William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

WESTERN NORMANDY

But for once in his life the Conqueror found himself confronted by an irreducible fortress. “He did not venture to lay siege to the castle of Sainte-Suzanne,” says Orderic,

“it being rendered impregnable by its position on rocks and the dense thickets of vineyards which surrounded it, nor could he confine the enemy within the fortress as he wished, since the latter was strong enough to control supplies and was in command of the communications. The king therefore built a fortification in the valley of Bonjen, and placed therein a strong body of troops to repress the raids of the enemy, being himself compelled to return into Normandy on weighty affairs.”[^[280]]

As William had no prospect of reducing the castle, either by storm or blockade, he was well advised to save his personal prestige by retreat, but the garrison of his counterwork under his lieutenant Alan Earl of Richmond proved themselves unequal to the task assigned them. For three years, according to Orderic, the operations in the Arne valley dragged on, and the fame of Hubert’s successful resistance attracted an increasing stream of volunteers from remote parts of France. At last, when many knights of fame had been killed or taken prisoner, the disheartened Normans at Bonjen resolved to bring about a reconciliation between the king and the viscount. William was in England at the time, and on receiving details of the Norman losses before Sainte-Suzanne he showed himself willing to come to terms with Hubert, who thereupon crossed the Channel under a safe conduct and was restored to favour at the royal court.[^[281]]

With this failure closes the record of the Conquerors achievements in Maine. The events of the next ten years proved that the triumph of Hubert of Sainte-Suzanne was more than the accidental success of a rebellious noble; a national force lay behind him and his crew of adventurers, which came to the front when Helie de la Flèche struggled for the county of Maine with William Rufus. In the process which during the next half-century was consolidating the feudal world of France, Maine could not persist in isolated independence, but its final absorption into Anjou was less repugnant to local patriotism and the facts of geography than its annexation by the lords of Rouen. Those who have a taste for historical parallels may fairly draw one between William’s wars in Maine and his descendant Edward I.’s attack on the autonomy of Scotland, with reference to the manner in which an initial success was reversed after the death of the great soldier who had won it, by the irreconcilable determination of the conquered people. But there lies a problem which cannot be wholly answered in the question why King William’s work, so permanent in the case of England, was so soon undone in the case of the kindred land of Maine.

It is possible that the Conqueror’s placability toward Hubert of Sainte-Suzanne was not unconnected with a more formidable danger threatening England from the north and east. Once more the Scandinavian peril hung over the land. Harold of Denmark, the eldest son of Swegn Estrithson, had died in 1080, and his brother and successor Cnut married the daughter of William’s inveterate enemy, Count Robert of Flanders. In this way a family alliance between the two strongest naval powers of the north was called into being; and in 1085 the king and the count planned a joint invasion of England. Cnut attempted to draw King Olaf of Norway into the expedition, and received from him a contingent of sixty ships, but Olaf would not join in person, giving as his reason that the kings of Norway had always been less successful than the kings of Denmark in enterprises against England, and that his kingdom had not yet recovered from the disaster of 1066.[^[282]] But now, as in the former year, England had no fleet available for serious naval operations; and King William’s subjects must have thought that his defensive measures were as ruinous to the districts affected as the passage of an invading army itself. The king was in Normandy when he became apprised of the danger, and he hastened across the Channel, with a great force of French and Breton mercenaries, “so that people wondered how the land could feed all that army,” remarks the Peterborough chronicler. The king arranged for the billeting of the host among his barons, and then proceeded deliberately to lay waste the parts of the country exposed to attack; a precaution which would have kept the enemy from advancing far from the coast, but which must have cruelly afflicted the poorer folk of the eastern shires.[^[283]] Meanwhile a great armament from Flanders and Denmark had been gathered in the Lijm fiord, and all was ready for the voyage when on July 10, 1086, Cnut was murdered in the church of Odensee.[^[284]] His death meant the abandonment of the expedition, but is probable that his abortive schemes contributed to one of the most notable events of William’s reign—the oath of Salisbury of 1086.

