CHAPTER VIII
THE CENTRAL YEARS OF THE ENGLISH REIGN

The conquest of England had exalted William of Normandy to a position of dignity and influence far above all his fellow-vassals of the French crown, it had renewed the lustre of the fame which the Norman race had won in its earlier conquest of southern Italy, but it did not mean an unqualified gain to the Norman state, considered merely as a feudal power. The process which had turned the duke of the Normans into the king of the English had meant the withdrawal of Normandy from the feudal politics of France for four years, and in that interval certain changes of considerable importance had taken place within the limits of the French kingdom. The Angevin succession war was now over; Fulk le Rechin had his brother safely bestowed in prison and could begin to prove himself the true heir of Geoffrey Martel by renewing the latter’s schemes of territorial aggrandisement. King Philip of France had reached an age at which he was competent to rule in person, and it was inevitable that the enmity between Normandy and France should become deeper and more persistent now that William had attained to a rank which placed him on an equality with his suzerain, and could employ the resources of his new kingdom for the furtherance of any designs which he might form upon the integrity of the royal demesne. More important than all, Count Baldwin of Flanders had died in 1067, and events were in progress which for twenty years placed the wealthy county in steady opposition to the interests of the Anglo-Norman state.

Between 1067 and 1070 Flanders was under the rule of Count Baldwin VI., the eldest son of Baldwin of Lille, who had greatly increased his borders by a marriage with Richildis, the heiress of the neighbouring imperial fief of Hainault. The counts of Flanders made it a matter of policy to transmit their inheritance undivided to the chosen heir, and Robert, the younger son of the old Count Baldwin, before his father’s death had secured himself against his ultimate disinherison by marrying Gertrude, widow of Florent I., count of Holland, and assuming the guardianship of her son Theodoric. On the death of Baldwin VI., the ancestral domain of Flanders descended to his eldest son, Arnulf, who was placed under the wardship of his uncle Robert, while Hainault passed to Baldwin, the second son, under the regency of his mother Richildis. The two regents were on bad terms from the start, but Robert at the time was hard pressed to maintain his position in Holland, and Richildis soon got possession of Arnulf, the heir of Flanders, and ruled there in his name. But her overbearing conduct rapidly made her unpopular in the county, and Robert was soon invited to invade Flanders and reign there in his own right. He accepted the invitation, and Richildis thereupon hired King Philip of France to support her with an army, and offered her hand and her dominions to William Fitz Osbern, Earl of Hereford. The earl, like a good knight-errant, accepted the adventure and hastened to the succour of the lady with the full assent of his lord King William, but fell into an ambush laid by his enemy Robert, at Bavinkhove, near Cassel, and perished there together with Arnulf his ward. Richildis maintained the struggle for a short time longer with the aid of troops supplied by the prince-bishop of Liège; but on their defeat near Mons, followed a little later by the surrender of Terouenne, the ecclesiastical capital of Flanders, she retired into the monastery of Maxines, and Robert, who is generally described in history as the “Frisian” from the name of his earlier principality on the shores of the Zuyder Zee, had the permanent possession of Flanders thenceforward.

The enterprise of William Fitz Osbern meant the dissolution of the alliance between Normandy and Flanders, which had been founded by the Conqueror’s marriage in 1053. It was true that French as well as Norman troops had been involved in the disaster at Bavinkhove, but William deliberately refused to make peace with Robert by recognising his right to Flanders, and threw him into the arms of the king of France by maintaining the claims of Baldwin, the brother of the dead Arnulf. The close friendship which this policy produced between France and Flanders for a time may suggest that William for once subordinated questions of state to personal feeling, but his own relations with a former king of France may have taught him that the alliances which a French monarch founded with one feudatory on a common hostility towards another were not likely to be very strong or permanent. It was not long after these events that King Philip threw away his Flemish connections by the unprovoked capture of Corbie, preferring, perhaps wisely, a definite territorial gain to a hazardous diplomatic understanding; and when Robert the Frisian, in 1085, at last tried to take the offensive against William, he found support, not in the French monarchy, but in the distant powers of Norway and Denmark.[[235]]

