It is painful to pass from this rhapsody to what is perhaps the grimmest scene in William’s life. The retreat of Geoffrey, to whatever cause it is to be assigned, exposed Alençon to William’s vengeance. Leaving a sufficient force before Domfront to maintain the siege, in a single night’s march he crossed the water-parting of the Varenne and the Sarthe, and approached Alençon as dawn was breaking. Facing him was the fortified bridge over the Sarthe, behind it lay the town, and above the town stood the castle, all fully defended. On the bridge certain of the citizens had hung out skins, and as William drew near they beat them, shouting “Hides for the tanner.”[[60]] With a mighty oath the young duke swore that he would prune those men as it were with a pollarding knife, and within a few hours he had executed his threat. The bridge was stormed and the town taken, William unroofing the houses which lay outside the wall and using the timber as fuel to burn the gates, but the castle still held out. Thirty-two of the citizens were then brought before the duke; their hands and feet were struck off and flung straightway over the wall of the castle among its defenders.[[61]] With the hasty submission of the castle which followed William was free to give his whole attention to the reduction of Domfront, and on his return he found the garrison already demoralised by the news of what had happened at Alençon, and by the ineffective departure of Geoffrey Martel. They made an honourable surrender and Domfront became a Norman possession,[[62]] the first point gained in the struggle which was not to end until a count of Anjou united the thrones of Normandy, Maine, and England.
Denier of Geoffrey Martel
CHAPTER II
REBELLION AND INVASION
Between the first Angevin war and the outbreak of overt hostilities between Normandy and France, there occurs a period of five or six years the historical interest of which lies almost entirely in the internal affairs of the Norman state. It was by no means an unimportant time; it included one external event of great importance, William’s visit to England in 1051, but its real significance lay in the gradual consolidation of his power in Normandy and its results. On the one hand it was in these years that William finally suppressed the irreconcilable members of his own family; on the other hand the gradual dissolution of the traditional alliance between Normandy and the Capetian house runs parallel to this process and is essentially caused by it. From the very time when William attained his majority these two powers begin steadily to drift apart; the breach widens as William’s power increases, and the support given by the king of France in these years to Norman rebels such as William Busac and William of Arques is naturally followed by his invasions of Normandy in 1054 and 1058. As compensation for this William’s marriage with Matilda of Flanders falls within the same period, and events ruled that the alliance thus formed was to neutralise the enmity of the Capetian house at the critical moment of the invasion of England. There is indeed a sense in which we may say that it was William’s success in these six years which made the invasion of England possible; whether consciously or not, William was making indispensable preparation for his supreme endeavour when he was taking the castles of his unquiet kinsmen and banishing them from Normandy.
The first of them to go was William surnamed “the Warling,” count of Mortain and grandson of Duke Richard the Fearless. His fall was sudden and dramatic. As we have only one narrative of these events it may be given here at length:
“At that time William named the Warling, of Richard the Great’s line, was count of Mortain. One day a certain knight of his household, called Robert Bigot, came to him and said, ‘My Lord, I am very poor and in this country I cannot obtain relief; I will therefore go to Auplia, where I may live more honourably.’ ‘Who,’ said William, ‘has advised you thus?’ ‘The poverty which I suffer,’ replied Robert. Then said William, ‘Within eight days, in Normandy itself, you shall be able in safety to seize with your own hands whatever you may require.’ Robert therefore, submitting to his lord’s counsel, bided his time, and shortly afterwards, through Richard of Avranches his kinsman, gained the acquaintance of the duke. One day they were talking in private when Robert among other matters repeated the above speech of Count William. The duke thereupon summoned the count and asked him what he meant by talk of this kind, but he could not deny the matter, nor did he dare to tell his real meaning. Then said the duke in his wrath: ‘You have planned to confound Normandy with seditious war, and wickedly have you plotted to rebel against me and disinherit me, therefore it is that you have promised booty to your needy knight. But, God granting it, the unbroken peace which we desire shall remain to us. Do you therefore depart from Normandy, nor ever return hither so long as I live.’ William thus exiled sought Apulia wretchedly, accompanied by only one squire, and the duke at once promoted Robert his brother and gave him the county of Mortain. Thus harshly did he abuse the haughty kindred of his father and honourably exalt the humble kindred of his mother.”[[63]]
The moral of the story lies in its last sentence. The haughty kindred of the duke’s father were beginning to show themselves dangerous, and William threw down the challenge to them once for all when he disinherited the grandson of Richard the Great in favour of the grandson of the tanner of Falaise. But, apart from the personal questions involved, the tale is eminently illustrative of William’s conception of his duty as a ruler. By policy as well as prepossession he was driven to be the stern maintainer of order; the men who would stir up civil war in Normandy wished also to disinherit its duke, and from this followed naturally that community of interest between the ruler and his meaner subjects as against the greater baronage which was typical of the early Middle Ages in Normandy and England alike. It is inadvisable to scrutinise too narrowly the means taken by William to secure his position; if on the present occasion he exiled his cousin on the mere information of a single knight, he had already been taught the wisdom of striking at the root of a rebellion before it had time to grow to a head. We must not expect too much forbearance from the head of a feudal state in his dealings with a suspected noble when the banishment of the latter would place a dangerous fief at the former’s disposal. Lastly, we may notice the way in which Apulia is evidently regarded as a land of promise at this time by all who seek better fortune than Normandy can give them. In the eleventh century, as in the fifteenth, Italy was exercising its perennial attraction for the men of the ruder north, and under the leadership of the sons of Tancred of Hauteville a new Normandy was rising on the wreck of the Byzantine Empire in the West by the shores of the Ionian Sea.
