William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

JUMIÈGES ABBEY—INTERIOR

For all this, the revolt of 1047 came near putting a summary close to William’s career and life. Normandy at this time was far from being a homogeneous state; apart from the general tendency of feudalism towards the isolation of individual barons, the greater divisions of the duchy had as yet little real cohesion; and a line of cleavage which is all-important in this revolt is marked by the river Dive, which separates Rouen and its territory, where the ducal power might be expected to be at its strongest, from the lands of the Bessin and Cotentin, which were always predisposed to local independence. These districts, as we have seen, formed no part of the territory ceded to Rollo by the treaty of Claire-sur-Epte, and it is quite possible that the course of events in the present year may have been affected by the distinction between the Gallicised Northmen of the Rouennais and Evrècin and the more primitive folk of the lands west of Dive. At any rate it was from the latter quarter that the main strength of the rising was drawn. The Bessin[Bessin] and Cotentin revolted under their respective viscounts, Randolf de Brichessart and Neel de Saint Sauveur, the latter being the most prominent leader in the whole affair; and with them were associated one Hamo, nicknamed “Dentatus,” the lord of Thorigny and Creuilly, and Grimbald the seigneur of Plessis. The nominal head of the revolt was William’s cousin Guy, son of Reginald, count of the Burgundian Palatinate by Adeliz, daughter of Duke Richard II. of Normandy, a young man, who up to this time had been the constant companion of William, and had received from him Brionne and Vernon, two of the most important castles of eastern Normandy. Guy was one of the few legitimate members of the ducal family, and he and his confederates found a justification for their rising in the stain which rested upon William’s birth. We are told that their ultimate object was to divide the duchy among themselves, and we may suppose that Guy would have taken Rouen and the surrounding country with the title of duke, leaving the western lords in practical independence. The latter took an oath to support his claims and to depose William, and they put their castles into a state of defence.

When the revolt broke out William was in the heart of the enemies’ country at Valognes, a town which seems to have been his favourite hunting seat in the west of Normandy. The opportunity was too good to be missed, and a plot was laid for his capture which came within an ace of success, and according to later tradition was only discovered, on the point of its execution, by Gallet, William’s fool. The duke had gone to bed when Gallet burst into his room and called on him to escape for his life. Clad in such garments as came to hand William sprang on horseback, and rode away through the dead of night eastwards towards his native and loyal town of Falaise. He took the coast road, crossing the estuary of the Vire at low water, and by day-break he had covered the forty miles which separate Valognes from Rye. It so chanced that Hubert the lord of Rye was standing between his castle mound and the neighbouring church as the duke came riding by, and recognising his lord he asked the reason of his haste. Upon learning of his danger Hubert called three of his sons and bade them escort the duke to Falaise; but even in the capital of his native province William made no delay, and hastened across the borders of his duchy to ask help of his overlord and guardian, King Henry of France.[^[48]] The king and the duke met at Poissy, and a French army prepared to enter Normandy under the leadership of the king in person, while on his part William summoned the men of Rouen, Auge, Lisieux, Evreux, and the Hiesmois, men, that is, from all Normandy east of the Dive and from the territory belonging to Falaise, west of that river. The Normans assembled in the latter district and concentrated on the Meance near Argences; the French army drew together on the Laison between Argences and Mezidon. King Henry heard mass and arranged his troops at Valmeray, then crossed the Olne on to the plain of Val-es-dunes and drew up his men on the bank of the river. In that position he was joined by William, who had crossed at the ford of Berangier, and the combined force prepared for battle, the Frenchmen forming the left wing and the Normans the right.[^[49]]

In the meantime the revolt had spread apace. The rebels had seized the duke’s demesne and, it would seem, were prepared to invade the loyal country across the Dive, for they had reached Val-es-dunes before the king and the duke had arrived there. Like their opponents, they drew up their army in two divisions, the men of the Cotentin forming the right wing and those of the Bessin the left. The battle seems to have begun by a charge of the Cotentin men on the French, but of the struggle which followed we have only a confused and indefinite account; it appears to have been a simple cavalry encounter, calling for no special tactical skill in the leaders of either side. Even in most of the Norman accounts of the battle William plays a part distinctly secondary to that of his overlord, although the latter had the ill luck to be unhorsed twice during the day, once by a knight of the Cotentin and once by the rebel leader Hamo “Dentatus.” Before long the fight was going decisively in favour of the loyal party. The rebel leaders seem to have mistrusted each other’s good faith. In particular Ralf of Brichessart began to fear treachery; he suspected that Neel de Saint Sauveur might have left the field, while one of his own most distinguished vassals had been cut down before his eyes, by the duke’s own hand as later Norman tradition said. Accordingly, long before the fight was over he left the field, but the western men were still held together by Neel, who made a determined stand on the high ground by the church of St. Lawrence. At last he too gave way, the flight became general, and it was at this point that the rebel force suffered its heaviest losses, for the broken army tried to make its way into the friendly land of the Bessin, and the river Olne lay immediately to the west of the plateau of Val-es-dunes. Large numbers of the rebels perished in the river and the rest escaped between Alegmagne and Farlenay, while Guy himself, who had been wounded in the battle, fled eastward to his castle of Brionne.

