1. Hereford, granted to William Fitz Osbern before January, 1067.
2. Shrewsbury, granted to Roger de Montgomery circ. 1070.
3. Chester, granted to Hugh d’Avranches, before January, 1071.
4. Kent, granted to Odo, bishop of Bayeux, possibly before January, 1067.
The exact extent of the earldom of Hereford is doubtful, for there exists a certain amount of evidence which makes it probable that William Fitz Osbern possessed the rights of an earl over Gloucestershire and Worcestershire in addition to the county from which he took his title. We have already discussed the general significance of the early writ which the king addressed to Earl William and the magnates of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, and the evidence of this document is supported by the fact that the earl appears as dealing in a very arbitrary fashion with land and property in both shires.[[306]] It is probable on other grounds that Gloucestershire lay within the Fitz Osbern earldom, for William’s possessions extended far south of the Herefordshire border to the lands between Wye and Usk in the modern county of Monmouth, and the addition of Gloucestershire to Herefordshire is required to complete the line of earldoms which lay along the Welsh border. On the other hand it seems probable that Worcestershire never belonged to Roger, William Fitz Osbern’s son, for in 1075 it was the main object of the royal captains in the west to prevent him from crossing the Severn to the assistance of his friends in the midlands. In any case the early date at which the earldom of Hereford was created deserves notice, for it shows that within four months of the battle of Hastings William was strong enough to place a foreign earl in command of a remote and turbulent border shire. Short as was his tenure of his earldom William Fitz Osbern was able to leave his mark there; fifty years after his death there still remained in force an ordinance which he had decreed to the effect that no knight should be condemned to pay more than seven shillings for any offence.[[307]] Lastly, it should be noted that in a document of 1067[[308]] William Fitz Osbern is styled “consul palatinus,” a title which should not be construed “palatine earl,” but which rather means that William, though raised to comital rank, still retained the position of “dapifer” or steward of the court, which he inherited from his father, the unlucky Osbern of the Conqueror’s minority, and in virtue of which the earl of Hereford continued to be the titular head of the royal household.
To the north of William Fitz Osbern, Roger de Montgomery, the other friend of William’s early days, was established in an earldom threaded by the Severn as Herefordshire is threaded by the Wye, and stretching along the former river to the town and castle to which the house of Montgomery left its name. From the standpoint of frontier strategy Roger’s position was even more important than that held by his neighbour of Hereford; for Shrewsbury, the point where roads from London, Stafford and the east, and Chester and the north met before crossing the Severn, continued throughout the Middle Ages to be the key to mid-Wales. Unfortunately, the date at which Roger received the Shropshire earldom cannot be fixed with certainty, for, while he appears at court in the enjoyment of comital rank as early as 1069, the one account which we possess of the operations at Shrewsbury in the latter year virtually implies that the town was then in the king’s hand. Probably the discrepancy is to be explained by the fact that before he received his grant of Shropshire Roger had been given the castle of Arundel and the town of Chichester in the distant shire of Sussex.[[309]] It is highly probable, in fact, that Roger possessed the rights of an earl over the latter county,[[310]] and such a grant would fall in well with the general policy of the Conqueror, for Sussex was only less important than Kent as a point of arrival from the continent, and in the eleventh century Arundel was a port. Most probably Roger was appointed earl of Shrewsbury after the events of 1069 had shown that a coalition of Welsh and English was the most pressing danger of the moment, but he continued in possession of Arundel and Chichester.[[311]] Once established at Shrewsbury, Roger and his followers speedily proceeded to take the offensive against the Welsh, and in 1072 Hugh de Montgomery, the earl’s eldest son, extended his raids as far south as Cardigan. In addition to being the earl of two English shires, Roger de Montgomery held great possessions in Normandy and France; in right of his wife he was count of Bellême, and by a more distant succession he became Seigneur of Alençon, while a series of marriage alliances placed him at the head of a powerful group of kinsmen. But it is probable that the place which he holds in history is due less to his wide lands and great power than to the accident that one of his knights became the father of the greatest historian whom Normandy had so far produced. The earl of Shrewsbury was a great baron and a loyal knight, but when we regard him as representing the best aspect of the Norman conquerors of England we are, consciously or otherwise, guided by the place which he fills in the narrative of the chronicler born within his earldom, Ordericus Vitalis.
