak to his own master. Whether, in Anselm’s place, he would Estimate of Anselm’s conduct. have dared to speak as Anselm did, we cannot tell. But surely the holy boldness of Anselm cannot be looked on as in any way blameworthy, as either insolent or untimed. To him at least the time doubtless seemed most fitting. He called on the King, before he exposed himself to the dangers of a campaign beyond the sea, to do something to win God’s favour by correcting the two grossest of the evils which were rife in his kingdom. The Assembly was clearly not dissolved when Anselm spoke; William could at once have filled the abbeys, he could at once have put forth a law against the other class of offenders, in the most regular form, by the advice of his Wise Men. Anselm might even have held his synod while the wind was waiting. The synod in Lanfranc’s day followed on the Gemót, and it took up only three days.[1253] Most of the bishops were present at Hastings; those who were absent had doubtless been summoned and, by the rule of the Great Charter and of common sense, they would be bound by the acts of those who obeyed the summons.The Archbishop’s claim to the regency. Moreover, according to the precedents of the late reign, Anselm would be the sole or chief representative of the King during his absence. He might fairly ask to be clothed with every power, temporal and spiritual, which was needed for the fit discharge of kingly as well as pastoral duties.
Anselm attempts to recover the King’s favour. Anselm was deeply grieved at the ill success of his personal appeal to the King. He was now wholly out of the King’s favour, and he felt that, without some measure of support from the King, he could not carry out the reforms, ecclesiastical and moral, for which he longed.[1254] He was ready to do anything that could be done with a good conscience in order to win back the King’s good will. He sent the bishops to William, to crave that he might, of the King’s free grace, be again admitted to his friendship. If the King would not grant him his favour, let him at least say why he would not grant it; if Anselm had wronged him in any way, he was ready to make the wrong good.[1255] The bishops laid the prayer of their metropolitan before the King. The answer was characteristic. “I have no fault to find with the Archbishop; yet I will not grant him my favour, because I hear no reason given why I should.”[1256] What those words meant in the mouth of Rufus the bishops knew very well. Advice of the bishops to give more money. They went back to tell the Primate that the mystery was clear.[1257] The King’s favour was to be won only by money, and by money in no small store. Their counsel was that Anselm should at once give the King the five hundred pounds which he had before offered, and that he should promise him another gift of the same amount as soon as he could get it out of his men.[1258] On those terms they fully believed that the King would grant him his peace and friendship. They saw no other way for him; they were in the same strait themselves, and knew no other way out of it.[1259]
In the counsel thus given to Anselm by his suffragans we hear the words, not of utterly worldly and unscrupulous men, but of the ordinary prelates of the time, good men, many of them, in all that concerned their own personal lives and the ordinary administration of their churches, but not men disposed to risk or dare much, men disposed to go on as they best might in very bad times, without doing anything which might make things still worse. Anselm’s grounds for refusing. In the eyes of Anselm, on the other hand, things hardly could be made worse; if they could, it would be by consenting to them. By an unflinching assertion of principle things might be made better; in the worst case the assertor of principle would have delivered his own soul. In Anselm’s eyes the course which his suffragans suggested was sinful on every ground; moreover—an argument which some of them might better understand—it was utterly inexpedient. He refused to make his way out of his difficulties by the path which they proposed. The King allowed that he had no ground of complaint; he was simply angry because he could not get five hundred pounds out of him as the price of his favour. If now, while his appointment was still fresh, he should win the King’s favour at such a price, the King would get angry with him at any other time that might suit him, in order to have his wrath bought off in the same way. This last argument seems to show that Anselm was after all not so lacking in worldly wisdom as some have thought. He will not oppress his tenants. But his main argument was that he would not commit the crime of wringing any more money out of his tenants. They had been frightfully oppressed and robbed during the vacancy; he had not as yet been able to do anything to relieve them; he would not lay fresh burthens upon them; he would not flay alive those who were already stripped to their skins.[1260] Again, he would not deal with his lord the King as if his friendship was a thing to be bought and sold. He owed the King faith and honour, and it would be doing him dishonour to treat his favour like a horse or an ass to be paid for in vile money. He utterly refused to put such an insult upon his sovereign. His answer to the bishops. He told his suffragans that they should rather do their best to persuade the King to deal of his free grace as it was fit for him to deal with his archbishop and spiritual father. Then he, on his part, would strive to do all that he could and might do for his service and pleasure. This ideal view of the relation of King and Primate was doubtless above the heads of John of Bath, of Robert of Lincoln, of Robert of Chester, and of William of Durham in his present mood. It was surely one of them, rather than Osmund or Robert of Hereford, who answered; “But at least you will not refuse him the five hundred pounds which you once offered.” Anselm answered that he could not give that either; when the King refused it, he had promised it to the poor, and the more part of it had been given to them already. The bishops went back to the King on their unpromising errand. The King more hostile than ever. William bade them tell the Archbishop that he hated him much yesterday, that he hated him much to-day, and that he would hate him more and more to-morrow and every other day. He would never hold Anselm for father or archbishop; he cursed and eschewed his blessings and prayers. Let him go where he would; he need not stay any longer there at Hastings, if it was to bless him on his setting sail that he was waiting.[1261]
