At Le Mans, as afterwards at London, William, when submission had become necessary, was received with every appearance of joy by the citizens; here, as in his later conquest, he distrusted the temper of his new subjects, and made it his first concern to secure their fidelity by the erection of a strong fortress in their midst—the castle which William planted on the verge of the precincts of the cathedral of Le Mans is the Mancel equivalent of the Tower of London. And, as afterwards in England, events showed that the obedience of the whole country would not of necessity follow from the submission of its chief town; it cost William a separate expedition before the castle of Mayenne surrendered. But the parallel between the Norman acquisition of Maine and of England should not be pressed too far; it lies rather in the circumstances of the respective conquests than in their ultimate results. William was fighting less definitely for his own hand in Maine than afterwards in England; nominally, at least, he was bound to respect the rights of the young Countess Margaret, and her projected marriage with Robert of Normandy proves that Maine was to be treated as an appanage rather than placed under William’s immediate rule. And to this must be added that the conquest of Maine was far less permanent and thorough than the conquest of England. The Angevin tendencies of the Mancel baronage told after all in the long run. Before twelve years were past William was compelled to compromise with the claims of the house of Anjou, and after his death Maine rapidly gravitated towards the rival power on the Loire.
While the body of the Norman army was thus employed in the reduction of Maine, William despatched a force to make a diversion by ravaging Mantes and Chaumont, the hereditary demesne of his rival,—an expedition in its way also anticipating the invasion which William was to lead thither in person in 1087, and in which he was to meet his death. Most probably it was this invasion, of which the details are entirely unknown, which persuaded Walter of Mantes to acquiesce in the fait accompli in Maine; at least we are told that “of his own will he agreed to the surrender [of Le Mans], fearing that while defending what he had acquired by wrong he might lose what belonged to him by inheritance.” Within a short time both he and his wife came to a sudden and mysterious end, and there was a suspicion afloat that William himself was not unconcerned in it. It was one of the many slanders thrown upon William by Waltheof and his boon companions at the treasonable wedding feast at Exning in 1075 that the duke had invited his rival and his wife to Falaise and that while they were his guests he poisoned them both in one night. Medieval credulity in a matter of this kind was unbounded; and a sinister interpretation of Walter’s death was inevitably suggested by the fact of his recent hostilities against his host.
One check to the success of William’s plans followed hard on the death of Walter and Biota. Margaret, the destined bride of Robert of Normandy, died before the marriage could be consummated. In 1063 Robert himself could not have been more than nine years old; while, although Margaret must have reached the age of twelve, the whole course of the history suggests that she was little more than a child, a fact which somewhat tends to discount the pious legend, in which our monastic informants revel, that the girl shrank from the thought of marriage and had already begun to practise the austerities of the religious profession. She left two sisters both older than herself, whose marriage alliances are important for the future history of Maine[[87]]; but their claims for the present were ignored, and William himself adopted the title of count of Maine.
Somewhere about the time of these events (the exact date is unknown) William was seized with a severe illness, which brought him to the point of death. So sore bestead was he that he was laid on the ground as one about to die, and in his extreme need he gave the reliquary which accompanied him on his progresses to the church of St. Mary of Coutances. No chronicler has recorded this episode, of which we should know nothing were it not that the said reliquary was subsequently redeemed by grants of land to the church which had received it in pledge; yet the future history of France and England hung on the event of that day.[[88]]
It was probably within a year of the settlement of Maine that William engaged in the last war undertaken by him as a mere duke of the Normans, the Breton campaign which is commonly assigned to the year 1064. As in the earlier wars with Anjou, a border dispute seems to have been the immediate occasion of hostilities, though now as then there were grounds of quarrel between the belligerents which lay deeper. Count Alan of Rennes, William’s cousin and guardian, had been succeeded by his son Conan, who like his father was continually struggling to secure for his line the suzerainty of the whole of Brittany as against the rival house of the counts of Nantes, a struggle which, under different conditions and with additional competitors at different times had now been going on for more than a century. The county of Nantes at this particular time was held by a younger branch of the same family, and there are some slight indications that the counts of Nantes, perhaps through enmity to their northern kinsmen, took up a more friendly attitude towards Normandy than that adopted by the counts of Rennes. However this may be, Count Conan appears in the following story as representing Breton independence against Norman aggression; and when William founded the castle of Saint James in the south-west angle of the Avranchin as a check on Breton marauders, Conan determined on an invasion of Normandy, and sent word to William of the exact day on which he would cross the border.