The circumstances under which the earldom of Chester was created present a certain amount of difficulty. Chester itself was the last great town of England which called for separate reduction at William’s hands, and it did not fall until the beginning of 1070. Then we are told that William gave the earldom of Cheshire to Gherbod, one of his Flemish[[312]] followers, but an original charter[[313]] of the time shows us Hugh Lupus of Avranches already addressed as earl of Chester in or before February, 1071. Now Gherbod (who never appears in any English document) was killed in Flanders in the latter month, so that we can only suppose that, if he ever received the earldom, he never took practical possession of it, and resigned it almost immediately. The historical earldom of Chester is that which remained in the family of Hugh of Avranches for two centuries and formed the “county palatine” which survived until 1536. It was a frontier earldom in a double sense: Chester controlled the passage of the Dee into North Wales and also the coast road to Rhuddlan and Anglesey, while so long as all England north of Morecambe Bay was Scotch territory, it was politic to entrust much power to the man who commanded the west coast route from the midlands to the north. Judging from the evidence of Domesday Book, the whole of Cheshire formed one compact fief in the hands of its earl; it is the only county in England possessed outright by one tenant-in-chief. Of Earl Hugh, we can draw the outlines of no very pleasing picture. He was devoted to every kind of sensual indulgence, and so fat that no horse could carry him; he is charged like most of his contemporaries with disrespect to the rights of church property. On the other hand, he was, so far as we can see, unswervingly faithful to the king, and he abundantly fulfilled his natural duty of keeping the Welsh away from the English border; nor is it probable that William would have entrusted to a lethargic fool one of the most responsible positions in his kingdom.
The case of Kent stands apart from that of its three sister earldoms. The latter were created as the readiest means of securing a part of the country remote from the centre of authority. The importance of Kent lay in its position between London and the Channel ports. Through the county ran the great Dover road, the main artery of communication between all northern England and the continent, the obvious line along which an invader would strike at London. The rising of 1067 proved the reality of such danger and it was reasonable that the county should be placed in charge of the man who by relationship was the natural vicegerent of the king when the latter was across the Channel. Territorially, Kent was much less completely in the hands of its earl than was the case with either of the three western earldoms, but the possessions of Odo of Bayeux in the rest of England placed him in the first rank of landowners. The date at which the earldom was created is not quite certain; like William Fitz Osbern, Odo may have received his earldom at the time of his joint regency with the former in 1067. He is addressed as bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent in a charter which is not later than 1077, and his rank as an earl is strikingly brought out in the circumstances of his dramatic arrest in 1082.
Judged by later events, the creation of these four great earldoms may seem to have been a mistake on the part of the Conqueror. Hereford, Kent, and Shropshire in turn served as the base of operations for a formidable revolt within fifty years of the Conquest. Their formation also contrasts with the general principles which governed the distribution of land among the Norman baronage, principles which aimed in the main at reproducing the discrete character of the greater old English estates. Before the Conquest no such compact block of territory as the earldom of Cheshire had ever been given in direct possession to any subject. But here, as in the case of the powerful sheriffdoms of William’s time, his justification lay in his immediate necessities. His reason for the creation of the western earldoms was the same as that which prompted his successors to entrust almost unlimited power to the great lords on the march of Wales. It was absolutely necessary to secure central England against all danger from Welsh invasion, and the king himself had neither the time nor the means to conquer Wales outright. He found a temporary solution by placing on the debatable border three earls, strong enough in land and men to keep the Welsh at bay and impelled by self-interest to carry out his wishes. And also we should remember that it was only wise to guard against a repetition of that combination of independent Welsh and irreconcilable English which had been planned in 1068; the three western earldoms were all created before the capture of Ely in 1071 ended the series of national risings against the Conqueror. Lastly, it will not escape notice that at the outset all four earldoms were given to men whom William knew well and had every reason to trust. Odo of Kent was his half-brother; Roger de Montgomery and William Fitz Osbern were young men already at his side in his early warfare before Domfront; Hugh of Chester belonged to a family which had held household positions in his Norman court. William might well have felt that he could not entrust his delegated power to safer hands than these.
Four or five shires only were placed under the control of separate earls, and in them as elsewhere in England the old English system of local government continued with but little change. The shire and hundred courts continued to meet to transact the judicial and administrative business of their respective districts though the manorial courts which sprang up in great numbers as a result of the Conquest were continually withdrawing more and more of this work. We know very little of the ordinary procedure of the local courts; it is only when they take part in some especially important affair such as the Domesday Inquest that the details of their action are recorded. An excellent illustration of the way in which the machinery of the shire court was applied to the settlement of legal disputes is afforded by the following record, taken from the history of the church of Rochester: