For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.
Map illustrating the
SHROPSHIRE CAMPAIGN.
A.D. 1102.
It is somewhat singular that in the line of defence traced by Robert’s father so commanding a site as that of the Bridge did not hold the first place. The strong place of Roger of Montgomery lies between three and four miles lower down the river. Older mound of Quatford. There, on the left, the English, side of the Severn, we meet with the first—first to one going up the stream—of our present group of fortresses. A bold height, of no very great positive elevation, marks the position of the church and mound of Quatford, standing side by side, as is so often seen both in our own island and beyond sea. The mound is a natural height rising close above the river, ditched and scarped as was needed, but raised only slightly above its original height. Quatford Castle. This elder fortification, the dwelling-place of some English thegn of the old time, seems to have given way, either before or after the coming of the Norman, to a stronghold a little way further up the river, which still bears the name of Quatford Castle. A sandstone hill, standing isolated, near to the river but not immediately on its banks, was, like the smaller and older post, improved and raised into a castle mound, perhaps by Earl Roger himself, perhaps by some earlier holder. Earl Roger’s house. There the Survey records his new house and his borough; and we may fairly see his work in the well which still remains bored deep in the heart of the rock.[410] In the days of King Eadward the lordship of Eardington had been held by Saint Mildburh of Wenlock. His chapel. But, if Earl Roger, who passes for the refounder of that house,[411] did any wrong to its patroness, he may be held to have atoned for it by the collegiate chapel which he raised at Quatford. It was founded at the request of his wife, not the proud and cruel Mabel, but her pious and gentle successor Adeliza. A pleasing legend is told of the origin of the chapel and of the house, a legend which, if it contains any kernel of truth, points to Earl Roger as having been the first to occupy Quatford Castle as a dwelling, and which may account for the restoration of the far more tempting site of the old fortress of the Lady being left to be the work of his son.[412]
The new rule now began, and the home of Roger and Adeliza was forsaken by Earl Robert for the far stronger point higher up the river, and on the opposite, the right or Welsh bank.[413] Robert of Bellême removes to Bridge (north). Here, in contrast to the mere fords at other points, to Quatford itself and to the Danesford above it, stood the bridge which still forms so marked a feature, and which had given the spot its name. Bridge then, the stronghold of Æthelflæd, became the stronghold of Robert of Bellême; and now, perhaps from its position with regard to his father’s dwelling at Quatford, it came to be specially distinguished as Bridgenorth. A steep cliff overhangs the river at a point where the opposite ground is high, where the stream is far wider than it again becomes lower down, and where the channel is divided by an island, such as those by which the Danes loved to anchor, whether in the Seine or in the Severn. Oldbury. And, as the Danes are recorded to have wrought a work in clear distinction from the burh which the Lady afterwards timbered, we are tempted to see that work in a mound not far from the bridge, and on the same side as the river, but not rising immediately above the river’s banks. A natural height has been ditched, scarped, and raised to a level somewhat lower than that of the cliff immediately above the stream, the cliff which was chosen for the fortress, first of the Lady and then of the rebel Earl. It is plainly in opposition to this last that the place had, before the time of Domesday, received the name of Oldbury, which is still borne by the parish in which it stands.[414] The cliff itself, the site of the castle and town of Bridgenorth, has a peninsular shape so strongly marked that it is hard to believe that the river runs on one side of it only, and that Bridgenorth and Oldbury are divided, not by a stream, but by a dry valley, in those days doubtless not dry, but marshy. Oldbury and Bridgenorth. The sites of the older and the newer fortress still look on one another, though the older has again become only a grassy mound, while the younger grew into a fortress, parish, and town, and still remains a parliamentary borough.
