William the Conqueror

by Edward A. Freeman

Meanwhile the other two earls were in open rebellion. Ralph, half Breton by birth and earl of a Danish land, asked help in Britanny and Denmark. Bretons from Britanny and Bretons settled in England flocked to him. King Swegen, now almost at the end of his reign and life, listened to the call of the rebels, and sent a fleet under the command of his son Cnut, the future saint, together with an earl named Hakon. The revolt in England was soon put down, both in East and West. The rebel earls met with no support save from those who were under their immediate influence. The country acted zealously for the King. Lanfranc could report that Earl Ralph and his army were fleeing, and that the King’s men, French and English, were chasing them. In another letter he could add, with some strength of language, that the kingdom was cleansed from the filth of the Bretons. At Norwich only the castle was valiantly defended by the newly married Countess Emma. Roger was taken prisoner; Ralph fled to Britanny; their followers were punished with various mutilations, save the defenders of Norwich, who were admitted to terms. The Countess joined her husband in Britanny, and in days to come Ralph did something to redeem so many treasons by dying as an armed pilgrim in the first crusade.

The main point of this story is that the revolt met with no English support whatever. Not only did Bishop Wulfstan march along with his fierce Norman brethren Ode and Geoffrey; the English people everywhere were against the rebels. For this revolt offered no attraction to English feeling; had the undertaking been less hopeless, nothing could have been gained by exchanging the rule of William for that of Ralph or Roger. It might have been different if the Danes had played their part better. The rebellion broke out while William was in Normandy; it was the sailing of the Danish fleet which brought him back to England. But never did enterprise bring less honour on its leaders than this last Danish voyage up the Humber. All that the holy Cnut did was to plunder the minster of Saint Peter at York and to sail away.

His coming however seems to have altogether changed the King’s feelings with regard to Waltheof. As yet he had not been dealt with as a prisoner or an enemy. He now came back to England with the King, and William’s first act was to imprison both Waltheof and Roger. The imprisonment of Roger, a rebel taken in arms, was a matter of course. As for Waltheof, whatever he had promised at the bride-ale, he had done no disloyal act; he had had no share in the rebellion, and he had told the King all that he knew. But he had listened to traitors, and it might be dangerous to leave him at large when a Danish fleet, led by his old comrade Cnut, was actually afloat. Still what followed is strange indeed, specially strange with William as its chief doer.

At the Midwinter Gemót of 1075–1076 Roger and Waltheof were brought to trial. Ralph was condemned in absence, like Eustace of Boulogne. Roger was sentenced to forfeiture and imprisonment for life. Waltheof made his defence; his sentence was deferred; he was kept at Winchester in a straiter imprisonment than before. At the Pentecostal Gemót of 1076, held at Westminster, his case was again argued, and he was sentenced to death. On the last day of May the last English earl was beheaded on the hills above Winchester.

Such a sentence and execution, strange at any time, is specially strange under William. Whatever Waltheof had done, his offence was lighter than that of Roger; yet Waltheof has the heavier and Roger the lighter punishment. With Scroggs or Jeffreys on the bench, it might have been argued that Waltheof’s confession to the King did not, in strictness of law, wipe out the guilt of his original promise to the conspirators; but William the Great did not commonly act after the fashion of Scroggs and Jeffreys. To deprive Waltheof of his earldom might doubtless be prudent; a man who had even listened to traitors might be deemed unfit for such a trust. It might be wise to keep him safe under the King’s eye, like Edwin, Morkere, and Edgar. But why should he be picked out for death, when the far more guilty Roger was allowed to live? Why should he be chosen as the one victim of a prince who never before or after, in Normandy or in England, doomed any man to die on a political charge? These are questions hard to answer. It is not enough to say that Waltheof was an Englishman, that it was William’s policy gradually to get rid of Englishmen in high places, and that the time was now come to get rid of the last. For such a policy forfeiture, or at most imprisonment, would have been enough. While other Englishmen lost lands, honours, at most liberty, Waltheof alone lost his life by a judicial sentence. It is likely enough that many Normans hungered for the lands and honours of the one Englishman who still held the highest rank in England. Still forfeiture without death might have satisfied even them. But Waltheof was not only earl of three shires; he was husband of the King’s near kinswoman. We are told that Judith was the enemy and accuser of her husband. This may have touched William’s one weak point. Yet he would hardly have swerved from the practice of his whole life to please the bloody caprice of a niece who longed for the death of her husband. And if Judith longed for Waltheof’s death, it was not from a wish to supply his place with another. Legend says that she refused a second husband offered her by the King; it is certain that she remained a widow.

