Decree for action in Scotland. August, 1097. It must have been at one of the later assemblies of the year which we have now reached, most likely at the August gathering,[288] that the resolution was taken for vigorous action in Scotland. The King himself had had enough of Welsh warfare; he must have been already looking forward to those French and Cenomannian campaigns which form the main feature of the next year; he was in the middle of his final dispute with Anselm. But William Rufus seems always to have been well pleased to set others in motion, even on enterprises in which he did not share himself. Designs of the Ætheling Eadgar. So he gladly hearkened to the proposals of the Ætheling Eadgar for an expedition into Scotland. Its object was to overthrow the usurper Donald, as the chosen of Dunfermline was deemed at Winchester, to restore the line of Malcolm and Margaret, and to bring the Scottish kingdom once more into its due obedience to the over-lord in England.
Relations between Eadgar and the King. Our last certain notice of Eadgar sets him before us as enjoying the fullest confidence on the part of the reigning King, as sent by him on the important errand of negotiating with Malcolm and bringing him to William’s court at Gloucester.[289] Story of Godwine and Ordgar. One hardly knows what to make of the tale which describes him as awakening a certain amount of suspicion in the King’s mind later in the same year;[290] but that, either before or after this time, he was in some such danger appears from another tale in the details of which there may or may not be a legendary element, but which undoubtedly brings before us real persons and a real state of things. To this tale I have already referred elsewhere, as having that kind of interest which belongs to every story in which we see any one of those who are recorded in the Great Survey as mere names stand forth as a living man, playing his part in the world of living men. However obscure the man, however small his deeds, there is always an interest in finding any part of the dry bones of Domesday clothed with flesh and blood. And the interest becomes higher when the man thus called forth out of darkness is a man of native English birth, and the father of one whom England may well be glad to reckon among her worthies.[291]
Eadgar accused by Ordgar. The story runs then that a knight of English birth, Ordgar by name, seeking favour with the King, brought a charge against the English Ætheling. He told William that Eadgar, trusting to his own descent from ancient kings, was seeking to deprive the reigning king of his crown. William hearkened to the accuser, and some grievous doom—would it have been the doom of William of Eu?--was in store for Eadgar, if his guilt—his ambition or patriotism—could be proved. The ordeal and the battle. But how was the charge to be proved or disproved? By Old-English law the appeal to the judgement of God in doubtful cases was by the ordeal; and, as between Englishman and Englishman, this rule had not been changed by the laws of the Conqueror.[292] But we can well believe that Englishmen who were admitted to a place in the Red King’s court had largely put on the ideas and feelings of Normans. They would doubtless look down on the ancient practice of their fathers, and they would be more inclined to follow the fashion of their Norman companions in better liking the more chivalrous test of the wager of battle. It seems in the present story to be taken for granted that the trial will be by wager of battle. But who will do battle for Eadgar, when the royal favour is so clearly shown on behalf of Eadgar’s accuser? The Ætheling was sad at heart, forsaken, as it seemed, of all men. Godwine volunteers to fight for Eadgar. But at last one stepped forward who was ready to dare the risk on behalf of a man to whom he was bound by a double tie. As an Englishman he was stirred to come to the help of the descendant of the ancient kings, and he was further bound to Eadgar by the special tie which binds a man to his lord. He was a knight of noble English descent, known as Godwine of Winchester. Notices of him in Domesday. We know him in Domesday as a tenant of the Ætheling for lands in Hertfordshire, and the Survey further suggests that he may have had a private grudge against the opposite champion. There were lands in Oxfordshire which were held by an Ordgar, and which had been held by a Godwine. Duel of Godwine and Ordgar. The matter is to be decided by the hand-to-hand fight of the two English knights. For they so far cleave to the customs of their fathers that they fight on foot and deal handstrokes with their swords. Ordgar comes forth in splendid armour, surrounded by a crowd of courtiers.[293] Godwine has nothing to trust to but his sword and his good cause. But there was at least no attempt made to hinder a fair fight—so to do would have been altogether foreign to the spirit of the chivalrous king. The herald and the umpire do their duty;[294] the knights take their oath to forbear the use of all weapons but those which were needed in the knightly duel. A long and hard fight follows, the ups and downs of which are described with Homeric minuteness. Victory of Godwine, and acquittal of Eadgar. Ordgar at last, sorely wounded, is pressed to the ground, with the foot of the victorious Godwine upon him.[295] As a last resource, he strives, but in vain, to stab Godwine with a knife which, in breach of his oath, he had treacherously hidden in his boot.[296] Godwine snatches the knife from him; Ordgar confesses the falsehood of his charge, and presently dies of his wounds.[297] Godwine now becomes an object of universal honour, and receives from the King the lands of the slain Ordgar, while Eadgar rises higher than ever in the King’s favour.
