No real success on the King’s part. This seems a somewhat paltry ending for a campaign which began with the King’s breathless rush from the New Forest to Bonneville. Not very much had come of the headlong ride or of the sail in the crazy ship. William Rufus had gained no real success, military or political. He was as far as ever from the real possession of the whole land of Maine. He had rooted up a great many vines and cut down a great many fruit trees; but he had neither won a battle nor taken a fortress. His garrisons at Le Mans and at Ballon had held out; Helias had left Le Mans open to him; at Vaux Robert of Montfort had overcome, not Helias, but the flames. On the other hand, Helias himself was safe, in full command of most of his southern castles; from the only one of them which the King had actually attacked, he had turned away baffled after one day’s fighting. Illustration of Rufus’ character. In all these cases it would seem as if the fiery impulses of Rufus soon spent themselves, as if all depended on the first rush. If that failed, he never had perseverance to go on. In his strangely mingled nature, he could be either a ruler or a captain when the fit to be either took him. He had not steadiness to be either for any long time together. The campaign unfinished. Certain it is that he left all his continental campaigns unfinished; and this one, which was begun with such a special blaze of energy, was left more utterly unfinished than any of the others. And yet perhaps, after all, William Rufus had succeeded in the chief wish of his heart. William satisfied by the recovery of Le Mans. Le Mans was the special prize of his father; its castles were the work of his father. But his father had had no special dealings with Mayet or Château-du-Loir. He might be satisfied to do without such small and distant possessions, he might be satisfied even to undergo defeat before them, as long as the city which his father had twice won, as long as the royal tower which his father had reared, were his beyond dispute.

William’s good treatment of Le Mans. But it is at least to William’s honour that, in his last entry at Le Mans, he showed himself a benefactor to the city which had suffered so much. Rufus had, as we have seen in the case of Robert of Bellême, men about him who were worse than himself. Or rather, putting aside such exceptional sinners as Robert of Bellême, he had men about him who simply did, as a matter of course, according to the fashion of the time, without either rising or sinking to those parts of the character of Rufus which are special to himself. So now the citizens of Le Mans found in the Red King himself a deliverer from the oppressions done by his officers. Those among the inhabitants who had stayed in the city and had not followed their Count in his flight, had suffered every kind of wrong-doing at the hands of the King’s garrisons. He enters the city. The tale, according to the local historian, was too long and sad to tell in full.[721] But matters grew better when the King came himself. William again entered Le Mans in triumph, a triumph won chiefly over vines and apple-trees, certainly not over the garrison of Mayet.[722] He stops the oppressions of his garrison. Anyhow he came in a merciful mood. He checked the excesses of his soldiers; it was owing to his bounty only that the city was saved from utter ruin.[723] But on one class of its inhabitants his hand was harder than on the rest. He drives out the canons. The canons of Saint Julian’s, or so many of them as had agreed to the election of Hildebert, were driven out by the King’s order.[724] He leaves garrisons and returns to England. September, 1099. William then disbanded his army,[725] leaving garrisons in the castles of Le Mans, and doubtless in that of Ballon also. He then left the mainland for the last time, and, after an absence of three months, came back to England about the time of the feast of Michaelmas.[726]

