William the Conqueror

by Edward A. Freeman

CHAPTER X.
THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM.
1070–1086.

The years which saw the settlement of England, though not years of constant fighting like the two years between the march to Exeter and the fall of Chester, were not years of perfect peace. William had to withstand foes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes in his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his first wound in personal conflict. Nothing shook his firm hold either on duchy or kingdom; but in his later years his good luck forsook him. And men did not fail to connect this change in his future with a change in himself, above all with one deed of blood which stands out as utterly unlike all his other recorded acts.

But the amount of warfare which William had to go through in these later years was small compared with the great struggles of his earlier days. There is no tale to tell like the war of Val-ès-dunes, like the French invasions of Normandy, like the campaigns that won England. One event only of the earlier time is repeated almost as exactly as an event can be repeated. William had won Maine once; he had now to win it again, and less thoroughly. As Conqueror his work is done; a single expedition into Wales is the only campaign of this part of his life that led to any increase of territory.

When William sat down to the settlement of his kingdom after the fall of Chester, he was in the strictest sense full king over all England. For the moment the whole land obeyed him; at no later moment did any large part of the land fail to obey him. All opposition was now revolt. Men were no longer keeping out an invader; when they rose, they rose against a power which, however wrongfully, was the established government of the land. Two such movements took place. One was a real revolt of Englishmen against foreign rule. The other was a rebellion of William’s own earls in their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King. Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale. More important in the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain. With the crown of the West-Saxon kings, he had taken up their claims to supremacy over the whole island, and probably beyond it. And even without such claims, border warfare with his Welsh and Scottish neighbours could not be avoided. Counting from the completion of the real conquest of England in 1070, there were in William’s reign three distinct sources of disturbance. There were revolts within the kingdom of England. There was border warfare in Britain. There were revolts in William’s continental dominions. And we may add actual foreign warfare or threats of foreign warfare, affecting William, sometimes in his Norman, sometimes in his English character.

With the affairs of Wales William had little personally to do. In this he is unlike those who came immediately before and after him. In the lives of Harold and of William Rufus personal warfare against the Welsh forms an important part. William the Great commonly left this kind of work to the earls of the frontier, to Hugh of Chester, Roger of Shrewsbury, and to his early friend William of Hereford, so long as that fierce warrior’s life lasted. These earls were ever at war with the Welsh princes, and they extended the English kingdom at their cost. Once only did the King take a personal share in the work, when he entered South Wales, in 1081. We hear vaguely of his subduing the land and founding castles; we see more distinctly that he released many subjects who were in British bondage, and that he went on a religious pilgrimage to Saint David’s. This last journey is in some accounts connected with schemes for the conquest of Ireland. And in one most remarkable passage of the English Chronicle, the writer for once speculates as to what might have happened but did not. Had William lived two years longer, he would have won Ireland by his wisdom without weapons. And if William had won Ireland either by wisdom or by weapons, he would assuredly have known better how to deal with it than most of those who have come after him. If any man could have joined together the lands which God has put asunder, surely it was he. This mysterious saying must have a reference to some definite act or plan of which we have no other record. And some slight approach to the process of winning Ireland without weapons does appear in the ecclesiastical intercourse between England and Ireland which now begins. Both the native Irish princes and the Danes of the east coast begin to treat Lanfranc as their metropolitan, and to send bishops to him for consecration. The name of the King of the English is never mentioned in the letters which passed between the English primate and the kings and bishops of Ireland. It may be that William was biding his time for some act of special wisdom; but our speculations cannot go any further than those of the Peterborough Chronicler.

Revolt within the kingdom and invasion from without both began in the year in which the Conquest was brought to an end. William’s ecclesiastical reforms were interrupted by the revolt of the Fenland. William’s authority had never been fully acknowledged in that corner of England, while he wore his crown and held his councils elsewhere. But the place where disturbances began, the abbey of Peterborough, was certainly in William’s obedience. The warfare made memorable by the name of Hereward began in June 1070, and a Scottish harrying of Northern England, the second of five which are laid to the charge of Malcolm, took place in the same year, and most likely about the same time. The English movement is connected alike with the course of the Danish fleet and with the appointment of Turold to the abbey of Peterborough. William had bribed the Danish commanders to forsake their English allies, and he allowed them to ravage the coast. A later bribe took them back to Denmark; but not till they had shown themselves in the waters of Ely. The people, largely of Danish descent, flocked to them, thinking, as the Chronicler says, that they would win the whole land. The movement was doubtless in favour of the kingship of Swegen. But nothing was done by Danes and English together save to plunder Peterborough abbey. Hereward, said to have been the nephew of Turold’s English predecessor, doubtless looked on the holy place, under a Norman abbot, as part of the enemy’s country.