Waltheof’s death must thus remain a mystery, an isolated deed of blood unlike anything else in William’s life. It seems to have been impolitic; it led to no revolt, but it called forth a new burst of English feeling. Waltheof was deemed the martyr of his people; he received the same popular canonization as more than one English patriot. Signs and wonders were wrought at his tomb at Crowland, till displays of miraculous power which were so inconsistent with loyalty and good order were straitly forbidden. The act itself marks a stage in the downward course of William’s character. In itself, the harrying of Northumberland, the very invasion of England, with all the bloodshed that they caused, might be deemed blacker crimes than the unjust death of a single man. But as human nature stands, the less crime needs a worse man to do it. Crime, as ever, led to further crime and was itself the punishment of crime. In the eyes of William’s contemporaries the death of Waltheof, the blackest act of William’s life, was also its turning-point. From the day of the martyrdom on Saint Giles’ hill the magic of William’s name and William’s arms passed away. Unfailing luck no longer waited on him; after Waltheof’s death he never, till his last campaign of all, won a battle or took a town. In this change of William’s fortunes the men of his own day saw the judgement of God upon his crime. And in the fact at least they were undoubtedly right. Henceforth, though William’s real power abides unshaken, the tale of his warfare is chiefly a tale of petty defeats. The last eleven years of his life would never have won him the name of Conqueror. But in the higher walk of policy and legislation never was his nobler surname more truly deserved. Never did William the Great show himself so truly great as in these later years.

The death of Waltheof and the popular judgement on it suggest another act of William’s which cannot have been far from it in point of time, and about which men spoke in his own day in the same spirit. If the judgement of God came on William for the beheading of Waltheof, it came on him also for the making of the New Forest. As to that forest there is a good deal of ancient exaggeration and a good deal of modern misconception. The word forest is often misunderstood. In its older meaning, a meaning which it still keeps in some parts, a forest has nothing to do with trees. It is a tract of land put outside the common law and subject to a stricter law of its own, and that commonly, probably always, to secure for the King the freer enjoyment of the pleasure of hunting. Such a forest William made in Hampshire; the impression which it made on men’s minds at the time is shown by its having kept the name of the New Forest for eight hundred years. There is no reason to think that William laid waste any large tract of specially fruitful country, least of all that he laid waste a land thickly inhabited; for most of the Forest land never can have been such. But it is certain from Domesday and the Chronicle that William did afforest a considerable tract of land in Hampshire; he set it apart for the purposes of hunting; he fenced it in by special and cruel laws—stopping indeed short of death—for the protection of his pleasures, and in this process some men lost their lands, and were driven from their homes. Some destruction of houses is here implied; some destruction of churches is not unlikely. The popular belief, which hardly differs from the account of writers one degree later than Domesday and the Chronicle, simply exaggerates the extent of destruction. There was no such wide-spread laying waste as is often supposed, because no such wide-spread laying waste was needed. But whatever was needed for William’s purpose was done; and Domesday gives us the record. And the act surely makes, like the death of Waltheof, a downward stage in William’s character. The harrying of Northumberland was in itself a far greater crime, and involved far more of human wretchedness. But it is not remembered in the same way, because it has left no such abiding memorial. But here again the lesser crime needed a worse man to do it. The harrying of Northumberland was a crime done with a political object; it was the extreme form of military severity; it was not vulgar robbery done with no higher motive than to secure the fuller enjoyment of a brutal sport. To this level William had now sunk. It was in truth now that hunting in England finally took the character of a mere sport. Hunting was no new thing; in an early state of society it is often a necessary thing. The hunting of Alfred is spoken of as a grave matter of business, as part of his kingly duty. He had to make war on the wild beasts, as he had to make war on the Danes. The hunting of William is simply a sport, not his duty or his business, but merely his pleasure. And to this pleasure, the pleasure of inflicting pain and slaughter, he did not scruple to sacrifice the rights of other men, and to guard his enjoyment by ruthless laws at which even in that rough age men shuddered.

