Two important changes in the government of Northumbria would seem to have been carried out at this time. The first was the installation of Walcher of Lorraine as bishop of Durham, and his establishment in a castle especially built for him, so that he might be secure against any spasmodic rising on the part of the men of his great diocese. The second event was the deposition of Earl Gospatric. He was held guilty, we are told, of complicity in the murder of Robert de Comines, and the Danish storm of York in 1069, although his offences in both these matters had been committed previous to his reconciliation with William in 1070. Whatever may have been the true cause of his downfall, it was followed immediately by the restoration of the house of Siward to its former position in the north, for the earldom of Northumbria was now given to Waltheof of Huntingdon, Siward’s son, and remained in his hands until the catastrophe which overtook him three years later. Gospatric in the meantime betook himself to his cousin’s court and received from him a large estate in Lothian, centring round the town of Dunbar, until he might be restored to King William’s favour. With this act his political importance ceases; Domesday proves that the whole or part of his Yorkshire estates had been restored to him by the time of the taking of the Survey, but he never recovered his former rank and influence.
It has been conjectured with much probability that one of the conditions of the peace of Abernethy was the expulsion of Edgar the Etheling from Scotland.[[249]] Shortly after this time he appears as beginning a series of journeys, which before long brought him once more into England as the honoured guest of King William. His first visit was paid to Flanders, where he would be sure of a kindly reception from Robert the Frisian, by this time William’s mortal enemy. After a stay of uncertain length in Flanders he returned to Scotland, where he landed early in July 1074, and was hospitably entertained by his sister and her husband. Before long, however, he received an invitation from King Philip of France, offering to put him in possession of the castle of Montreuil, which he might use as a base from which to attack his enemies.[[250]] The offer shows considerable strategical sense in the young king of France. Montreuil was the first piece of territory which the Capetian house had gained on the Channel coast, but it was separated by the possessions of the house of Vermandois from the body of the royal demesne, and it lay between the counties of Ponthieu and Boulogne. Once established in Montreuil Edgar could have received constant support from Robert the Frisian; and if the counts of Ponthieu or Boulogne wished to revolt from the Norman connection Edgar’s territory would have made it possible to form a compact and powerful league against the most vulnerable part of the Norman frontier.
Edgar complied with King Philip’s request, and set out by sea to take possession of his castle; the good-will of his Scottish protectors being expressed in a multitude of costly gifts. Unfortunately for the success of his enterprise he was speedily driven on to the English coast by a storm and some of his men were taken prisoner, but he succeeded in reaching Scotland again, although in very miserable condition. Curiously enough this slight check to his plans seems to have caused him to abandon outright the idea of occupying Montreuil, and we are told that his brother-in-law advised him to make terms with King William. The Conqueror was at the time in Normandy, but he gave a ready hearing to the overtures from Edgar and directed that an escort should be sent to accompany him through England and across the Channel. Of the meeting between the king and the etheling in Normandy we possess no details, but the English writers were struck with the honours which the Conqueror showed to his former rival,[[251]] and Domesday reveals the latter in peaceable possession[possession] of upwards of a thousand acres of land in the north-east of Hertfordshire. For the rest of William’s reign Edgar remained a political cipher.
We have now reached the central event of William’s rule in England, the revolt of the earls in 1075. The rising in question is sufficiently characterised by the name which is generally assigned to it; it was a movement headed by two of the seven earls who held office in England, incited by the motives proper to men of their rank, and finding little support outside the body of their personal dependants. It had no popular or provincial feeling behind it; it cannot even be described as a purely Norman revolt, for the mass of the English baronage held true to King William, and its most striking result was the execution of the last English earl, for complicity in the designs of his Norman confederates.
On the death of William Fitz Osbern in 1071 his earldom of Hereford had passed to his son, a stupid and vicious young man, in every way a degenerate successor to the tried and faithful friend of the Conqueror. From the moment of his succession to his earldom Roger seems to have kept himself in sullen isolation in his palatinate across the Severn; his name has not yet been found among the visitors to William’s court who witnessed the charters which the king granted during these years, and we should know nothing about the man or his character if it were not for the preservation of three letters addressed to him by his father’s old friend Archbishop Lanfranc. At the time when these letters were written, William was in Normandy, and Lanfranc had been left in a sort of unofficial regency, in which position he had clearly been rendered uneasy by rumours of Roger’s growing disaffection. Lanfranc, in his correspondence, was tactfully indefinite on the latter point, but he was very outspoken in regard to Roger’s personal acts of oppression and injustice. By the example of William Fitz Osbern, “whom,” says Lanfranc, “I loved more than anyone else in the world,” the archbishop pleaded with his friend’s son to amend his conduct, and promised to see him and give him counsel on whatever occasion he might choose. But Roger remained obdurate, and in the last letter of the three which we possess Lanfranc declares Roger excommunicate until he has compensated those whom he has injured, and has made his peace with the king for his arbitrary acts in his earldom.