More dangerous than the open hostility of Flanders were the symptoms of disaffection which at this time were beginning to show themselves in the Norman dependency of Maine. Fortunately for William, the county had kept quiet during his occupation with the affairs of England, and the revolt which we have now to consider occurred at a time when he could give his full attention to the work of its reduction. The nationalist party in Maine had only been suppressed, not crushed, by the conquest of 1063, and after some five years of Norman rule their hopes began to revive, fomented probably by external suggestion on the part of Count Fulk of Anjou. There were in the field two possible claimants, both connected by marriage with the line of native counts: Azo, marquis of Liguria, husband of Gersendis, the eldest sister of the Herbert whose death in 1063 had led to the Norman occupation, and John de la Flèche, who had married Paula, the youngest of Herbert’s three sisters. The seigneur of La Flèche was an Angevin lord, but he took the Norman side in the war which followed, and the nationalists made their application to the marquis of Liguria, who appeared in Maine with Gersendis his wife and Hugh their son, the latter being received as the heir of the county.[[236]] Azo had brought with him great store of treasure from his Italian lordship, with which he secured a recognition of his son’s claims from great part of the Mancel baronage, but upon the failure of his supplies his supporters began to fall away, and he soon retired in disgust beyond the Alps, leaving behind his wife and son to maintain the family cause under the guardianship of Geoffrey of Mayenne.

Thus far the Mancel revolt had run the normal course of its kind, but a more interesting development followed.[[237]] Shortly after the departure of Azo the citizens of Le Mans, rejecting the leadership of their baronial confederates, broke away on a line of their own which gives them the distinction of anticipating by some twenty years the movement of municipal independence which in the next generation was to revolutionise the status of the great cities of Flanders and northern France. The men of Le Mans formed themselves into a “commune”[[238]]; that is, a civic republic administered by elective officers and occupying a recognised legal position in the feudal hierarchy to which it belonged. Had this association persisted, the citizens in their collective capacity might have held their city of the duke of Normandy or the count of Anjou, but they would have enjoyed complete independence in their local government and no principle of feudal law would have prevented them from appearing, still collectively, as the lord of vassals of their own. We do not know whether they may have been prompted to take this step by news of Italian precedents in the same direction, but the formation of a commune raised the revolt at a bound to the dignity of a revolution. The citizens, as was usual in such cases, united themselves in an oath to maintain their constitution and they compelled Geoffrey of Mayenne and the other barons of the neighbourhood to associate themselves in the same. Herein lay the seeds of future trouble, for Geoffrey of Mayenne, a typical feudal noble, had no liking for municipal autonomy, and it was largely his oppression as the representative of Azo and his heir which had stung the citizens into this assertion of their independence.

At the outset all went well with the young republic. We hear rumours of various violations of accepted custom, of the death penalty inflicted for small offences, and of a certain disregard for the holy seasons of the church; but the citizens were able to enter without immediate mishap upon the work of reducing the castles which commanded the country around. The commune of Le Mans did not live long enough to face the problem of welding a powerful rural feudality into a coherent city state, and its overthrow, when it came, came suddenly and disgracefully. Some twenty miles from Le Mans, the castle of Sillé was being held by Hugh its lord against the commune, and the men of the capital called out a general levy of their supporters within the county to undertake the siege of the fortress. A considerable body of men obeyed the summons, and the communal army set out for Sillé with Arnold, bishop of Le Mans, marching at its head. Hard by the castle the army from Le Mans was joined by Geoffrey of Mayenne with his tenants; but Geoffrey felt the incongruity of joining with a host of rebellious burghers in an attack on the castle of a fellow-noble, and he secretly entered into communications with Hugh of Sillé. Whether the rout of the civic host which occurred on the following day was the result of Geoffrey’s treason cannot now be decided, but a sudden sally on the part of the garrison threw the besiegers into confusion, and, although they recovered themselves sufficiently to maintain the fight, they were finally scattered by a report that Le Mans itself had fallen into the enemy’s hand. Great numbers of them perished in the panic which followed, more by the precipitancy of their flight than by the efforts of the men of Sillé, and Bishop Arnold was among the prisoners.