The position of the great fortress of the oppressor is a noble one. The mere height of the cliff at Bridgenorth is so much lower than many of the surrounding hills of that lovely region that it makes less show than might have been looked for in the general view. But, as we stand close under it on the other side of the river, we feel that Bridgenorth needs only buildings of equal majesty on its height to make it rank with Lincoln, with Le Mans, almost with Laon itself. But against the proud minsters of those cities Bridgenorth has nothing to set in its general view save two church towers, one of them modern, whose ugliness is not relieved by the fact that it represents the castle church, the college of Bridgenorth, transferred thither by Robert of Bellême, when he moved castle, church, and everything from their older home at Quatford. Bridgenorth castle; But Bridgenorth still keeps one object of surpassing interest in our present story, that which is of a truth the very cradle and kernel of the place, the shattered keep of Robert of Bellême. Robert’s keep. There we have the good luck which we enjoy but seldom in examining the military remains of this age, the strongholds of the men of the Conquest and their immediate successors. Most commonly we light on little more than the mere site, or the works of earlier or of later times; it is only now and then that we actually see, in however imperfect a state, some piece of genuine masonry belonging to the time with which we are dealing. This satisfaction we have in no small measure at Bridgenorth. There is the square keep of the terrible founder of the fortress, broken down, riven asunder by some explosion in the warfare of later times—what is left of it driven to overhang its base like the tower of Caerphilly or the Muro Torto of Rome—but still keeping its main and distinctive features, still showing, in its flat pilasters, its double-splayed windows,[415] the traces of its double-sloped roof with the deep gutter,[416] what that stern, hard, tower was when the Devil of Bellême first called it into being. We can just trace the gateway which the keep commanded between the inner and outer courts of the castle, and we can see the ruins of the advanced building which sheltered the actual entrance of the keep itself. The square tower, so characteristic of Norman military work, is after all so rare in this its earlier form that every such fragment as this of Bridgenorth calls for most attentive study. Here we see the highest advances in the art of defence, as practised by the man whose name makes us shudder through almost every page of our story. At Bridgenorth nature had done almost everything. The tall and steep cliff called for nothing to be done in the way of mounds and ditches. It was enough to fence in the height—that the Lady had doubtless done after the fashion of her age—and to raise the keep—the distinctive feature of Earl Robert’s age—as the last shelter in case of attack from the land side. The churches and town of Bridgenorth. We can trace the inner and outer courts, the latter containing the unsightly church which represents the college within the castle. The other church stands nearly on a level with the castle, parted from the castle hill by a dip which takes the form of a steep road--Cartway is the name it still keeps—leading down from the town to the river. Few stronger or more striking sites of its own scale could have been found. The Castle by the Bridge is not a mountain fortress; far higher hills than the hill of Bridgenorth or the hill of Quatford come within the general view. But the stronghold of Æthelflæd and Robert served better than any loftier point could have done for its own immediate work. No other point could have served so well to guard the most important point of the river, and to shelter the older borders of England against any desperate attempt of the Britons to carry their endless warfare far within her later borders. The group of fortresses. The whole group, Bridgenorth, Oldbury, the two Quatfords, are a succession of strongholds which form a whole. All are within sight of one another, though it might be hard to find a point which directly commands all four at once. Burf Castle. A little further inland, on the Quatford side of the river, a broad hill, fenced in by a slight earthwork, and known as Burf Castle, commands the widest and most striking view of all, the round back of the Wrekin, the sharp rise and fall of the Titterstone, with a boundless view over the lower country to the north-east. This is undoubtedly the site of an early stronghold, which may have played its part in the days of the Lady or in the old time before her. But there is no sign that it entered into the military reckoning of Roger of Montgomery or of Robert of Bellême.
The great engineering works at Bridgenorth seem to have occupied the mind of Earl Robert during the whole of the few remaining years of his English career. We shall find that they were not fully finished four years later. Robert builds the castle of Careghova. At the same time, while he fenced in Bridgenorth in the rear of the capital of his earldom, he raised another stronghold in advance of it, within the later Welsh border, at Careghova, immediately on Offa’s Dyke.[417] And he was at the same time extending his possessions in a more peaceful region, where no inroads of Britons or Northmen were to be feared. His Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire estates. On the borders of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire stood a chief seat of one who, in the extent of his possessions, ranked as one of the foremost men in England. This was Roger of Bully, who took his name from a Norman lordship in the land of Braye, lying west of what was to be the New Castle of King Henry, on the high ground which overlooks the forest of Saint-Saen, the home of the faithful Helias. Roger of Bully. The name of Roger of Bully—the spellings of the name are endless—is less commonly mentioned in our tale than we might have looked for. He was a great land-owner in Yorkshire; he was one of the greatest land-owners in Nottinghamshire, and he held considerable estates in other parts of England. He had supplanted two English earls in their special homes; he sat by the hearth of Eadwine and by the hearth of Waltheof; in another spot, the holdings of ten English thegns had been rolled together into a single lordship to enrich the fortunate stranger.[418] His Yorkshire estates. Among his Yorkshire estates he held the exceptionally favoured lands of Sprotburgh and Barnburgh, which had remained untouched in the general harrying of Northumberland.[419] He seems to have won the special favour of the greatest ladies of the Conqueror’s court; if he held the hall of Hallam, the hall of Waltheof, it was by the gift of Waltheof’s widow Judith;[420] and an estate which he held in distant Devonshire is set down as the gift of Queen Matilda herself.[421] Yet this man, who holds so great a place in the Survey, plays no visible part in history; he lives only in the record of Domesday and in his still abiding work in a minster and a castle of his own rearing. Just within the borders of Yorkshire, at no great distance from the shires both of Nottingham and Lincoln, Roger had occupied an English dwelling-place, entered in the Survey as Dadesley, but which afterwards grew into greater note by the name of Tickhill.[422] Position of Tickhill. Like many other dwelling-places of English lords, Dadesley or Tickhill must have been chosen simply as a convenient centre for the estates of its owner. It is no natural stronghold; the post seems to have no special military advantages; it crowns no steep, it commands no river, it bars the entrance to no valley. The castle. A low hill of sandstone was improved by art into one of the usual mounds, and it had been in King Eadward’s day the possession of Ælfsige and Siward. The mound, as in other places, was in after time taught to bear a polygonal keep, and its sides were themselves strengthened by masonry. The keep, of which the foundations only are left, was of later date than the days with which we are concerned. And we may fully believe that parts at least of the circuit wall of the castle, and still more, that the elder parts of the gatehouse, with a face of ornaments and sculptures which almost remind us of the work of the great Emperor’s day at Lorsch, are due to the taste, such as it was, of the first Norman lord of Tickhill.