The reduction of this fortress must have been for William the most formidable part of the whole campaign. Even in the middle of the eleventh century the art of fortification was much more fully developed than the art of attack, and at Brionne the site of the castle materially aided the work of defence. The castle itself stood on an island in the river Risle, which at that point was unfordable, and it was distinguished from the wooden fortifications common at the time by the fact that it contained a stone “hall,” which was evidently considered the crowning feature of its defences.[^[50]] Immediately, it would seem, after the battle of Val-es-dunes King Henry retired to France, while William hastened to the siege of Brionne. A direct attack on the castle being impossible, William built counterworks on either bank of the Risle and set to work to starve the garrison into surrender. By all accounts the process took a long time,[^[51]] but at last the failure of supplies drove Guy to send and ask for terms with William. These were sufficiently lenient; Guy was required to surrender Brionne and Vernon, but was allowed to live at William’s court if he pleased. No very drastic measures were taken with regard to the rebels of lower rank, but William, realising with true instinct where his real danger had lain, dismantled the castles which had been fortified against him; and with the disappearance of the castles the fear[^[52]] of civil war vanished from Normandy for a while. The capital punishment of rebellious vassals was not in accordance with the feudal custom of the time.[^[53]] The legal doctrine of sovereignty, which made the levying of war against the head of the state the most heinous of all crimes, was the creation of the revived study of Roman law in the next century; and a mere revolt, if unaggravated by any special act of treason, could still be atoned for by the imprisonment of the leaders and the confiscation of their lands. To this we must add that William as yet was no king, the head of no feudal hierarchy; the distance that separated him from a viscount of Coutances was far less than the distance that came to separate a duke of Somerset from Edward IV. The one man who was treated with severity on the present occasion was Grimbald of Plessis, on whom was laid the especial guilt of the attempt on William’s life at Valognes. He was sent into perpetual imprisonment at Rouen, where he shortly died, directing that he should be buried in his fetters as a traitor to his lord.[^[54]] Guy of Burgundy seems to have become completely discredited by his conduct in the war, life in Normandy became unbearable to him, and of his own free will he retired to Burgundy, and vanishes from Norman history.

The war was over, and William’s future in Normandy was secured, but the revolt had indirect results which extended far beyond the immediate sequence of events. It was William’s duty and interest to return the service which King Henry had just done to him, and it was this which first brought him into hostile relations with the rising power on the lower Loire, the county of Anjou. The history of Anjou is in great part the record of a continuous process of territorial expansion, which, even by the beginning of the eleventh century had raised the petty lordship of Angers to the position of a feudal power of the first rank. Angers itself, situated as it was in the centre of the original Anjou, was an excellent capital for a line of aggressive feudal princes, who were enabled to strike at will at Brittany, Maine, Touraine, or Saintonge, and made the most of their strategical advantage. With Normandy the counts of Anjou had not as yet come into conflict; the county of Maine had up to the present separated the two states, and the collision might have been indefinitely postponed had not the events of 1047 compelled William of Normandy to bear his part in a quarrel which shortly afterwards broke out between the king of France and Count Geoffrey II. of Anjou.

The first five years of William’s minority had coincided, in the history of Anjou, with the close of the long reign of Count Fulk Nerra, who for more than fifty years had been extending the borders of his county with unceasing energy and an entire absence of moral scruple, and has justly been described as the founder of the Angevin state. His son and successor Geoffrey, commonly known in history, as to his contemporaries, under the significant nickname of Martel, continued his father’s work of territorial aggrandisement. He had three distinct objects in view: to round off his hereditary possessions by getting possession of Touraine, and to extend his territory to the north and south of the Loire at the expense of the counts of Maine and Poitou respectively. His methods, as described by Norman historians, were elementary; his favourite plan was to seize the person of his enemy and allow him to ransom himself by the cession of the desired territory. This simple device proved effective with the counts of Poitou and Blois; from the former, even before the death of Fulk Nerra, Geoffrey had extorted the cession of Saintonge, and from the latter, after a great victory at Montlouis in 1044, he gained full possession of the county of Touraine. The conquest of Touraine was undertaken with the full consent of the king of France; the counts of Blois, as we have seen, were ill neighbours to the royal demesne, and King Henry and his successors were always ready to ally themselves with any power capable of making a diversion in their favour. On the other hand their policy was not, and could not be, consistent in this respect; the rudimentary balance of power, which was all that they could hope to attain at this time, was always liable to be overthrown by the very means which they took to preserve it; a count of Anjou in possession of Saintonge and Touraine could be a more dangerous rival to the monarchy than the weakened count of Blois. Accordingly, less than four years after the battle of Montlouis, we find King Henry in arms against Geoffrey Martel, and William of Normandy attracted by gratitude and feudal duty into the conflict.[^[55]]

