The treaty was in effect a compromise. All the immediate advantage, it is true, lay on the Norman side: the heir of Normandy was now the lawful count of Maine, and Robert’s countship meant the effective rule of William the Conqueror, who even appropriated his son’s title and in solemn documents would at times add to his Norman and English dignities the style of “Prince of the men of Maine.” Yet, on the other hand, the formal recognition of the Angevin overlordship was no small thing. It gave to succeeding counts of Anjou a vantage ground which they did not neglect. The line which separated suzerainty from immediate rule, clear enough in law, would rapidly become indistinct when a strong prince like Fulk the Rechin was the overlord, and a feckless creature like Robert Curthose the tenant in possession. More than sixty years were to pass before a count of Anjou became the immediate lord of Maine, but the seeds of such a development were laid by the treaty of Blanchelande.
In the period which follows the suppression of the fenland rising of 1070, the bulk of our historical information relates to the affairs of the Conqueror’s continental dominions. But in English history proper the time was one of crucial importance. Its character was not such as to invite the attention of a medieval chronicler, eager to fill his pages with a succession of battlepieces: with the exception of the revolt of the earls in 1075, England was outwardly at peace from the flight of Hereward to the Conqueror’s death; but it is to this time that we must assign the systematic introduction of Norman methods of government, and the gradual reconciliation of the English people to the fact that they had thrown their last try for independence, and that for good or ill they must make the best of the permanent rule of their alien masters. A process of this kind, in itself largely subconscious, lay beyond the understanding of the best monastic annalist or chronicler, and we shall never know exactly in what light the great change presented itself to the peasantry of a single English village; but there are certain matters, more on the surface of the history, with regard to which we possess definite information, and which themselves are of some considerable importance.
Prominent among these last stands the question of the relations between the Conqueror and his unquiet neighbour, or, as William would probably have described him, his unruly vassal, Malcolm Canmore, king of Scots. The Scotch question had merely been shelved for a little time by the submission of 1068, and up to the Conqueror’s death there remained several matters in dispute between the kings, each of which might serve as a decent pretext for war if such were needed. In particular the English frontier on the north-west emphatically called for rectification from King William’s standpoint. Ever since the commendation of Cumbria to Malcolm I., in or about 954, the south-western border of Scotland had cut the English frontier at a re-entrant angle at a particularly dangerous point. From the hills which rise to 2000 feet along the boundary between Cumberland and Durham, the valley of the Tees affords a gradual descent to the fertile country which lies between the moors of the North Riding of Yorkshire and the hills of Cleveland. So long as Lothian remained part of the Bernician earldom, the strategical significance of Teesdale was to a great extent masked; no king of Scots could ravage the plain of north Yorkshire without facing the possibility that his country might be harried and his own retreat cut off by a counter raid from Bamburgh or Dunbar. But the cession of Lothian to Malcolm II. after the battle of Carham in 1018 materially altered the military situation, and but for the dissensions within the Scotch kingdom which followed Malcolm’s death, it is probable that Yorkshire during the Confessor’s reign would have received sharp proof of the danger which impended from the north-west.
Malcolm was succeeded by Duncan, the son of his sister by Crinan, lay abbot of Dunkeld; and on Duncan’s displacement by Macbeth, leader of the Picts beyond the Forth, the position of the new king was too unstable to allow him to interfere effectively on the side of Northumbria. Relying as he did on Highland support, Macbeth seems to have left Cumberland in virtual independence, and it has recently been proved that during some part of the first fifteen years of his reign Cumberland was largely settled by English thegns who seem to have regarded themselves as subject to Earl Siward of Northumbria.[[243]] On his part, Siward supported the party of Malcolm, Duncan’s son; but when, three years after Siward’s death, Malcolm had become king of Scots, the tide began to turn, and Cumberland became once more a menace to the peace of northern England.
The restoration of the son of Duncan to the throne of Scotland brought into importance the marriage relationship which existed between his line and the family which for a century had held hereditary possession of the Bernician earldom. The complicated relationships which united the local earls of Bernicia will best be illustrated in tabular form,[[244]] but the outline of the Northumbrian succession is fairly clear. Siward, although a Dane by birth, was connected by marriage with the great Bernician house, but on his death in 1055 the ancient family was dispossessed of the earldom in favour first of Tostig and then of Morcar. Their earldoms, however, were mere incidents in the general rivalry between the houses of Godwine and Leofric, and the attachment of the Northumbrians to their local dynasty is shown by the fact that, at the crisis of 1065, Morcar is found appointing Oswulf, son of Earl Eadwulf II., subordinate earl of Bernicia beyond the Tyne. Upon Oswulf’s murder his cousin Gospatric, as we have seen, bought a recognition of the family claims from the Conqueror; and it is not improbable that the latter, when making Gospatric his lieutenant in Northumbria, may have had in mind some idea of securing peace from the side of Scotland and conciliating the local sentiment of the north through an earl who inherited the blood of the ancient lords of Bamburgh and was near of kin to the king of Scots. The plan in the first instance failed through the defection of Gospatric in the summer of 1068, but the rapidity with which his restoration followed the submission which he tendered by proxy to William on the bank of the Tees at the close of 1069 is itself significant. In the interval created by Gospatric’s deposition there had occurred the disastrous experiment of the appointment of Robert de Comines. It was as important now as two years previously to prevent the men of Northumberland and Durham from making common cause with Malcolm of Scotland against the Norman government; and now as formerly Gospatric was the one man who could, if he chose, perform this work. But before another year had passed the precarious tranquillity of the north was again broken, and the Scotch danger reasserted itself in the acutest of forms.