Estimate of the story. I see no reason to doubt the main outline of this story, which rests on the evidence of undesigned coincidences. Men of no special renown, about whom there was no temptation to invent fables, are made to act in a way which exactly agrees with what we know from the surest of witnesses to have been their real position. Without pledging ourselves to the details of the combat, which have a slightly legendary sound, we may surely believe that we have here the record of a real wager of battle, like those which happened at no great distance of time in the cases of William of Eu and Arnulf of Hesdin. Its general truth. Englishmen under Rufus. We may surely believe that Eadgar was wrongfully accused, and that Godwine cleared his lord in the duel. We see then that in the Red King’s day there was nothing to hinder men of Old-English birth, exceptionally lucky men doubtless, from holding an honourable rank and a high place in royal favour. But we learn also, as we might expect to find, that such Englishmen found that it suited their purposes to adopt Norman fashions. Robert son of Godwine. Of Godwine we hear no more; but his son, as I have noticed elsewhere, bears, according to a very common rule, the Norman name of Robert.[298] Had we chanced to hear of him without hearing the name of his father, we might not have known that the hero and martyr was a man of our own blood.
The Eadgars march to Scotland. September, 1097. We now follow the Ætheling to a warfare in which Robert the son of Godwine is his companion. Eadgar set out about Michaelmas to place his nephew and namesake on the Scottish throne. He had a bright comet and a shower of falling stars to light him on his way.[299] But Donald was hardly of importance enough for the heavenly powers to foretell his fall; The comet. the shining and departure of the comet was rather understood to mark the approaching day when Anselm, the light of England, turned away from our land and left darkness behind him.[300] The force of the Ætheling seems to have been of much the same kind as the force which Duncan had led on the same errand three years before. He went with the King’s approval and support, but certainly without the King’s personal help, perhaps without any part of the royal army.[301] That army, as we have lately seen, was just then coming together for another errand.[302]
Vision of the younger Eadgar. The host then marched northward. On the way, we are told, the younger Eadgar was honoured by a vision of Saint Cuthberht, who bade him take his banner from the abbey at Durham—the abbey now without a bishop—and he should have victory in the battle.[303] The banner was borne before the army; the fight in which it was unfurled was long and hard; but the valour of the men who fought under its folds was not to be withstood. Exploits of Robert son of Godwine. Without binding ourselves to details which may well be legendary, we may believe that Robert son of Godwine was foremost in the fight, and that the victory in which Defeat and blinding of Donald. Donald was the second time overthrown was largely owing to his personal prowess.[304] Little mercy was shown to the vanquished; Donald spent the rest of his days blinded and a prisoner;[305] Fate of Eadmund; he becomes a monk at Montacute. his confederate Eadmund lived to become somewhat of a saint. He put on the garb of Clugny in the priory of Montacute, at the foot of that hill of Saint Michael where the castle of Robert of Mortain now covered the spot which had beheld the finding of England’s Holy Cross.[306] But as that house did not arise till some years later, at the bidding of Count William the son of Robert,[307] we may gather that Eadmund spent the intermediate time in some harsher captivity. When he died, he was buried, at his own request, in chains, as a sign of penitence for his share in his half-brother’s death.[308]
