Norwegian and Welsh versions. That shaft was, according to the monk of Saint Evroul, sent by the hand of Magnus, but by the special instigation of the devil. To the minstrels of Norway the death of Earl Hugh seemed a worthy exploit. They sang, not of a single shot, but of a fierce battle, in which the Norwegian king, lord of the islands, met the Welsh earls[388] face to face. They told how the arrows rattled on the coats of mail, and how the King’s own arrow overthrew Earl Hugh the Proud by the waters of Anglesey.[389] The British chronicler too tells us, if not of the fierce struggle described by the Northern poet, yet of arrows shot on both sides, alike from the ships and by the defenders of the land.[390] All agree that it was by the royal hand that the Earl fell. But it is only from Saint Evroul that we hear that Magnus shot Hugh unwittingly, and that he mourned when he knew who it was whom he had slain. Peace between Magnus and Hugh of Chester. It is added that he at once made full peace with the surviving Earl Hugh of Chester, declaring that he had no hostile purposes against England, but that he only wished to wage war with Ireland, and to assert his dominion over the islands.[391] The body of Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury was sought for with pains by Normans and English, and was found at last, as the tide went back.[392] The only gentle one among the sons of Mabel[393]—​gentle, we may easily believe, to all but the Britons, perhaps cruel to them only under the evil influence of his elder namesake—​was mourned by all, Burial of Hugh of Shrewsbury. and was buried the seventeenth day after his death in the cloister of his father’s abbey at Shrewsbury.[394]

The words which we have just seen put into the mouth of Magnus are words of doubtful meaning, and they might imply a claim to Anglesey, as well as to the other islands. Designs of Magnus on Anglesey. That Magnus came thither with purposes of conquest we may set down as certain; it is less clear whether those purposes were carried out, even for a moment. In Norway it was believed that the overthrow of Earl Hugh put the King of the Northmen in possession of Anglesey, which is strangely spoken of as a third of the British land.[395] In Man it was said that Magnus, having slain one earl and put another to flight, occupied Anglesey, but that he was persuaded by the Welsh, on the payment of a heavy ransom, to leave the island and sail back to Man.[396] Certain it is that, if Magnus took any real possession of Anglesey, it was a momentary possession indeed. According to the British chroniclers, he sailed away at once, so that his coming and the death of one of the earls did not really hinder the joint work of the two. Anglesey and North Wales subdued by Hugh. For a moment Anglesey, and with it seemingly the greater part of North Wales, was brought more thoroughly than ever under Norman or English rule. The phrase by which the Welsh writer sets forth the result has a strange sound; but it does not badly describe the final work of these endless wars. The French, he says, made the people become Saxons.[397] But for the present this work was done only for a moment. In the course of the next year, Anglesey was again, neither in French nor in Saxon, but in British hands.[398]

We shall hear again of Magnus in the revolutions both of Anglesey and of other parts of North Wales. For the present, satisfied with the glory of having carried the Norwegian arms further south in the British islands than any of his predecessors had done,[399] he seems to have sailed, first to Man and then to Ireland. There he made a truce with Murtagh, and, at a later time, he married the daughter of the Irish king to his own son Sigurd. Sigurd’s kingdom. This youth was now entrusted with the rule of all the Orkneys and Hebrides, and that with the kingly title.[400] Of his kingdom Cantire formed a part; the peninsula had been formally taken possession of by the Norwegian king. Occupation of Cantire. This was done by a symbolic rite, which well expressed the dominion of a king of the seas over the land. Magnus was drawn in a ship across the isthmus which joins Cantire to the mainland. Dealings of Magnus with Scotland. The occupation of Cantire was, according to the Norwegian writer, the result of a treaty with Malcolm King of Scots;[401] but the expedition of Magnus took place during the reign of Eadgar. Magnus then went back to Norway, to receive his surname from the dress of the islanders, the use of which he and his followers brought into their own land. He then occupied himself for a while with Scandinavian affairs, till his restless spirit again brought him within the range of our story.

§ 6. The establishment of Robert of Bellême in England.
1098.