The name of Hereward has gathered round it such a mass of fiction, old and new, that it is hard to disentangle the few details of his real history. His descent and birth-place are uncertain; but he was assuredly a man of Lincolnshire, and assuredly not the son of Earl Leofric. For some unknown cause, he had been banished in the days of Edward or of Harold. He now came back to lead his countrymen against William. He was the soul of the movement of which the abbey of Ely became the centre. The isle, then easily defensible, was the last English ground on which the Conqueror was defied by Englishmen fighting for England. The men of the Fenland were zealous; the monks of Ely were zealous; helpers came in from other parts of England. English leaders left their shelter in Scotland to share the dangers of their countrymen; even Edwin and Morkere at last plucked up heart to leave William’s court and join the patriotic movement. Edwin was pursued; he was betrayed by traitors; he was overtaken and slain, to William’s deep grief, we are told. His brother reached the isle, and helped in its defence. William now felt that the revolt called for his own presence and his full energies. The isle was stoutly attacked and stoutly defended, till, according to one version, the monks betrayed the stronghold to the King. According to another, Morkere was induced to surrender by promises of mercy which William failed to fulfil. In any case, before the year 1071 was ended, the isle of Ely was in William’s hands. Hereward alone with a few companions made their way out by sea. William was less merciful than usual; still no man was put to death. Some were mutilated, some imprisoned; Morkere and other chief men spent the rest of their days in bonds. The temper of the Conqueror had now fearfully hardened. Still he could honour a valiant enemy; those who resisted to the last fared best. All the legends of Hereward’s later days speak of him as admitted to William’s peace and favour. One makes him die quietly, another kills him at the hands of Norman enemies, but not at William’s bidding or with William’s knowledge. Evidence a little better suggests that he bore arms for his new sovereign beyond the sea; and an entry in Domesday also suggests that he held lands under Count Robert of Mortain in Warwickshire. It would suit William’s policy, when he received Hereward to his favour, to make him exchange lands near to the scene of his exploits for lands in a distant shire held under the lordship of the King’s brother.

Meanwhile, most likely in the summer months of 1070, Malcolm ravaged Cleveland, Durham, and other districts where there must have been little left to ravage. Meanwhile the Ætheling Edgar and his sisters, with other English exiles, sought shelter in Scotland, and were hospitably received. At the same time Gospatric, now William’s earl in Northumberland, retaliated by a harrying of Scottish Cumberland, which provoked Malcolm to greater cruelties. It was said that there was no house in Scotland so poor that it had not an English bondman. Presently some of Malcolm’s English guests joined the defenders of Ely; those of highest birth stayed in Scotland, and Malcolm, after much striving, persuaded Margaret the sister of Edgar to become his wife. Her praises are written in Scottish history, and the marriage had no small share in the process which made the Scottish kings and the lands which formed their real kingdom practically English. The sons and grandsons of Margaret, sprung of the Old-English kingly house, were far more English within their own realm than the Norman and Angevin kings of Southern England. But within the English border men looked at things with other eyes. Thrice again did Malcolm ravage England; two and twenty years later he was slain in his last visit of havoc. William meanwhile and his earls at least drew to themselves some measure of loyalty from the men of Northern England as the guardians of the land against the Scot.

For the present however Malcolm’s invasion was only avenged by Gospatric’s harrying in Cumberland. The year 1071 called William to Ely; in the early part of 1072 his presence was still needed on the mainland; in August he found leisure for a march against Scotland. He went as an English king, to assert the rights of the English crown, to avenge wrongs done to the English land; and on such an errand Englishmen followed him gladly. Eadric, the defender of Herefordshire, had made his peace with the King, and he now held a place of high honour in his army. But if William met with any armed resistance on his Scottish expedition, it did not amount to a pitched battle. He passed through Lothian into Scotland; he crossed Forth and drew near to Tay, and there, by the round tower of Abernethy, the King of Scots swore oaths and gave hostages and became the man of the King of the English. William might now call himself, like his West-Saxon predecessors, Bretwalda and Basileus of the isle of Britain. This was the highest point of his fortune. Duke of the Normans, King of the English, he was undisputed lord from the march of Anjou to the narrow sea between Caithness and Orkney.