Eadgar King of Scots. The younger Eadgar now reigned over Scotland as the sworn liegeman of King William of England.[309] The elder Eadgar went back to England, to end there a year of heavy time, a year of evil weather, Character of the year 1098. a year in which men could neither till the earth nor gather in its tilth, and when the folk was utterly bowed down by unrighteous gelds.[310] His valiant comrade abode for a while in the dominions of the Scottish King. Eadgar was grateful to all who had helped him in heaven or in earth. The battle had been won by Saint Cuthberht and Robert son of Godwine. Saint Cuthberht, in the person of the monks of his abbey, received the lands of Coldingham, the seat in ancient times of a house of nuns famous in the days of Danish warfare.[311] Eadgar’s gifts to Durham and to Robert son of Godwine. A little later—for it was when Durham had again a bishop—he received, in the person of his own successor, the greater gift of the town of Berwick.[312] Robert, by the leave of his own sovereign, received a fief in the same land of Lothian, and began the building of a castle. Action of Eadgar, Robert, and Randolf Flambard; after 1099. But, while King Eadgar went to do service to his over-lord in England, the bishop—it was already Randolf Flambard—and the barons of the bishopric, whom Robert’s fortress seems in some way to have offended, attacked it and made its lord a prisoner.[313] King Eadgar came back with letters from his over-lord, ordering the release of their common subject. The Bishop and his barons obeyed; but the King of Scots withdrew his gift of Berwick from the bishopric, as a punishment for the wrong done to the man to whom he owed his crown.[314]
Eadgar and Robert go to the Crusade. Robert the son of Godwine was presently called to a nobler work. His lord the Ætheling went to the Holy War. Eadgar was not one of those who marched first of all with the two Roberts of Normandy and Flanders. He was one of that second party who set forth about the time of the siege of Antioch, 1099. and joined the Norman Duke in his ignoble retreat at Laodikeia.[315] Robert the son of Godwine, if he stayed in Britain long enough to have any dealings with Flambard in his character of Bishop of Durham, must have set out later still. He could have had no share in the leaguer of Nikaia or of Antioch; most likely he had no share in the rescue of the Holy City. Robert in Palestine. He could hardly have reached Syria till Jerusalem was again a Christian kingdom under its second king. Godfrey, the mirror of Christian knighthood, was gone. His successor was his less worthy brother Baldwin, he who had told the dream of his calling to Dame Isabel in the hall of Conches.[316] But there was still work to be done; the land which had been won had to be defended. King Baldwin was besieged in Rama by the misbelievers.[317] 1103. The King, attended by five knights only, made a sally to cut his way through the besiegers. His exploits and death. The valiant Englishman rode in front of him, cutting down the infidels on each side with his sword. As Robert pressed too fiercely on, his sword fell from his hand; he stooped to grasp it again; he was overpowered by numbers, and was carried off a prisoner.[318] He was led to the Egyptian Babylon; he was offered his choice of death or apostasy; he clave to his faith; placed as a mark in the market-place, like the East-Anglian Eadmund, he died beneath the arrows of his merciless captors.[319] Such men could England, even in her darkest day, send forth for the relief and defence of Christendom in the Eastern world. Modern parallels and contrasts. Such men she could send forth even in the days of our fathers, to draw the sword for right in the haven of Pylos or beneath the akropolis of Athens. Now the men who go forth from England to the same quarter of the world seem to share more of the spirit of another Robert who, a century later, went forth from the same shire as the son of Godwine on another errand. In our own story we come across no renegade or traitor save the single name of Hugh of Jaugy.[320] But in the course of the twelfth century we see the forerunners of a class of men whose names stain the annals of our own time. Robert of Saint Alban’s. The glory of Robert son of Godwine is balanced by the shame of Robert of Saint Alban’s, English by birth and blood, the apostate Templar who joined the host of Saladin and mocked the last agonies of the defenders of the Holy City.[321] Of the earlier Robert our century has seen the true successors in the honoured names of Gordon and Church and Hastings. Of the later Robert it has seen the successor in the Englishman who sells his soul and his sword to keep down the yoke of the barbarian on the necks of his Christian brethren. It has seen him in the Greek who sells his soul and his glib tongue to argue in the councils of Europe against the deliverance of his own people.