Of the two earls who had crossed over to Anglesey to meet with such singular ups and downs of fortune, it was the elder who came back alive. Hugh of Chester, Hugh the Fat, had still to rule for a few years longer till he died a monk at Saint Werburh’s. Effects of the death of Hugh of Shrewsbury. But the short-lived reign of Hugh the Proud at Shrewsbury and Arundel had come to an end, and his death led to important changes in all those parts of England with which he had had to deal, but above all in his own earldom on the Welsh border. Robert of Bellême Earl of Shrewsbury. 1098. A large part of that district, a district the most important of all in a military point of view, passed under the rule of the man who was at once the most merciless of oppressors and the most skilful of military engineers. The Red King and his minister had now an opportunity of carrying out their doctrines with regard to the redemption of lands on a grand scale. The King was doubtless ready to be the heir of Earl Hugh, as of all other men; but, as in the case of other men, he was willing to allow the next kinsman to redeem the inheritance, if he offered a becoming price. He buys his brother’s possessions. So now, when Robert of Bellême claimed the earldom and lands of his deceased brother, he obtained a grant of them on a payment of three thousand pounds.[402] This was nearly half the sum for which William Rufus had made himself master of all Normandy; but it was perhaps not too great a price to pay for the great earldom of Shropshire with its endless castles and lordships, for Arundel and Chichester and the other South-Saxon lands of Roger of Montgomery, and for the rest of his possessions scattered over many English shires. Extent of his estates. Robert of Bellême, specially so called as the son of his mother, but who was no less Robert of Montgomery as the son of his father, and who now became no less Robert of Arundel and of Shrewsbury, thus joined together in his own person three inheritances, any one of which alone might have set him among princes. Doubtful policy of the grant. One might doubt whether William the Conqueror would have been tempted by any price to allow the accumulation of such vast powers in the hands of one man, and that a man whose homage was not due to himself only. But with William the Red the services and the payments of Robert of Bellême together outweighed any thought of the policy which might have led him rather to bestow the vacant earldom and other lands on some other among the sons of Earl Roger. Robert was now at the height of his power and his fame—​such fame as his was—​beyond the sea. Position of Robert on the continent. We shall read in the next chapter of his doings in Maine this very year, the doings of which he now received the reward. To the Norman heritage of his father, to the marchlands which he had inherited from his mother, to the lands which mother and son had snatched from so many Norman and Cenomannian holders, Robert now added all that his father had received from the Conqueror’s grant among the conquered English, and all that his father had won for himself among the half-conquered Welsh.

His new position in England. The establishment of Robert of Bellême in England marks an epoch in our story. Though we have already so often heard of him, not only in continental affairs but in the affairs of our own island, he had not yet, as far as we can see, held any English possessions at all; certainly he had none which put him on a level with the great Norman land-owners. From this time he is something more than merely one among them; he at once begins to play the part of the foremost among them, foremost alike in power and in ambition. His namesake, Robert of Mortain and of Cornwall, had held as great a number of English acres, and his death had handed over the vast heritage to his son. Comparison with the Counts of Mortain. But neither of the Counts of Mortain had any personal gifts which could win for them the personal position which was held by Robert of Bellême. The father was sluggish; the son was turbulent; neither of them was the peer of the great captain and engineer who was now to lord it over the British march. Nor did the nature and position of his estates give to the grandson of Herleva the same advantages which belonged to the son of Mabel. The one was, bating the title of Earl, as great in Cornwall as the other was in Shropshire; but the lord of Cornwall might, if he chose, sleep idly, while the lord of Shropshire was driven to constant action against a restless enemy. Each had a great position in Sussex; but the position of the lord of Arundel and Chichester was practically higher than that of the lord of Pevensey. The vast scattered possessions held by the Count of Mortain throughout England added more to his wealth than to his political power. Comparison of Robert of Bellême and Hugh of Chester. Earl Hugh of Chester was in his own earldom even greater than Robert was in his; but Earl Hugh was growing old, and ambitious as he was, he seems to have kept his ambition within certain geographical bounds, in those regions of Normandy and of Britain which destiny seemed to have set before him. Unique position of Robert. There can be no doubt that, at this moment, Robert of Bellême held a position in England which he shared with no rival in the island, and which was backed by a power beyond sea which put him rather on a level with sovereign dukes and counts than with ordinary nobles.