Anselm leaves Hastings. The Red King had thus cast aside another offer of grace. Our guide tells us; “We departed from the court with speed, and left him to his will.” The pronoun is emphatic. From that time, if not from an earlier time, English Eadmer was the inseparable companion of Anselm. Anselm and Eadmer then turned away, at what exact date we are not told. But the north wind seems not to have blown till more than half the month of March had passed. Then at last King William of England set sail from Hastings for the conquest of Normandy. He went without Anselm’s blessing; yet some of the ceremonies which had been gone through during his sojourn at Hastings must surely have dwelled in his mind. Fresh from the rite which in some sort marked the completion of his father’s work in England, the William crosses to Normandy. March 19, 1094.younger William set out so far to undo his father’s work as to bring Normandy into political subjection to England. At what Norman haven he landed we are not told; it was seemingly in some part of the lands of his earlier conquest, the lands on the right bank of the Seine. Before swords were drawn, an attempt was made to settle the dispute between the brothers.Vain attempts to settle the dispute. King and Duke met in person; what was their place of meeting we are not told; but no agreement could be come to.[1262] A second meeting took place, in which the guarantors of the former treaty were appealed to, much as Cnut had appealed to the witnesses of the treaty between him and Eadmund.[1263] Verdict of the guarantors against William. The guarantors, the twenty-four barons, twelve on each side, who had sworn to the treaty, agreed in a verdict which laid the whole blame upon the King. The words of our account—it is the English Chronicler who speaks—clearly imply that the guarantors on William’s side agreed in this verdict no less than those who swore on behalf of Robert.[1264] And he adds from himself that Rufus would neither allow that he was in fault nor abide by his former engagement.[1265] This meeting therefore was yet more fruitless than the former; the brothers parted in greater anger than ever.[1266] The Duke went back to Rouen; the King again took up his head-quarters at Eu.[1267]
Again on Norman soil, William began to practise the arts which had stood him in such stead in his former enterprise on the duchy. He hired mercenaries; he gave or promised money or lands to such of the chief men of Normandy as were willing to forsake the allegiance of Robert; he quartered his knights both in the castles which he had hitherto held, and in those which he won to himself by these means.[1268] Some of these last were very far from Eu. Castles held by the King. It shows how successful were the arts of Rufus, how wide was the disaffection against Robert, when we find castles, far away from one another, far away from the seat of William’s power in eastern Normandy, but hemming in the lands in the Duke’s obedience on two dangerous frontiers, garrisoned by the King’s troops. We are reminded of the revival of Henry’s power in the Côtentin when we read La Houlme. that the castle of La Houlme, at the junction of the two rivers Douve and Merderet, lying south-east from Valognes and nearly east from Saint Saviour, was now held for William.[1269] Argentan. So was another stronghold in quite another quarter, not far from the Cenomannian border, the castle of Argentan on the upper course of the Orne, to the south of the great forest of Gouffers. Two famous captains held these threatening posts. Argentan was commanded by Earl Roger’s son, Roger the Poitevin.[1270] La Houlme was held by William Peverel, the lord of Nottingham and the Peakland.[1271] Taking of Bures. But the first military exploit of the campaign was wrought in a land nearer to Eu. Bures—whether still held or not by the faithful Helias we are not told—was taken, and the garrison were made prisoners; some of them were kept in Normandy, others were sent by Rufus for better safe-keeping in his own kingdom.[1272]
Rufus thus pressed the war vigorously against his brother, with the full purpose of wholly depriving him of the duchy. Robert calls in King Philip. Robert, in his distress, again called on his over-lord, and this time with more effect than before.[1273] The French intervention was at least able to turn the balance for a while against Rufus. No object was more important for Robert than the recovery of the two strongholds which threatened him, one in the dangerous land on the upper Orne, the other in the no less dangerous Constantine peninsula. Siege of Argentan. A joint expedition of the new allies was agreed on, and King and Duke appeared side by side before Argentan. The castle stood on a height of no great elevation above the river, with the town, as usual, spreading down to its banks. The existing fragments show that the fortress and its precinct covered a vast space, but no architectural feature remains as a witness of the siege of Argentan by Philip and Robert. The town contains several attractive buildings of later date, ecclesiastical, civil, and military. There are churches, town-walls with their towers, the later château within the fortress; but of the stronghold which Roger of Poitou had to guard against the powers of Rouen and Paris but little can be traced. There are some massive and irregular pieces of wall, and part of a polygonal donjon, the latter at least far later than Roger’s day. But of the size and strength of the castle there can be no doubt. It is therefore with some little wonder that we read that the besiegers found its capture so easy a matter as they did, especially when its defender was one of the house of Montgomery and Bellême. Surrender of Argentan. On the very first day of the siege the castle surrendered without bloodshed. Roger of Poitou, with seven hundred knights and as many esquires—a name which we are now beginning to come across—and his whole garrison were made prisoners and were kept in ward till they were ransomed.[1274] Here we see the hand of Philip; we see, as in some other cases which we have come across already, the beginning of one of the institutions of chivalry. Ransom of prisoners. We shall presently see the custom of the ransom become a marked feature of the wars between France and England—so we shall soon find ourselves obliged to call them—in the eleventh century no less than in the fourteenth. But the bulky King of the French was for the present contented with this one exploit and with so valuable a stock of captives. Philip went back into France, and left his Norman vassal to go on with the campaign alone.[1275] Robert now drew some spirit from success. He marched westward, and attacked La Houlme. Robert takes La Houlme The castle surrendered; the lord of the Peak, with eight hundred men, became the prize of the Duke’s unusual display of vigour.[1276]