Reign of Eadgar in Scotland. 1097–1107. With the accession of Eadgar to the Scottish crown the direct connexion between English and Scottish affairs comes to an end, as far as concerns the period with which we have immediately to do. Eadgar reigned in peace, as far as his own kingdom was concerned, for ten years, earning the doubtful praise of being in all things like to his remote uncle the Confessor.[322] At his death the Scottish dominions were divided between his two more energetic brothers. Alexander. 1107–1124. Alexander took the kingdom; David, by a revival of an ancient custom,[323] held as an appanage that part of Strathclyde or Cumberland which still belonged to the Scottish crown. Friendship of the Scottish kings for England. Both princes maintained strict friendship with England, and both sought wives in England. Alexander married a natural daughter of King Henry, Sibyl by name;[324] the wife of David was, more significantly, the widowed daughter of Waltheof.[325] Alexander had to strive against revolts in the North,[326] and his reign marks a great period in the ecclesiastical history of Scotland. Turgot and Eadmer. It is the time in which we meet with the familiar names of Turgot and Eadmer, the one as bishop, the other as bishop-elect, of the first see in Scotland.[327] The influence of the reign of Eadgar told wholly in favour of the process by which Scotland was becoming an English kingdom. The reign of Alexander told perhaps less directly in favour of things specially English,[328] but it worked strongly towards the more general object of bringing Scotland into the common circle of western Christendom. Effects of the reign of David. 1124–1153. The succession of David reunited the Scottish dominions, and his vigorous rule of twenty-nine years brought to perfection all that his parents had begun. That famous prince was bound to England by every tie of descent, habit, and affinity. His English position; Brother of her Queen, uncle of her Imperial Lady,[329] David was an English earl in a stricter sense than any king of Scots who had gone before him. his earldoms. He was not only Earl of Lothian, which was becoming fast incorporated with Scotland—or more truly was fast incorporating Scotland with itself—nor yet only of Northumberland and Cumberland, with which the same process might easily have been carried out.[330] He was Earl also of distant and isolated Huntingdon, an earldom which could not be held except on the same terms as its fellows of Leicester or Warwick. English influence in Scotland. Under David, the great reformer, the great civilizer, but at the same time the king who made the earlier life of Scotland a thing of the past, all that was English, all that was Norman, was welcomed in the land which was now truly a northern England. His invasion of England. If David, like his father, appeared as an invader of England, if, in so doing, he made England feel that he had subjects who were still far from being either English or Norman,[331] he did so only as a benevolent mediator in the affairs of England, as the champion of the claims of one of his nieces against the claims of the other. The Scottish kings of the second series. With the three sons of Malcolm and Margaret begins the line of those whom we may call the second series of Scottish kings, those who still came in the direct line of old Scottish royalty, but under whom Scotland was a disciple of England, and on the whole friendly to England. They stand distinguished alike from the purely Celtic kings who went before them, and from the kings, Norman or English as we may choose to call them by natural descent, who were politically more hostile to England than the old Malcolms and Kenneths. Eadgar and Alexander died childless; the later kings were all of the stock of David. The English or Norman candidates for the Scottish crown. Of that stock—and thereby of the stock of Waltheof and Siward and their forefathers of whatever species—came that motley group who in after days wrangled for David’s crown. Bruce, Balliol, Hastings, Comyn, all came by female descent of the line of David and Matilda. In every other aspect all of them were simply English nobles of the time. It is an odd destiny by which, according as they supported or withstood the rights of their own prince over the kingdom which they claimed, some of them have won the name of Scottish traitors and others the name of Scottish patriots.
§ 5. The Expedition of Magnus. 1098.