The nomenclature of the lands of Roger of Bully has been singularly shifting. Dadesley gave way to Tickhill. But Tickhill is not the only name borne by Roger’s stronghold. It not uncommonly takes the name of a more certain memorial of him which lies only a few miles off, but within the bounds of another shire. The priory of Blyth, founded 1088. In the year of the first rebellion of the Red King’s reign, Roger of Bully had founded a monastery dependent on the abbey of the Holy Trinity at Rouen. It was reared on a point of his possessions known as Blyth, lying within the borders of Nottinghamshire, and near a river which joins the old historic stream of the Idle.[423] The nave of Roger’s church still stands; there is no mistaking the distinguishing marks of the earliest Norman style, even in a building whose loftiness and narrowness have more in common with later forms of art.[424] Blyth became at least as famous as Tickhill. Name of Blyth and Tickhill used indiscriminately. The castle, with the honour of which it formed the head, is called by both names, and we shall find as we go on that the same incident in our story is placed by some of our authorities at Blyth and by others at Tickhill.[425] Death of Roger of Bully. Roger, founder of both castle and monastery, seems to have died about the time when Robert of Bellême was strengthening himself at Bridgenorth and Careghova. His lands went at once to swell the possessions of the terrible Earl. On some plea of kindred, Robert demanded them of the King. The lands of Roger of Bully granted to Robert of Bellême. William was as ready to grant him the lands of Blyth and Hallam as he had been to grant him the earldom of Shropshire and the other possessions of his father. But he was no more inclined than he was then to grant anything without a consideration. Earl Robert was allowed to redeem the heritage of his kinsman, but to redeem it only on payment of a great sum.[426] Impolicy of the grant. We may again doubt whether William the Great would have allowed such a redemption, even in the days when he had fallen into covetousness and greediness he loved withal. With the Conqueror neither greediness nor anything else ever came before policy. He whose policy it had been to separate Norman and English estates in the second generation, who had taken care that no son of his own chosen friend should hold Breteuil and Hereford in a single hand,[427] would surely never have allowed any one man to have reached the gigantic height of wealth and power which was now reached by Robert of Bellême. Greatness of Robert of Bellême. The gathering together of such vast possessions in Normandy and England in the hands of one who had some pretensions to rank as a prince beyond the bounds of Normandy and England almost amounted to a direct challenge to their owner to dispute the great lesson of Rochester, and to see whether there was not at least one subject in England whom the King of England could not control.
That question had yet to be tried, and to be tried in the person of the new lord of Tickhill. But it was not raised during the short remnant of the days of William the Red. The two powers of evil contrived to pull together in friendly guise as long as the days of unlaw and unright lasted. And the longer those days lasted, the blacker and the bitterer they grew. The greater the power and wealth which was gathered together in the hands of Robert of Bellême, the greater, we are told, was the pride and cruelty of that son of Belial.[428] He may by this time have grown weary of oppression in the familiar scenes of his evil deeds on both sides of the sea. The death of Robert of Bully opened to him a new and wide human hunting-ground in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. But his hold on all that he had within our island was fated to be short. We are drawing near to the end of the reign and the life of William Rufus, and, when the reign and life of William Rufus were over, the English power of Robert of Bellême did not last long.
But before we come to the last days of the Red King in his island kingdom, we must again cross the sea, to follow the warlike campaigns of his latest days, to trace out the wide-reaching schemes of dominion which filled his restless soul, his fitful energy in beginning enterprises, his strange waywardness in leaving them half done. And now will come the living contrast between unright, as embodied in William Rufus, and right, as embodied this time, not in a man of the church and the cloister, but in a man of his own order, a layman, a prince, a soldier. We have had one chapter where the main interest has gathered round Anselm of Aosta; we are now coming to another in which the main interest will gather round Helias of La Flèche.