Mr Freeman attaches to the speech that follows no small importance. Holding that the king 'was now ready to take the decisive step of crossing the sea himself or sending others to cross it', he pointed out that:
even William Rufus, in all his pride and self-confidence, knew that it did not depend wholly on himself to send either native or adopted Englishmen on such an errand. He had learned enough of English constitutional law not to think of venturing on a foreign war without the constitutional sanction of his kingdom. In a Gemot [sic] at Winchester, seemingly the Easter Gemot of the third year of his reign, he laid his schemes before the assembled Witan [sic], and obtained their consent to a war with the Duke of the Normans.[27]
Of course, in reading Mr Freeman's works we must reconcile ourselves to 'Gemot' and 'Witan' being thrust upon us at every turn, however radically false a conception these words may convey. At the close of his dealing with this episode, he refers us, as a parallel, to the 'full Gemot' of 1047, in which 'the popular character of the assembly still', we learn, 'impresses itself on the language of history'. Now Orderic describes those who were summoned to our Winchester gathering as 'turmas optimatum'; he makes William begin his speech 'nostri egregii barones'; and he places in his mouth language essentially feudal and Norman:
Nunc igitur commoneo vos omnes, qui patris mei homines fuistis, et feudos vestros in Normannia et Anglia de illo tenuistis[28] ... cœnobia quæ patres nostri construxerunt in Neustria ... Decet ergo ut, sicut nomen ejus [i.e. Willelmi] et diadema gero, sic ad defensionem patriæ inhæream ejus [i.e. Normanniæ] studio.
Mr Freeman expressed astonishment and delight at William's 'constitutional language', and declared that though, in its actual wording, the speech, of course, was Orderic's:
the constitutional doctrines which he has worked into his speech cannot fail to set forth the ordinary constitutional usage of the time. Even in the darkest hour in which England had any settled government at all, etc., etc.[29]
And then follows the usual lament for 'the days of King Eadward', when it was not a 'cabinet', but a crowd, that dealt with the delicate question of peace or war.
Now even the late Professor's most ardent followers cannot represent my criticism here as 'trifling', or unimportant. Mr Freeman, I hold, had misconceived the matter altogether. The whole thing is sheer delusion. William's appeal, as set before us, was not the fruit of studies in English 'constitutional law': it was the appeal of a feudal lord to 'barons' holding by feudal tenure. Should there be any one who feels the slightest doubt upon the question, let him turn to Mr Freeman's own account of the great 'Assembly of Lillebonne'. He could not himself avoid a passing glance at the parallel, when he wrote that 'William the Red had as good reasons to give for an invasion of Normandy as his father had once had to give for an invasion of England'.[30] Contrasting that Assembly (1066) with an English Gemot, he wrote that 'in William's Assembly we hear of none but barons'.[31] Precisely. But that remark is equally true of his son's Assembly at Winchester.[32] And when we learn, a few years later, the composition of his Assembly, we find it admittedly restricted to tenants-in-chief.[33] Of the two Assemblies, that of Lillebonne revealed a more active opposition, showed more 'parliamentary boldness', than that of Winchester.[34] The latter merely applauded, we read, the King's appeal. Like his father, he appealed to his barons to follow him on foreign service; like him also, he pleaded his wrongs and the justice of his righteous cause.
Of the two, the father seems, as I have said, to have met with more opposition than the son. One might therefore produce an argument ad absurdum, and contend that, on Mr Freeman's showing, an English King was not less, but more, absolute than a Norman Duke. In any case we have now seen that the ideas about 'constitutional usage', and so forth, imported here by Mr Freeman, were nothing but a figment of his brain. The Assembly of Winchester no more resulted from 'English constitutional law' than did the Assembly of Lillebonne, convened for a similar purpose. William Rufus had to deal with barons who could not be anxious to invade Normandy merely to make him Duke of the Normans. If they had any preference in the matter, it would be rather for Robert than for William, for a weak rather than a strong ruler; but, apart from preference, the barons would be loth to engage in internecine warfare merely for the personal advantage of one brother or the other. This was seen in the peaceful close of the invasion by Duke Robert, as with that of Duke Henry half a century later. The question, in short, that arose in 1066, when a Duke of the Normans asked his barons to make him King of the English, arose once more in the days of his son, when a King of the English asked his barons to make him Duke of the Normans.