We might gather from the table above referred to, alone, that Malcolm, by his English connections, would be the natural protector of any dispossessed natives who might choose to seek refuge at his court, and we have seen that Edgar the Etheling had twice been driven to escape beyond the Tweed. We possess no information as to the motives which induced Malcolm in the course of 1070 to break peace with King William. In his barbarian mind Malcolm may have conceived of himself as avenging the wrongs of his English friends by harrying the land from which they had been driven, or, more probably, the withdrawal of the Conqueror from the north may have seemed to him to open a safe opportunity for an extended plunder raid. Possibly he regarded his cousin Gospatric as having betrayed the cause of his people by doing homage to the Norman Conqueror, but whatever the immediate cause, he suddenly fell upon Northumbria by way of Cumberland and Teesdale, harried Cleveland and Holderness, and then turned back again upon the modern shire of Durham.[[245]] And it was while he was in the act of burning the town of Wearmouth that Edgar the Etheling, with his mother and sisters, accompanied by Marleswegn, Harold’s former lieutenant in the north, and other battered relics of the national party, landed from their ships in the harbour.[[246]] So long as the Danes under Earl Asbiorn had kept to the Humber, it would seem that the etheling had been content to drift about aimlessly with them, but their departure for Ely had driven him to seek refuge for a third time within two years at the Scottish court. Malcolm went down to the fugitives and assured them of a welcome in Scotland, whither they sailed off without delay, while he betook himself with renewed energy to his work of devastation.
For in the meantime Gospatric had been doing what he would consider to be his duty as the lawful earl of Bernicia: while Malcolm was harrying Durham, Gospatric was harrying Cumberland. The action taken by King Malcolm had for the time being destroyed all possibility of a coalition between Scot and Bernician, and, on the present occasion, Gospatric’s fidelity was unimpeachable, if his generalship was bad. He was successful in carrying off much booty to his fortress of Bamburgh, but he did nothing to check the Scot king’s depredations, and the news of what had been happening in Cumberland excited Malcolm to a state of fury, in which he committed the most appalling atrocities on the country folk of the region through which his northward march lay. Red-handed as he was, Malcolm on his return to Scotland found the English exiles in the enjoyment of his peace, and forthwith insisted that Margaret, the etheling’s sister, should be given to him in marriage. Some project of the kind had undoubtedly been mooted during the etheling’s earlier visits to Scotland, but Margaret felt a desire to enter the religious life; and nothing but the fact that the very existence of the fugitives lay at Malcolm’s mercy induced the etheling to give his consent to the union. The exact date of the ceremony is uncertain, but it may not unreasonably be placed in the course of 1071, and with the alliance of the royal houses of Scotland and Wessex the northern kingdom begins to emerge from its barbaric isolation, and to fill a permanent place in the political scheme of English statesmen.
To William the marriage was no matter of congratulation. It meant that the Scottish court would become definitely interested in the restoration of the old English dynasty; so long as such an event were possible, it was likely to make Scotland both a refuge and a recruiting ground for any political exile who might choose to attempt his return by force and arms. To minimise these evils, and to avenge the harrying of 1070, the Conqueror in the summer of 1072 set out for Scotland in person. The expedition was planned on a great scale; the fyrd was called out, and the naval force which was at William’s command co-operated with the native host. Malcolm seems to have felt himself unequal to meeting a force of this size in the open field; he allowed William to pass through Lothian and to cross the Forth without any serious obstruction, and the two kings met at Abernethy on the Tay. There Malcolm renewed his homage to William, made peace, and gave hostages for its observance, among them Donald, his son by his first wife, Ingibiorg. The expedition could not have been intended to accomplish more than this, and William at once turned southwards, retracing his steps along the great east coast road.[[247]]
Nothing appears to have been done at this time to improve the defences of the northern border. Carlisle remained in Scotch hands, and the site of the future Newcastle on the Tyne is only mentioned in the record of this march through the fact of the river being flooded at the moment when the army sought to cross it, thereby causing an inconvenient delay. The importance of the Teesdale gap had been sufficiently proved by the events of 1070, but no attempt was made to guard the course of the river in any special manner. On the other hand we should do well not to ignore the possibility that the first creation of the earldom of Richmond immediately to the south of the Tees may not have been unconnected with the advisability of keeping a permanent military force in this quarter. The earldom in question had been conferred upon Brian of Penthievre in or before 1068, and had passed from him to his brother Alan by the date of the events with which we are dealing.[[248]] So far as we know King William never created an earldom save for purposes of border defence, and the geographical facts which we have just noted make it distinctly improbable that Richmond was an exception to this rule.