In Domesday twelve houses in Exeter appear as 'liberæ ad numerum in ministeriis Edid reginæ'.[48]
This is, of course, the same entry, only that here our author changed pounds into houses, and libras into liberæ. What idea was conveyed to his mind by a house 'libera ad numerum' I do not profess to explain. But, oddly enough, as he here turned pounds into houses, so in a passage of his William Rufus he turned houses into pence.[49]
The essence of the whole matter is that the 'burdens' to which Exeter was subject were not raised at all, but remained precisely the same as had been paid to former kings. And this fact is the more notable, because, as Mr Freeman had to admit, 'even the tribute imposed by William' [on his own hypothesis] 'was not large for so great a city', and, one may add, a rich one.[50] Indeed, it was so small as to fairly call for increase.[51] Even Lincoln, which, according to Mr Freeman, received 'favourable' treatment from William, had its 'tribute largely raised'[52] in fact, more than trebled.[53] What we have to account for, therefore, is the fact that a city which had defied, insulted, and outraged William, received not only 'a free pardon',[54] but peculiar favour at his hands.
The paradox itself is beyond dispute, whatever may be said of my solution.
For a solution there is. Only it is not to miracles or legends, nor to the flatterings of courtly chaplains that we must look to learn the truth, but, in the words of a memorable essay, to 'the few unerring notices in Domesday and the chronicles'.[55] As yet we have not, it must be remembered, heard the story from the English side. Let us turn, therefore, to the English version, to what Mr Freeman described as 'the short but weighty account in the Worcester Chronicle, which gives hints which we should be well pleased to see drawn out at greater length'.[56] These hints I shall now examine, though I doubt if Mr Freeman's friends will be well pleased with the result.
We have in the Chronicle a straightforward story, not only intelligible in itself, but also thoroughly in harmony with the known facts of the case. The king finds himself compelled to lay formal siege to Exeter ('besæt þa burh'); he is detained before its walls day after day ('xviii. dægas') in the depth of an English winter, 'and þær wearð micel his heres forfaren'. The need for sternness was there indeed; but swiftness was to him, for the moment, a matter of life and death. Held at bay by those stubborn walls, learning the might of those 'two generals'—January and February—in whom the Emperor Nicholas put his trust, William was in sore straits. Take Mr Freeman's own words:
The disaffected were intriguing for foreign help;... there was a chance of his having to struggle for his crown against Swend of Denmark;... men were everywhere seeking to shake off the yoke, or to escape it in their own persons. Even where no outbreak took place local conspiracies were rife.[57]
Swend was in his rear, half England on his flank; before him reared their head the walls of dauntless Exeter.[58] In that bleak wilderness of frost and snow his men were falling around him, and, in very bitterness of spirit, the Conqueror bowed himself for need. So, at least, I boldly suggest. He fell back on his 'arts of policy', and set himself to win by alluring terms the men whom he could not conquer. In the words of the Chronicle, he promised them well ('ac he heom well behet').
This solution, of course, differs toto cælo from Mr Freeman's narrative. We have seen that he blindly accepted the statements of that 'abandoned flatterer', William of Poitiers (whom Orderic had here 'doubtless followed'[59]) —against whom he elsewhere warned us—and combined them with a miracle from William of Malmesbury, which he euhemerized in the style that he himself had ridiculed in Thierry.[60] And as he could not harmonize the courtly version with the 'short but weighty account' in the Chronicle he cut the knot by dismissing the latter, and pronouncing his own version 'the most likely'.[61]