When William, archdeacon of Lisieux, the Conqueror’s first biographer, was living, an exile as he styles himself, in Poitou shortly after this time, the prowess of the young duke in this campaign was a matter of current conversation.[^[56]] The Frenchmen, we are told, were brought to realise unwillingly that the army led by William from Normandy was greater by far than the whole force supplied by all the other potentates who took part in the war. We are also told that King Henry had the greatest regard for his protégé, took his advice on all military matters, and remonstrated with him affectionately on his too great daring in the field. William seems in his early days to have possessed a full share of that delight in battle which is perhaps the main motive underlying the later romances of chivalry, and his reputation rose rapidly and extended far. Geoffrey Martel himself said that there could nowhere be found so good a knight as the duke of Normandy. The princes of Gascony and Auvergne and even the kings of Spain sent him presents of horses and tried to win his favour.[^[57]] Also it must have been about this time that William made overtures to Baldwin, count of Flanders, for the hand of his daughter, while in 1051 we know that he made a journey, fraught with memorable consequences, to the court of Edward the Confessor. In fact, with the subjugation of his barons and his first Angevin war William sprang at a bound into fame; the political stage of France lacked an actor of the first order, and William in the flush of his early manhood was an effective contrast to the subtle and dangerous count of Anjou.

At some undetermined point in the war an opportunity presented itself for Geoffrey Martel to gain a foothold in Norman territory. On the border between Normandy and Maine stand the towns of Domfront and Alençon, each commanding a river valley and a corresponding passage from the south into Normandy. Domfront formed part of the great border fief of Bellême, and at this time it was included in the county of Maine, over which, as we shall see later, Geoffrey Martel was exercising rights of suzerainty. Alençon was wholly Norman, but its inhabitants found William’s strict justice unbearable, and being thus predisposed for revolt they admitted a strong Angevin garrison sent by Geoffrey Martel. William decided to retaliate by capturing Domfront, leaving Alençon to be retaken afterwards.[^[58]] The plan was reasonable, but it nearly led to William’s destruction, for a traitor in the Norman army gave information as to his movements to the men of Domfront, and it was only through his personal prowess that William escaped an ambush skilfully laid to intercept him as he was reconnoitring near the city. The siege which followed was no light matter. It was winter, Geoffrey had thrown a body of picked men into the castle, and, unlike Brionne, Domfront was a hill fortress, accessible at the time only by two steep and narrow paths. It would thus be difficult to carry the place by sudden assault; so William, as formerly at Brionne and later at Arques, established counterworks and waited for the result of a blockade, harassing the garrison meanwhile by incessant attacks on their walls. The counterworks, we are told, consisted of four “castles,” presumably arranged so as to cover the base of the hill on which Domfront stands, and William contented himself for the present with securing his own supplies and preventing any message being carried from the garrison to the count of Anjou, in the meantime making use of the opportunities for sport which the neighbouring country offered. At last the men of Domfort contrived to get a messenger through the Norman lines and Geoffrey advanced to the relief of his allies with a large army. What followed may be told in the words of William of Poitiers:

“When William knew this he hastened against him [Geoffrey], entrusting the maintenance of the siege to approved knights, and sent forward as scouts Roger de Montgomery and William fitz Osbern, both young men and eager, who learned the insolent intention of the enemy from his own words. For Geoffrey made known by them that he would beat up William’s guards before Domfront at dawn the next day, and signified also what manner of horse he would ride in the battle and what should be the fashion of his shield and clothing. But they replied that he need trouble himself no further with the journey which he designed, for he whom he sought would come to him with speed, and then in their turn they described the horse of their lord, his clothing and arms. These tidings increased not a little the zeal of the Normans, but the duke himself, the most eager of all, incited them yet further. Perchance this excellent youth wished to destroy a tyrant, for the senate of Rome and Athens held such an act to be the fairest of all noble deeds. But Geoffrey, smitten with sudden terror, before he had so much as seen the opposing host sought safety in flight with his whole army, and lo! the path lay open whereby the Norman duke might spoil the wealth of his enemy and blot out his rival’s name with everlasting ignominy.”[^[59]]