The exact terms of the treaty between William’s royal vassal and his overlord are unknown. But one of them was clearly the removal of Edgar from Scotland. Before long he was on the continent. William had not yet learned that Edgar was less dangerous in Britain than in any other part of the world, and that he was safest of all in William’s own court. Homage done and hostages received, the Lord of all Britain returned to his immediate kingdom. His march is connected with many legendary stories. In real history it is marked by the foundation of the castle of Durham, and by the Conqueror’s confirmation of the privileges of the palatine bishops. If all the earls of England had been like the earls of Chester, and all the bishops like the bishops of Durham, England would assuredly have split up, like Germany, into a loose federation of temporal and spiritual princes. This it was William’s special work to hinder; but he doubtless saw that the exceptional privileges of one or two favoured lordships, standing in marked contrast to the rest, would not really interfere with his great plan of union. And William would hardly have confirmed the sees of London or Winchester in the privileges which he allowed to the distant see of Durham. He now also made a grant of earldoms, the object of which is less clear than that of most of his actions. It is not easy to say why Gospatric was deprived of his earldom. His former acts of hostility to William had been covered by his pardon and reappointment in 1069; and since then he had acted as a loyal, if perhaps an indiscreet, guardian of the land. Two greater earldoms than his had become vacant by the revolt, the death, the imprisonment, of Edwin and Morkere. But these William had no intention of filling. He would not have in his realm anything so dangerous as an earl of the Mercian’s or the Northumbrians in the old sense, whether English or Norman. But the defence of the northern frontier needed an earl to rule Northumberland in the later sense, the land north of the Tyne. And after the fate of Robert of Comines, William could not as yet put a Norman earl in so perilous a post. But the Englishman whom he chose was open to the same charges as the deposed Gospatric. For he was Waltheof the son of Siward, the hero of the storm of York in 1069. Already Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, he was at this time high in the King’s personal favour, perhaps already the husband of the King’s niece. One side of William’s policy comes out here. Union was sometimes helped by division. There were men whom William loved to make great, but whom he had no mind to make dangerous. He gave them vast estates, but estates for the most part scattered over different parts of the kingdom. It was only in the border earldoms and in Cornwall that he allowed anything at all near to the lordship of a whole shire to be put in the hands of a single man. One Norman and one Englishman held two earldoms together; but they were earldoms far apart. Roger of Montgomery held the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Sussex, and Waltheof to his midland earldom of Northampton and Huntingdon now added the rule of distant Northumberland. The men who had fought most stoutly against William were the men whom he most willingly received to favour. Eadric and Hereward were honoured; Waltheof was honoured more highly. He ranked along with the greatest Normans; his position was perhaps higher than any but the King’s born kinsmen. But the whole tale of Waltheof is a problem that touches the character of the king under whom he rose and fell. Lifted up higher than any other man among the conquered, he was the one man whom William put to death on a political charge. It is hard to see the reasons for either his rise or his fall. It was doubtless mainly his end which won him the abiding reverence of his countrymen. His valour and his piety are loudly praised. But his valour we know only from his one personal exploit at York; his piety was consistent with a base murder. In other matters, he seems amiable, irresolute, and of a scrupulous conscience, and Northumbrian morality perhaps saw no great crime in a murder committed under the traditions of a Northumbrian deadly feud. Long before Waltheof was born, his grandfather Earl Ealdred had been killed by a certain Carl. The sons of Carl had fought by his side at York; but, notwithstanding this comradeship, the first act of Waltheof’s rule in Northumberland was to send men to slay them beyond the bounds of his earldom. A crime that was perhaps admired in Northumberland and unheard of elsewhere did not lose him either the favour of the King or the friendship of his neighbour Bishop Walcher, a reforming prelate with whom Waltheof acted in concert. And when he was chosen as the single exception to William’s merciful rule, it was not for this undoubted crime, but on charges of which, even if guilty, he might well have been forgiven.