Some information as to William’s own movements in Normandy during 1080 may be gathered from charters and other legal documents. On the 7th of January he was at Caen,[[269]] and on the 13th he appears at Boscherville on the Seine[[270]]; at Easter he held a great court probably at Rouen.[[271]] At Whitsuntide he presided over a council at Lillebonne,[[272]] where a set of canons was promulgated which strikingly illustrates his opinion as to the relations which should exist between church and state.

Whitsunday in 1080 fell on the 31st of May, and serious disturbances had been taking place in England earlier in the month. Bishop Walcher of Durham had proved an unpopular as well as an inefficient earl of Northumbria. Himself a foreigner and a churchman, he must from the outset have been out of touch with the wild Englishmen placed under his rule, and the situation was aggravated by the fact that the bishop’s priestly office compelled him to transact the work of government in great part by deputy. He entrusted the administration of his earldom to a kinsman of his own called Gilbert,[[273]] and in all matters of business he relied on the counsel of an ill-assorted pair of favourites, one of them a noble Northumbrian thegn called Ligulf, who found his way to his favour by the devotion which he professed to Saint Cuthbert, the other being his own chaplain, Leobwine, a foreigner. Jealousy soon broke out between the thegn and the chaplain, and at last the latter, being worsted by his rival in a quarrel in the bishop’s presence, took the above mentioned Gilbert into his confidence and prevailed on him to destroy the Englishman secretly. On hearing the news the bishop was struck with dismay, and, in his anxiety to prove his innocence, summoned a general meeting of the men of his earldom to assemble at Gateshead. The assembly came together, but the Bernicians were in a dangerous humour; the bishop dared not risk a deliberation in the open air, and took refuge in the neighbouring church. Instantly the gathering got out of hand, the church was surrounded and set on fire, and the bishop and his companions were cut to pieces by the mob.

For such an act as this there could be no mercy. The punishment of the murderers was left to Walcher’s fellow-prelate Odo of Bayeux, and the vengeance which he took was heavy. It must have been impossible to determine with accuracy the names of those who had actually joined in the crime, but it is evident that men from all parts of Bernicia had taken part in the meeting at Gateshead, and the whole earldom was held implicated in the murder. Accordingly the whole district was ravaged, and the bishop of Bayeux administered death and mutilation on a scale unusual even in the eleventh century.[[274]] To the thankless dignity of the Northumbrian earldom, the Conqueror appointed Aubrey de Coucy, a powerful Norman baron; but he soon abandoned the task of governing his distressful province and retired to his continental estates. To him there succeeded Robert de Mowbray, who was destined to be the last earl of Bernicia, but who proved more successful than any of his predecessors in the work of preserving order and watching the movements of the king of Scots; and for the next ten years Northumbria under his stern rule ceases to trouble the central administration.

The chief interest of the following year in the history of the Conqueror lies in the singular expedition which he made at this time beyond the limits of his immediate rule into the extreme parts of Wales. The various but scanty accounts of this event which we possess are somewhat conflicting. The Peterborough chronicler says that the king “in this year led an army into Wales and there freed many hundred men.” The Annales Cambriæ tell us that “William, king of the English, came to St. David’s that he might pray there.” Very possibly the Conqueror did in reality pay his devotions at the shrine of the apostle of Wales, but secular motives were not lacking for an armed demonstration in that restless land. So long as the Normans in England itself were only a ruling minority, holding down a disaffected population, the conquest of Wales was an impossibility; and yet on all grounds it was expedient for the king to show the Welshmen what reserves of power lay behind his marcher earls of Shrewsbury and Chester. The expedition has a further interest as one of the earliest occasions on which it is recorded that the feudal host of England was called to take the field; the local historian of Abingdon abbey remarked that nearly all the knights belonging to that church were ordered to set out for Wales, although the abbot remained at home.[[275]] It does not appear that any of the native princes of South Wales suffered displacement at this time; the one permanent result of the expedition would seem to have been the foundation of Cardiff castle[[276]] as an outpost in the enemies’ land. The strategical frontier of England in this quarter consisted of the line of fortresses which guarded the lower course of the Wye, and the settlement of the Welsh question, like the settlement of the Scotch question, was a legacy which the Conqueror left to his successors.

After these events, but not before the end of the year, King William withdrew into Normandy, and probably spent the greater part of 1082 in his duchy. But his return to England was marked by one of the most dramatic incidents in his whole career, the famous scene of the arrest of Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent. Up to the very moment of the bishop’s fall, the relations between the brothers appear to have been outwardly friendly, and in an English charter of the present year, the bishop appears at court in full enjoyment of his lay and spiritual titles.[[277]] The cause of the final rupture is uncertain. Ordericus Vitalis[[278]] assigned it to the unprecedented ambition of Bishop Odo, who, not content with his position in England and Normandy, was supposed to be laying his plans to secure his election to the papal chair at the next vacancy. According to this tale, the bishop had bought himself a palace in Rome, bribed the senators to join his side, and engaged a large number of Norman knights, including no less a person than the earl of Chester, to follow him into Italy when the time for action came. Whatever Odo’s plans may have been, William received news of them in Normandy, and he hurried across the Channel, intercepting Odo in the Isle of Wight. Without being actually arrested, Odo was placed under restraint, and a special sitting of the Commune Concilium was convened to try his case. The subsequent proceedings were conducted in the Isle of Wight, very possibly in the royal castle of Carisbrooke, and King William himself seems to have undertaken his brother’s impeachment. The articles laid against Odo fell into two parts, a specific charge of seducing the king’s knights from their lawful duty, and a general accusation of oppression and wrong-doing to the church and to the native population of the land. The task of giving judgment on these points belonged by customary law to the barons in council, but they failed to give sentence through fear of the formidable defendant before them, and the Conqueror himself was compelled to issue orders for Odo’s arrest. Here another difficulty presented itself, for no one dared lay hands on a bishop; and upon William seizing his brother with his own hands, Odo cried out, “I am a bishop and the Lord’s minister; a bishop may not be condemned without the judgment of the Pope.” To this claim of episcopal privilege William replied that he arrested not the bishop of Bayeux, but the earl of Kent, and Odo was sent off straightway in custody to the Tower of Rouen. At a later date it was suggested that the distinction between the bishop’s lay and spiritual functions was suggested to the king by Lanfranc,[[279]] whose opinion as an expert in the canon law was incontrovertible; and apart from the dramatic interest of the scene the trial of Odo has special importance as one of the few recorded cases in which a question of clerical immunity was raised before the promulgation of the Constitutions of Clarendon.

