Starting with the greatest persons in church and state the list gradually shades off to a number of obscure names, the bearers of which cannot be identified outside this record. Some of these last may be local people connected with the estates to which the grant refers, but most of even the English names can be recognised in the general history of the time. The peculiar value of the list is that it shows us Englishmen and Normans associated, apparently on terms of equality, at the Conqueror’s court. It is instructive to see the English earls of Northampton and Mercia signing between Earl William Fitz Osbern and Count Robert of Mortain; the fact that men whose names are among the greatest in Domesday Book are to be found witnessing the same document with men who had signed Edward the Confessor’s charters helps us to bridge the gulf which separates Anglo-Saxon from Norman England. But this phenomenon is confined to the years immediately succeeding the Conquest; very suddenly, after the date of this document, the English element at William’s court gives way and disappears, and with it disappear the names which unite the Old English “Witan” to the Norman “Concilium.” This is a fact to which we have already had occasion to refer, for the general change in William’s policy which occurs in 1070 affects every aspect of his history.
EARLDOMS
January 1075
The functions of this court or council seem to have been as indeterminate as its composition. Largely, no doubt, they were ceremonial; this aspect of the council was evidently in the mind of William of Malmesbury when he wrote the passage quoted on page [missing][[missing]]. At times it appears as a judicial body, Waltheof was condemned in the Midwinter Council of 1075; while of its advisory powers we have a supreme example in the “deep speech” at Gloucester, which led to the making of Domesday Book. If the title which is attached to the oldest copy of William’s laws has any validity, they were promulgated in accordance with Old English customs by the king cum principibus suis; one clause in particular is said to have been ordained “in civitate Claudia,” which may suggest that the law in question had been decreed in one of the Midwinter Councils at Gloucester. But of one thing only we can be sure, whatever functions the Council may have fulfilled, the king’s will was the motive force which under lay all its action.
In later times, the chief justiciar appears as the normal president of the Council, but in William’s reign it is hard to find any single officer bearing that title. No doubt, when William was in England he himself presided over his council; when he was in Normandy, if the council met at all, which is unlikely, his place would probably be taken by the representative he had left behind him. It is, perhaps, impossible to give a dated list of the vicegerents who appear in William’s reign; our notices of them are very scanty. We have seen that in 1067 William Fitz Osbern and Odo of Bayeux were left as “regents” of England when William made his first visit to Normandy after the Conquest; there has survived an interesting writ of that year in which “Willelm cyng and Willelm eorl” address jointly the country magnates of Somersetshire.[[298]] At the time of the revolt of the three earls in 1075, it is clear that Lanfranc was the king’s vicegerent, an office which he probably filled again during William’s last continental visit in 1086–7. For several reasons it is probable that Odo of Bayeux was regent not long before his fall in 1082; it was as the king’s representative that he took drastic vengeance on the murderers of Bishop Walcher of Durham in 1080, and a most suggestive story in the Abingdon Chartulary shows us King William repudiating the judgment which his brother had given in a local lawsuit during his regency.[[299]] From the same chartulary we learn that at some time between 1071 and 1081 Queen Matilda herself was hearing pleas at Windsor “in place of the king who was then in Normandy,”[[300]] though this, of course, need not imply that she was regent in any wider sense of the term. In general, the writs which the king sent from Normandy into England will be addressed directly to the ordinary authorities of the shire; and our knowledge of the succession of William’s representatives is derived from incidental notices elsewhere.
EARLDOMS
September 1087
So far as we can see King William was always attended by a varying number of his barons; a continually changing cortège followed the king in his progress over the country. To this fluctuating body, just as to the solemn council, our Latin authorities give the title of the King’s Court, the “Curia Regis,” a phrase which at once connects the amorphous group of William’s courtiers with the specialised executive of Henry II. In a sense, no doubt, William’s court was the only executive of its time, but the employment of these modern terms leads straight towards anachronism; the judicial function of the Curia Regis was quite as important as its executive work, and the court was, after all, only a fraction of that larger council in which we have seen “judicial,” “executive,” and “legislative” powers to be combined. If we are to make for ourselves a distinction between two bodies which are tacitly identified by all early writers, we may say that the Curia Regis was composed of just those members of the Commune Concilium who happened to be in attendance on the king at any given moment. But we must remember that to the men of the eleventh century the king’s “court” and the king’s “council” were one and the same; any distinction between them which we may make exists for our own convenience and nothing more; the court was only a shrunken form of the council.
Even those men who are most frequently to be found in attendance on the king do not seem to be characterised either by special legal knowledge or by definite official position. Great officers of the court, such as the steward and the constable, do repeatedly appear; their positions have not yet become annexed to any of the greater baronial houses, and it is probable that their official duties are a reality; but, although Eudo Fitz Hubert (de Rye) the steward, for instance, seems to have been a personal friend of all three Norman kings, and accordingly is a frequent signatory of their writs, such members of the official class seem always to be accompanied by the unofficial barons present. Their attendance also is very intermittent; even the chancellor is much less in evidence in the Conqueror’s charters than in those of Henry I. or II., and under these circumstances we may fairly ask how this unprofessional body acted when required to behave as a court of law. English evidence helps us little, but we get a useful hint as to procedure in certain Norman charters and an analysis of one of them may be quoted:
“At length both parties were summoned before the king’s court, in which there sat many of the nobles of the land of whom Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, was delegated by the king’s authority as judge of the dispute, with Ranulf the Vicomte, Neel, son of Neel, Robert de Usepont, and many other capable judges who diligently and fully examined the origin of the dispute, and delivered judgment that the mill ought to belong to St. Michael and his monks forever. The most victorious king William approved and confirmed this decision.”[[301]]