Probably about this time, and possibly not without some connection with the disaffection of William the Warling, there occurred another abortive revolt, of which the scene was laid, as usual, in one of the semi-independent counties held by members of the ducal house. In the north-east corner of Normandy the town of Eu with its surrounding territory had been given by Duke Richard II. to his illegitimate brother William. The latter had three sons, of whom Robert, the eldest, succeeded him in the county, Hugh, the youngest, subsequently becoming bishop of Lisieux. The remaining brother, William, surnamed Busac, is a mysterious person whose appearance in history is almost confined to the single narrative which we possess of his revolt. The latter is not free from difficulty; William was not his father’s eldest son, and yet at the period in question he appears in possession of the castle of Eu, and, which is much more remarkable, he is represented as laying claim to the duchy of Normandy itself. At present this is inexplicable, but it is certain that the duke besieged and took Eu and drove William Busac into exile. The place of refuge which he chose is very suggestive. He went to France and attached himself to King Henry, who married him to the heiress of the county of Soissons, where his descendants were ruling at the close of the century.[[64]] It is plain that the king’s opportunist policy has definitely turned against William of Normandy, when we find a Norman rebel received with open arms and given an important territorial position on the border of the royal demesne.[[65]]
The third and last of this series of revolts can be definitely assigned to the year 1053. It arose like the revolt of William Busac in the land east of Seine, and its leader was again one of the “Ricardenses,” a member of a collateral branch of the ducal house. William count of Arques was an illegitimate son of Duke Richard II., and therefore brother by the half blood to Duke Robert I., and uncle to William of Normandy. With the object of conciliating an important member of his family the latter had enfeoffed his uncle in the county of Arques, the district between Eu and the Pays de Caux. Before long, however, relations between the duke and the count became strained; William of Arques was said to have failed in his feudal duty at the siege of Domfront, and when a little later he proceeded to fortify the capital of his county with a castle, it was known that his designs were not consonant with loyalty towards the interests of his lord and nephew. In the hope of anticipating further trouble the duke insisted on his legal right of garrisoning the castle with his own troops, but the precaution proved to be quite futile, for the count soon won over the garrison, defied his nephew, and spread destruction over as wide an area as he could reach from his base of operations. At this time, as at the similar crisis of 1047, William seems to have been at Valognes; he was certainly somewhere in the Cotentin when the news of what was happening at Arques was brought to him.[[66]] Without a moment’s delay he rode off towards the scene of the revolt, crossing the Dive estuary at the ford of St. Clement and so past Bayeux, Caen, and Pont Audemer to the Seine at Caudebec, and then to Baons-le-Comte and Arques, his companions dropping off one by one in the course of his headlong ride until only six were left. Near to Arques, however, he fell in with a party of three hundred horsemen from Rouen, who had set out with the object of preventing the men of Arques from carrying supplies into the castle. William had not yet outgrown the impetuosity which called forth King Henry’s admonitions in the campaign of 1048: he insisted on delivering an instant attack, believing that the rebels would shrink from meeting him in person, and dashed on to the castle regardless of the remonstrances of the Rouen men, who counselled discretion. Charging up the castle mound he drove the count and his men within the fortress as he had anticipated, and we are given to understand that but for their hastily shutting the gates against him the revolt would have been ended then and there.