The Herefordshire revolt had soon run its course; Earl Roger never got across the Severn and within a short time had been taken prisoner, but the earl of East Anglia was a person of greater ability. Before engaging in the rebellion the earls had sought for external help; application had been made to the King of Denmark for a fleet, and reinforcements had been drawn from Brittany, recruited in great part, no doubt, from the Breton estates of Ralf de Wader. From the latter’s head-quarters at Norwich a highroad of Roman origin stretched invitingly across the Norfolk plain towards the royal castle of Cambridge, and Earl Ralf moved westward in the hope of effecting a junction with Roger of Hereford; but at an unknown place in the neighbourhood of this line, designated by Ordericus Vitalis as “Fagadun,” the rebel army was broken and scattered, and from a letter which Lanfranc wrote to the king immediately after this event, the archbishop was evidently in expectation of a speedy suppression of the whole rising. That this hope was frustrated was due to the heroism of Earl Ralf’s bride, who undertook the defence of Norwich castle in person, while her lord went off to Denmark, and held out for three months against all that the Norman commanders could do. At last she was compelled to surrender upon conditions. The Breton tenants of Earl Ralf in England were required to abandon their lands and to withdraw to Brittany within forty days; the mercenaries of the same race were allowed a month to get away from the country. Emma herself, to whom belonged all the honours of the war, went to Brittany, where she met her husband, and Norwich castle was once more occupied in the king’s name.
Earl Ralf’s journey to Denmark had not been fruitless, for a fleet of two hundred Danish ships appeared in the Humber shortly after the fall of Norwich, under the command of Cnut, son of King Swegn Estrithson, and a certain earl called Hakon.[[255]] Their coming reopened an endless possibility of further trouble; the Conqueror, through Archbishop Lanfranc, enjoined Bishop Walcher of Durham to look well to the defences of his castle.[[256]] But the first object of the ordinary Danish commander of those times was always plunder, and Cnut after successfully evading the royal troops contented himself with the sack of York cathedral, and quickly sailed away to Flanders. In the very year of this expedition (1075), Swegn Estrithson died, and Harold, his eldest son, who succeeded him, kept peace towards England throughout his reign. In the autumn of 1075 William had returned to England, and at Christmas he proceeded to deal with the persons and property of the revolted earls. Waltheof and Roger were in his power; Ralf was safe beyond the sea, but his English lands remained for confiscation, and such of his Breton associates as were in the king’s hands were punished according to the fashion of the times. Earl Roger was sent to prison, but his captivity at first was not over severe, and had it not been for his contumelious conduct towards the king he might have obtained his release in due course. Unfortunately for himself, he mortally offended William by throwing into the fire a rich present of silks and furs which the king sent to him one Easter, and perpetual captivity was the return for the insult. The relative leniency of the Conqueror’s treatment of Roger contrasts very strikingly with his attitude to the third earl implicated in the revolt, and no incident in King William’s career has won more reprobation from medieval and modern historians than the sentence which he allowed to be passed on Earl Waltheof.
We have already sketched in outline the narrative of Waltheof’s action as given by Ordericus Vitalis, and it will be well now to consider briefly the independent story told by the native English chronicles.[[257]] On all accounts it is certain that Waltheof had been implicated in the treason proposed at Exning, and it is no less clear, though the fact is suppressed by Orderic, that he had speedily repented and under the advice of Lanfranc had revealed the whole scheme to King William in Normandy.[[258]] The part played by Lanfranc is explicable, not only by the species of regency he held in the kingdom at the time, but also by his position as metropolitan of the English church, and his reputation as a famous doctor of the canon law. No man was better qualified to give a sound opinion as to the circumstances under which an indiscreet oath might be broken without the guilt of perjury; and the penances which he imposed on Waltheof for his intended breach of the engagement which he had taken at Exning seem to have been accepted by all parties as a satisfactory solution of the matter. On his part, William bided his time; he appears to have accepted the gifts which Waltheof offered as the price of his peace, and he contented himself with keeping the earl under his own supervision until his return to England. Not till then was Waltheof placed under actual arrest, and it has been conjectured that the reason for this action was the fear that he might make his escape to the Danes in the Humber.[[259]] At the midwinter council of 1075 he was brought to trial, whether or not upon information laid against him by his wife, the countess Judith, and although no definite sentence was passed against him at this time he was sent into closer imprisonment at Winchester.
For the first five months of 1076 Waltheof’s cause remained undecided. It is clear that there was considerable uncertainty in high quarters as to what should be done with him. Lanfranc interceded on his behalf, apparently going so far as to declare him innocent of all complicity in the revolt. We are told nothing of the Conqueror’s own sentiments in the matter, but the strange delay in the promulgation of definite sentence suggests that throughout these months he had been halting between two opinions. At last the sterner view prevailed, and under the influence of Waltheof’s Norman rivals at the royal court, according to Ordericus Vitalis, the king gave orders for the execution of the last English earl.