The one extended narrative which we possess of these events was composed some forty years after the date in question, and the scheme which is attributed to Bishop Odo may well seem too visionary a project to have been undertaken by that very hard-headed person, yet on the whole we shall probably do well to pay respect to Orderic’s version of the incident. For, although the militant lord of Bayeux might seem to us an incongruous successor for the saintly Hildebrand, it must as yet have been uncertain how far the church as a whole had really identified itself with the ideals which found their greatest exponent in Gregory VII., and the situation in Italy itself was such as to invite the intervention of a prelate capable of wielding the secular arm. The struggle between pope and emperor was at its height, and within three years from the date of Odo’s arrest Hildebrand himself was to die in exile from his city, while Norman influence was all-powerful in south Italy. The tradition represented in Orderic’s narrative shows an appreciation of the general situation, and if we regard the motive assigned for Odo’s preparations as merely the monastery gossip of the next generation, yet the bishop’s imprisonment is a certain fact, and the unusual bitterness of King William towards his half-brother would suggest that something more than political disloyalty gave point to the latter’s schemes. Nevertheless the captivity in which Bishop Odo expiated his ambition cannot have been enforced with very great severity, for in the five years which intervened between his disgrace and William’s death he appears at least occasionally in attendance at his brother’s court.

The circle of the Conqueror’s immediate companions was rapidly breaking up now. On November 3rd, 1083, Queen Matilda died, and was buried in the convent of the Holy Trinity at Caen, which she had founded in return for her lord’s safety amid the perils of his invasion of England. Archbishop Lanfranc and Earl Roger of Montgomery almost alone represented the friends of King William’s early manhood at the councils of his last four years. Through all the hazards of her married life Matilda of Flanders had played her part well; if William the Conqueror alone among all the men of his house kept his sexual purity unstained to the last, something at least of this may be set down to his love for the bride whom he had won, thirty years before, in defiance of all ecclesiastical censure. Nor should Matilda’s excellence be conceived of as lying wholly in the domestic sphere; William could leave his duchy in her hands when he set out to win a kingdom for himself and her, and William was no contemptible judge of practical ability in others. We shall hardly find in all English medieval history another queen consort who takes a place at once more prominent and more honourable.

In the year following Queen Matilda’s death, the Conqueror’s attention was for the last time concentrated on the affairs of Maine, and in a manner which illustrates the uncertain tenure by which the Normans still held their southern dependency. Twenty years of Norman rule had failed to reconcile the Manceaux to the alien government. The rising of 1073 had proved the strength and extent of the disaffection, and from the events of the present year it is plain that the Norman element in Maine was no more than a garrison in hostile territory, although the disturbance which called William into the field in 1084 was merely the revolt of a great Mancel baron fighting for his own hand, which should not be dignified with the name of a national movement. In the centre of the county the castle of Sainte-Suzanne stands on a high rock overlooking the river Arne, one of the lesser tributaries of the Sarthe. This fortress, together with the castles of Beaumont and Fresnay on the greater river, belonged to Hubert the viscount of Maine, who had been a prominent leader of the Mancel nationalists in the war of 1063, and had subsequently married a niece of Duke Robert of Burgundy. Formidable alike from his position in Maine and his connection with the Capetian house, Hubert proved himself an unruly subject of the Norman princeps Cenomannorum and after sundry acts of disaffection he broke into open revolt, abandoned his castles of Fresnay and Beaumont, and concentrated his forces on the height of Sainte-Suzanne. Like Robert of Normandy at Gerberoi, five years before, Hubert made his castle a rendezvous for all the restless adventurers of the French kingdom, who soon became intolerable to the Norman garrisons in Le Mans and its neighbourhood. The latter, it would seem, were not strong enough to divide their forces for an attack on Sainte-Suzanne, and sent an appeal for help to King William, who thereupon gathered an army in Normandy, and made ready for his last invasion of Maine.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
(AS CONCEIVED BY A FRENCH PAINTER OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY)
THE ORIGINAL OF THIS PICTURE, NOW LOST, WAS PAINTED BY AN ARTIST WHEN THE TOMB OF THE CONQUEROR WAS OPENED IN 1522. A COPY EXECUTED IN 1708, IS PRESERVED IN THE SACRISTY OF ST. ETIENNE’S CHURCH AT CAEN; THE PRESENT ILLUSTRATION IS FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THAT COPY