For this crime the men of his day saw the punishment in the strange and frightful deaths of his offspring, two sons and a grandson, on the scene of his crime. One of these himself he saw, the death of his second son Richard, a youth of great promise, whose prolonged life might have saved England from the rule of William Rufus. He died in the Forest, about the year 1081, to the deep grief of his parents. And Domesday contains a touching entry, how William gave back his land to a despoiled Englishman as an offering for Richard’s soul.

The forfeiture of three earls, the death of one, threw their honours and estates into the King’s hands. Another fresh source of wealth came by the death of the Lady Edith, who had kept her royal rank and her great estates, and who died while the proceedings against Waltheof were going on. It was not now so important for William as it had been in the first years of the Conquest to reward his followers; he could now think of the royal hoard in the first place. Of the estates which now fell in to the Crown large parts were granted out. The house of Bigod, afterwards so renowned as Earls of Norfolk, owe their rise to their forefather’s share in the forfeited lands of Earl Ralph. But William kept the greater part to himself; one lordship in Somerset, part of the lands of the Lady, he gave to the church of Saint Peter at Rome. Of the three earldoms, those of Hereford and East-Anglia were not filled up; the later earldoms of those lands have no connexion with the earls of William’s day. Waltheof’s southern earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon became the dowry of his daughter Matilda; that of Huntingdon passed to his descendants the Kings of Scots. But Northumberland, close on the Scottish border, still needed an earl; but there is something strange in the choice of Bishop Walcher of Durham. It is possible that this appointment was a concession to English feeling stirred to wrath at the death of Waltheof. The days of English earls were over, and a Norman would have been looked on as Waltheof’s murderer. The Lotharingian bishop was a stranger; but he was not a Norman, and he was no oppressor of Englishmen. But he was strangely unfit for the place. Not a fighting bishop like Ode and Geoffrey, he was chiefly devoted to spiritual affairs, specially to the revival of the monastic life, which had died out in Northern England since the Danish invasions. But his weak trust in unworthy favourites, English and foreign, led him to a fearful and memorable end. The Bishop was on terms of close friendship with Ligulf, an Englishman of the highest birth and uncle by marriage to Earl Waltheof. He had kept his estates; but the insolence of his Norman neighbours had caused him to come and live in the city of Durham near his friend the Bishop. His favour with Walcher roused the envy of some of the Bishop’s favourites, who presently contrived his death. The Bishop lamented, and rebuked them; but he failed to “do justice,” to punish the offenders sternly and speedily. He was therefore believed to be himself guilty of Ligulf’s death. One of the most striking and instructive events of the time followed. On May 14, 1080, a full Gemót of the earldom was held at Gateshead to deal with the murder of Ligulf. This was one of those rare occasions when a strong feeling led every man to the assembly. The local Parliament took its ancient shape of an armed crowd, headed by the noblest Englishmen left in the earldom. There was no vote, no debate; the shout was “Short rede good rede, slay ye the Bishop.” And to that cry, Walcher himself and his companions, the murderers of Ligulf among them, were slaughtered by the raging multitude who had gathered to avenge him.

The riot in which Walcher died was no real revolt against William’s government. Such a local rising against a local wrong might have happened in the like case under Edward or Harold. No government could leave such a deed unpunished; but William’s own ideas of justice would have been fully satisfied by the blinding or mutilation of a few ringleaders. But William was in Normandy in the midst of domestic and political cares. He sent his brother Ode to restore order, and his vengeance was frightful. The land was harried; innocent men were mutilated and put to death; others saved their lives by bribes. Earl after earl was set over a land so hard to rule. A certain Alberie was appointed, but he was removed as unfit. The fierce Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances tried his hand and resigned. At the time of William’s death the earldom was held by Geoffrey’s nephew Robert of Mowbray, a stern and gloomy stranger, but whom Englishmen reckoned among “good men,” when he guarded the marches of England against the Scot.