Early on the morning of the 31st of May, Waltheof was taken from his prison in Winchester to die on the hill of St. Giles outside the city. Accustomed hitherto to the active life of his northern ancestors, the monotony[monotony] of his imprisonment would seem to have destroyed his courage, and the fatal morning found him in bitter agony of soul. The executioners, who feared a rescue, and were anxious to get through with the work, had little patience with his prayers and weeping, and bade him rise that they might carry out their orders. Waltheof begged that he might be allowed to say a pater noster for himself and them, and they granted his request, but at the clause “et ne nos inducas in tentationem” his voice failed him, and he burst into a storm of tears. Before he could recover his strength, his head had been struck from him at a single blow, but the monks of Crowland abbey, where his body lay in after years, told their Norman visitor Ordericus Vitalis that the severed head was heard duly to finish the prayer with “sed libera nos a malo, Amen.”
The case of Earl Waltheof involves two separate questions which it is well to keep distinct in estimating the justice of King William’s conduct in the matter. The first is how far Waltheof had really implicated himself in the designs of the earls of East Anglia and Hereford; the second is what, on the assumption of his serious guilt, would have been the lawful punishment for it. It does not seem likely that the first question will ever be finally answered, for by a singular chance none of our authorities are quite disinterested when they relate the circumstances of Waltheof’s fall. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler and Florence of Worcester, compatriots of the dead earl, lie under some antecedent suspicion of minimising the extent to which he had compromised himself; and Ordericus Vitalis, to whom we should naturally turn for a statement of the Norman side of the case, based his account[account] of Waltheof upon information received from the monks of Crowland at a time when the earl was, in popular sentiment, rapidly becoming transformed into a national martyr. Orderic’s narrative, written under such influences, has just as much historical value as any professed piece of martyrology; that is, it probably presents the authentic tradition of the details of its hero’s death, but it is not concerned to pay a scrupulous regard to facts which might be inconvenient for his reputation. And so King William for once has no apologist; but sixty years after the event it was recognised by an impartial writer like William of Malmesbury[[260]] that the Norman story about Waltheof was very different from that which the English put forward. With such untrustworthy authorities as our only guides, we should scarcely attempt to settle a matter which in the days of King Stephen was already a burning question, but our hesitancy should make us pause before we accuse King William of judicial murder.
To the second of the problems arising out of the case—the sentence which followed Waltheof’s condemnation—it is possible to find a more satisfactory answer. Nothing is more probable than that the Conqueror, in sending Roger of Hereford into prison and beheading Waltheof, was simply applying to criminals of high rank the great principle that men of Norman or of English race should be judged respectively according to Norman or English law.[[261]] Earl Roger as a Norman, according to a practice on which we have already had occasion to remark, was condemned to imprisonment, but English law regarded treason as a capital offence, and Waltheof suffered the strict legal penalty of his crime. Indeed, Waltheof himself, in Orderic’s version of his reply to the conspirators at Exning, is made to declare that the English law condemned a traitor to lose his head, and it is probable that he was better informed on this point than have been some of the later historians who have undertaken his defence. During the next century, members of the Norman baronage established in England who had raised an unsuccessful revolt uniformly received sentence according to the rule which applied to men of their race; and the execution of a traitor against the king will scarcely occur between 1100 and 1200, and but rarely in the course of the thirteenth century. But Waltheof had no privilege of the kind, and, stern as was his sentence, he might not complain that formal justice had been denied him.
The revolt of 1075 produced a sequel in a small continental war. Earl Ralf, as we have seen, had fled to his estates in Brittany, and his appearance coincided in point of time with the outbreak of a general revolt among the Breton baronage. Count Hoel, who possessed in his own right five-sixths of Brittany, was the first of his line to exercise effective rule over the whole peninsula, and the fact was little to the liking of his greater subjects. The malcontents found a leader in Geoffrey “Grenonat,” count of Rennes, an illegitimate son of Alan III.; and the dispossessed earl of East Anglia brought the resources of his barony of Wader to their side. Ralf and Geoffrey seized the castle of Dol; and the rising assumed such serious proportions that Hoel sent to England, and requested King William’s assistance. William, ever desirous of asserting Norman influence in Brittany, took the present opportunity, and in 1076 he crossed the Channel with a force which to the chroniclers of Worcester and Peterborough represented an English fyrd, and laid siege to Dol. The result was a serious loss of prestige, for the garrison had answered Hoel’s application to William by making a counter-appeal to Philip of France, and held out valiantly in the expectation of relief. Philip took the field with a large army, advanced to Dol, and took a measure of revenge for his father’s discomfitures at Mortemer and Varaville, by compelling William to beat a hasty retreat with the loss of his baggage and stores. William engaged no further in the war which dragged on for three years longer, but ended in 1079 with the final success of Hoel.[[262]]
In the meantime, certain important changes had taken place in the administrative geography of England. The earldoms of Hereford and East Anglia, vacant through the treason of Earls Roger and Ralf, were allowed to fall into abeyance. Waltheof’s earldom of Northampton likewise became extinct, although his widow, the countess Judith, was possessed in 1086 of large estates scattered over the shires which had lain within her husband’s government. There was no particular reason why Northamptonshire should possess an earl, but it was still abundantly necessary that William should be represented by a permanent lieutenant on the Scotch border. An earl for Bernicia was now found in the person of Walcher of Lorraine, whose appointment anticipated by more than sixty years the beginning of the long series of bishops of Durham, whose secular powers within their diocese produced the “county palatine” which lasted until 1836.[[263]] The experiment made in Walcher’s appointment was destined to end in tragic failure, but for four years Northumbrian affairs relapse into unwonted obscurity, and the Conqueror was never again called upon to lead an army into the north.