Within the capital all was confusion. The cause of the commune had been hopelessly discredited, and there was treachery within the city as well as in the camp by Sillé. The castle of Le Mans was occupied in the nationalist interest by Gersendis of Liguria, who, immediately upon the retreat of her elderly husband to Italy, had become the mistress of Geoffrey of Mayenne. But Geoffrey, after his conduct at Sillé, did not venture to return to the capital, and Gersendis, unable to endure her lover’s absence, began to plot the surrender of the castle to him. Her object was soon gained, and a fierce struggle raged for many days between the citizens and Geoffrey of Mayenne, now in the possession of their fortress. Betrayed and desperate, the men of Le Mans appealed for help to Fulk of Anjou, and pressed on the siege with such fury that Geoffrey was driven to make his escape by night. On Fulk’s arrival the castle surrendered to him, and was dismantled, with the exception of such of its fortifications as could be turned to the general defence of the city against the greater enemy who was already on the way.

Quickly as events seem to have moved, there had yet been time for news of the revolt to be brought to King William in England, and the messenger of evil had been no less a person than Arnold bishop of Le Mans himself. Long before William’s army had been set in motion Arnold had returned to Le Mans to play, as we have seen, a somewhat ignominious part in the catastrophe at Sillé. Meanwhile William had gathered a force, which is especially interesting from the fact that in it for the first time Englishmen were combined with Normans in the service of the lord of both races beyond the sea. Englishmen in the next generation believed that it was their compatriots who did the best service in this campaign, and William of Malmesbury thought that though the English had been conquered with ease in their own land yet that they always appeared invincible in foreign parts.[[239]] On the present occasion, however, there was little call for feats of arms. William entered Maine by the Sarthe Valley and besieged Fresnay, whose lord, Hubert, was soon driven by the harrying of his lands to surrender Fresnay itself and the lesser castle of Beaumont lower down the river. Sillé was the next point of attack, but Hugh of Sillé made his submission before the investment of his castle had begun, and William moved on southward towards Le Mans. After the strife and confusion of the past months men were everywhere disposed to welcome the King as the restorer of peace, castles were readily surrendered to him, and the way lay open to the distracted capital. Here too, after a brief delay, he was received without opposition, but the men of Le Mans, before they surrendered the keys of the city, obtained from the king a sworn promise that he would pardon them for their revolt, and would respect their ancient customs and the independence of their local rights of jurisdiction.[[240]] The commune of Le Mans ceased to exist, but in its last moments it had shown itself strong enough to win an act of indemnity from its formidable conqueror, and to guard itself against the possible consequences of a feudal reaction.

The war now entered upon another phase. Count Fulk was little minded to forego the position he had won in Le Mans as the protector of its commune, and, but for the unwonted strength of the Anglo-Norman army, it is likely enough that he would have made some effort to oppose William’s march to the city. As it was, however, he contented himself with turning upon John de la Flèche, William’s leading Angevin adherent, who immediately appealed to his ally for help. William at once despatched a force to his assistance under William de Moulins and Robert de Vieux Pont, a move which had the effect of widening the area of hostilities still further. Fulk proceeded to the siege of La Flèche, and called to his assistance Count Hoel of Brittany.[[241]] The combined Breton and Angevin host would be far superior to any force which William’s lieutenants had in the field in that quarter; and at the head of a large army, now as formerly composed of English as well as Norman troops, he hastened to La Flèche in person and everything betokened a pitched battle of the first class. But, at the supreme moment, an unnamed cardinal of the Roman Church, together with some pious monks, intervened in favour of peace, and within the circle of the Norman leaders Counts William of Evreux and Roger of Montgomery were of the same mind. Various conferences were held to discuss the conditions of a possible settlement, and at last, at Blanchelande, just outside the walls of La Flèche, a treaty was concluded.[[242]] Now, as ten years earlier, Robert of Normandy was selected as count of Maine, and to him Fulk of Anjou released the direct suzerainty which he claimed over the barons of the county, together with all the fiefs which were Robert’s marriage portion with Margaret, his affianced bride in 1061. Robert, in return, recognised Fulk as the overlord of Maine, and did homage to him in that capacity. William promised indemnity to those Mancel barons who had taken the Angevin side in the late war, and Fulk was formally reconciled to John de la Flèche, and the other Angevin nobles who had leagued themselves with the king of England.