By the majority of Frenchmen it would seem that Brittany was regarded as a land inhabited by savages; in the eleventh century the peninsula stood out as distinct from the rest of France as it stands to-day. Its inhabitants had a high reputation for their courage and simplicity of life, but they were still in the tribal stage of society, and their manners and customs were regarded with abhorrence by the ecclesiastical writers of the time. Like most tribal peoples they had no idea of permanent political unity; and the present war was largely influenced by the fact that within the county of Rennes a Celtic chief named Rhiwallon was holding the town of Dol against his immediate lord on behalf of the duke of Normandy.[[89]] Instead of invading Normandy as he had threatened, Conan was driven to besiege Dol, and it was William’s first object in the campaign to relieve his adherent there.
What gives exceptional interest to the somewhat unimportant expedition which followed is the undoubted presence in William’s army of his future rival for the crown of England, Harold the earl of Wessex.[[90]] The reason for, and the incidents connected, with, his visit to Normandy will have to be considered in a later chapter, but there cannot be any question as to its reality; and in a famous section, the Bayeux tapestry, our best record of this campaign, shows us Harold rescuing with his own hand a number of Norman soldiers who were being swept away by the Coesnon as the army crossed the border stream of Brittany. On the approach of the Norman army Conan abandoned the siege of Dol and fell back on his capital of Rennes; but relations soon seem to have become strained between Rhiwallon and his formidable ally, for we find Rhiwallon remarking to William that it mattered little to the country folk around Dol whether their substance were to be consumed by a Norman or a Breton army. Possibly it may have been the remonstrances of Rhiwallon which induced William to retire beyond the Norman border, but we are told that as he was in the act of leaving Brittany word was brought to him that Geoffrey (le Barbu) count of Anjou had joined himself to Conan with a large army and that both princes would advance to fight him on the morrow. It does not appear that William gave them the opportunity, but the tapestry records what was probably a sequel to this campaign in the section which represents William as besieging Conan himself in the fortress of Dinan. From the picture which displays Conan surrendering the keys of the castle on the point of his spear to the duke it is evident that the place was taken, but we know nothing of the subsequent fortunes of the war nor of the terms according to which peace was made. Within two years of these events, if we are right in assigning them to 1064, Conan died suddenly,[[91]] and was succeeded by his brother-in-law Hoel, count of Cornouaille, who united in his own person most of the greater lordships into which Brittany had hitherto been divided.
THE SIEGE OF DINANT FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY
It may be well at this point briefly to review the position held by William at the close of 1064. With the exception of his father-in-law of Flanders, no single feudatory north of the Loire could for a moment be placed in comparison with him. Anjou and the royal demesne itself were, for different reasons, as we have seen, of little consequence at this time. The influence of Champagne under its featureless rulers was always less than might have been expected from the extent and situation of the county; and just now the attention of Count Theobald III. was directed towards the recovery of Touraine from the Angevin claimants rather than towards any rivalry with the greater power of Normandy. Brittany indeed had just shown itself hostile, but the racial division between Bretagne Brettonante and the Gallicised east, which always prevented the duchy from attaining high rank among the powers of north France, rendered it quite incapable of competing with Normandy on anything like equal terms. With the feudal lords to the east of the Seine and upper Loire William had few direct relations, but they, like the princes of Aquitaine, had received a severe lesson as to the power of Normandy in the rout of the royal army which followed the surprise of Mortemer. On the other hand, Normandy, threaded by a great river, with a long seaboard and good harbours, with a baronage reduced to order and a mercantile class hardly less prosperous than the men of the great cities of Flanders, would have been potentially formidable in the hands of a ruler of far less power than the future conqueror of England. Never before had Normandy attained so high a relative position as that in which she appears in the seventh decade of the eleventh century; and, kind as was fortune to the mighty enterprise which she was so soon to undertake, its success and even its possibility rested on the skilful policy which had guided her history in the eventful years which had followed Val-es-dunes.