William and Hildebert. But, if William Rufus, on his last visit to Le Mans, saved the inhabitants of the city from ruin, he presently deprived the city itself of one of its chief material ornaments. It was the election of Hildebert which had first stirred up his wrath, and he had picked out the lands of the bishopric, as the lands of a personal enemy, for special havoc.[727] Hildebert reconciled to the King. Yet we read that, at some very early stage of his march, before he had yet crossed the frontier of Normandy and Maine, Hildebert met the King, and was received as a friend, on showing that he had had no hand in bringing about the occupation of the city by Helias.[728] Charges brought against him. But, after William had again entered Le Mans, the charge was once more brought against the Bishop by some of the clergy of Saint Julian’s who had opposed his election from the beginning. It was by Hildebert’s counsel, they said, that Helias had been received, and that the King’s castles had been besieged; nay, the towers of the minster itself, the twin towers of Howel, had been used, as they well might be, for the attack on the royal tower. William bids Hildebert pull down the towers of Saint Julian’s. William hearkened to the enemies of Hildebert, and gave him his choice, either to pull down the towers which were so liable to abuse, or else to follow him at once into England.[729] To the Bishop of Le Mans the sea-voyage itself seemed frightful;[730] and when its dangers were passed, when Hildebert had reached the shores of our island, his enemies, who seem to have crossed also, again began to accuse him to the King.[731] Dialogue between William and Hildebert. A strange dialogue followed between the two. William, in his craft, offered to purchase the destruction of the towers at a price which would have greatly increased the internal splendour of the church. Let the Bishop agree to pull down the towers, and he, King William, will give him a vast mass of gold and silver for the adornment of the new shrine of Saint Julian.[732] But the Bishop had his craft also. He was in the land so famous for gold and silver work, the land where Otto and Theodoric were doubtless still plying their craft. They had no such goldsmiths at Le Mans; let the King keep his precious ingots for works within his own kingdom.[733] Still the destruction of the towers is pressed upon him; all that he can gain, and that with difficulty, is a little delay. Hildebert at last went back to Le Mans, taking with him, not indeed the King’s great ingots, but some lesser ornaments for his church.[734] The burning of the city, the dispersion of his canons, the havoc wrought in his own lands, all weighed him down. He poured forth the full bitterness of his soul in his extant letters. The unrepealed order for the pulling down of the two towers still hung over him. Was it ever carried out? Our author does not say distinctly. We might rather infer from his story that the death of Rufus and the return of Helias saved the Bishop from his difficulties.[735] Yet the appearance of the building itself looks the other way. The southern tower. As the church of Saint Julian now stands, the southern tower of Howel has its existing representative. It is slender, and, if it stood against a building of ordinary height, it would be tall. Its upper part belongs to the late rebuilding of the transepts, but the lowest stage belongs to the latest and richest style of Romanesque, contemporary with the great recasting of the nave. It is no work of Howel or even of Hildebert; but it is the work of one who wished to reproduce, with the richer detail of his own day, the general likeness of what Howel’s tower had been. Appearance on the north side. On the north side this tower has no fellow; the space at the end of the transept which answers to it is occupied by a ruined building of earlier Romanesque, which may well be the stump of the original tower of Howel.[736] Are we to infer that the bidding of Rufus was carried out—​that the towers, or their upper stages, were actually destroyed—​that every later ruler of Le Mans, the devout Helias among them, deemed the northern tower too near to the royal fortress to allow of its rebuilding, but that the rebuilding of the more distant tower on the southern side was begun in the earlier and finished in the later recasting of the church? May we look on the shattered building which joins hard to the northern transept of Saint Julian’s as being truly the remnant of a tower which Howel reared with the good will of William the Great, and which Hildebert, with a heavy heart, pulled down at the bidding of William the Red? If it be so, I know of no spot where architectural evidence speaks more strongly to the mind, where walls and columns and arches bring us more directly into the presence of the men who made and who unmade them. Among all the wonders of Saint Julian’s minster—​beside the nave which is inseparably bound up with so many living pages of our story—​beside the choir which in itself concerns not the historian of Norman kings and Cenomannian counts, but on which we gaze in breathless wonder as one of the noblest of the works of man—​no spot comes more truly home to us than that where we see the small remnants of what once was there and is there no longer. Alongside of the soaring apse to the east, of the wide portal to the west, the northern tower of Howel is indeed conspicuous by its absence.