The king had kept the feast of 1086 at Winchester and had knighted his youngest son, Henry, in the Whitsuntide council at Westminster. Not long afterwards he turned westward again, and by the first of August had come to Salisbury, where he held an assembly of very exceptional character. “There his Witan came to him,” says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, “and all the landholding men in England, no matter whose men they might be, and swore him fealty that they would be true to him against all men.”[^[285]] The native chronicler in his cell at Peterborough was evidently impressed by the scale of all the Conqueror’s measures in these last years, and his statement that all the land-holding men in England came to the Salisbury meeting must not be construed too literally, but he has seen clearly enough what was the real purpose of the famous oath. It was no slight matter that King William was strong enough to exact from each mesne tenant in his kingdom an absolute oath of allegiance to himself in person, without explicit reference to the tie of homage which bound individual tenants to their immediate lords. But, significant as is this clear enunciation of the principle that the king’s claim to fealty overrides the lord’s claim to service, it should not be taken to imply any revolutionary change in the current doctrines of feudal law. It is highly probable that this general oath was demanded with the single purpose of providing against the defection of disloyal knights and barons to Cnut of Denmark in the imminent event of his landing. News travelled slowly in the eleventh century, and King William at Salisbury on August 1st could not well have heard of the murder at Odensee on July 10th. But apart from this, any feudal monarch could have maintained in theory that the facts of subinfeudation should not invalidate his sovereign rights; the question was merely as to the possibility of enforcing the latter. The exceptional power enjoyed by William and his successors in this respect was due to the intimate relations established between the king and his feudatories by the circumstances of the Conquest; the Oath of Salisbury was a striking incident and little more.

It was probably not long after the famous scene at Salisbury that the Conqueror crossed the Channel for the last time. No chronicler has recorded the name of the port which witnessed King William’s last embarkation, but we know that he called at the Isle of Wight on his way to Normandy, and we may suppose that he had set sail from some Hampshire or Sussex haven. His subjects probably rejoiced at his departure, for England had fallen on evil times in these last years. The summer of 1086 had been disastrous for a population never living far from the margin of subsistence. “This year was very grievous,” laments the native chronicler, “and ruinous and sorrowful in England through the murrain; corn and fruit could not be gathered and one cannot well think how wretched was the weather, there was such dreadful thunder and lightning, which killed many men, and always kept growing worse and worse. God Almighty amend it when it please him.” But the bad harvest brought its inevitable train of famine and pestilence, and 1087 was worse than 1086 had been. It was the agony of this year that called forth the famous picture of the Conqueror’s fiscal exactions, how the miserly king leased his lands at the highest rent that could be wrung out of the poor men by right or wrong; how his servants exacted unlawful tolls. Medieval finance was not elastic enough to adapt itself to the alternation of good and bad seasons; and in a time of distress men were crushed to the earth by rents and taxes, which, as Domesday Book shows, they could afford to bear well enough in years of normal plenty. The monk of Peterborough took no account of this, and yet he clearly felt that he had reached the climax of disaster as he recorded the death of William the Conqueror.

The question of the Vexin Française, which, by a singular chance, was to cost the Conqueror his life, originated in the days of Duke Robert of Normandy and Henry I. of France. We have seen that King Henry, in return for help given by Robert to him in the difficult time of his accession, ceded the Vexin Française to the Norman Duke. Drogo, the reigning count, remained true to the Norman connection, and accompanied Duke Robert to the Holy Land, where he died; but his son Walter wished to detach the Vexin from association with Normandy and to replace himself under the direct sovereignty of the king of France. He proved his hostility to William of Normandy in the campaign of Mortemer, and by the claims which he raised to the county of Maine in 1063, but he died without issue, and his possessions passed to his first cousin, Ralf III., count of Valois. The house of Valois was not unfriendly to Normandy, and from 1063 to 1077 its powerful possessions were a standing menace to the royal demesne. But in the latter year the family estates were broken up by a dramatic event. Simon de Crepy, the son of Count Ralf, who had successfully maintained his position against Philip I., felt nevertheless a desire to enter the religious life, and on his wedding night he suddenly announced his determination, persuaded his young bride to follow his example, and retired from the world. Philip I. thereupon reunited the Vexin to the royal demesne without opposition from William of Normandy, who was at the time much occupied with the affairs of Maine.[^[286]] For ten years William acquiesced in the state of affairs, and his present action took the form of a reprisal for certain raids which the Frenchmen in Mantes had lately been making across the Norman border. It would clearly have been useless to expect King Philip to intervene, and William accordingly raised the whole Vexin question once more, and demanded possession of Pontoise, Chaumont, and Mantes, three towns which command the whole province.