Effects of his coming. To the men of the borderland, of whatever race, the change of masters was a frightful one. To the settled inhabitants, Norman and English, it must have been like yet another foreign conquest. The change is marked in the change of name; the surname of the new lord comes from the lands of his mother which lay beyond the bounds either of England or of Normandy. Hugh of Montgomery is exchanged for Robert of Bellême. Robert a stranger in England. The new master from the march of Normandy and Maine must, twenty-nine years after the conquest of Shropshire, have seemed a stranger, not only to Englishmen, but to Normans of the first settlement, still more so to men who were of Norman parentage but of English birth. In its personal aspect the change of lords must have been a matter of shuddering. The rule of Earl Roger had been tolerable; the four years of Earl Hugh we have seen spoken of as a reign of special mildness, at least for his own people. But now they had a lord of another kind. English and Welsh, we are told, had smiled at the tales of the deeds of Robert in other lands; Cruelty of the new earl. they listened to them as to the song of the bard or the gleeman, deeming that, if such things were done, they were at least done far away from themselves. But now they found in their own persons that those tales were true, when, in the strong words of a writer of those times, they were flayed alive by the iron claws of Earl Robert.[403] The Earl himself, great as he was in power and wealth, was only puffed up by what he had to hanker after yet more. His spoliations. He spared no man, of whatever race or order, whose lands lay conveniently to his hand, nor did he scruple to take away from the saints themselves what the men of the elder time had given to them.[404]

But Robert of Bellême was something more than an ordinary plunderer; he was a man of genius in his way; whatever he either inherited or seized on was sure to be strengthened by the best engineering skill of his time.[405] His skill in castle-building. In the gradual work of planting both England and Normandy with castles he had no small share; and his skill is nowhere more to be admired than in the way in which he adapted his designs to the varying circumstances of different places. He built at Bridgenorth and he built at Gisors; there is little that is alike in the two fortresses, because there is little that is alike in the position of the two points which those fortresses severally had to defend. The former, Robert of Bellême’s great creation on English ground, held a most important place in the defences of the middle course of the Severn. His defence of Shropshire. The Welsh wars of this reign had brought that whole line of country into renewed importance. If the power of England under her Norman masters was stretching further and further over the British lands, that very advance laid the English lands more and more open to passing and occasional British ravages. The experience of such warfare within the English border was quite fresh. 1094. When Robert of Bellême took his earldom, four years only had passed since Shropshire and Herefordshire had been laid waste,[406] just as in the old days when Gruffydd smote the Saxon at Rhyd-y-Groes.[407] The new Earl of Shropshire therefore found it needful to strengthen the whole line of defences of the Severn. Early history of the Shropshire fortresses. Strong as was the capital of his earldom on its peninsular height, it was well to have, in the rear of Shrewsbury, another great fortress on a lower point of the river, a point whose importance is witnessed by its name; it is emphatically the Bridge. The whole region had been carefully fortified, perhaps in earlier days still, certainly in the days when the Dane as well as the Briton had to be guarded against. 896. In the last campaign of Ælfred, the Danes, finding it expedient to leave the neighbourhood of London, had marched across the whole breadth of England from Thames to Severn, and had wrought a work beside that river at Quatbridge.[408] Æthelflæd fortifies Bridge (north). 912. Sixteen years later, the victorious Lady, the guardian of the Mercian land, had timbered the burh at Bridge. At a somewhat lower point, the enemy against whom Ælfred and his daughter had to strive has left his memory in the name of Danesford. The Bridge was the site of the chosen stronghold of Robert of Bellême. But when his discerning eye marked the spot for a great military centre, he did but do afresh what had been already done by the native guardian of England. The fortress of Robert of Bellême was but a calling into fresh being, a strengthening with new works, of the older fortress of Æthelflæd.[409]

Edwᵈ. Weller