The second war with Maine is the only event beyond the bounds of England which our own annalists record under this year, except indeed those œcumenical events besides which the affairs of Maine, and even the affairs of England, seem for the moment but as trifles. Robert at Jerusalem. July, 1099. In the same month of July in which William made his way into Le Mans, his brother Robert, in quite another warfare, made his way into Jerusalem.[737] Presently, before he could have heard of his own work, the great preacher of the crusade, Death of Pope Urban. July 29. Pope Urban the Second, passed away.[738] With the affairs of Maine these events have a direct connexion. It was not the fault of Count Helias that he did not obey the teaching of Urban, that he did not enter the Holy City alongside of Robert and Godfrey. Revolt in Anglesey. 1099. But it needs an effort to turn away either from Jerusalem or from Le Mans to record the last counter-revolution in Anglesey. Yet it is not amiss to remember that two lands were at the same moment striving for freedom against the Red King, and that the Briton and the Cenomannian had to hold their own against the same enemy. He who ruled at once at Bellême and at Shrewsbury was terrible to both alike. We may believe that the Britons marked their time while the fierce Earl had his hands full beyond the Channel, to strike another blow to win back their land, and specially to win back the island which had been the scene of the warfare of the last year. Return of Cadwgan and Gruffydd. But it would seem that, in some parts at least of the land, there was little need for blows. The two princes who had fled to Ireland, Cadwgan son of Bleddyn and Gruffydd son of Cynan, now came back. Cadwgan obtained a peaceful settlement in Ceredigion; Recovery of Anglesey and Ceredigion by the Welsh. Gruffydd got possession of Anglesey, perhaps as the price of warfare. A son of Cadwgan, Llywelyn, was presently killed by the men of Brecheiniog, that is doubtless by the followers of Bernard of Newmarch.[739] Another Welsh prince, Howel by name, had to flee to Ireland.[740] We may infer that the central border-land was still firmly held by the conquerors, but that, though the French had constrained the Britons of Anglesey to become Saxons,[741] French and Saxons alike had to yield to the returning Britons both in Anglesey and in Ceredigion. Gruffydd and Cadwgan, names which are by this time familiar to us, are again established in Britain. Both of them play a part in the later history of their own land, and Cadwgan at least will appear again within the range of our own story.

These Welsh matters find no place in the English Chronicles, which find so little space even for the deeds of Helias. Most likely they made no great impression on the mind of Rufus, now that, not Maine indeed, but at least Le Mans, was again his. He came back to England, a conqueror doubtless in his own eyes, about the feast of Saint Michael. Natural phænomenon. The year did not end without one of those natural phenomena in which the reign is so rich. The great tide. November 3, 1099. This time it was the wonderful flood-tide which, in the beginning of November, on a day of new moon, came up the Thames, flooded the land, overwhelmed houses and villages, and swept away men, oxen, and sheep.[742] A month later a new source of revenue began to flow into the Red King’s coffers. Death of Bishop Osmund of Salisbury. December 3, 1099. Bishop Osmund of Salisbury, the founder alike of the elder church and of the abiding ritual of his diocese, died early in December.[743] His temporalities passed, like those of Canterbury and Winchester, into the King’s hands. The Bishop of Durham had doubtless bade farewell to such duties; but the race of exactores, of clerical exactores, had not died out. There were still plenty of men in the Red King’s court who were ready to help in wringing the last penny out of the lands of bishops till they had wrung enough to buy bishoprics for themselves. The end is now drawing nigh; but till the end came, the groans of the Church, of the tenants of the Church, and of the whole people of the land, went up with a voice ever louder and louder.

CHAPTER VII.

THE LAST DAYS OF WILLIAM RUFUS AND THE ACCESSION OF HENRY.
1100–1102.[744]

The last year of the eleventh century had now come. End of the eleventh century. The course of those hundred years had wrought many changes in the world. To our eyes the changes which it had wrought in the isle of Britain seem great and wonderful, and great and wonderful they were. Changes in Britain. 1000–1100. At the beginning of the century Englishmen were struggling for their country and their homes against the invading Dane. The Dane had won the land; he had given us one foreign ruler who became one of ourselves. The days of foreign rule had passed away, only, as the event proved, to pave the way for a foreign rule which was to be far more abiding. A foreign rule which, by adopting national feelings, in some sort deadened them paved the way for a foreign rule which, by seeming for a moment to crush the old life of the nation, really called it up again in new shapes. But the rule of the Norman could not, like the rule of Cnut, itself become national during the life-time of the Conqueror or of his first successor. Internal changes. There was indeed a change between the England of Æthelred and the England of William Rufus. The outward aspect of the land itself must have changed, now that well-nigh every English mound was crowned by its Norman castle, now that well-nigh every English minster was giving way to a successor built after Norman patterns. But, if things had changed, men had changed also. Compare the signatures to a charter of Æthelred and the signatures to a charter of William. The change which had come over the land is marked by the difference between the list of English names among which it may be that some follower of the Norman Lady has crept in, and the list of Norman names among which it may be that some unusually lucky Englishman has contrived to hold his place. Changes in foreign relations. England had thus changed indeed in her internal state; she had changed no less in her relations to other lands. Within her own island she had made what it is no contradiction to speak of as a peaceful conquest made at the sword’s point. Scotland. The elder Eadgar had placed the younger on the Scottish throne as the work of warfare. So far as Eadgar’s work was the political submission of Scotland, its results were but for a moment. So far as it led to the peaceful change of Scotland into a second and separate English kingdom, its results have been indeed abiding. Wales. Towards Wales, amidst much of seeming ill-success, the work of conquest had in truth begun; the Red King had found out the true way to curb those bold spirits which he could not overcome in the field. Fusion of elements in Britain begins. Much indeed had the eleventh century done, in different ways, towards welding the three elements of the isle of Britain into one political whole. Ages had to pass before the work was finished; but it was in the eleventh century, above all, in the reign of Rufus, that it really began. Ireland. Towards the impossible work, forbidden by geography and history, of welding another great island into the same whole, whatever either William may have dreamed—​yet to the Conqueror we may not dare to ascribe mere dreams—​neither had done anything. So far as the two great islands of the Ocean had begun to draw near to one another, it was as yet wholly through the advances which the princes and people of Ireland had made in spiritual things to the Pontiff of the other world, the Patriarch of all the nations beyond the sea.