The war went on; each side burned the towns and took the men of the other side.[1277] But the tide had for the moment decidedly turned against the Red King. Difficulties of Rufus. The loss of Argentan and La Houlme, with their commanders and their large garrisons, was a serious military blow. The payment of their ransoms might be a still more serious financial blow. And the payment of a ransom, by which he only got back again what he had had before, would be less satisfactory to the mind of Rufus than the payment of bribes and wages by which he had a hope of gaining something fresh. The hoard at Winchester seems at last to have been running low; but when William Rufus was king and when he had Randolf Flambard to his minister, there could be no lack of ways and means to fill it again. Further taxation. Specially heavy were the gelds laid on England both in this year and in the following.[1278] And money was gained by one device which surely would have come into the head of no king and no minister save those by whom it actually was devised. A great levy was ordered; Levy of English soldiers. King William sent over his bidding that twenty thousand Englishmen should come over to help the King in Normandy.[1279] Englishmen had by this time got used to service beyond sea. Nothing is said of any difficulty in getting this great force together. The troops were gathered at Hastings, ready to set sail. Each man had brought with him ten shillings, the contribution of his shire for his maintenance in the King’s service. For the men who answered to Rufus’ bidding were no mercenaries, not even housecarls; they were the fyrd of England, summoned, by a perhaps unjustifiable but not very wonderful stretch of authority, to serve their king beyond the sea. But, when they were ready to sail, Flambard takes away the soldiers’ money. Flambard came, and by the King’s orders took away each man’s money, and bade them all go home again.[1280] One would like to know something of the feelings of the men who were thus strangely cheated; we should surely have heard if there had been any open resistance. Anyhow, by this amazing trick, the Red King had exchanged the arms of twenty thousand Englishmen for a sum of ten thousand pounds of English money. After all, the money might be of greater use than the men in a war with Philip of Paris.
If William thus reckoned, he was not deceived. He was still at Eu. Philip was again in arms; his forces joined those of Robert; again King and Duke marched side by side, this time with the purpose of besieging the King of the English in his Norman stronghold. Rufus buys off Philip. The ten thousand pounds now served William’s turn quite as well as the twenty thousand men could have served it. The combined French and Norman host had reached Longueville on the Scie, with streams and forests between them and Eu.[1281] Longueville was the last stage of their march. Thither Rufus sent those who knew how to bring his special arguments to bear on the mind of Philip. The King again went back to France, and the confederate army was broken up.[1282]
Contemporary notices of the campaign. There is something very singular in the way in which this second Norman war of William Rufus is dealt with by those who wrote at or near the time. Some make no mention of it at all; others speak of it only casually; our own Chronicler, who gives the fullest account of all, does not carry it on to any intelligible issue of success or of failure. In his pages, and in those of some others, the war drops out of notice, without coming to any real end of any kind.[1283] The monk of Saint Evroul, so lavish in local Norman details, seems to have had his head too full of the local strifes among the Norman nobles to tell us anything of a warfare which in our eyes comes so much nearer to the likeness of a national struggle. It must always be remembered that the local wars which tore every district of Normandy in pieces did not stop in the least because two hostile kings were encamped on Norman soil. Difference between England and Normandy. There cannot be a more speaking comment, at once on the difference between Robert and either of his brothers and on the essential difference between the ordinary state of Normandy and of England. With us private war was never lawful; we needed not the preaching of the Truce of God.[1284] William the Great, when his authority was fully established, kept England in peace; and in his later years the peace of Normandy itself, as distinguished from the border lands, was broken only by the rebellion of his own son. So in England there still were rebellions alike against Rufus and against Henry; but, when the rebellion was crushed, the land was at rest. Private wars go on in Normandy. In Normandy, as soon as the hand of the great ruler was taken away, things fell back into the state in which they had been during his own minority. And they remained in that state till William the Red in his later years again established order in the duchy. One can well understand that the endless ups and downs in the local struggles which went on close to every man’s door really drew to themselves far more of men’s thoughts than the strife of King William, King Philip, and Duke Robert himself. The two kings were but two more disputants added to the crowd, and they were disputants who really did much less harm to the land in general than was done by its own native chiefs. It is not very wonderful then that we hear so little of this war from the Norman side. It is not wonderful that, on the English side, when stirring events began again before long to happen in England, the Norman war dropped out of sight. And presently events in the world’s history were to come which made even the warfare of England and France seem trifles amid the general stir of “the world’s debate.”