The position of Waltheof at this time has already been described. His Bernician earldom was less important on this occasion than were the group of shires in the eastern midlands over which he also possessed comital rights. The four counties of Northampton, Bedford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, together with Waltheof’s extensive estates in Leicestershire and Warwickshire, went far towards connecting the palatinate of Hereford with the distant earldom of East Anglia, the most dangerous quarter of the present rebellion.
The earl of East Anglia, Ralf of Wader, might, like Waltheof, claim to be considered an Englishman; for, although his mother was a Breton and his father also bore the Norman name of Ralf, the latter was an Englishman of Norfolk birth, and had been earl of East Anglia under Edward the Confessor and during the earliest years of the Conqueror. Ralf the younger, despite his succession to his father’s earldom, is identified with his mother’s land of Brittany, where he held the estates of Wader and Montfort, rather than with England.[[252]] Like Roger of Hereford, and judging from the same evidence, Earl Ralf would seem to have been a consistent absentee from William’s court, and his one appearance in the history of the latter’s reign, previous to his own revolt in 1075, took place in 1069, when he beat off the Danes from the estuary of the Yare.
The immediate cause of the present outbreak was the Conqueror’s objection to a marriage which had been projected between Earl Ralf and Emma, daughter of William Fitz Osbern and sister of Roger of Hereford. The reasons for the Conqueror’s action are intelligible enough; nothing could be further from his interest than the creation of a series of marriage ties among the greater vassals of his crown, especially when the parties to be connected in this way held the wide military and territorial powers which at this early date were inherent in the dignity of an earl. There is no reason to suppose that Earl Ralf’s loyalty had been suspected at any earlier time or that there was anything deeper than the royal prohibition of his marriage which now drove him into revolt. Without the king’s consent, the marriage was celebrated and the wedding feast held at Exning in Cambridgeshire, a vill within Waltheof’s earldom. Earls Roger and Ralf had already made preparations for their rising, their friends had been acquainted with their intention, and their castles were prepared to stand a siege; and at Exning a determined attempt was made to seduce Waltheof from his temporary fidelity to King William. His accession to their cause might very possibly bring with it some measure of English support, he had a great popular reputation as a warrior, and the plans and motives of the conspirators were unfolded to him at the wedding feast with startling frankness. The occasion was hardly such as to produce sobriety of counsel, and in the one extended narrative which we possess of the original plot, the terms of the offer now made to Waltheof were involved in a long harangue, in which the deposition of the Conqueror was declared to be a matter pleasing to God and man, and every event in William’s life which could be turned to his discredit was brought forward, heightened according to the taste of the conspirators or the literary skill of our informant. More important than the grotesque crimes attributed to the Conqueror are the plans formed by the earls for the event of his expulsion. Their object, we are told, was to restore England to the condition in which it had existed in the days of Edward the Confessor. With this object, one of the three chief plotters was to be king, the other two earls; Waltheof in particular was to receive a third part of England. William was declared to be fully occupied beyond the sea, his Normans in England were assumed to be discontented with the reward they had received for their services, and it was suggested that the native English might be willing to rise once more if a chance of revenge were offered them. Waltheof was assured that the chances of a successful rising could never be higher than at the moment in question.[[253]]
The narrative of Ordericus Vitalis, which we have hitherto been following, makes Waltheof indignantly refuse to be a party to any scheme of the kind. By the examples of Ahitophel and Judas Iscariot he demonstrated the sinister fate that was the portion of a traitor, and declared that he would never violate the confidence that King William had placed in him. On his refusal to join the plot, he was compelled to take a terrible oath not to betray the scheme and the rising was accomplished without his assistance; but after its suppression the tale makes Waltheof accused of treason by Judith his wife before the king, and describes his behaviour in prison and the manner of his end with great wealth of detail and a not improbable approximation to the facts of the case. It seems fairly certain that Waltheof took no effective part in the military operations which followed the bridal of Exning, and we may consider the difficult question connected with his trial and execution apart from the details of the war.
The plan of campaign followed by both sides was extremely simple. Neither the earldom of East Anglia or of Hereford acting by itself could obtain any permanent success against the loyal portions of the country; the object of the rebel leaders was to join their forces, and the object of King William’s lieutenants was to prevent the combination. The line of the Severn was guarded against Earl Roger of Hereford by the local magnates of Worcestershire, Wulfstan the bishop, and Urse d’Abetot the sheriff of the shire, Agelwig, abbot of Evesham, and Walter de Lacy, at the head of a force composed of the local fyrd in conjunction with the knightly tenants from their own estates.[[254]]