Britain ceases to be another world. But one great work of the times over which we are casting our eyes was that Britain was now fast ceasing to deserve its ancient name of another world. The earliest and the latest years of the century are each marked by a marriage, by a change of name on the part of the bride, which puts the change before us in a living way. Marriages of Ælfgifu-Emma and Eadgyth-Matilda. A new epoch of intercourse with other lands had begun when, on her marriage with a King of the English of her day, Norman Emma had to become English Ælfgifu. How greatly things had turned the other way was shown when, on her marriage with a King of the English of her day, English Eadgyth had to become Norman Matilda. England becomes part of the Latin world. The land which was to be the realm of Henry and Matilda was, through the chain of events which began with Emma’s marriage, fast changing from the separate world of Æthelred’s day into a part of the larger world of Western Europe, the world of Latinitas, of Latin speech and of learning, the world which, amidst all the struggles of rival Popes and Emperors, still deemed itself the world of Rome. Advance of the Latin world in the eleventh century. And in few ages had that world done more to extend itself than in the age which began with Æthelred and ended with Henry. At the beginning of the century northern Europe was still largely heathen; England was fighting the battle of Christendom against the Danish renegade. Conversion of the North. The Crusade. Now the kingdoms of the North had passed into the Christian fold. The change between the beginning of the century and the end is best marked by saying that before its end the crusades had begun, that the first crusade had been crowned with the greatest of crusading victories. But, in looking at the crusades of the East, the abiding crusade of the West must not be forgotten. The struggle in Spain. Our own Chronicler has not failed to tell us somewhat of the great strife of Christian and Saracen in the south-western peninsula,[745] and if the taking of Toledo was followed by reverses of the Christian arms, it was only by dint of help from Africa. Here is a sign that the tide was turned, and that it was only by such help from beyond the straits, by a new passage of Africa into Europe, that Islam could maintain itself in the once Roman and Gothic land. In the Eastern world, the crusade should not make us forget the causes of the crusade. Decline of the Eastern Empire. At the beginning of the century we saw the Eastern Rome in her full might, the might of Saracenic victories which were already won, of Bulgarian victories which were winning. But now, as the Western Mussulman has to call in help from Africa, so the Eastern Christian has to call in help from Western Europe. Renewed advance. The Christian frontier in Asia has indeed frightfully gone back since the beginning of the century; but it has again begun to advance; Nikaia, Antioch, Jerusalem itself, are restored to the Christian world, and Nikaia is restored, not only to the Christian world but to the obedience of the Eastern Augustus. Sicily. And, by not least memorable change among so many, the great Mediterranean island, the battle-field of Greek and Saracen, has passed away from the rule of either, while remaining the flourishing dwelling-place of both. Sicily has entered within the range of Western Christendom, and Palermo, like Winchester, has entered within the range of Norman dominion. When Æthelred reigned at Winchester and Richard at Rouen, a bishop of Evreux could not have performed the funeral rites of a bishop of Bayeux within the walls and between the havens of the Happy City.